“President Putin declared in the autumn of 2021, and actually sent a draft treaty that they wanted NATO to sign, to promise no more NATO enlargement. That was what he sent us. And [that] was a pre-condition for not invade [sic] Ukraine. Of course we didn't sign that. He went to war to prevent NATO, more NATO, close to his borders. He has got the exact opposite.”
NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said this to committee of the European Parliament on September 7.
And yet many people get angry when this is suggested by people who are not Secretary General of NATO.
There was never a time when there was less respect for freely exchanging opinions than now, except perhaps in wartime - but only Russia and Ukraine are at war.
Tsarist Russia, unlike Russia or the rest of Europe today, had free speech, more or less. I thought I'd mention that.
I think it is obvious that NATO expansion does not have any relation with the modernisation of the Alliance itself or with ensuring security in Europe. On the contrary, it represents a serious provocation that reduces the level of mutual trust. And we have the right to ask: against whom is this expansion intended? And what happened to the assurances our western partners made after the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact? Where are those declarations today? No one even remembers them. But I will allow myself to remind this audience what was said. I would like to quote the speech of NATO General Secretary Mr Woerner in Brussels on 17 May 1990. He said at the time that: “the fact that we are ready not to place a NATO army outside of German territory gives the Soviet Union a firm security guarantee”. Where are these guarantees?
ReplyDeleteVladimir Putin
Speech at the Munich Conference on Security Policy, February 10, 2007
http://www.en.kremlin.ru/events/president/transcripts/24034
By saying that the US will "not allow Ukraine to be carved up" Biden is claiming that there can be no territorial compromise in respect to Ukraine.
ReplyDeleteVirtually every peace plan put forward by numerous parties has foreseen territorial compromise as the only way a solution can be found. Even the Minsk Agreements, which Ukraine signed in 2014 and again in 2015, allowed for compromise on territory.
Ruling out territorial compromise is a message that already is understood in Russia. Russia is fighting the Ukraine war because, in its view, it wants to (a) protect the Russian speaking population of Ukraine and (b) to keep NATO out.
NATO’s presence in Ukraine is a Russian red line.
As a practical matter, there is no chance that Ukraine has any ability to retake any significant part of these annexed areas. Almost all the fighting along the contact line, especially since the start of Ukraine's counter-offensive, has been about a Ukrainian attempt to break Russia's first line of defense protecting these territories. Today there is a consensus that the counter-offensive has failed to achieve any meaningful results other than to kill tens of thousands of Ukrainians and chew up billions of dollars of western military assistance.
Biden had nothing to say about NATO and Ukrainian membership, even though for Russia this has been a red line from the start, and it was NATO's buildup of Ukrainian forces that triggered the Russian invasion in the first place. The Russians declared many warnings to the United States and NATO about NATO's presence in Ukraine, as late as more than a month before Russian troops crossed into Ukrainian territory. The US and NATO refused to have any discussion with Russia on the subject.
Ukraine has not been put in NATO formally, mostly because some NATO members oppose the idea, especially the Germans. They do so because if Ukraine was put into NATO, Russia would attack NATO itself, bypassing the pesky Ukrainians. That would mean war in Europe.
Meanwhile the US and its allies have been working overtime to destabilize Russia by promoting attacks from Ukraine on Russian territory, assassinations and bombings in Russia, and sabotage inside Russian territory.
Russia continues its military buildup, including enlarging its army and producing more weapons and ammunition. NATO and the United States' massive support for Ukraine has changed the strategic landscape in Europe. From Russia's point of view, it is involved in a war against NATO with Ukraine as the proxy. There is, unfortunately, a point where the proxy fails and where the war's backers decide to put their own troops on the front line. There already are NATO "advisers" in Ukraine, as US "advisers" once were in Vietnam before the US sent in the Marines and the Army.
If Biden is reelected, it is almost a certainty he will send in US troops to try and "save" Ukraine. In turn that will mean war in Europe.
Biden's UN Speech--No Compromise, No Negotiations
BY STEPHEN BRYEN
SEP 21, 2023
https://weapons.substack.com/p/bidens-un-speech-no-compromise-no