Russia is taking counter measures against extension of NATO’s presence in Europe, Alexander Glushko, the Russian Permanent Envoy, has said. According to him, the US is still increasing its military presence in Europe, focusing on the eastern part. “Russia’s response will be developed in such a way that it would meet our understanding of a military threat, the measure wouldn’t be very expensive, but highly effective,” Glushko promised.
Veronica Krasheninnikova, DG of the Institute for Foreign Policy Studies and Initiatives, thinks that this is the most interesting period in Russia's modern history: “It is interesting due to the fact that we occasionally begin to follow our own line in foreign policy. In February 2007, at the Munich conference, President Vladimir Putin stated a really independent position in the state and foreign policy and presented the fundamental issues to our Western partners. The first such episode was Crimea, when we stopped NATO’s expansion to the East. Until 2014, NATO was moving eastward. In 1991 there were 12 members, now there are 28 NATO members. This all happened after the US Secretary of State James Baker promised Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev in February 1990 that ‘NATO will not expand an inch to the East’, and East Germany would not be included in NATO. Of course, those were empty promises. NATO like a roller was moving towards us.”
Krasheninnikova believes that there would have been no merger of Crimea if there had not been such pressure from the West: “If Crimea had not taken such a decision, then, yes, today NATO troops would have been standing by the Crimean coast. The US Department of Defense already then, in 2012, began repair works in two schools in Sevastopol for their needs. What needs did the US Department of Defense have in Sevastopol?”
The second important step in the Russian foreign policy is Syria, according to the expert: “This was the first time we had taken the initiative outside the borders of the former Soviet Union. Syria is a distant frontier of the southern Russian front. What we are doing there today directly concerns our security in the country. Will we be able to make Washington abandon the use of terrorism as an international instrument for the realization of their interests to overthrow the leaders who do not satisfy it? Only with the power and effectiveness that we demonstrated in Syria. The US and European governments still have to reckon with public opinion. In September 2013 Washington had to give up the strikes on Syria because Congress opposed it, because society opposed it, Great Britain was against it, but most importantly, Russian diplomacy lifted the formal pretext of the presence of chemical weapons in Syria and left Washington without reasons for this. We can sometimes change this line. It requires enormous efforts to change it, but it should be done in any case.”
