NATO’s exercises in Norway is a furtherance of US aggression towards many countries – in this case it’s towards Russia, Joe Lombardo from United National AntiWar Coalition told RT.

The bloc has started the largest war games since the end of the Cold War. Tens of thousands of troops, as well as warships and planes, arrived for the drills in Norway which shares a border with Russia.

During Trident Juncture exercises, which will be held in and around Norway between October 25 and November 7, the forces will model the situation when a potential enemy is threatening one of the alliance’s member states.

The Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu has expressed his concern about NATO's increased military activity near Russia's borders saying that it reached a level not seen for nearly thirty years.

Get ready for #TridentJuncture 18! 🔱👩‍✈️👨‍✈️🚢🚙🛩️🚁🇳🇴 #NATO's largest exercise in decades. Click on the video for more information. pic.twitter.com/kdB1JsPMK2 — NATO (@NATO) October 25, 2018

Asked about whether NATO is modeling a situation on a potential attack from Russia, Joe Lombardo, United National AntiWar Coalition co-coordinator, said he hasn’t seen Russian aggression but, on the contrary, he said “I do know about US aggression.”

He explained that the US has been aggressive towards many countries, in wars with a number of countries and has its military in more than 150 countries – “that is about 20 times the number of foreign military bases as all other countries combined.”

These new war games is “a furtherance of that aggression, in this case towards Russia,” Lombardo believes.

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In Lombardo’s view, the upside down logic is prevalent in the US: “The US invades a country or occupies a country or does war games on the border of the country for peaceful purposes. And this is really not the case.”

He recalled that the US made a promise after the fall of the Soviet Union to not send NATO into the Warsaw pact countries or the former Soviet countries and today it is in 11 of those countries.

“It never abided by that pact and this is clearly an aggressive movement on the part of the US and NATO, in my opinion,” Lombardo claimed.

“The fact that although Trump likes to say there is no such thing as climate change and global warming, there clearly is. And what we are seeing is in the North - where these war games are taking place - in Norway, a lot of the ice has melted. And now for the first time, there is exploration that is going on there for oil. And perhaps, oil, just as in the Middle East, is the real motive behind a lot of the US aggression in this area. It can’t say that openly, so, it always says it is responding to dictatorship or the aggression from other governments. But that has never been the case,” he told RT.

Lombardo also recalled how NATO was created to contain the Soviet Union but “when there is no longer a Soviet Union, NATO did not disappear,” on the contrary, “it expanded.”

That means that the real motives were different, he said.

“The US is demanding from other NATO countries right now that they up the amount of money that they put into their military and into NATO. And all of these countries, including the US are really in a period of economic austerity,” he added.

Good luck to all the men & women participating in #NATO exercise #TridentJuncture, starting in Norway today. We are sending a clear message that NATO stands ready to defend our nations & preserve the peace. pic.twitter.com/QVCky9Rf8x — Jens Stoltenberg (@jensstoltenberg) October 25, 2018

“So, this really takes away from the needs of people in all of these countries and puts it towards war which is against the interest of everybody in this world. Especially when we are talking about war between two nuclear powers which has the potential, just like climate change to destroy the entire world,” he concluded.

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