Vice Speaker of the Federation Council Konstantin Kosachev has argued that NATO must not be allowed to expand further, and said this is especially true when it comes to possible Ukrainian accession.

He claimed that if Ukraine were to join the alliance, the Kiev authorities would deliberately engage in provocations against Russia in order to then appeal to NATO members for support. Kosachev also referred to a recent statement by NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, who said the bloc could invoke Article Five of its founding treaty in the event of a conflict with Iran.

In a post on his Telegram channel, the senator described what he sees as a dangerous logic: any NATO member state, in his words, can launch a military strike from its territory, while a retaliatory strike on that same territory would be interpreted by the alliance as an attack on NATO as a whole, triggering the involvement of all 32 member countries.

Kosachev argued that this is precisely what makes NATO an extremely dangerous structure from Russia’s perspective. He added that, in his view, a global threat stems from what he called an unrestrained, feeling-of-impunity «Russophobic elite» in London, Paris and Berlin.