The head of the German Defense Ministry said that NATO will not allow Moscow to blackmail the alliance | News from Germany about Germany | DW

NATO will not allow Moscow to blackmail the alliance, the Russian Federation does not have the right to veto its expansion. German Defense Minister Christine Lambrecht announced this on Friday, January 14, speaking in the Bundestag.

“Russia has no veto power in matters relating to the alliance and cannot blackmail us. These red lines must be clear in all upcoming negotiations,” Lambrecht said. “However, there is a big gap between the red lines and the military conflict, which we must use,” the head of the German defense department added.

“All means to defuse the conflict”

“We must use all means to defuse this conflict,” the German defense minister said. She also expressed confidence that NATO and the EU need to maintain the proximity of their positions: “The security of our allies is our security, especially in Central and Eastern Europe.” At this stage, there are serious threats to her, stated Christine Lambrecht.

“The deployment of Russian troops on the border with Ukraine violates all the rules of peaceful coexistence,” the minister stressed, urging Moscow to comply with international law.

German Defense Minister to meet with NATO Secretary General

The head of the German Defense Ministry added that next week she would meet with NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg.

Earlier, Stoltenberg gave an interview to DW, in which he stated that NATO does not exclude the possibility of a Russian attack on Ukraine and will support Kiev. In this case, the Russian Federation is waiting for severe economic sanctions, the Secretary General of the alliance added. “We are ready for a dialogue with Russia, but we will never compromise on the basic principles of European security,” he stressed.

See also:

• The history of the summits of the leaders of the USSR and Russia with the US presidents

  Face to face

  Joe Biden became the fifth President of the United States, with whom the head of the Russian Federation Vladimir Putin met. In total, the number of different high-level meetings between the leaders of the USSR and Russia and the presidents of the United States exceeded one hundred, and some of them went down in the history of world politics. The first face-to-face meeting between Biden and Putin in Geneva in June 2021 was not a breakthrough, but the very fact that it took place is important, observers say.

• 

  The history of the summits of the leaders of the USSR and Russia with the US presidents

  First visit to the USA

  The first Soviet leader to pay an official visit to the United States was Nikita Khrushchev. In September 1959, he met with US President Dwight Eisenhower. No agreement was reached on any of the issues discussed. The return visit did not take place due to the scandal with the downed in May 1960 near Sverdlovsk by an American U2 spy plane.

• 

  The history of the summits of the leaders of the USSR and Russia with the US presidents

  Agreed to the Wall

  Khrushchev’s talks with the new American President John F. Kennedy took place on June 4, 1961 at Vienna’s Schönbrunn Palace. The main topic was the fate of Berlin and Germany as a whole. The parties firmly defended their positions and failed to agree on key agenda items. Two months later, the Berlin Wall divided the city into eastern and western parts.

• 

  The history of the summits of the leaders of the USSR and Russia with the US presidents

  Discovering Moscow

  Richard Nixon became the first US president to pay an official visit to the USSR. The negotiations that took place in May 1972 with Leonid Brezhnev, General Secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU, marked the beginning of a new stage in relations, which was called “detente”. The Agreement on the Limitation of Strategic Offensive Arms (SALT-1) and the Treaty on the Limitation of Anti-Missile Defense Systems (ABM) were signed in Moscow.

• 

  The history of the summits of the leaders of the USSR and Russia with the US presidents

  Before the war in Afghanistan

  The entry of Soviet troops into Afghanistan in December 1979 caused a new deterioration in Soviet-American relations. Six months earlier, Brezhnev met in Vienna with the new US President Jimmy Carter. The negotiations resulted in the signing of the Treaty on the Limitation of Strategic Offensive Arms (SALT-2), which, among other things, limited the deployment of nuclear weapons in outer space.

• 

  The history of the summits of the leaders of the USSR and Russia with the US presidents

  The end of the evil empire

  Relations between Mikhail Gorbachev and US President Ronald Reagan did not work out at first. After the first meeting in Geneva in 1985, one dubbed the other a “dinosaur”, the second called a colleague a “hard-headed Bolshevik.” That did not prevent them from holding several meetings and signing a number of important documents in the field of disarmament. Arriving in Moscow in 1988, Reagan declared that he no longer considered the USSR an “evil empire.”

• 

  The history of the summits of the leaders of the USSR and Russia with the US presidents

  Seasick Summit

  A two-day meeting between Mikhail Gorbachev and the new American leader, George W. Bush, took place in 1989 in Malta aboard the Soviet cruise ship Maxim Gorky, docked in the port of Valletta. Despite the strong storm, the summit opened a fundamentally new stage in relations between the two countries. In particular, for the first time in history, a joint press conference was held between the two leaders.

• 

  The history of the summits of the leaders of the USSR and Russia with the US presidents

  Point in the Cold War

  The meeting of the first Russian President Boris Yeltsin with George W. Bush in the United States in the winter of 1992 summed up the 46-year Cold War. A declaration was signed stating that Russia and the United States no longer consider each other as possible adversaries. A year later, in Moscow, politicians signed the Treaty on the Further Reduction and Limitation of Strategic Offensive Arms (START-2).

• 

  The history of the summits of the leaders of the USSR and Russia with the US presidents

  Friend Bill

  Friendly relations connected Boris Yeltsin and the next US President Bill Clinton. They met several times. In 1997, in Helsinki, during the last summit of the two leaders, Clinton persuaded Yeltsin not to impede NATO expansion, promising to admit Russia to the G7, promote WTO accession, and help restructure Russia’s debt in the Paris Club of creditors.

• 

  The history of the summits of the leaders of the USSR and Russia with the US presidents

  On Russia’s accession to NATO

  In 2000, Bill Clinton came to Moscow, where he met with the new Russian President Vladimir Putin. No important documents were signed. The main sensation was voiced by Putin many years later. In an interview with American director Oliver Stone, the Russian leader said that he suggested that Clinton consider the option of Russia joining NATO, and he was not against it.

• 

  The history of the summits of the leaders of the USSR and Russia with the US presidents

  He is the king

  In November 2001, Putin became the first foreign leader to visit not only the ranch of US President George W. Bush in Texas, but also to attend a closed CIA briefing for the head of the White House. At the same time, the cooling in relations between Russia and the United States began precisely under Bush Jr., who already in 2006 said: “Putin is no longer a democrat. He is the tsar. We have lost him.”

• 

  The history of the summits of the leaders of the USSR and Russia with the US presidents

  Reboot at the burger joint

  A brief period of thaw in Russian-American relations fell on the presidency of Dmitry Medvedev in the Russian Federation. In September 2009, he visited the United States, visited the headquarters of Twitter and started his own microblog, received the latest iPhone from the hands of Apple CEO Steve Jobs, and had breakfast with US President Barack Obama at a burger joint. And on April 8, 2010 in Prague, Medvedev and Obama signed the START-3 Treaty.

• 

  The history of the summits of the leaders of the USSR and Russia with the US presidents

  It blew cold

  Soon after Vladimir Putin returned to the Kremlin, a new deterioration in Russian-American relations began: from 2012 to 2018, official visits by the presidents of the two countries were not held. During the bilateral meeting of Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump in Helsinki in 2018, not only no agreements were signed, but even a joint final statement.

  Author: Vitaly Kropman

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