Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2000-12-12-Speech-2-154"
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"en.20001212.8.2-154"2
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"Mr President, we must establish cooperation with Russia, a country wounded in its statehood, so that she can become a European state that aspires to education and culture. Mr Oostlander’s report is crucially important and it sets out to achieve this cooperation. We have to use our combined powers to heal the wounds that ten years of crude capitalism have inflicted on Russia. Boycotts will not resolve the problem. Things are now going badly for Russia. There is no middle class: there are just the super-rich and the super-poor. Half the population live below the poverty line. The country is in sharp moral decline: it is almost like Sodom and Gomorra. There are fears that the number of HIV-positive cases will rise in the next few years to close on 600 000, and the disease is also beginning to hit young people hard. Eighty per cent of new infections concern people under the age of 25. The birth rate is dropping, the mortality rate is going up, and the net loss in Russia’s population amounts to a million a year. That goes to show just how bad things are for the people there.
The country is also burdened by the need to protect nature and human beings from old mistakes. There are still 300 tons of anthrax bacteria manufactured for purposes of biological warfare in existence there, and just a small dose is lethal. Dozens of tons of waste plutonium have to be destroyed as a result of disarmament negotiations. The EU must help Russia, because in that way it is also preventing risks that would threaten itself.
The most important area of cooperation is energy policy, which is connected with superpower politics, which governs, for example, the transportation of oil and gas from the east to the west. Today 30-40% of EU gas comes from Russia, and in ten years’ time the EU will be almost totally dependent on Russian gas. There is no northern, western or southern alternative for this. The EU countries should not be a geopolitical extension of the United States in matters of gas and oil pipelines. The EU is no threat to the Russians, but a unipolar world under the leadership of the USA is. The Russians cannot, at least not yet, oppose NATO’s sly expansion through the militarisation of EU structures. Slyness does not become us: we must build a Europe of economic cooperation."@en1
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