NATO, Russian ambassadors meet to keep dialogue open

“Russia is our biggest neighbour, [it] can not and should not be isolated”, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said at the Warsaw summit, stressing the western alliance’s willingness to seek dialogue with Moscow.

“In the spirit of transparency, we will brief Russian Federation on the important decisions we took in Warsaw last week to enhance our security”. “This shows the value of the Nato-Russia Council”, he said at the press conference. Meanwhile, Moscow calls NATO’s planned deployment of additional multinational forces to Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland a “dangerous build-up” close to its borders and that will create new military divisions in response. Indeed the body that is meeting – the Nato-Russia Council founded in 2002 – was itself a product of the optimism of those early days of Nato-Russia harmony.

NATO’s Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg chided Russian Federation last week, saying the country was violating its cease-fire in Ukraine “again and again”.

While only part of a broader strategy, the Polish-Baltic battalions are also dwarfed by the Russian buildup, and represent an insignificant menace in military terms, says Christopher Chivvis, associate director at RAND’s International Security and Defense Policy Center.

Ahead of the meeting, Russian officials condemned the Western plans to station troops in the Baltics, and said that little new dialogue was likely.

Russian Federation can also use NATO’s eastern buildup to justify a military expansion of its own.

But NATO said it was acting purely defensively.

Russia’s ambassador to NATO, Alexander Grushko, is expected to “present technical details” to avoid any aerial incidents, a senior NATO diplomat said on condition of anonymity. And while many Western pundits and politicos like to believe that that is precisely what Putin is – “a insane person” – only those still wilfully immersed in Cold War dramaturgy can really believe it is the case.

Russian Federation is already crying foul, with Moscow’s envoy to Nato Alexander Grushko insisting earlier this week that such troop movements contradict the provisions of the Founding Act.

It is alarmed too at what it sees as a pattern of irresponsible behaviour on the part of Russian aircraft over the Baltic region and elsewhere, which routinely fly in busy air space with their transponders – or identification beacons – turned off. The NATO chief said “allies will study this proposal carefully”, but want more details.

Moscow said before the meeting that it would raise the U.S. missile shield that North Atlantic Treaty Organisation declared operational at the summit in the Polish capital.

The meeting was only the second such conclave since Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea turned back relations to Cold War lows. Several other European Union members are considering Brexit-like referendums to decide whether they should remain members of what began as an admirable attempt to create a continental free market, but has morphed into a quasi-government with a system that reminds those of us who lived through it of the old Soviet bureaucracy staffed by imperious men and women ready, willing and able to meddle with just about every aspect of life within the borders of its member states.