MOSCOW, May 24. /TASS/. Behind NATO’s latest expansion push lie the same underlying intentions as the policies of Hitler, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said at an international meeting of high-level officials responsible for security issues in Moscow on Wednesday.

"In essence, NATO’s reckless expansion reflects the same intentions that undergirded the Hitlerian doctrine of ‘Drang nach Osten’ (German for ‘Drive to the East,’ which was the Nazi slogan justifying the conquest of Central and Eastern European lands - TASS)," Lavrov said.

According to Russia’s top diplomat, the United States has purposefully set about destroying the architecture of European security, "while focusing in particular on engendering threats that are unacceptable to Russia." "It is enough just to mention the US withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty more than 20 years ago, as well as from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty and from the Open Skies Treaty," he maintained.

Lavrov accused Washington and its allies of marginalizing the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), a body that he said no longer played any role in European security. The Russian foreign minister criticized the NATO countries’ "provocative" course toward relentlessly expanding the alliance eastward, which he said has been done in spite of the top-level Western pledges made to the then-leadership of the Soviet Union that NATO would not expand "one inch." Also, this policy "contravenes [Western countries’] commitments made at the highest level to refrain from bolstering their own security at the expense of the security of other [nations]," he lamented.