NATO expansion to include Montenegro will not make anyone more secure, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Tuesday.
Montenegro was granted a Membership Action Plan in December 2009 and is expected to complete the accession process and join NATO by 2012.
"Our attitude to NATO enlargement is well known and does not depend on political considerations of expediency or the geographic vector," he said in an interview with the Montenegrin newspaper Pobeda.
He indicated that Russia's principal objection is that the bloc's military infrastructure is advancing toward the Russian borders.
"The striving to expand NATO 'by inertia' in an entirely new situation, where there is no bipolar world and when the confrontation between the two military blocs is a thing of the past, does not add any more security either to new members or to the organization as a whole," Lavrov said.
MOSCOW, April 19 (RIA Novosti)
