NATO’s course towards its enlargement is only creating new dividing lines while the world needs unity in the fight against the coronavirus, Russia’s Foreign Ministry said in a statement on Tuesday in the wake of North Macedonia’s accession to the alliance, EDNews reports citing TASS.
"It is obvious that Skopje’s accession to the alliance brings no added value to European, regional or national security. This step surely does not contribute to unifying the efforts to fight common threats and challenges, including the coronavirus pandemic. It will only be creating dividing lines," the statement reads.
The attempts to "make this event pompous and reverberating" have proven to be futile due to the deteriorating situation caused by the coronavirus pandemic, Russia’s Foreign Ministry pointed out.
"Amid the state of emergency declared in the country, the leaders of North Macedonia nonetheless did not miss the opportunity to pompously declare the historic nature of the accession to NATO, which allegedly guarantees Skopje’s stability and security. Foreign Minister Nikola Dimitrov even called the membership in the organization ‘the behest of fathers and grandfathers,’" the statement runs.
However, what was left unnoticed was the fact that North Macedonia’s accession to the alliance almost coincided with the date of the start of NATO’s bombings of the former Yugoslavia, the Russian Foreign Ministry recalled.
From the time of signing the Prespa agreement with Greece in June 2018, North Macedonia’s integration into NATO was accompanied by numerous procedural and legislative violations, the ministry said.
In particular, in compliance with the national legislation, the turnout at the referendum on the accession to the European Union and NATO on September 30, 2018 proved to be insufficient to deem it valid. Moreover, the cases of various kinds of interference into the country’s internal affairs, up to blackmail and intimidation, were observed, the statement says.
"All this passed unnoticed by our Western partners who are usually quite sensitive about the peculiarities of observing legislative procedures," Russia’s Foreign Ministry stressed.