BRUSSELS. Feb 6 (Interfax) - Senior NATO officials and permanent representatives to the alliance have been sending messages to Russia declaring the need for a framework preventing dangerous military situations to be in place, Russian Permanent Representative to NATO Alexander Grushko said.
"They have been making public statements as well. For instance, NATO Supreme Allied Commander Europe Philip Breedlove has done so. NATO Military Committee Chairman Knud Bartels also said it was expedient to restore contacts at a high military level and to maintain a direct dialogue for avoiding dangerous incidents and situations in which actions of one side may be wrongly interpreted by the other," the senior Russian diplomat said.
Chairman of the Munich Security Conference, Ambassador Wolfgang Ischinger suggested that Russia and NATO should agree on rules to contain the advancement of their military infrastructures to certain distances.
"In fact, there is nothing new about this. The Soviet Union and many NATO countries agreed on the prevention of dangerous military activity back in the Cold War era," Grushko said.
"Concrete measures have been suggested, but the very fact the issue has been highlighted proves that security levels are falling and NATO is thinking about ways to cushion these effects with tools developed throughout the years of confrontation," the envoy said.
"This is another symptom of depleting security," he added.
"Actually, the scope of military activity started to grow already in 2004 when NATO launched a patrolling mission in the Baltic airspace. There were no objective reason for doing so at all. But the sole reason why they did so is the NATO regulations allow the access to any spot of the alliance's airspace within a set period of time," the Russian diplomat said.
"That proved that NATO deemed its own security much more significant than regional and common European security," he stated.
"And we are witnessing this logic now," Grushko said.