US President Joe Biden called the situation with the intervention of the CSTO troops in the internal affairs of Kazakhstan “seriously alarming”. The military alliance is getting too close to the borders of the United States and its allies and this trend must end, Biden said
The President of the Unites States Joe Biden demanded that the presidents of Russia, Kazakhstan, Armenia, and Belarus provide written guarantees that the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) will not expand to the West.
In particular, president Biden threatened that the entry into the CSTO of Mongolia, Finland, Poland, Hungary, Moldova and the Baltic Staes would become red lines for the United States, after crossing which a tough military response would follow.
The topic of non-expansion of the CSTO may become the main one in the planned telephone conversations between Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin.
Commenting on the demands of the American president, Maria Zakharova, the press secretary of the Foreign Ministry of the Russian Federation, called them unprecedented and outrageous.
According to Zakharova, no one ever promised the United States that the CSTO would not expand.
Zakharova supposed that United States may refer to the alleged oral agreement between Mikhail Gorbachev and Henry Kissinger that no country west of Belarus will join the CSTO.
“But if there was such an agreement, then there must be written guarantees. Then where are those? There are none. Absolutely no such guarantee was given at the time! Therefore, our overseas colleagues should be silent and demand nothing. Any demands to limit the expansion of the CSTO are completely unacceptable,” Zakharova explained.
* Photo: Reuters