MOSCOW (Dispatches) -- One of President Vladimir Putin’s closest allies said on Tuesday that Russia was now fighting the U.S.-led NATO military alliance in Ukraine and that the West was trying to rip Russia apart and ultimately wipe it from the political map of the world.
“The events in Ukraine are not a clash between Moscow and Kyiv - this is a military confrontation between Russia and NATO, and above all the United States and Britain,” Russian Security Council Secretary Nikolai Patrushev said.
“The Westerners’ plans are to continue to pull Russia apart, and eventually just erase it from the political map of the world,” Patrushev told the Argumenti i Fakti newspaper.
NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said at a news conference on Tuesday that NATO must further strengthen its support for Ukraine.
“We are determined to take the partnership between NATO and the EU to the next level,” said Stoltenberg.
The Ukraine war has triggered one of the deadliest European conflicts since World War Two and the biggest confrontation between Moscow and the West since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.
“In the face of emerging military threats, it is important for us to have such armed forces and special services so that Russia’s adversaries would not even think they could fight us,” Patrushev said.
The defense ministry said a Russian warship armed with hypersonic cruise weapons has held exercises in the Norwegian Sea.
“The crew of the frigate ‘Admiral of the Fleet of the Soviet Union Gorshkov’ conducted an air defense exercise in the Norwegian Sea,” the ministry said.
“The crew... conducted an exercise to repel the means of an air attack of a simulated enemy in the Norwegian Sea.”
Last week, President Vladimir Putin sent the frigate to the Atlantic Ocean armed with new generation hypersonic cruise missiles, a signal to the West that Russia will not back down over the war in Ukraine.
The frigate is armed with Zircon missiles which Russia says fly at nine times the speed of sound and have a range of over 1,000 km (620 miles).
Russia sees the weapons as a way to pierce increasingly sophisticated U.S. missile defenses which Putin has warned could one day shoot down Russian nuclear missiles.
Former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev last week warned the United States that the hypersonic missiles would soon be close to NATO’s shores.