Amid heightened tensions with NATO, Moscow has vowed that it will not turn a blind eye to the US-led military bloc’s purported build-up near Belarus, as Russian officials seek responses to their proposed security guarantees.
Speaking as part of an interview with TASS published on Tuesday, Russia’s ambassador to Minsk, Boris Gryzlov, remarked “we see that the build-up of NATO forces and resources, in fact, does not stop at our gates.”
He continued, stating that during the migrant crisis, when thousands of would-be asylum seekers from troubled nations, mainly in the Middle East, attempted to cross over from the former Soviet republic into EU states, additional forces, including heavy weapons were moved to the Belarusian border from Poland.
Gryzlov cautioned that such actions from NATO and its partners “of course, does not go unnoticed.” He added that the two states take a careful approach to border protection, and that joint Russian-Belarusian air patrols are regularly organized, using “long-range Tu-22M3 bombers, Su-30SM multirole fighters, and others.”