NATO's Expansion East Prevented Crisis In Europe From Happening Earlier - Clinton

MOSCOW (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 19th September, 2022) NATO's expansion to Eastern Europe allowed for preventing a crisis in the region from happening even earlier than it did today, former US President Bill Clinton said on Monday.

"I think we did the right thing at the right time. And if we had not have done it this crisis might have occurred even sooner," Clinton told CNN.

He said the United States offered Russia partnership, because "the biggest security problems are going to come from non-state actors or from authoritarian states selling chemical, biological and nuclear capacity to terrorist groups," but Russia refused.

"I offered Russia not only a special partnership with NATO, but the prospect of eventual membership in NATO," Clinton said.

Russia has been a consistent critic of the alliance's expansion following the collapse of the Soviet Union, with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov saying in April that it has nothing to do with the fulfillment of statutory goals and is geared toward strengthening and perpetuating the unipolar world. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said in early April that further expansion of the alliance eastward is aggressive in nature and will not make Europe more secure.