Clinton said in a interview recently aired on CNN’s “Fareed Zakaria GPS" that he had a conversation with Yeltsin about the expansion of NATO to Eastern Europe during his tenure as the US president.
"I participated in three summit meetings between the two presidents in 1997-1998 and I do not recall talks about NATO’s expansion to the east at any of those meetings. There was no such conversation at the last three official meetings between Yeltsin and Clinton," Sergey Yastrzhembsky told Sputnik.
The spokesperson added that there were also meetings without his participation, so it is "quite possible that the discussion came up," but he cannot give a reliable answer.
Russia has been a consistent critic of the alliance's expansion following the collapse of the Soviet Union, with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov saying in April that it has nothing to do with the fulfillment of statutory goals and is geared toward strengthening and perpetuating the unipolar world. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said in early April that further expansion of the alliance eastward was aggressive in nature and would not make Europe more secure.