MOSCOW, 23 June (BelTA) – The UN, the OSCE and some other international organizations are held hostage to the states funding them, Belarus' Defense Minister Viktor Khrenin said at the plenary session of the 9th Moscow Conference on International Security on 23 June, BelTA has learned.
“In fact, international security institutions have been discredited. Moreover, the criticism they draw for their passive stance and unwillingness to solve pressing international problems is quite justified. The determination to save funds during the pandemic led to disastrous consequences. The UN, the OSCE and other organizations are now in thrall to donor states and are actually forced to take their politicized agenda on board. In such a situation, small nation states can hardly rely on these organizations' support in preserving their independence and territorial integrity,” he said.
According to the minister, the architecture of international treaties in the field of security and arms control has been destroyed. “Such important treaties as the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe, the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, the Treaty on Open Skies, the Chemical Weapons Convention have simply ceased to exist, because their provisions are deliberately disregarded and violated while international organizations turn a blind eye to it. The only exception is START III (Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty), since it directly has to do with the threat of nuclear destruction of the planet,” he said.
Viktor Khrenin stressed that in the absence of treaty commitments, individual countries and private structures embarked on active research with a view to creating new types of weapons of mass destruction. “Research in the field of biology and genetic engineering has resumed. Two years ago, at the Beijing forum, we rang alarm bells warning of the danger coming from biological laboratories in the post-Soviet countries. The Pentagon is now calling the shots there. But people did not want to hear us. We hope that the COVID-19 pandemic, the source of which even the World Health Organization cannot ascertain yet, will make the international community fully realize the threat coming from weapons of mass destruction,” he said
Taking part in the 9th Moscow Conference on International Security (MCIS 2021) are defense ministers, chiefs of general staffs, delegations of defense ministries from 109 countries as well as representatives of international organizations – the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), the United Nations Organization (UN), the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), the International Committee of the Red Cross, and the League of Arab States. Participants of the conference are expected to discuss problems of global and regional stability, various aspects of security in Europe, Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America.
