US admits moving NATO weapons close to Russian border was a mistake
Moving NATO weapons closer to Russia's borders as the alliance expanded after the collapse of the Soviet Union was a mistake, the New Yorker wrote, citing Daniel Treisman, a Russia expert at the University of California at Los Angeles.
In his opinion, the North Atlantic Alliance's decision in 1994 to admit former Soviet allies into its ranks was a "disastrous failure".
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| Photo illustration: Public domain/Sgt. Daniel Cole |
"The main international challenge of the 1990s was Russia's steady rapprochement with the Western world. The West had to establish new financial, trade, cultural and political ties, as well as create new European security mechanisms beyond the pre-existing NATO bloc," the newspaper quoted Mr. Treisman as saying.
If these efforts had been successful, the analyst said, they could have ensured security in Eastern Europe. However, this did not happen, and the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland joined NATO in 1999.
"Instead, the West was wrong in assessing Moscow's reaction to NATO's transfer of weapons to the East," the expert concluded.
Russia has repeatedly noted that the North Atlantic Alliance has a confrontational policy. Dmitry Peskov, the press secretary of the Russian President, said that further expansion of the organization would not bring more security to Europe, NATO is aggressive in nature. At the same time, he noted that he does not consider Sweden and Finland joining the military-political bloc as an existential threat to Russia.
