PARIS, May 13. /TASS/. Henri Geno, who served as an advisor to the French president from 2007 to 2012, on Friday said NATO should stop accepting new members.
"Doors to NATO should be closed," he said on BFM TV. "It’s unacceptable to include Finland, Sweden, Ukraine, Moldova and Georgia in the alliance."
He said the US and the EU helped the admission of Eastern European states to NATO, the transformation of the alliance into an anti-Russian organization and the advance of the EU borders to the borders of Russia. That way, Washington and Brussels created "for the Russians a sense of encirclement that was at the heart of many European wars," Geno said.
The former advisor to French President Nicolas Sarkozy is convinced that the November 10, 2021 agreement on the strategic partnership between the United States and Ukraine "formalized an alliance between the two countries, clearly directed against Russia."
Return to diplomacy
"Neither Churchill nor Roosevelt at the beginning of World War II thought that one day they would order mass bombing of German cities in order to break the spirit of the population," Geno continued. "When sending military advisers to Vietnam in 1961, US President John Kennedy did not imagine that eight years later America would keep half a million soldiers there, burn napalm and stand accused of exterminating entire villages."
He said, "The cold war did not turn into a third world war only because none of its actors tried to put the enemy in a stalemate." Now the US and its allies, according to Geno, are trying to "drive Russia into a corner."
"A return to diplomacy is the only way to prevent a slide into a global conflict," the former adviser said. He agreed with the position of French President Emmanuel Macron, who called for a ceasefire in Ukraine to prevent the conflict from spreading to other parts of Europe.
NATO expansion
On February 24 Russian President Vladimir Putin announced a special military operation in response to a request for help by the heads of the Donbass republics. The US and its allies retaliated by imposing sweeping sanctions on Russia and started arms supplies to Kiev.
Discussions about Finland's accession to NATO intensified in early April. The key members of the alliance supported this idea. The majority of members of the Finnish parliament were in favor of accession. Sweden is also considering this possibility, and the ruling Social Democratic Labor Party will decide on joining NATO on May 15.