Leaders of nine states of Central and Eastern Europe and the Baltic states published a joint statement on Wednesday, in which they expressed “serious concern” about “the aggressive position” of Russia and stood for a stable presence of NATO in the region, the Voice of America reports. The joint declaration which they adopted in Bucharest stated that the leaders would unite efforts to provide “a full-scale, effective, and regular” military presence of NATO in the region.
Russia views NATO expansion highly negatively for several reasons. Sergey Markov, director of the Institute of Political Studies, says that “the accession of Montenegro to NATO does not strengthen the security of NATO if we regard the objectives of NATO as they are declared – the security of countries from outside aggression. Montenegro is already integrated into NATO to some extent. The alliance transferred Montenegro to its standards: they trained officers there for a long time; they can obtain permission for flights at any time. But NATO's policy is for Montenegro to join NATO. The objective of NATO is to ensure domination, through the use of absolute power superiority, of the countries of the Anglosphere – the US, the UK, Canada, the Netherlands. We are talking about the political unification of all the other countries, which includes the processes of de-Russification.”
According to the expert, “there is a conflict between those in NATO who believe that the Cold War is the fight of democracy against communism and, therefore, the Cold War is over, and those who believe that the Cold War is a war of the western Catholic-Protestant civilization against the Orthodox Russian civilization, from their point of view the war is not over. In Latvia and Estonia, Russophobia won. We have reasons to believe that the same thing will be implemented in other Balkan countries, which have traditional relations with Russia. That is, the main objective of NATO in Montenegro is not to increase military security, but to get rid of all pro-Russian forces. Their gradual forced suppression, so that Russia would never have any allies there.”
Markov says that “they have taught Ukrainians that Russia is the main enemy of Ukrainians, now they will teach Montenegrins that Russia is the main enemy of Montenegro. All their life they will write it in textbooks and teach about it. The falsification of textbooks, from this point of view, is one of the main objectives of NATO. The real work that NATO is engaged in is the falsification of history textbooks.”
