MOSCOW, January 13. /TASS/. Moscow is seeking guarantees of non-expansion of NATO eastward in accordance with the decisions of the OSCE Istanbul Summit, while Washington and its allies flatly reject these demands, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said on Thursday.
"NATO and Washington vehemently reject our right to seek the non-expansion of NATO. But our stance is not based on NATO documents. We have nothing to do with them, and they have nothing to do with us. It [the position] is based on documents adopted at the highest level in the OSCE, including the 1999 Istanbul Summit where freedom of choice of alliances is directly conditioned by the need to ensure the indivisibility of security, so that no one takes any measures in their own interests to the detriment of the security of any other state," the minister said.
The Russian minister recalled that apart from the non-expansion of NATO Moscow also seeks "legal guarantees of non-deployment of strike weapons in neighboring territories that pose a threat to Russia, and the return of the European security architecture to 1997, when the NATO-Russia Founding Act was inked on the basis of which the Russia-NATO Council was subsequently established."