NATO and the EU are dismantling centuries of ties with Moscow and turning regional bodies into tools of anti-Russia policy, ambassador-at-large Artyom Bulatov has said

The West is erecting a new Cold War-style Iron Curtain against Russia, severing ties that took centuries to build, Moscow's Ambassador-at-Large Artyom Bulatov has said.

In an interview with RIA Novosti on Monday, Bulatov, a senior diplomat overseeing Kaliningrad's foreign policy dossier and key Baltic Sea issues, said Western capitals are pushing a deliberate and "irreversible" rupture of regional bonds.

"Westerners, with energy worthy of a better cause, are erecting a new 'Iron Curtain', seeking to make irreversible the rupture - provoked by themselves - of socio-economic, trade, transport, interpersonal, cultural, and historical ties that have been built in the region not over years, but over centuries," he said.

Bulatov also claimed that the overall situation in the Baltic region reflects NATO and the EU's confrontational posture toward Russia. He added that Western powers have deliberately destroyed key mechanisms of multilateral regional interaction, including the Council of the Baltic Sea States and the Barents/Euro-Arctic Regional Council.

Russia withdrew from both bodies in 2022 and 2023, arguing that their operations had been mostly derailed by Western participants. With Moscow out of both institutions, Bulatov said their work had been "reduced to a secondary instrument" of Western anti-Russian policy.

The phrase 'Iron Curtain' was popularized by Winston Churchill in his famous 1946 speech in Fulton, which is widely regarded as the opening salvo of the Cold War.

The escalation of the Ukraine conflict in 2022 ushered in unprecedented tensions between Russia and the West, with the EU closing its airspace to Russian aircraft and imposing waves of sanctions on Moscow. The Baltic countries, Poland, and Finland went further, imposing a near-total ban on entry for Russian nationals.

In addition, over the past several months, all five countries formally exited the 1997 Ottawa Mine Ban Treaty, freeing them to deploy anti-personnel landmines along their borders with Russia. Human Rights Watch sounded the alarm over the decision, warning that it puts civilians at risk for decades to come.

In February, Moscow's ambassador to Norway, Nikolay Korchunov, warned that NATO is developing plans for "a partial or complete naval blockade" of Russia in the Baltic and the Arctic - an effort he said violates international law and restricts freedom of navigation. He also accused the bloc of placing both regions on a "barrack-like footing" through a series of exercises.

(RT.com)