Russia said it does not expect any change in politics by the new NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte — the former Dutch prime minister, who replaced the Norwegian Jens Stoltenberg in the post, reports "Reuters", quoted by News.bg.
"Our expectations are that the North Atlantic Alliance will continue to work in the same direction as it is doing now," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said. He noted that President Vladimir Putin knows Rutte well from past meetings.
"At one time there were hopes for the possibility of building good pragmatic relations — at least such a dialogue was conducted, but subsequently we know that the Netherlands took a rather uncompromising position, a position to completely exclude any contacts with our country", Peskov pointed out.
Therefore, we do not think that anything significant new will happen in the politics of the Alliance, he concluded.
Rutte heads NATO at a critical moment in the war in Ukraine — as Russian forces advance in the eastern part of the country, and just over a month before the US presidential election.
"We need to make sure that Ukraine prevails as a sovereign, independent, democratic country," he said at NATO headquarters in Brussels earlier today.