US wants Eurasia as ‘space of warring nations’ – Moscow
The US has a strategic goal to balkanize Eurasia, making the region an easy target for its colonial policies, a senior Russian security official warned on Friday. NATO is Washington’s tool, and it is ready to wage war in Eastern Europe, he told his counterparts from members of a regional security organization.
“Turning Eurasia into a conflagration space of warring nations, which would be turned into puppet colonial states similar to Ukraine, is a long-term goal for the West,” the secretary of Russia’s Security Council, Nikolay Patrushev, said.
The dire warning was addressed to his opposite numbers from member states of the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), who’d gathered in Armenia. He said attempts to disrupt regional integration organizations like the CSTO, made by the US and its allies, served as proof of their intentions.
Patrushev pointed to NATO as the main vehicle for the alleged Western plot to diminish Russia and its neighbors. The bloc “is used as a tool of foreign policy by a single nation,” he said. “This is done in an aggressive manner that further degrades an already difficult state of international security,” he assessed.
NATO’s expansion in Eastern Europe has already placed its military infrastructure next door to Russia and Belarus, the official said. He expressed concern about the rapid military buildup in the region, arguing it had disturbing ramifications for the region’s security.
“It’s obvious that NATO perceives Eastern Europe as the most likely theater of war,” he said.
Western nations claim that NATO is a purely defensive organization and that its increased military activities in Europe were a reaction to Russia’s aggressive behavior. Moscow says the US and its European allies have repeatedly broken their promises not to expand NATO eastward, creating an ever-serious threat to Russian national security.
Russia attacked Ukraine in late February, citing NATO’s creeping expansion into the neighboring country as one of the reasons. The relationship between Moscow and the West has plunged to a new low after that, with an unprecedented number of economic sanctions imposed against Russia in an attempt to hurt its economy. Washington has declared a “strategic defeat” of Moscow as its goal in Ukraine.
