Chinese diplomat says NATO must keep promise not to expand eastward

By AP 19 March 2022, 9:16 pm

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Protesters hold signs regarding Ukraine as they stand outside the security perimeter during a meeting of NATO defense ministers at NATO headquarters in Brussels, on March 16, 2022. (AP Photo/Sylvain Plazy)

A Chinese diplomat says NATO should stick to what he claimed was a promise not to expand eastward.

In a speech, Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Le Yucheng criticizes the far-reaching Western sanctions imposed on Russia after it invaded Ukraine and says the root cause of the war in Ukraine “lies in the Cold War mentality and power politics.”

Echoing a Kremlin talking point, the Chinese envoy says 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 says.

He expresses an understanding for Russian President Vladimir Putin’s oft-repeated position, saying 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 says. “One could well anticipate the consequences going down this path. The crisis in Ukraine is a stern warning.”