Russia enters acute standoff phase with unfriendly alliance

Drobinin made the remarks in an article posted on the website of International Affairs magazine on Wednesday.

"Russia has entered an acute phase of confrontation with an aggressive alliance of unfriendly states led by the United States. The enemy's aim is to inflict a strategic defeat on our country and to eliminate it as a geopolitical competitor," the article reads, TASS reported.

"One should be aware that the Russophobic collective West is a dangerous, motivated and strong rival, even though its aggregate power is gradually and irreversibly weakening. It is a rival that still has an advanced military-technical potential and controls a significant share of global markets, financial resources, logistics chains and information flows."

"For some of us, this turnaround was an unpleasant surprise, and this can be understood," Drobinin added. The strategies of convergence, "embedding", dialogue and common spaces have featured prominently in planning over many years, he recalls. "However, at the H-hour it turned out that the hostile NATO bloc was gaining a foothold on territories adjacent to the vital regions of central Russia (the Baltic states and Ukraine), and the European Union was spreading its neo-colonial influences throughout Eastern Europe, Transcaucasia and Central Asia in defiance of the integration associations existing there (the EAEU and the CIS)," Drobinin stressed.

"It is clear that this reality is a result of many years of arrogant rejection of Russia's honest attempts to negotiate with the West on the rules of coexistence, and it can no longer be tolerated," he believes.