Thursday, 25 June 2009
Further NATO expansion is currently impossible and the military alliance is unsure of how to alter the situation, Russia's NATO envoy said on Thursday.
"NATO expansion has got bogged down. I am certain that it is impossible to talk about anything happening in the near future," Dmitry Rogozin told journalists in the Kazakh capital of Astana, currently hosting a Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council security forum.
"Even for Ukraine and Georgia this [joining the alliance] is impossible, not to mention other states," he added.
Relations between Russia and NATO have been frayed in recent years over the military alliance's eastern expansion. Ukraine and Georgia, both former Soviet republics, have applied to join, but their U.S.-backed bids were turned down due to pressure from Germany and France at a 2008 NATO summit in Bucharest.
However, NATO has stated that the two countries will join at an unspecified date in the future. Both countries have also been included in the alliance's Partnership for Peace program, aimed at allowing "partner countries to build up an individual relationship with NATO, choosing their own priorities for cooperation."
Rogozin also said that he believed the Partnership for Peace program "was a program for the drawing in of individual states into NATO, that is to say, a kind of waiting room."
Russia's envoy was also unconcerned with ex-Soviet republic Kazakhstan's participation in the NATO partnership program.
"It's like when your faithful wife has lots of admirers who give her flowers. NATO here is an admirer of Kazakhstan," he said.
"It is impossible to compare our [those between Russia and Kazakhstan] close, family-like relations with relations with another family who come with cake and want everyone to like them," he went on. "I believe that the Kazakh leadership understands that all this idle talk has no real perspectives."
He also said that NATO "is changing, and so far it is unsure of how exactly to develop the organization, to globalize it and make it into a world police officer, and also whether or not to keep Article V or turn it into a kind of chained dog."
NATO's Article V calls on member states to defend one another in the event of an attack by a third party.
Rogozin also said that partner-like relations with NATO were necessary in so far as they signified "contact, dialogue and the cooperative exchange of information."
"[Relations with NATO] should be as pragmatic as possible, to receive from this partnership the maximum benefits for security and sovereignty. Relations should always be developed in this way - make your enemy a neutral state, a neutral state - a partner, a partner - an ally, and an ally - a friend," he concluded.
