MOSCOW, April 3. /TASS/. By expanding its borders eastward, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization was steadily approaching Russian "red lines" and became a source of crises and conflicts, Deputy Speaker of the Federation Council of the Federal Assembly Konstantin Kosachev told TASS before the anniversary of NATO’s founding.
"The 21st century has finally dotted all the i's. NATO is not a security guarantor for Europe but a guarantor of problems for its security, not a solution but a source of crises and conflicts. By moving the iron curtain to the east which distinguished German politician Hans-Dietrich Genscher had warned against, NATO was not expanding the space of democracy but was consistently approaching our red lines," the senator said.
"Now, we see it igniting but no conclusions have been drawn. The state of being blinded by their own potency and the confidence of always being on the right side of history make the alliance absolutely incapable of negotiating. And this is, perhaps, the saddest conclusion by the current anniversary of the Cold War ‘dinosaur’," he added.
The senator thinks that congratulations on the anniversary are superfluous because hardly any other alliance played "such an ominous role" in the history of mankind. However, in his opinion this is a good moment to reiterate the problems created for the global community by this "Cold War relic."
He noted that the divergence of NATO’s purported mission with reality is rather obvious. "Only a person who reads exclusively NATO bulletins would believe the tales of the alliance’s defensive nature. The US alone spent almost six trillion dollars on conducting wars in less than two decades, while not a single war was conducted on the soil of the alliance’s countries themselves. While the number of foreign victims of the ‘defensive alliance’ even by US estimates amounts to hundreds of thousands," the senator pointed out.