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MOSCOW, September 11. /TASS/. Countries seeking to deploy NATO’s contingents or weapons on their territories are playing with fire and endanger their own security, Russia’s Permanent Representative at NATO Alexander Grushko said on Friday.
He said politicians permitting or even asking to deploy foreign troops on the territories of their countries should be aware that they were putting their countries at risk.
"It should be no secret for our Western partners that any attempts to deploy any weapons potentially dangerous for Russia are like playing with fire. It is to the prejudice of their own security when their own states become a kind of front line, virtual so far," he said.
"I have an impression that some states simply like to call themselves frontline countries in a bid to be granted some political and economic dividends as the most important partners," Grushko said. "It is a dead-end track. Serious people understand that Russia has no aggressive plans and cannot have such plans."
NATO used Ukrainian crisis to emerge from political non-existence
According to Grushko, NATO has used the conflict in Ukraine in a bid to justify its existence.
"NATO has been losing the reason for its existence in the new security conditions when it has no big enemy," he said in an interview with Rossiya-24 television channel. "Developments in Ukraine were used to save NATO from a perspective of political non-existence and place in back in the centre of the European trans-Atlantic agenda."
"This way, the United States is seeking to line up its allies. It is another method used to united Europe around the United States," he noted. In his words, "projection of force" on Russia and eastern borders was fraught with a "collapse of all concepts about the construction of a joint security system based on cooperation but not confrontation."
"Today we, I mean the entire Euro-Atlantic community, are in a position when risks of returning to the Cold War schemes are running high and there are no signs so far that NATO might change this course," Grushko noted.