Russia has “no interest” in fighting with NATO countries

Russian President Vladimir Putin said that Russia has “absolutely no reason” and “interest” to fight with NATO countries. In a conversation with VGTRK correspondent Pavel Zarubin, excerpts of which were published by Russian Telegram channels on Sunday morning, Putin reacted to the recent words of US President Joe Biden that if Ukraine is defeated, Russia may attack one of the NATO countries. He called these words “nonsense”, and said that Biden, in his opinion, understands this.

“Russia has no geopolitical, economic, political, or military interest in fighting with NATO countries,” Putin said. According to him, Russia is “interested in developing relations” with NATO countries. At the same time, he called the organization itself the “backyard” of the USA. He also complained about Finland joining NATO, saying that this country “didn’t have any problems” in relations with Russia, and now there will be problems, since Russia will concentrate “certain military units” on the borders with Finland.

Putin also once again accused the leadership of Western countries of trying to “destroy Russia”. According to him, earlier he was naive and did not believe in such plans, but then he was “absolutely one hundred percent convinced” that after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the countries of the West wanted to “destroy” Russia as well: “as proposed by the famous US politician Brzezinski, divide into five parts, and these parts will be separately subordinated and used resources”.

Biden put forward the argument that in the future Russia may attack US NATO allies on December 6 in a speech dedicated to supporting Ukraine. The US president appealed to Congress to approve the administration’s request for continued aid to this country, including the fact that if Putin “continues to move forward”, he will “attack NATO allies” after Ukraine. “If Putin attacks an ally [США] according to NATO… well, we, as a member of NATO, have pledged to protect every inch of NATO territory. Then we will get what we do not aspire to and what we do not have today: American troops fighting Russian troops,” Biden said in particular.

• Other Western politicians and analysts have repeatedly stated about a possible Russian threat to NATO countries – primarily the Baltic countries, as well as Poland – especially since the beginning of the invasion of Ukraine. A number of Russian figures spoke about a possible attack on NATO countries – in particular, the head of Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov. Putin’s deputy in the Security Council, Dmitry Medvedev, threatened Europe with “nuclear Armageddon,” and a political scientist close to the Kremlin, Sergei Karaganov, directly suggested a nuclear attack on Poland. The package of requirements for so-called security guarantees, put forward by Russia a few months before the invasion of Ukraine, also contained a demand for the dismantling of the entire military infrastructure of NATO in the countries that joined the union after 1997.
• Until February 24, 2022, the Russian authorities denied plans to invade Ukraine. In particular, in January, the head of the Russian Foreign Ministry, Sergey Lavrov, said that Moscow was “not interested” in a war with Ukraine: “If it depends on the Russian Federation, there will be no war. We do not want wars, but they will attack our interests rudely, ignore our interests we won’t allow it,” he said. After the beginning of the invasion, it was justified by the fact that it was a “preemptive” strike, since Ukraine allegedly wanted to attack the separatist republics of Donbass and the annexed Crimea.
• The American political scientist and statesman Zbigniew Brzezinski, whom Russian officials often call a Russophobe and the author of the concepts of the collapse of Russia, never actually spoke about the division of Russia into five parts. In his work “Geostrategy for Eurasia” he wrote about the desirability of decentralization of Russia – for example, in the form of a confederation of European Russia, the Siberian and Far Eastern republics, which, in his opinion, combined with economic freedom, would allow to a greater extent to “uncover the creative potential of the Russian people and of Russian natural resources”. At the same time, Brzezinski noted: “Between Russia and the rest of Europe, there is a mutual recognition of the historical role and cultural features. And I predict in the future the emergence of an extensive unified community from Vancouver to Vladivostok.”
• Putin is now running for president of Russia for the fifth term. During his tenure in power in the USA, five presidents have changed.