NATO can hardly withstand present-day global challenges without Russia’s assistance, but the ball is on the side of the Western military alliance, Alexander Grushko, Russia’s permanent envoy to NATO, said.
Grushko repeated that Russia has never refused cooperation with the western military bloc.
Grushko spoke in an interview with Russia’s Kommersant business daily.
“By cutting off cooperation with Russia, the alliance weakens the potential of international efforts in the fight against terrorism, piracy, the Weapons of Mass Destruction proliferation, drugs trafficking and regional instability,” he said.
“We did not make a decision to suspend projects on practical cooperation within the frames of Russia-NATO Council,” Grushko said.
Grushko said that Moscow “has always had a firm stance that true cooperation is possible only on an equal and mutually respected basis.”
“Considering all this, we directly stated our resentment of NATO’s expansion policy and the movement of its military infrastructure up to the Russian borders, as well as our non-admission of ignorance of international law norms.”
Russia may resume strategic cooperation with NATO if cold war pattern of relations are dropped, but currently there is little to suggest such a development.
“It is obvious that such developments are not providing for true interests concerning the strengthening of the common European security on the collective basis,” Grushko said.
In early August, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, who was the secretary general of NATO at that time, said that the Western military alliance terminated cooperation with Russia, was set to strengthen collective defense of the military alliance’s member states and would expand its level of cooperation with Ukraine.
Last week, Rasmussen, whose office term in charge of NATO expired on November 1, said Russia poses no threat to NATO, ItarTASS reported.
Grushko, however, already said in mid-October that the North Atlantic alliance exploited the Ukrainian crisis to promote its own geopolitical interests, adding that NATO’s role in Ukraine was exceptionally destructive.
According to the UN, more than 4,000 people have been killed and hundreds of thousands have fled Ukraine’s southeast as a result of clashes between Ukrainian troops and local militias in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions during Kiev’s military operation, conducted since mid-April, to regain control over the breakaway territories, which call themselves the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s republics.