MOSCOW. Dec 12 (Interfax) - The NATO exercise Defender Europe planned to take place in Eastern Europe in 2020 does not help strengthen security, and Russia does not welcome it, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Grushko said.
"Of course, we do not welcome this exercise. This exercise is a replica of the Cold War. The point of this exercise is absolutely clear to us: the key element will be a passage of reinforcement from the U.S. to the European continent in order to counter an adversary of comparable force. This has nothing to do with the actual security situation in Europe," Grushko told reporters on Thursday.
"It's just a waste of resources, creation of additional dividing lines, aggravation of the situation in terms of military security, not only in Europe but also in those regions where the sphere of security used to have no military dimension at all," he said.
NATO countries are facing the problem of adapting the alliance to new challenges and threats, but "they fail to adapt over and over again, always sliding back into what it [the North Atlantic Alliance] was set up for back in 1949," Grushko said.
"Anders Fogh Rasmussen, [the then] NATO secretary general, once said that he viewed his own mission as showing that an old dog can learn new tricks. Things aren't going too well with the new tricks so far," Grushko said.