BRUSSELS (Dispatches) — NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said Wednesday that the military organization and Russia have agreed to try to set up more meetings to ease tensions between them and Russia.
Speaking after chairing a meeting of the NATO-Russia Council, Stoltenberg said both parties had “expressed the need to resume dialogue and to explore a schedule of future meetings.”
He said that the 30 NATO countries want to discuss ways to prevent dangerous military incidents, reduce space and cyber threats, as well as arms control and disarmament, including setting agreed limits on missile deployments.
But Stoltenberg said that any talks about Ukraine wouldn’t be easy.
“There are significant differences between NATO allies and Russia on this issue,” he told reporters, after what he said was “a very serious and direct exchange” with Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Grushko and Deputy Defense Minister Alexander Fomin.
The NATO-Russia Council was the first meeting of its kind in over two years. The forum was set up two decades ago but full meetings paused when Russia annexed Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula in 2014. It has met only sporadically since, the last time in July 2019.
U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman also underlined that any European country should have the right to join NATO if it wants to.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told journalists Wednesday that NATO is an instrument of confrontation, so Russia is concerned over any expansion of this alliance, answering a question whether Moscow is concerned over the potential accession of Finland and Sweden to the alliance.
“Of course, Russia is concerned over any NATO expansion. NATO is not an instrument of development, it is an instrument of confrontation,” the spokesman stated, TASS reported.
According to Peskov, “the alliance was conceived this way, it was designed this way, it was implemented this way and it exists this way.”
“It is a totally obvious fact, so an expansion of this mechanism is a threat for us,” Peskov concluded.