Russia has said it will \u201ccounteract\u201d the expansion of NATO infrastructure in Europe, claiming that the military alliance is \u201cconstantly and incrementally moving towards\u201d its borders as tensions escalate over the war in Ukraine. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Thursday that Russia had noted decisions taken by NATO leaders at this week\u2019s summit in Washington, DC, to \u201ccreate separate logistics hubs in Black Sea cities\u201d and open \u201cadditional facilities in Europe\u201d. \u201cThis is a very serious threat to the national security of our country. All of this will require us to take thoughtful, coordinated, effective responses to deter NATO, to counteract NATO,\u201d he said. His remarks came a day after the United States and Germany announced at the summit that the US would begin \u201cepisodic deployments\u201d of long-range missiles \u2013 including surface-to-air SM-6 missiles, Tomahawk cruise missiles and hypersonic weapons \u2013 in Germany from 2026. Additionally, NATO said that same day that a new US air defence base in northern Poland, designed to detect and intercept ballistic missile attacks as part of a broader NATO missile shield, was mission-ready. NATO \u201chas once again very clearly confirmed its essence. It is an alliance created in an era of confrontation with the aim of maintaining confrontation\u201d, said Peskov. Last month, President Vladimir Putin said Russia should resume production of intermediate and shorter-range nuclear-capable missiles and then consider where to deploy them after the US brought similar missiles to Europe and Asia. He had previously spoken of agreeing not to deploy such missiles in Russia\u2019s Baltic exclave of Kaliningrad, but said the US had resumed their production, brought them to Denmark for exercises and also taken them to the Philippines. Ground-based missiles with a range exceeding 500km (310 miles) were banned under the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty signed by the then-Soviet Union and the US in 1987, but the latter withdrew from the treaty in 2019, claiming Russia was violating terms. Speaking on the margins of the NATO summit, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said on Thursday that any possibility of a direct confrontation between Russia and NATO was \u201cworrying\u201d and that any steps in that direction should be \u201cconsciously avoided\u201d. Russia\u2019s Ministry of Defence said on Thursday that its troops had \u201cliberated\u201d the village of Voskhod, about 30km (20 miles) northwest of Donetsk city, capital of the eastern Donetsk region that Moscow claims to have annexed. Ukraine, anxious to receive more supplies of weapons that will help its outgunned and outmanned troops resist Russian pressure, says the fiercest fighting across the entire front line is taking place in the region.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Russia has said it will \u201ccounteract\u201d the expansion of NATO infrastructure in Europe, claiming that the military alliance is \u201cconstantly and incrementally moving towards\u201d its…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":18390,"comment_status":"registered_only","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18389","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18389","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=18389"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18389\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/18390"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=18389"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=18389"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=18389"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}