The NATO strategic concept being developed will return the security situation in Europe to close to the state of the Cold War, if the document includes the postulates regarding Russia declared in the latest documents of the alliance, said Russian deputy FM Alexander Grushko, TASS reported.

“We see that NATO countries have decided to develop a new strategic concept. If all those philosophical postulates that were fixed in the last document [of the alliance] become the basis of this strategic concept, then, in fact, we will get a situation in the field of military security in Europe, which resembles in its basic approaches the situation of the Cold War, which we all they tried to overcome by joint efforts," the deputy minister said.

According to Grushko, it was calculated that Russia was mentioned 63 times in the latest declaration of NATO countries. 

"If we remove all these paragraphs from this declaration, it will turn out that the real tasks of the alliance in the field of security are not visible,” Grushko noted. 

The only new element is China, which has been declared a strategic challenge for the United States. As one of the former high-ranking NATO officials said, Russia is close, and China is far away, so the Russian threat, or the threat from the East, should remain the main purpose of the alliance, he added.