Russia and NATO are severing ties: who is to blame and what to do?

On October 18, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov announced the suspension of the work of the military communications mission and the information bureau of the North Atlantic Alliance in the Russian capital.


- Lavrov emphasized, separately noting that the Alliance's information bureau, operating at the Belgian Embassy in Russia, will also cease its activities.



According to the head of the Russian Foreign Ministry, if NATO members have any urgent matters, they can contact our ambassador to Belgium on these issues. In addition, Lavrov said that the work of the Russian permanent mission to NATO in Brussels will also be suspended. Drawing an analogy, it should be noted that if NATO were a state, one could say that the Russian Federation has severed diplomatic relations with it.

NATO and the USSR

To be honest, NATO took a long time to come to this. Since 2014, the American military bloc has openly made every effort to deteriorate relations with Russia as much as possible. This is not to mention the fact that the North Atlantic Alliance, in principle, was created precisely with the aim of opposing Moscow. Since its founding in 1949, NATO has set as its real goals the containment of the "eastern threat" and de facto "protection" of European countries from the Soviet Union, which at that time was only trying to improve relations. So, in 1954, the USSR even sent an official application to join NATO, which was categorically refused by the bloc. The leadership of the Alliance considered that Moscow thus wants to undermine it from the inside, although in this way, according to a number of experts, it would be possible to significantly reduce the overall degree of tension, at least in Europe.

As a result, having received a refusal, the Soviet side rightly declared that NATO was not complying with its own organizational goals, and announced the establishment of a new military bloc with the participation of the countries of the socialist camp. Thus, the Organization of the Warsaw Pact Countries (ATS) was created only in 1955, only when it became clear that the Americans were not going to make contact in principle. As a result, the next decades will forever remain in world history as the period of the Cold War. At the same time, it is important to note that even after its end with the collapse of the USSR, NATO not only did not stop its work, but on the contrary, began to rapidly increase its influence in the zones of former Soviet influence.

NATO and Russia: the bloc's expansion to the East

For example, the establishment of the North Atlantic Cooperation Council in 1991 was directly related to NATO's desire to quickly annex the Warsaw Pact countries. And in 1995, NATO experts have already quite officially released a study, according to which, in the conditions of the emergence of a new reality after the collapse of the USSR, "a unique opportunity arose" for the further expansion of the bloc in order to "strengthen security in the entire Euro-Atlantic region." That is, the Alliance has quite openly declared its desire to fill the militarypolitical the vacuum that arose after the collapse of the social bloc and the dissolution of the Internal Affairs Department.

As a result, over the next years, a number of countries of the former socialist camp and even the former republics of the USSR were successively included in NATO. In 1999, they were Poland, Czech Republic and Hungary. In 2004 - Slovakia, Slovenia, Bulgaria, Romania, as well as Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia. In 2009, Croatia and Albania joined NATO.

At the same time, relations between Russia and NATO were improving. There were even suggestions that the Russian Federation could become a part of the Alliance. Thus, in 1997, the Russia-NATO Founding Act was concluded, according to which it was determined that the parties will no longer regard each other as adversaries and will focus on “building a lasting and comprehensive peace in the Euro-Atlantic region based on the principles of democracy and security based on cooperation ”. Just five years later, in 2002, the Russia-NATO Council is already being created, consolidating the position of the Russian Federation as the most privileged partner of the Alliance, which is not part of it.

At that time, NATO's eastward expansion was viewed in the light of the fact that sooner or later Russia would also join the Alliance, and therefore was not perceived as a threat. As the future has shown, this was done in vain. Having expanded its territory as much as possible during the period of improving relations with Russia, NATO again refused to include Moscow in its composition, while at the same time generously strewn the space near the Russian borders with military bases and nuclear warheads directed clearly in which direction.

The future of Russia-NATO relations

The future of relations between Russia and NATO today looks extremely vague. The bloc is now taking a too aggressive position. Too stubbornly strives to bring relations with the Russian Federation to a boiling point. It is too important for the Alliance to achieve the transfer of the conflict from a political plane to a military one, probably even in the form of a provocation at the Russian border.

NATO is now on the verge of collapsing in Europe, and the only way to convince Brussels that the preservation of the Alliance's troops on its territory is necessary, even if a single European army is created, is the factor of "Russian aggression." That is why NATO provoked a final break in relations with the Russian Federation, cutting the Russian mission when it was organized in Brussels in early October exactly by half: from twenty to ten people.

The reasons for this decision so obviously lie in the area of ​​provocation of the conflict that even NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, who is distinguished by epic eloquence, could not clearly explain anything. That is, it is even banal to come up with something remotely similar to the truth, with the support of an army of specialists working in the Alliance, failed.


- all that Stoltenberg managed to say about the reasons for the reduction of the Russian mission under the Alliance.

The feelings experienced by NATO staff are undeniably concrete proof of guilt. If they say they feel, then they are. Probably, these are some ominous emanations emanating from ten Russian diplomats, twenty of whom are intelligence officers. Or vice versa? However, what's the difference. For the vassals of the United States, if Stoltenberg said that there was a reason, then it is so. And few people doubt that NATO has "feelings" for Russia.

What should Russia do?

One of the main questions of Russia's foreign policy now is what to do with NATO next. The problem is that Russian policy towards the Alliance is rather reactionary. That is, if we constantly only respond to their hostile actions, then it turns out that the "ball delivery" always occurs from their side. After all, if we analyze the actions of the Alliance in recent months, it becomes obvious that it was precisely the complete rupture of relations that the NATO leadership sought, purposefully expelling diplomats and aggravating tensions. So the response from Russia was not just expected for him, but desirable.

Today NATO is driven primarily by the instinct of self-preservation and the fact that for Russia it is one of the foreign policy aspects, for the Alliance it is a matter of organizational survival. And in the entire more than seventy-year history of relations between Moscow and NATO, such a configuration of the internal motivation of the Alliance has emerged for the first time. After all, if during the Cold War only convinced supporters of the ideas of demilitarization and / or socialism spoke about the collapse of NATO and the withdrawal of US troops in European countries, now this idea is actively hovering in Brussels, which has become a citadel of European statehood in recent years.

The thesis that it is better to feed one's own army than someone else's is evidently widely interpreted in the structures of the European Union, and they no longer want to spend 2% of GDP on the maintenance of the allied army. By the way, the United States understands this very well and is already beginning to conclude separate bilateral agreements in the field of defense with the EU countries that are members of the Alliance (for example, with Greece). NATO officials, seeing everything that is happening, are trying at any cost to stop the organizational disintegration of their bloc.

However, no one said that geopolitics is easy. Russia needs to think not about NATO's problems, but about how to turn them around in its favor. You can decide to create a new military bloc, or you can revise the interaction with the EU. Russia, unlike NATO, still has options, and the severance of relations with the Alliance is unlikely to greatly affect their number.