Expert: NATO possibilities in Europe diminishing year by year

MOSCOW, July 14. /TASS/. The "window" of NATO possibilities in Europe is narrowing every year, the head of a Moscow State University department said at round-table discussion focusing on the results of a Russia-NATO Council meeting.

"Confrontation with Russia is getting increasingly disadvantageous for ‘old Europe’," said Andrei Sidorov, the head of the department for international organizations and global political processes.

"The main thing for Moscow at the moment is not to yield to what Washington wants from it in the current conditions. This first of all concerns the arms race," he said.

He said confrontation between Russia and the US could affect the economies of the Baltic states. "An arms race always has an asymmetric response absolutely outside the military sphere. In response to the deployment of battalions in the Baltic states, Moscow can stop a transit via the Baltic states, which will certainly do major economic damage," Sidorov said.

A meeting of the Russia-NATO Council at the level of ambassadors, the first one after the North Atlantic Alliance’s Warsaw summit, was held in the Belgian capital, Brussels, on Wednesday. The parties discussed the settlement in Ukraine, reduction of risks of military incidents around the world, as well as key results of the NATO summit in Warsaw on July 8-9, which passed a decision to deploy four multinational battalions in the Baltic states and in Poland.