Analysis: NATO must calm Russia fears
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Belgium, Bulgaria*, Canada, Czech Republic*, Denmark, Estonia*, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Italy, Latvia*, Lithuania*, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania*, Slovakia*, Slovenia*, Spain, Turkey, United Kingdom, United States.
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 The addition of new members sends a mixed message to Russia.
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(CNN) -- All of NATO's diplomacy skills will be needed to calm the fears of Russia over the military alliance's eastward expansion, analysts say.
The accession of seven new nations into NATO was sealed on Friday when the flags of Romania, Bulgaria, Slovakia, Lithuania, Slovenia, Latvia and Estonia were raised at its headquarters in Brussels, Belgium.
The new members do not bring much in terms of military hardware to NATO, which was set up in 1949 by the U.S. and its West European allies to counter the Soviet Union's might during the Cold War.
But Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer says they can bring niche expertise, as the Czech Republic has done already with its expertise in countering chemical and biological weapons. And politically their arrival demonstrates the end of old divisions.
There may, however, be a complication. NATO has been working to establish friendlier relations with Moscow but several former members of the Soviet bloc have made clear they are joining NATO to seek protection against Russia, as Latvia's president underlined at the weekend.
"Western Europe had its end of the war occurring on the eighth of May 1945," Vaira Vike-Freiberga told CNN.
"For us, the Second World War and its sequels will end only ... when we become members of the NATO alliance and when we can be assured of not ever being occupied again as we were by two occupying powers: Stalinist Soviet Union and Nazi Germany."
Moscow's concerns about NATO expansion were underlined when Belgium immediately sent four F-16 fighters to Lithuania to patrol that country and Latvia and Estonia. All of the Baltic states were left without their own fighter planes when they broke from the Soviet Union in 1991.
Russian Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov said in a magazine interview last week that Moscow might even revise its defense policy unless the alliance limits the deployment of weapons near Russia's borders.
And Konstantin Kosachyov, the head of the international affairs committee of Russia's parliament, told the Russian news agency Interfax on Monday that NATO "has recently been making steps that are unfriendly to Russia."
NATO has tried to convince Moscow the expansion is not directed at Russia and U.S. President George W. Bush emphasized this week that a larger alliance can more effectively combat terrorism.
But NATO Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, who was at the White House for an accession ceremony for the seven new nations on Monday, told CNN much needed to be done to strengthen NATO-Russian ties.
"We need, in the interests of NATO and in the interests of Russia, a strong partnership, which means that we not only discuss the easy things but also the harder nuts to crack in that relationship," he said.
This will be no mean feat, analysts predict. "For the first time ever NATO could claim to actually cover all the willing countries in Europe that wanted to be part of the alliance," said Jonathan Eyal, from the Royal United Services Institute.
"Clearly the Russians are rather annoyed seeing their old former satellites not merely escaping from their influence but actually joining the alliance which historically was facing the Soviet Union."
And as CNN's European Political Editor Robin Oakley added, "if you can't make omelettes without breaking eggs, it seems you probably can't make alliances either without fracturing a few friendships."
