MOSCOW, June 21. /TASS/. Any attempts to threaten Russia’s sovereignty and territorial integrity will be met with resistance, Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said on Wednesday in comments on the latest NATO exercise.
"This type of exercise shines a light on the fact that the NATO military machine has nothing to do with defense and that all its efforts are directed exclusively toward the comprehensive containment of our country and even the rehearsal of ways to attack Russia," the diplomat said. "In these conditions, I would like to emphasize again that any attempts to threaten Russia’s sovereignty and territorial integrity won’t pass without consequences for their initiators."
In this context, the spokeswoman mentioned the large NATO military exercise dubbed Air Defender that’s currently taking place in German airspace.
"The magnitude of the means and forces involved - there are about 250 jets alone, of which about 100 are US aircraft - show that Washington and its allies are developing operational plans to conduct combat operations against a comparable enemy," she stated. "It is clear who is kept in mind because the training targets over the past decades have always been designated by NATO as Russia."
"Exercise Baltops-23, which was held recently by NATO forces in the Baltic Sea, which took place from June 4-16, also fits into this confrontational logic," Zakharova said. "According to information that has become available, the area that was restricted for navigation included the Kaliningrad Region and the Russian maritime areas along its coast.".