Moscow. October 21. INTERFAX - NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg's statements about readiness for dialogue are not backed up in practice and are meaningless, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said.
"We have heard another statement by Mr. Stoltenberg about his alleged readiness to discuss security issues with Russia. There is nothing behind these statements in practical terms, in principle, it seems to me, and there is no sense in them," Zakharova said at a briefing on Thursday.
According to her, NATO expels Russian diplomats and simultaneously talks about the desire to talk with Moscow, despite the fact that Russian diplomats "were accredited to NATO to conduct such a dialogue."
"Everything we hear not only from NATO as a bloc and directly from the secretary of this structure cannot be taken seriously," the official representative of the Russian Foreign Ministry said.
According to Zakharova, NATO and Stoltenberg personally "drove our relations into a state in which they were not even in the harshest times of the Cold War, their unwillingness to jointly seek ways of de-escalation actually buried the Russia-NATO Council." "In such conditions, it is impossible and makes no sense to work with the alliance on challenges and threats to regional security. The alliance itself has refused any practical cooperation with Russia and military contacts," the representative of the Russian Foreign Ministry said.
