“Without nerves, without emotions, we will develop a military response, first of all, to this new game,” Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said after the announcement that the US planned to deploy long-range missiles in Germany by 2026.
The plan calls for the deployment of missiles SM-6, Tomahawk and hypersonic weapons with range greater than current capabilities in Europe.
NATO also announced yesterday that a new US anti-aircraft base in northern Poland; designed to detect and intercept ballistic missile attacks as part of a broader NATO missile shield; is ready.
“They aim to maintain the confrontation”
Asked at a briefing with Russian news agencies about the outcome of the NATO summit, the Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said: “The North Atlantic alliance has clearly confirmed its essence once again. It is an alliance created in a moment of confrontation with the aim of maintaining the confrontation.”
NATO is steadily advancing towards our borders
“Tensions on the European continent are rising,” he added, saying the Kremlin is observing the approach of NATO’s military infrastructure.
“We see the decisions that NATO has made to create separate logistics hubs in the Black Sea cities, the creation of additional facilities in Europe, and we see that in fact NATO’s military infrastructure is constantly and gradually moving towards our borders,” Peskov said.
“This requires us to analyze in depth the decisions taken in the discussion that took place. This is a very serious threat to the national security of our country. All of this will require us to take calculated, coordinated and effective responses to deter NATO, to counter NATO.”
“We had foreseen”
Moscow anticipated the US-German missile move, Sergei Ryabkov said, which he described as aimed at intimidating Russia and further destabilizing regional security and strategic relations.
“The necessary work on preparing countermeasures by the relevant Russian state agencies began much earlier and is being carried out systematically,” Ryabkov said in a statement published on his ministry’s website.
Last month, Putin says Russia should resume production of nuclear-capable short- and medium-range missiles and then consider where he will develop them, since the US brought similar missiles to Europe and Asia.
He had previously spoken of a deal not to deploy such missiles in Russia’s blockaded Kaliningrad in the Baltic, but said the US had resumed production, brought them to Denmark for exercises and also flown them to the Philippines.
Surface-to-surface missiles with a range exceeding 500 km were banned until 2019 under the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty signed in 1987 by Soviet Union President Mikhail Gorbachev and then US President Ronald Reagan.
But the United States withdrew from the Treaty in 2019, saying Moscow was violating the agreement, which the Kremlin denied.
Source: AMPE