A former Russian foreign minister has accused Nato of adopting a “self-centred” approach that could lead to a deeper crisis following the invasion of Ukraine . Igor Ivanov, the foreign minister between 1998 to 2004, told diplomats and academics at a forum in Beijing on Sunday that the West was convinced it was the sole winner from the Cold War and was seeking to put its own interests above all other. China tells UN expansion of Nato into Asia-Pacific will stir up conflict “Unfortunately, nations of the West are not giving up every attempt to secure a one-sided unilateral military advantage but [undermining] the security of other countries, fuelling more competition in geopolitics and moving forward with directing exclusive blocs.” Ivanov, now president of the Moscow-based Russian International Affairs Council think tank, said Nato’s new strategic blueprint – which defines Russia as “the most significant and direct threat to allied security and to peace and stability in the Euro-Atlantic area”– was “clearly inconsistent with the idea of indivisible security and equal rights of sovereign states”. He added: “At some point, this self-centred approach will produce a deep crisis.” He warned the World Peace Forum, hosted by Tsinghua University, that the war in Ukraine has already made a sharp watershed between Russia and Europe and that the divergence “will continue for a long time”. He also appeared to be pessimistic about the security situation in Europe because mutual trust between Russia and Europe had been damaged after channels of communication of both sides were either frozen or dramatically downgraded. Speaking right after Ivanov, the European Union’s ambassador to China Nicolas Chapuis defended Nato, which he said “had helped keep Europe free”. He said the 30-member military alliance – including the US and Canada and most EU members – is not something imposed on the European countries “at the behest of the United States”. “The creation of Nato and its enlargement has always been, and always remains a sovereign decision … and such a decision is something that needs to be approved by consensus of the existing member states,” said Chapuis, who is about to leave his post after four years in Beijing. He also denied claims by Russian President Vladimir Putin in January that Nato betrayed Russia by expanding eastward after promising not to do so. “No such commitment has been made, and no one has asked Nato to make such a commitment,” Chapuis told diplomats and academics in Beijing. New Zealand’s Ardern warns Nato of China’s rising assertiveness “In fact [former Soviet leader] Mikhail Gorbachev himself denied such claims in a 2014 interview, saying that the subject of Nato enlargement had never been discussed and that no Eastern European country had mentioned it … not even after the Warsaw Agreement, which ceased to be in force in 1991,” he added. He also urged Beijing to play a more active role to persuade Putin to end the war in Ukraine, which is now entering its fifth month. “We expect China to take a responsible role and stand up to defend the international security order and to demonstrate a resolve to help us to stop Russia’s war,” Chapuis said. China has rejected calls from Europe to condemn Russia’s invasion . Beijing has also complained that Nato had, for the first time, singled out China by name in its new strategy document , criticising it for “promoting confrontation and antagonism” being full of “the cold war mentality and ideological bias”. The document, recently updated for the first time in 12 years at last month’s Nato summit in Madrid, criticised China’s deepening strategic relationship with Russia and “their mutually reinforcing attempts to undercut the rules-based international order [which runs] counter to our values and interest”. Feng Zhongping, the director of the Institute of European Studies with Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, told the event that while Europe has some of the most important international security and economic frameworks, it needed to learn important lessons. China calls on SCO to ‘oppose hegemonic bullying’ as Nato set to expand “First, do not isolate your neighbours and humiliate your neighbours,” he said. “Political mutual trust requires a lot of interactive exchanges, including cultural, military and economic interactions, people-to-people contacts and so on. What I am saying is that political mutual trust takes a long time to build up, let’s not easily say that it is impossible and just give up.”