Deputy Foreign Minister Grushko Briefs Izvestia, How NATO Is Preparing a Clash with Russia
June 14—NATO is clearly preparing a clash with Russia, including with nuclear weapons, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Grushko told Izvestia published June 13, and summarized in English in a series of reports by TASS.
“Everything NATO is doing in this area today, to put it bluntly, is the alliance’s preparation for a possible military clash with Russia,” he said. “And the exercises that are being conducted show how all concepts of cooperative security have now been discarded and NATO has returned to Cold War-era security schemes.”
Referring to the hybrid warfare being waged against Russia, Grushko pointed to illegal sanctions, as well as the Russia-demonizing announcement “that if NATO is defeated in Ukraine, the next day Russia will definitely invade Poland and the Baltic states….”
Speaking of NATO’s growing dependence on deploying nuclear weapons in Europe, Grushko said, “From the latest exercises and from the latest documents we can see that the role of nuclear weapons in NATO’s military strategy and military planning is only growing. There is talk about the use of nuclear weapons in Poland and other countries. And we should keep this in mind also from the point of view of working out neutralization measures, if such talks take the form of concrete plans.”
Accusations against Russia as being a nuclear threat, Grushkov said, were “another move to turn things upside down.” He emphasized, “It is NATO that today is on the path of escalation, not to speak of nuclear weapons.”
Pointing to the dangerous geopolitical game in Asia the United States is playing, he said that “if we talk about security trends in the Asian region, we see that they clearly lead to deterioration. The situation around Taiwan is escalating, there are very dangerous attempts to militarize the region by deploying new long-range weapons systems that can directly threaten China and not only China. Tensions are building up around North Korea.”
