"Certainly, the involvement of non-regional players, to put it this way, is becoming more visible," Sergei Lavrov told Russia Today, the country's first 24-hour English-language news channel.
Asked whether this disturbed Russia, Lavrov said: "Yes and no. It is not disturbing since we do understand the natural legitimate interest of countries like the United States, Western Europeans, Europeans in general, the legitimate interest in this region."
Lavrov admitted that the Central Asian and Caucasian region still demanded close attention from the viewpoint of the threats of terrorism, drug trafficking and organized crime.
"To a very large extent all this threats relate to the unsettled situation in Afghanistan. So it is in the interest of all these countries to stabilize the situation there and to be present there for this purpose, because all these threats: terrorism, drugs, crime in general - they are not limited to Afghanistan or to the neighboring areas, they are reproduced through various roots in Europe and in the United States," the minister said.
He said all these threats were of global nature. "So we understand the legitimate interest of all other countries to stabilize this region and to be present there for this purpose. We also understand the legitimate interest, for example, in having access to energy resources with which this region [is] quite rich.
"What we want is to see that the means to promote those interests, the methods with which those countries are assuring their presence in this region are also legitimate and transparent, and that these methods do not infringe on Russia's legitimate interest in this region," Sergei Lavrov said.
