Russia is pressuring NATO to formally guarantee that the alliance will not expand eastward, the Russian embassy in Belgium said, amid ongoing negotiations aimed at ending the war in Ukraine.
Moscow also wants to overturn a decision from the 2008 Bucharest summit, which declared that Ukraine and Georgia could join the alliance in the future.
“All verbal promises made by NATO in the past about non-proliferation were conveniently forgotten or ignored when it suited them,” a Russian embassy spokesman told the Izvestia newspaper anonymously, referring to assurances given to the Soviet Union during the unification of Germany.
The diplomat stated that there is documentary evidence in Western archives, but that it has never been published.
Former USSR President Mikhail Gorbachev, however, denied that NATO countries had agreed that the alliance would not expand. “It’s a myth” that the West misled him about further expansion, he said in a 2014 interview. “That question wasn’t even asked then.”
Putin has repeatedly accused the West of “betraying” Russia by breaking promises that NATO would not expand eastward.
At the same time, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte said last year that Russia has no say when it comes to Ukraine’s membership in the alliance.
“Russia has neither a voice nor a veto in deciding who will become a member of NATO,” he said, adding that accession requires the unanimous consent of all member states.
Rutte stressed that Ukraine must receive strong security guarantees to prevent future attacks, regardless of whether it joins NATO or not.
NATO is the only alliance that Moscow openly opposes, while simultaneously welcoming the possibility of Ukraine’s membership in the European Union. Last year, the Kremlin insisted that Ukraine’s EU membership was its “sovereign right”.
“It is the sovereign right of every country. No one can dictate such decisions and we will not do that,” Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov said.
Since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Finland and Sweden have joined NATO, almost doubling Russia’s land and sea borders with the alliance’s member states to around 3,000 kilometers. The Baltic Sea now practically functions as an internal “lake” of NATO.
(Vijesti.ba)
