China’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian today got right to the point, in response to a question from CCTV on the Russian Foreign Ministry’s assertion on March 31 of NATO’s “readiness to follow the total containment of Russia and the alliance’s interest in continuing hostilities between Russia and Ukraine?” Zhao replied: “As a product of the Cold War, NATO should have been disbanded after the collapse of the former Soviet Union. In the early 1990s, former U.S. Secretary of State James Baker made his ‘not one inch eastward’ assurance regarding NATO expansion to then President of the Soviet Union Mikhail Gorbachev. As the culprit and the leading instigator of the Ukraine crisis, the U.S. has led NATO in pursuing five rounds of eastward expansion in the two decades or so since 1999. NATO’s membership has increased from 16 to 30 countries and the organization moved over 1,000 km eastward to somewhere near Russia’s borders, pushing the latter to the wall.