NATO warned on confrontational statements against Russia

Over the recent time, the NATO secretary general has been active in making statements on Russia, doing this in a confrontational style, zealously reproducing the rhetoric of the Cold War times, the Russian Foreign Ministry said on Thursday.

As the latest example, the ministry mentioned a speech of Anders Fogh Rasmussen in Paris on April 8, at a seminar on NATO’s transformation. “Repeated accusations against us by the secretary general prove that the Alliance is trying to use the crisis in Ukraine for ‘uniting’ in the face of an imaginary external threat to NATO countries and to substantiate the Alliance’s importance in this respect in the 21st century,” the ministry said.

“Hence a deliberate emphasis on a ‘growing militarization of Russia’, when NATO’s military expenditures today make up half of the global military spending, while the Russian military budget is at least ten times less than the aggregate defense budgets of the Alliance’s countries,” it said.

“Anders Fogh Rasmussen speaks about the revision of the whole set of relations with Moscow, including the 1997 Founding Act on Mutual Relations, Cooperation and Security between Russia and NATO and the 2002 Rome Declaration,” the ministry said. “For all that, it is not embarrassed by the fact that member countries of the Alliance have repeatedly assumed the role of a judge and officer of justice in violation of the basic provisions of these documents, like it was in Kosovo or in Libya, thus shattering norms of the international law,” it continued.

“When Russia was pointing at all risks of such activity, we were being convinced that there had been no other way out. Now, the Alliance is trying to act as the leading advocate of legal norms, turning a blind eye at the same time to rampageous activity of extremist forces in Ukraine that is splitting the society into ‘us and them’,” it said.