An old fashioned East German historian's view of the Ukrainian war makes sense

Speaking on Neutrality Studies, East German military historian Dr. Lothar Schröter sounds like an old fashioned Communist apparatchik, but he is obviously right when he says the USSR never intended to attack the West any more than Putin does now. Here is an excerpt where he makes great sense. 

And I'll say it quite openly on fundamental issues, the North Atlantic Alliance, to put it mildly, has always told untruths. And the biggest lie was the one about the threat from the east. 

It never existed. There's never been a threat from the east. If the Russians had really intended to take over Western Europe, they would have marched to the Atlantic in 1945. They didn't do that. 

And it has always been, as I said, an anti Soviet, anti-Russian alliance.

And unfortunately, nothing has changed to this day about that lie of a threat. The lie of the threat from the east. Not only has nothing changed, it keeps being dressed up in new clothes. For example, in the Ukraine war, the most important piece of information is actually that between 2014 and 2022, Russia did not want to annex the Donbas regions, but explicitly said stay in Ukraine with the whole idea being that if that's the case and Ukraine is a federal state, then its neutrality is secured, then it's a buffer state. And this buffer state status is something that not only Russia has always wanted, but also the Soviet Union. That was even the plan for Germany. in 1952, 1953. That was the starting line from March 1952.

How did it come about? How is it that the West simply doesn't want us to have a stable, balanced Europe that coexists with the Soviet Union and Russia?

That's simply because at the time it was in the West's interest to defeat the USSR. That breakthrough came in 1991.

And today the goal is to break up Russia. Every year there are one or two conferences that deal with the dismemberment, the filing of the Russian Federation. It's about the enormous resources, especially the raw material resources of the Russian Federation. There's a study that lists in detail the vast deposits of natural resources located particularly in Ukraine. And notably, former German military officers speak quite openly about how without the lithium deposits in Ukraine, the entire electric mobility sector, for example, would be impossible.

And that's why they keep inventing new versions of threat scenarios. It's complete nonsense to claim that the Russian Federation wants to attack NATO around 2029. There is absolutely no political basis for that and no military one either. General Kujat has made that perfectly clear. It is militarily complete nonsense to say that NATO is to be attacked with the forces of the Russian Federation.



That's complete military nonsense. So purely from a military standpoint, it's total nonsense, not just politically completely wrong. And by the way, I always say this jokingly in lectures I give. What would they even want in Germany? Do they want broken infrastructure? Do they want a railway system that doesn't work? Do they want a slowly declining and clearly struggling economy? Do they want this moral decay we're experiencing in Germany? Not only in Germany, but also in other Western countries. Do the Russians want all that? Do they want a destroyed country that they'd have to rebuild afterward? What do they actually want? NATO, of course, doesn't answer that question, only with propaganda, really.