MOSCOW, May 16. /TASS/. The countries of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization continue to stubbornly insist on expanding the alliance, which only serves to exacerbate the situation and forces Moscow to draw relevant conclusions, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov told reporters on Tuesday.

"We see that NATO countries are continuing to stubbornly push through their agenda for expanding the alliance, with Finland [recently] acceding to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, <...> [and] Sweden is next despite certain difficulties, so the situation is not changing for the better, but is changing, unfortunately, for the worse, and so we are drawing our own conclusions from this," he noted.

"This is certainly a factor that we have to take into account, literally while conducting relevant events in the military sphere, and balancing the consequences of this step from the point of view of ensuring our security," the senior diplomat emphasized.