MOSCOW, December 27. /TASS/. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization is a geopolitical project to colonize territories after the dissolution of the USSR and the Warsaw Pact, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said in an exclusive interview with the Soloviev Live YouTube channel on Monday.

"NATO now is a purely geopolitical project on colonizing the territory that became unclaimed after the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact [Organization] and the break-up of the Soviet Union. This is what they are doing," he said.

The top diplomat noted that Russia couldn’t turn a blind eye to the fact of NATO approaching its doorstep.

That said, he pointed out that it is not necessary to prepare the agreement on security guarantees with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in the NATO-Russia Council. "Of course, [NATO’s General Secretary Jens] Stoltenberg who is essentially the main administrative decision-maker of the Secretariat of the North Atlantic Alliance won’t be the negotiator but the key members of the bloc will be, above all, the US," he noted.

The Russian foreign minister also reiterated that NATO had promised that it wouldn’t embark on an eastward expansion of the alliance.

"Recently, I read the memoirs of some British diplomat who somewhere participated in some talks, including related to the re-unification of Germany and those subjects that were added to a united Germany in the context of NATO, nuclear weapons that shouldn’t be further to the East than the line where they were at that time," the top diplomat divulged. "And that British diplomat wrote <...> a fantastic thing. He says: yes, they sincerely promised that NATO wouldn’t expand, but, of course, they didn’t mean it, they were simply impelled by a historic chance to build a new Europe where there wouldn’t be a confrontation. And Zbigniew Brzezinski in a conversation with one of his colleagues openly said: ‘We tricked them,’" the Russian foreign minister noted.