NATO gambles on fascism to pressure Russia – Moscow

NATO chief’s call to not recognize new Russian regions is part of a policy to support revanchism and fascism, Moscow has said

A recent call by NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte not to recognize the new Russian regions de jure is just another display of “systemic subversion” tactics employed by the West in attempts to exert pressure on Moscow, the Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova has said in a commentary for Izvestia newspaper.

She was referring to Rutte’s Sunday interview with CBS, where he maintained that NATO members “can never accept … in a legal sense” that four former Ukrainian territories officially became a part of Russia following a series of referendums in autumn 2022. Kiev has refused to recognize the change and still lays claim to all the regions as well as Crimea, which joined Russia back in 2014 following another referendum.

The NATO chief then drew parallels to the US approach to the Baltic States between 1940 and 1991, when they were a part of the USSR.

Washington hosted “embassies” of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia during that period to show it does not see them as parts of the Soviet Union. According to Zakharova, the NATO chief has fallen back to the old Western practices of supporting “fascists” and “revanchists” as a form of pressure on Moscow.

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Such statements fall in line with the modern Western practice of glorifying Nazi collaborators in the Baltic States and Ukraine just because they fought against the Soviet rule, the spokeswoman said. “This is systemic subversion,” she wrote. “The Euronazi leadership is putting bloody executioners on a pedestal and supports the demolition of monuments to those who freed Europe from the brown plague [of Nazism and fascism].”

The EU and NATO have “bet on establishing a belt of Russophobic regimes on Russia’s western borders,” Zakharova stated.

During the Cold War, Washington spent taxpayers’ money to fund the “embassies” of the fallen “pro-fascist” authoritarian regimes of the Baltic nations, the spokeswoman said. Twenty years ago, the UK welcomed the “emissaries” of Chechen terrorist groups as “ambassadors and even presidents” as Russia fought extremists in its Caucasus regions – all in the name of pressuring Russia. “They’ve failed then. They will fail now,” Zakharova wrote.