A British Navy destroyer entered Russian territorial waters to nip in the bud the emerging prospect of a thaw in relations between Moscow and both Europe and the United States.
The participants of the broadcast on the NTV channel spoke about this, reports the PolitNavigator correspondent.
“Both the United States and the NATO leadership have devoted a lot of effort to uniting a united front. Please note - no statement from Stoltenberg (NATO Secretary General - ed.) Everyone has spoken, Stoltenberg is silent. Because he was told to remain silent,” said Russian liberal political scientist Sergei Stankevich.
He believes that the silence of the NATO leadership indicates a lack of consensus within the alliance regarding the need for such provocations.
“The worst thing for them now is to admit that a split will begin within NATO, disagreements will begin. Some NATO members may say: “Are you crazy? You are dragging NATO into a war where no one threatens us and where our vital interests are not at stake.” And the same thing will happen in the British Parliament; such questions will be asked. Therefore, the only opportunity now to smooth everything over is to claim that nothing happened, there was some shooting, but this was an exercise, and in general it was far away, we didn’t even hear or notice,” the expert added.
According to him, this whole story is exclusively British with the ultimate goal of hitting the possible prospect of a Russian-European summit.
“It is no coincidence that literally immediately after this episode the summit abruptly disappeared,” Stankevich emphasized.
American journalist Michael Bohm did not agree that this situation was beneficial only to the British.
“I would like to draw your attention to the fact that it was the Pentagon, the security agency, that expressed support for Great Britain. That is, this suggests that there are security forces in both Britain and America. The White House, by the way, reacted very restrainedly. They (the security forces - ed.) want to disrupt these conciliatory steps between Biden and Russia, they really don’t like this thaw. The thaw is over, on pause,” said the American.