Opinions & Interviews

Minsk Dialogue forum to focus on European security amid global militarization

MINSK, 6 August (BelTA) – A Minsk Dialogue forum will take place in Minsk on 7-8 October. It will be focused on European Security: Stepping Back from the Brink, BelTA learned from Director of the Council for International Relations Minsk Dialogue Yevgeny Preigerman.

Explaining the choice of this year’s forum’s topic, the expert noted that it may look excessively dramatized but it is the situation Belarus and other countries are in. “And this situation is getting more and more dramatic because a historical negative event happened on Friday: another pillar of strategic stability, which existed since the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union, crumbled: the key signatories – the USA and Russia – withdrew from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty,” Yevgeny Preigerman explained. “The forum will be the first venue where we will representatively discuss regional security in conditions after the INF Treaty collapse and new reality. It turns out that Europe is in the very center of an unavoidable arms race.”

Countries are getting militarized. This global trend is obvious. The arms race, which is picking up the pace, confirms it, too. “Militarization when there is no dialogue, when channels of communication between the key players are destroyed, when the strategic stability system is no more, represents a direct road to increased military and political risks,” Yevgeny Preigerman stated. “It is particularly dangerous for us, citizens of Belarus. We are now squeezed in between these geopolitical contradictions. If, god forbid, something catches fire, it will most likely do so in our region, just like it did in Ukraine.”

This is why instead of academic interest in arranging such forums Belarus has practical interest in it. “We would like to emphasize that for Eastern Europe countries, which are geographically and geopolitically located between historically conflicting centers of geopolitical attraction, there is another way, a way different from the path chosen by Georgia or Ukraine. This way is important not only for one’s own security and survival. It represents the only opportunity to preserve stability in the broad Eurasian space,” Yevgeny Preigerman is convinced.

Participants of the forum are expected to discuss strategic stability and arms control, propaganda, counter-propaganda, basic standards of journalism against the background of information wars. The experts will discuss results of the first decade of the Eastern Partnership Initiative, the potential of the Belt and Road initiative, prospects of development of the Eurasian Economic Union.

All the interested parties will be able to openly debate the present and future of European security and search for mutually acceptable security standards for everyone. The event is expected to gather high-ranking officials and leading experts from the European Union, Russia, the USA, China, and countries of Eastern Europe, Southern Caucasus, and Central Asia. It is quite a unique composition from the point of view of geopolitical balance, the organizers believe.

The Minsk Dialogue started working as an expert initiative in early 2015. It is designed to offer an open platform without geopolitical separating lines for the sake of research and discussions about international relations and security in Eastern Europe. Regular events of the Minsk Dialogue gather international experts as well as high-ranking government officials and diplomats.

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