Moscow. December 20. INTERFAX - Russia's Permanent Representative to the EU, Vladimir Chizhov, said that NATO expansion in itself would be a violation of the political obligations assumed by all countries of the European continent plus the United States and Canada within the OSCE
"We say that the expansion of NATO in itself would be a violation of the political obligations assumed by all countries of the European continent plus the United States and Canada within the OSCE," Chizhov said in an interview with Izvestia on Monday.
Chizhov stressed that he perfectly remembers how the OSCE documents were formed back in 1999.
"At the Istanbul summit, documents were adopted, which fixed one of the key principles: the security of each participating country can be implemented in such a way as not to affect the security of others. This notion of the unity of European security has recently been forgotten - at least they are trying to forget it, referring to the fact that the commitments that were made in 1999 in Istanbul were not legally binding, but political. One can easily object to this: the commitments to Georgia and Ukraine, which were accepted into NATO in 2008 in Bucharest, that these two countries will be members of the alliance, without specifying the dates, are also from the category of political ones. So this decision of NATO does not have a higher status and does not have more legal force in comparison with the OSCE commitments," Chizhov said in an interview with the publication.
