NATO is only interested in confrontation with Russia. That is the Russian assessment of the NATO foreign ministers meeting as presented by Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Grushko, yesterday, in remarks to reporters. “The results of the ministerial level meeting must be studied first without jumping at hasty conclusions. But it is very clear that NATO is following a path of confrontation with Russia. NATO is unable to get rid of the habit of using a ‘threat from the East’ in attempts to formulate its mission in the new security situation,” he said, reported TASS.
Grushko stated, for example, that NATO has not responded to Putin’s proposal for a moratorium on the deployment of intermediate-range missiles in Europe. It was the United States as the key stakeholder in NATO that quit the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, “thus ruining one of the key elements of present-day European security,” he said. “NATO ignores the Russian proposals on introducing a reciprocal moratorium on deploying this type of missiles.”
Regarding the matter of “dialogue,” which NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg claimed Moscow is not interested in, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said yesterday that Russia is indeed ready for a NATO-Russia Council meeting on condition that there is a proposal to have “substantive and equal dialogue,” but so far “there haven’t been such initiatives from our colleagues.”