MOSCOW (Sputnik) — On Thursday, leaders of 28 NATO member states participated in the one-day summit in Brussels. Speaking at the summit, Trump said that Russia posed a threat on the alliance's eastern and southern borders and called on the allies to increase their defense spending.
During the NATO summit in Brussels, US President Donald Trump said that the NATO alliance must focus on the threats posed to Europe by terrorism, unchecked immigration and Russia.
"Trump has made a lot of these generally noteworthy statements while on a trip to the Middle East and European countries. Regarding NATO, there were harsh statements about the allies, in my opinion, priority attention has been given to these statements. As for mentioning Russia, maybe this can be seen, among other things, in terms of pushing the allies to fulfill obligations to contribute appropriate amounts to the NATO budget," Ushakov told reporters.
The presidential aide pointed out that the NATO activities near the Russian borders were concerning.
"There is nothing good in that. But we regard this remark in the context of what is going on in the United States now around the so-called 'Russian dossier,'" Ushakov added referring to the scandal around the alleged Russian interference in the EU presidential election.
Russia has faced repeated allegations from the United States that it may have influenced the 2016 presidential election. Russian officials have repeatedly denied USclaims that it meddled in the election and called such allegations absurd. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said in February that Moscow had never interfered in foreign states' internal affairs and was not intending to do so in the future.
During his election campaign, Trump called for a thaw in US-Russia relations in order to cooperate in the fight against terrorism, saying that he wants to "get along with Russia," however, after he became the US president, Washington's ties with Moscow have remained strained.
NATO has set a sustainable course for the alliance's expansion by engaging Eastern European states since 2014, explaining the enlargement as a response to Russia's alleged meddling in the Ukrainian conflict. Moscow has repeatedly refuted such allegations, and regards NATO's encroachments as provocative.
At the NATO July summit in Warsaw, it was decided that the military alliance would send multinational battalions to Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia and Poland, at the request of these countries.
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