MOSCOW, December 19. /TASS/. The Soviet Union, and later Russia, expressed readiness to join NATO but realized they weren’t welcome there, Russian President Vladimir Putin said during his combined Direct Line Q&A session and year-end press conference headlined "Results of the Year."

"As for our cooperation with NATO, we did cooperate with NATO. It even came down to discussing NATO membership - not just cooperation - for the Soviet Union, and later the Russian Federation. However, we realized in both cases that we weren’t welcome there," the head of state noted.

He stressed that Russia had been promised that NATO would not expand, but those promises were being ignored. "We were deceived once again," Putin went on to say. "There have been several rounds of NATO expansion, and the movement of military infrastructure towards our border was what caused us concern."