PRESS RELEASE
Putin: ‘We Will Never Accept’ Obama’s Provocations and Threats
Dec. 9, 2016 (EIRNS)—Russian President Vladimir Putin is being as hard as nails in rejecting the warlike anti-Russian provocations still coming from the rapidly outgoing Obama administration and its allies. At a meeting in Moscow yesterday of the Council for the Development of Civil Society and Human Rights, Putin referred to the Dec. 5 attack against a Russian field hospital near Aleppo, Syria, that left two Russian medics dead:
"Big international structures have equated our medics who have been killed, and those who hit their hospital, and did it deliberately, as they knew where the medical establishment is located. It is absolutely unacceptable and inadmissible. We will never accept it."
He added: "Regrettably, it sets us thinking about how unbiased some of our partners are in highlighting the situation."
Putin also signed a decree awarding the Order of Courage to the two medics who were killed, as well as to two Russian colonels who also died supporting Syria’s military efforts to free Aleppo from terrorist control.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov took a similar approach, in comments Dec. 8 at the Organization for Security and Cooperation (OSCE) Ministerial Council meeting in Hamburg. For there to be actual security in the region, "it is necessary to abandon bellicose rhetoric and mutual accusations," Lavrov said.
"Meanwhile, the first step is obvious. NATO countries should stop their military build-up near Russia’s borders so that at least the late 2013 situation could be restored. Otherwise, it seems as if the alliance seeks to create a new military reality and wants Russia to take it into consideration; but this is not going to happen,"
Lavrov stated. He also presented to his colleagues at the OSCE meeting documentation that the United States and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization had promised Russia that there would be no eastward expansion of NATO after the demise of the Soviet Union.
"I handed my counterparts the documents, which were declassified when Mikhail Gorbachev talked to Helmut Kohl, Eduard Shevardnadze talked to Hans-Dietrich Genscher and [U.S. Secretary of State] Jim Baker was also a participant of these talks, it is clearly written there that all these figures from Germany, the United States—Francois Mitterrand also took part in those talks—they clearly said there would be no NATO eastward expansion, and moreover, NATO’s military infrastructure will not approach our country’s borders,"
Sputnik reported Lavrov saying.
