Russia: A new era of hostility with NATO?
The long-chilly relationship between NATO and Russia has now entered an ice age, said Nezavisimaya Gazeta (Russia) in an editorial. The crisis “erupted out of nowhere” in October, when NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg expelled eight of the 18 Russian diplomats stationed at NATO’s headquarters in Brussels, asserting without evidence that they were spies. The dismissal was particularly jarring since Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov had met with Stoltenberg days earlier and heard only soothing words. This is simply the latest act of NATO hostility toward Russia. The alliance has been buzzing our borders with reconnaissance flights—up 30 percent this year—and dangling membership to Ukraine and Georgia, former Soviet states with large Russian minorities. Faced with such a catalog of aggression, the Kremlin had no choice but to sever relations with NATO last week and shutter the alliance’s office in Moscow.
Welcome to “Cold War 2.0,” said Dmytro Redko in Ukrinform .ua (Ukraine). NATO is finally taking a stand after more than a decade of Kremlin provocations, especially in the Black Sea region, with Russia snatching the Crimean Peninsula from Ukraine in 2014. At a NATO defense ministers summit last week, Stoltenberg said sternly that the Black Sea was not Russia’s exclusive sphere of influence, noting that NATO members Turkey, Bulgaria, and Romania border it, as do potential members Georgia and Ukraine. Russian President Vladimir Putin has also been making encroachments in the Baltic, deploying missile launchers in Kaliningrad, a tiny Russian exclave between Poland and Lithuania. Now, by cutting relations, Putin has chosen to “critically escalate the confrontation with NATO.” That’s why the alliance has adopted its first comprehensive plan for Europe’s defense since the end of the Cold War in 1991, said Paul-Anton Krüger in the Süddeutsche Zeitung (Germany). At last week’s summit, NATO leaders formed a strategy to combat every Russian threat “from conventional military attacks and hybrid warfare to cyberattacks and disinformation offensives.”
NATO will regret this aggressive stance, said Gevorg Mirzayan in Ekspert (Russia). The guiding force behind its “hostile agenda” is, of course, Washington. The U.S. needs to cast Russia as a foe to justify the continued existence of NATO, the organization it uses to “formally manage European affairs.” But the U.S. has started to “confuse the fictional world with the real one.” In reality, Russia is no enemy, but “one of the two great nuclear powers, an integral component of any possible system of European security, and a bulwark of world stability.” For years, NATO balanced these two worlds by positioning Russia as an adversary but also cooperating with us—in Afghanistan, for example—and taking our interests into account by refusing NATO admission to Ukraine and Georgia. But the U.S. has now made a serious miscalculation. It needs NATO as a bulwark against China, its real competitor, and it should have tried to woo Moscow away from Beijing. Instead, its belligerence is making the fiction of a hostile Russia come true.