At the Warsaw Summit of NATO the Secretary General of the alliance, Jens Stoltenberg, announced a paradigm shift in relations with Russia. Thus, in his words, Moscow is no longer a strategic partner for NATO, but the parties are not in a state of a cold war.
"We do not see any immediate threat. Russia is not a strategic partner as well. We do not have a strategic partnership that we were trying to create after the end of the cold war. But we are not in the situation of a cold war. Now it is a completely different situation,’’ he said.
It is also known that the leaders of the 28 NATO countries and Finland and Sweden, who were invited, held an informal working dinner on Friday night, the main theme of which was relations with Russia.
It is reported that the heads of the states attending the summit supported the NATO-Russia Council, which is to be held shortly after the Warsaaw summit.
"The heads of the NATO states unanimously supported the need to maintain a common position on Russia. They confirmed the double alliance approach to relations with Russia, which includes strong defense and dialogue,’’ TASS cites the source.
Yesterday NATO confirmed its decision to strengthen its ‘eastern flank’ to counter ‘the aggressive policy of Moscow’, to deploy new battalions to Poland and the Baltics.
The former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev believes that the decision at the NATO summit in Warsaw suggests that the alliance is taking a step up from a cold war to a real one.
‘’The NATO members are trying to pretend that they are not afraid of anything, and it's very suspicious, thus they are trying to draw us, the whole world, into an even bigger confrontation,’’ Interfax quotes him as saying.
