NATO has never denied the possibility of expansion. He said this on December 23 in an interview with the agency. dpa Jens Stoltenberg, Secretary General of the North Atlantic Alliance.
He stressed that even the founding agreement of NATO says that every European state can become a member of the alliance.
“Secondly, there are documents of the 1970s and 1990s – the Helsinki Final Act, the Charter of Paris, the Russia-NATO Founding Act and many other treaties,” the Secretary General said.
He noted that on their basis, each state can freely determine its own destiny.
“This is the fundamental principle of European security, to which Russia has subscribed. We cannot change this with a few quotes, ”explained Stoltenberg.
In addition, he said, the Allies deny that such promises were ever made.
“Former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev himself said that the issue of NATO expansion to the east was not discussed before the reunification of Germany,” Stoltenberg said.
Earlier on December 23, Russian President Vladimir Putin, commenting on previous promises of the North Atlantic Alliance (NATO) not to move eastward, said that Russia had been deceived.
On December 21, Putin said that the deployment of US missile defense (ABM) elements near Russian borders is troubling. According to him, Moscow is concerned about the deployment of elements of the US global missile defense system near Russia. If this infrastructure appears in Ukraine, the flight time of missiles to Moscow will be reduced to 7-10 minutes, he added.
In turn, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov stressed that further NATO advance towards the Russian borders will be regarded as crossing the “red line”. The head of the Russian Foreign Ministry stressed that Russia sincerely wants to prevent a negative development of events according to the scenarios that are drawn by a number of the alliance’s strategists.
On December 20, Deputy Foreign Minister of the Russian Federation Alexander Grushko announced that Moscow would respond in proportion to the deployment of NATO strike weapons. According to the diplomat, now there is a great danger that contacts along the military line between Russia and the United States have been cut off.
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