Russian Foreign Minister on NATO Expansion

Russian Foreign Minister, Sergey Lavrov, has warned that Moscow will spare no efforts to prevent Georgia’s and Ukraine’s NATO membership.

In an interview with the Ekho Moskvy radio station on April 8, Lavrov said: “We will do everything not to let Georgia’s and Ukraine’s accession to NATO, not to allow worsening of our relations either with the alliance, or with its leading members, as well as with our neighbors that will be inevitable in case of these [countries’] accession [to NATO].”

He also said that NATO expansion “is the major irritant threatening to turn into a systemic problem in our relations with NATO, in our relations with those NATO members, which are actually pushing the issue.”

“It actually contradicts the logic of transformation of NATO into an organization, which provides global security,” Lavrov said. “This expansion is not in the spirit of transformation, in the spirit of adjustment to new, real threats. Instead, this expansion is in the spirit of that cold war logic, in the spirit of confrontation between blocs, in the spirit of occupation of the territories by blocs; and what particular effect it will have for increasing the security of NATO members and its separate countries, I simply do not know. The effect will be opposite. Dividing lines in Europe will instead be created again; we cannot consider the attempts of approaching the NATO machine to our borders, in other way than a threat to our security.”

“More than a half of the Ukrainian population, probably 70% are against joining NATO. In Georgia – if we talk about Georgia – Abkhazia and South Ossetia do not want even to hear that Georgia will become a NATO member and will start pushing them [Abkhazia and South Ossetia] back to its territorial integrity under the NATO umbrella.”