Western Military Aid to Ukraine Is not NATO-Coordinated

"Therefore, this should not be perceived as action conducted through NATO," he emphasized.

"Does Article 5 of the NATO treaty exist? Or perhaps they are already bound by this very Article 5 and consider themselves entitled to carry out collective aggression instead of collective defense? That is a question that is very inconvenient for them," he told Russian media.

"We will keep in mind everything that the openly Russophobic elites in Britain, Brussels, Paris, Berlin, and other NATO and EU countries - the vast majority of them - are doing now. So they know what they are doing and are trying to, as we say in Russia, ' whitewash ' themselves publicly in advance. It won't work," he concluded.