MOSCOW. Aug 27 (Interfax) - Russia has no intention of establishing centers similar to NATO's Strategic Communications Center of Excellence in the Latvian capital, Ivan Soltanovsky, director of the Russian Foreign Ministry's pan-European cooperation department, told Interfax.
"It is not the best method to engage in a competition to open some centers of ours in response to the opening of NATO ones. However, in today's conditions of the blatant propaganda war against Russia, additional measures are being taken to get the truth across to the international public," he said.
"It is strange that NATO, as a military-political alliance, is getting engaged in such activity," Soltanovsky said, when commenting on the opening of the NATO Strategic Communications Center of Excellence in Riga earlier in August.
"Obviously, Western countries simply do not have enough resources to carry out their usual counter-propaganda work. For this reason, additional structures are being created in order to take control of the media's work," he noted.
According to the Russian diplomat, such a step on the part of NATO "can be recognized to a major extent as a positive result of the vigorous and goal-oriented work of Russian journalists that already causes concern within this military-political alliance."
It was reported earlier that on August 20, Latvian President Raimonds Vejonis opened NATO's Strategic Communications Center of Excellence in Riga in the presence of high-ranking Latvian and foreign officials.
"The struggle for people's hearts and minds takes place on a day-to-day basis. For this reason, strategic communications will play a major role in the future," Vejonis said.
The ribbon-cutting ceremony for the center was attended by U.S. Senators John McCain, Sheldon Whitehouse and John Barrasso, as well as Lithuanian President Dalia Grybauskaite.
McCain said that he saw the opening of this NATO center in the Baltic region as a key element of the propaganda struggle.
The Latvian and Lithuanian presidents, for their part, said that the alliance's center in Riga had not been created only to counter Russian propaganda.
The main goal of the NATO Strategic Communications Center of Excellence is to help to further strengthen NATO, Grybauskaite said.
The full version of Soltanovsky's interview will be published on the www.interfax.ru website.