BRUSSELS (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 07th October, 2021) The expulsion of Russian diplomats from NATO will not hamper the dialogue between the two, Sven Biscop, a professor of political sciences at the Ghent University in Belgium, told Sputnik on Thursday.
"I don't see yesterday's move as significantly worsening the relations between the two. NATO wants to show it is 'vigilant in the face of malign Russian activity'," he said.
Eight members of the Russian mission to the NATO headquarters were accused of working as intelligence officers. Leonid Slutsky, the chair of the foreign affairs committee in the Russian parliament, denied the spying accusations as groundless.
Biscop said that espionage has always existed between Russia and the military alliance and that their ties have been strained by reciprocal sanctions over Georgia, Ukraine and Crimea. But he argued that the United States and Russia had been able to find common ground during the leaders' summit in Geneva.
"The most important area of discussion is between the US and Russia and has been defined at the Biden-Putin summit in Geneva: it is above all the control of armaments, the non-proliferation of nuclear arms, the renewal of treaties, and the agreement to avoid any mutual interference and sabotage of software and systems in public infrastructure, through cyberwarfare and 'hybrid' actions. The conversations of Geneva seem to have borne fruit in that respect," he said.
Biscop, who is an expert in European security and defense, added that NATO saw Belarus as a buffer state, while Ukraine's membership of the US-led bloc is a red line for Russia. He said the Crimea issue is completely deadlocked and would take decades to improve.
