The Kremlin said on Thursday that the Black Sea would never be a “big NATO” after Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba called on the alliance to play a bigger security role in the region at an event in Bucharest, Reuters reported.

“Never,” Kremlin spokesman Dmytro Peskov emphasized on Thursday afternoon in the context of the fact that, in addition to Russia and Ukraine, 3 NATO countries have access to the Black Sea: Romania, Bulgaria and Turkey.

He made this comment in the context of a request by Moscow journalists regarding Dmitry Kuleba’s statements made the day before in Bucharest at the Conference on the Security of the Black Sea Region.

In addition to statements about the need to strengthen NATO’s presence in the region, the head of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine warned that if the West does not have a consistent strategy regarding the Black Sea, then Russia has always had one – an aggressive one in response.

Dmytro Kuleba also stated that “many of us believed that the 21st century would be a century of peace, development and cooperation,” but “unfortunately, Russia went in the opposite direction, in the 19th century, of colonial competition.”

Speaking about the illegal occupation of Crimea by Russia, he stated that “every time we hear that anywhere in the world someone says that Crimea is something special and should not return to Ukraine again, we must say that Ukraine categorically rejects this work”.

Russia is concerned about the discussions about Crimea that took place in Bucharest

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyi, after the failure of peace talks with Russia in the spring of last year, has repeatedly stated that Ukraine will only accept the release of all its territories occupied by Moscow, the last time he sent a corresponding message last week.

At the end of March last year, Ukraine offered Russia a 15-year moratorium on the Crimea settlement, but talks to end the war launched by Vladimir Putin collapsed after Moscow refused to order its troops to cease fire and withdraw to the borders. before the start of the “special military operation”.

“We believe that the issue of security in the Black Sea is not only a regional problem, but has a global aspect. And there is a lesson learned from the case of Crimea, which led to a bigger war, on February 24 (No. 2022): when evil cannot be stopped, it intensifies,” the Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine also said on Thursday. in Bucharest by Emine Japarova.

She recalled that the Ukrainian authorities sounded the alarm “in 2014, when Crimea became a Russian military base and when the Black and Azov Seas practically became lakes of the Russian Federation, when Russia began to block commercial ships leaving Ukraine. ports in 2017”.

The comments of Ukrainian officials sound in the context of the fact that the American Congress is going to adopt a bipartisan legislative project to strengthen security in the Black Sea region starting this year in the context of Russian aggression against Ukraine.

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