The never-ending expansion of NATO has enabled the US to turn many nations into its puppets, helping Washington to cling to its hegemony, Nikolay Patrushev, the secretary of Russia’s National Security Council, has said.
In an op-ed for the Razvedchik magazine issued by Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) and published on Friday, Patrushev claimed that the West often resorts to military force, coercion, ‘privatization’ of elites, and color revolutions to achieve global domination.
The constant expansion of the North Atlantic Alliance basically provides the US with the opportunity to absorb states and deprive them of their independence in terms of defending their national interests.
The official also blasted the US-led military bloc for what he called “duplicity,” arguing that while NATO has always claimed to stand for peace, it has waged war or threatened military action against countries that oppose Washington’s policies.
“NATO’s military power is used to maintain Western hegemony, economic enslavement, and political pressure on states that pose no military threat to the alliance,” Patrushev stated, adding that members of the bloc have taken part in more than 200 conflicts across the world over the past seven decades.
Meanwhile, Patrushev continued, Washington regards the armies of allies as “colonial” troops and would eagerly use them as “cannon fodder” if necessary without putting its own “exceptional people” in harm’s way.
The West “perceives Russia as a constant threat” because it remembers that it was the Soviet Union that played a crucial role in dismantling the colonial system, according to Patrushev. As a result, he said, the West is using the full range of tools at its disposal against Russia, including sanctions and its massive system of media resources that help it concoct “information frenzy campaigns” across the globe.
Moscow has repeatedly protested NATO expansion, seeing it as a major national security threat and arguing that the increased military build-up on its borders leads to heightened tensions in Europe. Russian President Vladimir Putin has named the risk of Kiev joining the military bloc as one of the key reasons behind the Ukraine conflict.