WASHINGTON, December 31. /TASS/. No one should doubt Russia will defend its security interests, Russian amabassador to the US, Anatoly Antonov, said in an article published in Foreign Policy magazine on Thursday.
"No one should doubt our determination to defend our security," he said.
"Everything has its limits," he went on to say. "If our partners keep constructing military-strategic realities imperiling the existence of our country, we will be forced to create similar vulnerabilities for them."
NATO and Ukraine
"Military exploration of Ukraine by NATO member states is an existential threat for Russia," Antonov wrote. "Urgent action is needed. The principle of equal and indivisible security must be restored."
"This means that no single state has the right to strengthen its security at the expense of others," he went on to say. "With political will, this can be achieved through the development of serious long-term and legally binding security guarantees."
He said NATO is seeking to make Ukraine and Georgia its members.
"With the "crawling" of the alliance into Ukraine’s territory, the threat to Russia’s security is increasing sharply, as missile systems with minimum flight time to our country and other destabilizing weapons can be deployed there," he said.
Antonov lamented US withdrawals from some treaties such as the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, and the Treaty on Open Skies, thus effectively dismantling a post-World War II collective security system.
"Why? What did Washington gain?" he said.
Eastward expansion
Russia needs commitments from the United States and other NATO countries that the alliance won’t expand further or use countries close to Russia as hosts for weapons systems that Russia perceives as a threat, Antonov said.
Russia’s draft agreements on security guarantees have been published recently do not infringe on the security of the United States, he said. "On the contrary, they create conditions for de-escalation in Europe, restoration of trust, and intensification of interaction in order to solve global problems, such as the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic, nonproliferation of weapons of mass destruction and their means of delivery, rebuilding of national economies, and settlement of serious issues regarding climate change," Antonov wrote.