LONDON, February 7. /TASS/: London is willing to cooperate with Moscow and provides its assurances that NATO poses no threat to Russia, Spokesman of British Prime Minister told journalists on Monday.
"Russia has expressed concerns about potential NATO aggression, but we have been clear that those concerns are fundamentally unfounded as NATO is a defensive alliance at its heart," Reuters cites Johnson's spokesman as saying. "But we do want to work with Russia to provide diplomatic reassurance on that front. It is not about making concessions as the PM and other western leaders have said all European democracies have a right to join NATO."
UK Foreign Secretary Liz Truss may visit Russia and hold a meeting with her Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov in the near future. According to the Times newspaper, a visit to Moscow by UK Foreign Secretary is scheduled for February 10. The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) said that UK Defense Secretary Ben Wallace is to visit Russia to meet his Russian counterpart Sergey Shoigu on February 11.
Russia issued legally binding drafts on mutual security guarantees with the US and NATO, including the non-expansion of the alliance and non-deployment of strike weapons. Concerns over Moscow's alleged preparations for an invasion into Ukraine have been increasingly announced in the west and in Kiev recently. Kremlin Spokesman Dmitry Peskov castigated these statements as an empty and groundless escalation of tension, emphasizing that Russia posed no threat to anyone. At the same time, the Kremlin press secretary did not exclude some possible provocations to justify such claims and warned that the attempts to resolve the Ukrainian conflict by force would carry extremely serious consequences.
