The meeting at NATO’s Brussels headquarters follows last week’s gathering of alliance heads of state and government in Warsaw.
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“We want to understand the explanation of NATO’s decisions taken at the Warsaw summit”, he said.
The agenda is also to include safety measures over the Baltic Sea, according to earlier reports. Indeed the body that is meeting – the Nato-Russia Council founded in 2002 – was itself a product of the optimism of those early days of Nato-Russia harmony.
According to Vladimir Yevseyev, a military expert and deputy head of the CIS Institute, since the start of the Ukraine crisis, North Atlantic Treaty Organisation has acquired a objective in the minds of the citizens of its member states that was lost with the breakup of the Soviet Union, that of the need to oppose Moscow. The meeting of the council will take place on July 13 in Brussels. Formally, readiness to cooperate is declared, though what is being pursued for real is not so much a policy of containment as a policy of intimidation towards Russian Federation.
Russian Federation expressed dismay at the summit’s decisions, with Kremlin Spokesman Dmitry Peskov signaling that Russian Federation didn’t share NATO’s view that its measures were defensive only.
The NATO-Russia relationship appeared to be back on track again in 2010 until NATO members agreed on establishing a missile-defense shield in Europe. Its reaction will go beyond conventional warfare to nuclear weapons: Moscow is highly focused on building up its strategic missile force.
Bert Koenders, foreign minister for the Netherlands, told CNBC that European sanctions on Russian Federation were meant to encourage it to respect the territorial sovereignty of other countries.
Russia’s Defense Ministry said in late June it is looking at a new rule to make it mandatory for military planes to have their transponders switched on at all times over the Baltic Sea – a neutral yet crowded airspace where many of these close calls have happened.
But critics argue there is little chance the NATO-Russia Council will ever return to its original role as a partnership because the two sides no longer seem to agree on the original post-Cold War architecture it was founded upon.
“[Russian leaders] have actually quite plainly stated that they want something different, a new security architecture, that this post-Cold War architecture does not satisfy Russia’s interests and that this has all been built at the expense of Russian Federation”, he says.
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Military expert Viktor Murakhovsky, editor-in-chief of the Arsenal Otechestva (Arsenal of the Fatherland) magazine, said that Russian Federation would not be taking any additional steps in response to NATO’s actions and political statements.
