NOVOSIBIRSK, June 4 (RIA Novosti) — NATO's advance to the East is of a destabilizing nature, head of Russia's Presidential Administration Sergei Ivanov said Wednesday, after United States' President Barack Obama called for greater military cooperation of the alliance's members to resist possible threats during his visit to Poland this week.
"The advance of NATO's infrastructure eastward, to me, is of an obviously destabilizing nature and has nothing to do with real security problems in Europe," Ivanov told journalists Wednesday.
He reminded that NATO members had raised the question of moving the organization's presence eastward, including in the Baltics, several times in the past decade.
"So what, has global security improved from this point of view? Or does someone really think that Russia prepares aggressive moves? It is simply used as a psychological stroke, or it is an intentional psychological stroke aimed to push the NATO infrastructure closer to our borders," he said, adding he saw no military sense in what was "more of politics or political maneuvering."
"All the words about the need to fortify NATO's eastern borders have no sense aside from creating additional problems in the relations between Russia and NATO. Security problems that worry both Russia and NATO really do exist, but these problems lie outside of the European continent and have nothing to do with European security," he said.
On Tuesday, the White House said in a statement US President Barack Obama would request the Congress to approve a $1 billion plan to boost US military presence in Eastern Europe.
Obama called on all NATO members to step up their defense spending in light of the Ukrainian crisis, after he arrived in Warsaw to place US soldiers on Polish soil, the closest possible to Russian border, for the first time citing the need to protect Eastern European countries in response for Crimea’s reunification with Russia.
The alliance has earlier intensified its air patrols in Baltic states, deployed AWACS surveillance planes over Poland and Romania and sent its warships to the Black and Mediterranean seas.
On April 1, NATO ended all practical cooperation with Russia over Ukraine, only maintaining contacts at the ambassadors' level and higher.
Russian Ambassador to NATO Alexander Grushko earlier suggested that the alliance "is trying to use to its maximum the crisis in Ukraine in order to prove its relevance in the current security environment," while Russia’s Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu described NATO troops massing near Russian borders as "unprecedented."
President Vladimir Putin earlier accused Western countries of supporting the unconstitutional coup in Ukraine at a time when Moscow was calling for searching a way out of the crisis in the country through dialogue.
