A Chinese Communist Party diplomat has wanted NATO to stick to its promise not to expand eastward.
Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Le Yucheng criticized the far-reaching Western sanctions imposed on Russia following the invasion of Ukraine, saying the root cause of the war in Ukraine “lies in the Cold War mentality and power politics.”
The Chinese envoy said if NATO’s “enlargement goes further, it would be approaching the ‘outskirts of Moscow’ where a missile could hit the Kremlin within seven or eight minutes.”
“Pushing a major country, especially a nuclear power, to the corner would entail repercussions too dreadful to contemplate,” he said.
He added that NATO should have disintegrated and “been consigned to history alongside the Warsaw Pact.”
“However, rather than breaking up, NATO has kept strengthening and expanding and intervened militarily in countries like Yugoslavia, Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan,” he said.
“One could well anticipate the consequences going down this path.
Putin made the allegations while addressing Russians at a rally at Moscow’s Luzhniki Stadium on Friday to mark the eighth anniversary of Russia’s annexation of Crimea, Ukraine.
Footage from the event showed a packed venue filled with tens of thousands of people.
Putin addressed the crowd to explain why he organized the gathering to coincide with Russia’s annexation of Crimea from Ukraine on March 18, 2014.
“Punitive military operations were immediately organized against them, and not one, they were immediately plunged into a blockade, subjected to systematic shelling from cannons, air strikes — this is all what is called ‘genocide,’” he said.
“It is to save people from this suffering, from this genocide — this is the main, main reason, motive and goal of the military operation that we launched in the Donbass and Ukraine, this is precisely the goal,” the Russian president acknowledged.
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