JAKARTA, July 13. /TASS/. Tokyo and Seoul are sending signals that they would not be against obtaining their own nuclear arsenals or hosting US nuclear weapons, which represents a dangerous trend, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov told reporters on Thursday.

"NATO is promoting the idea that security in the Euro-Atlantic and Indo-Pacific, as they call it, regions, is indivisible. Plans are in the works to transfer parts of NATO’s military infrastructure to that region, including to those countries that were invited to the Vilnius summit; I mean Australia, New Zealand, Japan and Korea," he said. "Japan and Korea, by the way, are already sending signals that they are not against deploying US nuclear weapons on their soil or obtaining their own. This is a very serious and dangerous trend," the top Russian diplomat added.

According to Lavrov, the methods of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) are currently being seriously tested. "This is happening because the US and its allies are trying in every way to replace the ASEAN-centric security structure, here, in the APAC, which has been taking shape over decades and was acceptable to everyone until only recently, with the so-called Indo-Pacific strategies and the NATO bloc’s attempts to infiltrate this region," he pointed out.