Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova's comment on occasion of the 75th anniversary of NATO
4 April 2024 10:24
610-04-04-2024
Seventy-five years ago, on April 4, 1949, the North Atlantic Treaty was signed in Washington, D.C., which marked the birth of the most aggressive military alliance of our time. Just four years after the end of World War II, the US-led collective West started plotting a new confrontation in the form of a bloc-based face-off with the Soviet Union, which was an alternative centre of power and sovereign development. The way the politicians of that time saw it, NATO was designed to become the key tool for establishing and maintaining the global hegemony of Washington and its allies, which it has remained to this day. Neither the end of the Cold War, nor the demise of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Treaty Organisation has changed the alliance's mission statement in any way.
According to its first Secretary General, Lord Ismay, the purpose of NATO was to "keep the Soviet Union out, the Americans in, and the Germans down," and it has remained unchanged to this day. For the United States, NATO has remained a key tool to keep its European allies under control and a resource base for the US defence complex. Not a single genuine European security interest was ever taken into account if it could potentially weaken US military and political hegemony in the Old World.
After the Cold War ended, the alliance has been looking for a raison d'etre for quite a while and entered an era of major operations. Washington and its allies engaged in armed "peacekeeping" in the Balkans, which ended in a treacherous aggression against Yugoslavia, and "fighting terrorism" in Afghanistan. NATO allies joined the US-led coalition in Iraq and carried out a "humanitarian" intervention in Libya. These interventions invariably led to entire countries being ruined and broken up, vast swathes of land left without public administration, poverty, exacerbation of humanitarian problems, massive loss of life, and millions of migrants.
The efforts to overcome the identity crisis have ended in NATO failing on all fronts. Seeking to justify its relevance as a guarantor of the security of the "golden billion," the alliance returned to its origins, that is rebuffing the threat from the East. Russia, which advocated an international order based on multipolarity, international law, equality and mutual consideration of interests, which the US-led collective West finds unacceptable, was once again assigned the role of an adversary. The Alliance has set on a course to dismantle the arms control system, to militarise Europe and to oppose our country.
Our initiatives to alleviate political and military tensions, to build a fair security architecture based on its indivisibility, and to refrain from provocative moves have been met with a wall of silence on the part of the alliance. Washington and Brussels' top priority was to keep NATO, which is unable to survive without an external adversary, afloat, rather than work with Moscow to neutralise the newly arisen common challenges and threats, and to address regional and global security issues. This gave start to six waves of NATO eastward expansion, support for hotbeds of instability and colour revolutions along our borders, as well as major disinformation campaigns to make people in Western and Eastern Europe and the post-Soviet space believe in the threat emanating from Russia. Military budgets were inflated under the pretext of confronting Moscow, Russophobia was hammered in the public mind, and the sanctions pressure was ratcheted up coupled with the military development of NATO's "eastern flank" and flooding it with weapons.
The key role in containing our country was assigned to Ukraine, which was purposefully turned into an anti-Russia entity. Western countries instigated the coup in that country and supported the new Kiev authorities' punitive campaign against the Russian-speaking population. In 2014, in response to Crimea and Sevastopol rejoining Russia, NATO broke off civilian and military cooperation with us. The entirety of the mutually beneficial cooperation with Russia was sacrificed to NATO's geopolitical ambitions. All of the projects that were truly beneficial for strengthening the Russia-NATO Council members' security were scrapped, among them counter-terrorism and counter-narcotics, arms control, disarmament and non-proliferation, missile defence, and air traffic control interoperability projects.
Incrementally, unbearable conditions were created for our diplomats in Brussels, including the expulsion of our diplomatic staff. The unfriendly actions by the NATO members have led to our diplomatic mission to NATO suspending its activities.
In order to alleviate tensions in its relations with the United States and its NATO allies and to strengthen stability in Europe, Russia, in December 2021, sent to Washington and Brussels draft agreements providing for firm legal security guarantees for our country that preclude NATO's eastward advancement and the deployment of threatening weapons systems next to Russia's borders, as well as bringing NATO's force alignment back to what it was in 1997 when it was announced that NATO and Russia did not consider each other as adversaries.
NATO was not ready to stop escalation and discard confrontational rhetoric towards Russia. On the contrary, it redoubled its efforts and provided direct support to the nationalist Kiev regime, encouraging it to provide a military solution to the Donbass issue and to exacerbate its relations with Moscow.
We know what it has led to. For the third straight year now, Washington and its satellites have been flooding Ukraine with mercenaries and weapons in order to inflict, as they say, a strategic defeat on Russia and to deplete our resources. They are using every means and methods available to the collective West and its Kiev puppets, up to and including the terrorist attacks, to get there. The alliance's reckless schemes have failed, which fact pushes it towards moves that could entail tragic ramifications for the European and even global security.
The West has already had the chance to see that Russia is prepared for any scenario. Our security is reliably protected and our defence capabilities are strong.
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