The North Atlantic Alliance marked its 72nd anniversary on Sunday. Created in 1949 at the height of the Cold War to ‘contain the Soviet threat', the alliance continued to expand after the USSR's collapse, swallowing up every former member of the Warsaw Pact alliance and ending up facing just 110 km from St. Petersburg, Russia's second city.
The Russian Foreign Ministry has taken to Twitter to comment on the anniversary of the founding of NATO, comparing the alliance's spending to that of Russia and other countries, and suggesting that the bloc's stated aim of “securing peace” doesn't mesh with its aggressive operations in Yugoslavia, Iraq, Libya, and elsewhere.
The ministry accompanied the tweet with a chart showing NATO's $1.09 trillion in spending in 2020 compared to Russia's $50 billion and the rest of the world's $790 billion in spending during the same period.
In a separate tweet, Russia's Arms Control Delegation in Vienna suggested that the alliance had “failed to adapt to the new security environment,” remaining “obsessed with deterring a mythical ‘threat from the east' that does not exist” instead of “joining broad international efforts to banish new threats and challenges.”
Last month, NATO Secretary Jens Stoltenberg said Russia and China's growing cooperation, including in the military sphere, “defines the challenges facing NATO,” and indicated that…
