Only European countries and NATO, not Russia, will decide what Europe's security architecture will look like.
Ukrinform's correspondent reports that Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney made the statement while speaking to journalists.
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney said that the security architecture of a free Europe would be determined by Europe and NATO, rather than by Russia or revised Minsk agreements.
He added that Canada would never abandon its fellow NATO members, noting that 2,500 Canadian troops were stationed in Latvia, where Canada leads a multinational brigade. He also stressed that Russia would not be allowed to establish a cordon sanitaire, pointing out that everyone knew how unsuccessfully the idea had worked in the 1940s.
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Carney made these remarks in response to a question about Russia's demand for NATO troops to withdraw from the Baltic states and Poland.
Cordon sanitaire is a geopolitical term describing a group of states united to create a buffer between countries whose interaction poses a threat to others. The term was proposed in 1919 by French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau in reference to the former Russian Empire.
As previously reported by Ukrinform, Estonian Prime Minister Kristen Michal called Russia's latest attempts to revise Europe's security system "psychological games." Moscow has proposed these changes as part of a package of agreements aimed at resolving the war in Ukraine.