Russian Foreign Ministry renames key wing ‘Department of European Problems’

By Anjali Sharma

WASHINGTON –The Russian Foreign Ministry on Monday has renamed its Department of European Cooperation as the Department of European Problems on its website as the tensions between Russia and the West grow.

RT media said that the changes to the structural diagram on the ministry’s webpage were made earlier this week but only reported by Russian media on the weekend.

The department, which deals with matters of “international European organizations” such as the OSCE and the Council of Europe, the EU, and NATO, will do the same work as before.

The renaming has only been done on the Foreign Ministry’s Russian version and the department’s name remains the same on the English, French, and German versions.

Russia’s relations with most European countries and organisations have deteriorated since 2014 since the change of regime in Ukraine and its takeover of Crimea, and gotten only worse since the conflict began with Ukraine in February 2022, in which the EU has been supporting Kiev with weapons and funds.

Russia had held that the OSCE is in “a crisis situation” due to the inability of its members to find common ground on the most basic issues, it had withdrawn from the Council of Europe last year, contending that the West had hijacked the transnational grouping to further its interests.

EU nations due to their support of Ukraine, participation in sanctions and other actions against Russia and its citizens, are seen by Moscow as “unfriendly” countries and NATO as a hostile military bloc.

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban met with the Russian President Vladimir Putin in July described the state of relations between Moscow and the EU as being “at its lowest point”.