Russia yesterday accused NATO of encroaching on its borders and seeking to change the strategic balance of power, forcing Moscow to take steps to protect its interests and security.
The comments by Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov came a day after Russia and the West accused one another of endangering global security, adding to tensions over the conflict in Ukraine, in which pro-Russian separatists have seized land in the east after Moscow annexed Crimea from Kiev early last year.
“It’s not Russia that’s approaching someone’s borders. It’s NATO’s military infrastructure that is approaching the borders of Russia,” Peskov told reporters.
Photo: AFP
“All this ... forces Russia to take measures to safeguard its own interests, its own security,” he said.
Peskov said the West had increasingly resorted to “unconstructive and confrontational” Cold War-style rhetoric and that Russia had never wanted strife.
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s top foreign policy adviser, Yuri Ushakov, yesterday also said that Russia would not be dragged into an arms race with the West as this would hurt the economy.
“Russia is not entering an arms race. Russia is trying to react in some ways to certain threats, but nothing more than that. We are not entering any arms race because that would hurt our capabilities in the economic sphere,” Ushakov said.
He declined to comment when asked about the possibility of a direct military conflict between Russia and the West.
Putin on Tuesday rattled the West by saying that Russia would add more than 40 new intercontinental ballistic missiles to its nuclear arsenal this year
He said that Russia must defend itself if threatened and accused NATO of “coming to our borders.”
“If someone puts some of our territories under threat, that means we will have to direct our armed forces and modern strike power at those territories, from where the threat emanates,” he said at a meeting with his Finnish counterpart Sauli Niinisto.
“As soon as some threat comes from an adjoining state, Russia must react appropriately and carry out its defense policy in such a way as to neutralize a threat against it,” Putin added.
“This year, the size of our nuclear forces will increase by over 40 new intercontinental ballistic missiles that will be able to overcome any, even the most technologically advanced, missile-defense systems,” Putin said at the opening of an exhibition of military hardware outside Moscow.
The US slammed the announcement as a retrograde move reminiscent of the Cold War.
“We’ve had enormous cooperation from the 1990s forward with respect to the destruction of nuclear weapons that were in former territories of the Soviet Union. And nobody wants to see us step backwards,” US Secretary of State John Kerry said.
“Nobody should hear that kind of announcement from the leader of a powerful country and not be concerned about what the implications are,” he said. “Nobody wants to — I think — go back to a kind of Cold War status.”
Russia has an estimated 7,500 nuclear warheads, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, of which about 1,780 are deployed on missiles or at military bases. The US has about 7,300 warheads, of which 2,080 are deployed, the institute said.
NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said Putin’s remarks were part of a pattern of aggressive behavior by Moscow.
“This nuclear saber-rattling by Russia is unjustified, destabilizing and it is dangerous,” he said.
However, Putin said that observers should not “blow anything out of proportion” with regard to Russia’s perception of the threat from NATO, saying it was “more political signals aimed towards Russia or its allies.”
Poland and other countries in Eastern Europe have been rattled by Russia’s actions in Ukraine and NATO has moved to reassure them, including launching US-led drills in the Baltic states and Poland earlier this month.
The New York Times reported over the weekend that the Pentagon was poised to station heavy weapons for up to 5,000 US troops in several Eastern European and Baltic countries to deter Russian aggression.
Additional reporting by AFP
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