NATO gambling on fascism to pressure Russia – Moscow
Bloc chief Mark Rutte’s call to not recognize territorial changes is part of a policy to support revanchism, the Foreign Ministry has said
A recent call by NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte not to recognize new Russian regions is just another “systemic subversion” tactic employed by the West in its attempts to exert pressure on Moscow, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova has said in a commentary for Izvestia newspaper.
Speaking to CBS on Sunday, Rutte insisted that NATO members “can never accept … in a legal sense” that four former Ukrainian territories officially became part of Russia following a series of referendums in September, 2022.
Ukraine has refused to recognize the change and still lays claim to all the regions as well as Crimea, which joined Russia in a 2014 referendum following a Western-backed armed coup in Kiev.
The NATO chief drew parallels to the US approach to the Baltic States between 1940 and 1991, when they were part of the USSR.
Washington hosted “embassies” of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia during that period to show it does not see them as parts of the Soviet Union. According to Zakharova, the NATO chief has fallen back to the old Western practices of supporting “fascists” and “revanchists” as a form of pressure on Moscow.
Such statements resemble the modern Western practice of glorifying Nazi collaborators in the Baltic States and Ukraine just because they fought Soviet rule, the spokeswoman said.
“This is systemic subversion,” she wrote. “The Euronazi leadership is putting bloody executioners on a pedestal and supports the demolition of monuments to those who freed Europe from the brown plague [of Nazism and fascism].”
The EU and NATO have “bet on establishing a belt of Russophobic regimes on Russia’s western borders,” Zakharova stated.
During the Cold War, Washington spent taxpayers’ money to fund the “embassies” of the fallen “pro-fascist” authoritarian regimes of the Baltic nations, the spokeswoman said. Twenty years ago, the UK welcomed the “emissaries” of Chechen terrorist groups as “ambassadors and even presidents” as Russia fought extremists in its Caucasus regions – all in the name of pressuring Russia. “They failed then. They will fail now,” Zakharova wrote.
