Russia announces a mutual response to NATO’s military expansion | News

Russian President Vladimir Putin warned Wednesday that if the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) military infrastructure expands across the territories of Finland and Sweden, the Slavic country will respond in kind.

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He also stressed that Moscow has no qualms about Stockholm and Helsinki being part of NATO.

“We don’t have those problems with Sweden and Finland that we unfortunately have with Ukraine. We don’t have regional issues or disagreements, and we don’t have anything to worry about from the point of view of Finland and Sweden’s membership in NATO.”

“If they want to [unirse a la OTAN]Go ahead, but now you must understand clearly and concisely […], that in the case of military units and infrastructure that are deployed there, we will have to respond mutually and create the same threats to those territories from which the threats arose for us. “These are self-evident matters,” the president said at a press conference held as part of his visit to Turkmenistan.

Similarly, the president noted that there are differences between joining the politico-military bloc if Ukraine joins or if the two Scandinavian countries do, while the West has used Ukraine’s case as a bridge to aggravate the Russian situation.

“They started turning Ukraine into ‘anti-Russian’, a bridgehead to try to somehow shake Russia itself, they started fighting Russian culture, the Russian language, they started persecuting people who felt they were part of the Russian world,” he argued.

Describing the alliance as merely a political tool of the United States, the president reiterated, “There is nothing similar in Finland or Sweden, it is a very different situation.” In turn, he emphasized that the West seeks to achieve its own interests by inciting Kyiv to continue the conflict.