“I will say for the first time: in 2000, I asked Clinton how America would react to accepting Russia into NATO, the reaction looked very restrained,” Putin said.
According to him, in the future, "it became clear how the Americans really reacted to this opportunity."
The Russian leader emphasized that "the United States not only did not want to have an ally in the person of Russia, but even made an enemy out of it, since they did not need such a large independent country as Russia."
Earlier, the official representative of the Russian Foreign Ministry, Maria Zakharova, said that Western partners "lied" about the non-expansion of NATO.
Russian President Vladimir Putin, during a meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on February 14, called NATO's eastward expansion endless and very dangerous.
According to him, Russia has been talking about non-expansion of NATO for 30 years, while the infrastructure of the alliance has already appeared at the Russian borders.