Putin said Sweden and Finland could join NATO as Russia has no territorial differences with them.
Ashgabat, Turkmenistan:
Russia has “no problem” if Finland and Sweden join NATO, President Vladimir Putin said on Wednesday.
“We have no problems with Sweden and Finland as we have with Ukraine,” Putin said at a news conference in the Turkmenistan capital Ashgabat.
“We have no territorial differences,” the Russian leader continued.
“There is nothing that could bother us about Sweden and Finland joining NATO. If Finland and Sweden want to, they can join. It’s up to them. They can join whatever they want.”
“However, if military contingents and military infrastructure were deployed, we would be obliged to respond symmetrically and issue the same threats to those areas where threats to us have arisen,” Putin said.
Sweden and Finland both decided to join NATO after Russia launched its military operation in pro-western Ukraine on February 24.
The formal membership process was launched on Wednesday at the NATO summit in Madrid.
Until now, Russia had always been critical of the prospect of the two Nordic countries joining the alliance, saying it would be a “destabilizing factor” for international security.
Putin nevertheless denounced NATO’s “imperial ambitions” and accused the alliance of seeking to assert its “supremacy” through the conflict in Ukraine.
“Ukraine and the well-being of the Ukrainian people is not the goal of the collective West and NATO, but a means of defending their own interests,” Putin said.
“The leaders of the NATO countries want to… affirm their supremacy, their imperial ambitions,” he added.
The Atlantic alliance and “the United States in particular have long needed an external enemy around which to unite their allies,” the Russian leader said.
“Iran was not good for that. We gave them this chance… to rally the whole world around them.”
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by DailyExpertNews staff and has been published from a syndicated feed.)
