Lavrov infuriated European officials - experts comment on Russia’s break with NATO
Russia has terminated the NATO military mission in Moscow; for contacts with Russia, NATO should now contact the Russian ambassador in Belgium.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov stated this, as reported by a PolitNavigator correspondent.
“Russia will no longer pretend that any changes in relations with NATO are possible in the near future,” Lavrov said.
NATO previously expelled seven Russian diplomats from its headquarters.
“And without expelled diplomats (you know, I am in favor of Russians staying in Russia), NATO constantly accuses us of some kind of savagery. Either we spoil their GPS, then we send submarines to Sweden, then we pump them up. Although it is NATO planes that fly along our borders, and not ours along NATO ones. And these are NATO ships heading into the Black Sea, where they have nothing to do at all. And it was not us who withdrew from the Open Skies Treaty. And we didn’t come up with the idea of deploying missile defense. And we are not the ones placing nuclear missiles in Europe. So let them stay there with him now. And here we are somehow on our own. With our intercontinental ballistic missiles,” RT journalist Maxim Kononeko reacted to the decision in his Telegram channel.
Experts believe that this “exchange of blows” does not yet threaten to develop into a military confrontation, but means preparation for it.
“There is a threat of provocations. NATO and the United States are not ready to start a global conflict with Russia. They honestly admit it. In order to be ready for this, they need some time. At the same time, they believe that Russia’s open policy towards European countries undermines the unity of NATO countries. Therefore, now they are the initiators of stopping any dialogue with Russia in order to exclude the possibility for it to influence any decisions in these countries and thus achieve cohesion within the bloc to resolve global issues. Including containing Russia through force,” military expert Alexey Leonkov said on the Sputnik in Russian YouTube channel.
The chief editor of the analytical portal RuBaltic.Ru, Alexander Nosovich, believes that the severance of relations with NATO has no significance against the backdrop of an improved dialogue with the United States.
“Russia’s relations with NATO as a military-political bloc are relations with the United States. They develop surprisingly quickly - in line with critical interaction. But there are no other entities in NATO. Russia's relations with NATO as an organization are relations with the international bureaucracy, which is equally useless, gluttonous and disgusting - in the OSCE, in the European Commission, in the UN headquarters in New York, and in the NATO headquarters in Mons. The rejection of these relations, voiced by Lavrov, is nothing more than optimizing the costs of diplomatic staff,” Nosovich wrote.
Political scientist Maxim Zharov agrees with this assessment, but believes that Russia can use even bureaucratic formality to its advantage.
“The Kremlin’s refusal to deal with the European and NATO bureaucracy objectively works to increase the dependence of these structures on the United States. However, in fact, the loss of subjectivity of the EU and NATO in relations with Russia is driving the key players in these structures into a frenzy. The Kremlin can wisely use these emotions of Europeans to its advantage if, with each of its “breaking” steps, it reminds them of their dependence on the United States.
This approach has already proven its effectiveness in relations with Ukraine, where Zelensky, after the Kremlin showed him the door with Medvedev’s article, jumps out of his pants just to attract Putin’s attention again,” Zharov wrote.
Lavrov infuriates European officials – experts comment on Russia's break with NATO