Russian Parliament Speaker Warns About Worst Split With EU Since Cold War

The Russian-European ties are at their worst since the end of the Cold War, the speaker of the Russian parliament’s lower-house Duma warned on Tuesday.

MOSCOW (Sputnik) — The parliament speaker’s article echoed a remark by Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev who said at the Munich Security Conference earlier this month that Russia-NATO relations were spiraling into a new Cold War.

Medvedev explained his statement in an interview with the Time magazine, where he said that NATO's actions pushed the world closer to a new cold war, but no war was happening yet.

"We’ve been through a lot during this two-year security crisis… I believe that this period is perhaps the most dangerous since the Cold War, while EU and US provocative actions are aimed at reaching practical goals – at the expense of other nations," Sergei Naryshkin wrote in his op-ed column in the Rossiyskaya Gazeta.

The senior lawmaker pointed at the US-led NATO military bloc, which he said used Russia’s rift with the West to move closer to the Russian border in Eastern Europe. "But that would not have been possible without active participation of key European politicians," he noted.