ATO is constantly on the lookout for an external enemy that will keep the alliance alive, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said during a speech to students at the Belarusian State University in Minsk. The broadcast was conducted on the YouTube channel of the Russian Foreign Ministry.
"The meaning of NATO's existence, which by and large - even many politicians and analysts in the West admit - was lost during the period when the Warsaw Pact disappeared, the Soviet Union disappeared," Lavrov said.
He noted that in the early 1990s there were chances to start building a common space of security and economic cooperation, as proposed in France, from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean.
Lavrov called "stupid" and "shameful" statements that NATO is an exclusively defensive alliance. He pointed to the desire of the military bloc to increase its influence in the so-called Indo-Pacific region and recalled that NATO has expanded five times since the Cold War.
