The “age of engagement with Russia is over,” UK Foreign Secretary Liz Truss said at a dinner with NATO foreign ministers in Brussels on Wednesday, according to a statement from the UK Foreign Office released ahead of the dinner.
In her remarks, Truss told her NATO counterparts the “NATO-Russia Founding Act is dead and it is time to cast off an outdated approach to handling Russia,” the foreign office said.
The Act, signed in 1997, rules that “NATO and Russia do not consider one another adversaries”, according to the original document.
“The age of engagement with Russia is over. We need a new approach to security in Europe based on resilience, defense, and deterrence”, Truss said.
NATO meeting: Truss’s remarks come as NATO foreign ministers convene in Brussels to discuss Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
According to the statement sent to CNN, Truss underlined that NATO cannot allow “security vacuums” at the alliance’s Eastern borders and should “rethink” support for countries “caught in the web of Russian influence” such as Georgia, Moldova, Sweden and Finland.
The foreign secretary also urged her partners to toughen sanctions and arm Ukraine “quickly and decisively … to ensure Putin fails.”
Truss also said she is working with her G7 counterparts to impose more sanctions on further Russian banks, according to an op-ed published in The Telegraph on Wednesday. In the article, Truss defended increasing NATO spending and presence in Eastern Europe.
“For NATO to remain at the vanguard of global security, it must be bold. As President Eisenhower, the alliance’s first supreme commander, said: “History does not long entrust the care of freedom to the weak or the timid,” the foreign secretary wrote.
