That Russia is going to “invade Ukraine”, occupying the whole country, is completely out of the question. Traces of the Soviet occupation of 1956 are still visible in the streets of Budapest. What happened then in Hungary would be laughable compared to what would happen in Ukraine in such a case. This is obvious to anyone who is even minimally informed, so it is not worth going into further detail.
Another thing is that, given the total lack of results of Russia’s complaint to the United States and NATO, demanding security guarantees, there should be a “strong” response from Moscow. Russia announced “military measures”. Which ones? At a minimum placing “tactical” nuclear missiles in Belarus, Kaliningrad and so on. At most, an annexation of the Donbass with the approval of the local population. The current rising oil prices and the expectation that they will continue to rise allow the Kremlin to more than cover the economic costs of such operations.
They could also militarily take over the area south of Donbass (Mariupol) to organize a security belt in a south-west direction and link the two rebel areas with Crimea, but the latter seems to me extremely risky. The population of the Ukrainian districts of Zaporozhia and Kherson, mostly Russian-speaking like that of Odessa, does not carry their Russophilia to the extreme of wishing to join Russia and break with Ukraine, as was clearly the case for the population of Crimea in 2014. In that extreme scenario, there would be a lot of violence and the Russian occupation would become hell….
What is clear is that Moscow will do something. Otherwise, it would all look like a bluff. The Russian bear, who after twenty-five years of ignoring it has proclaimed a “red line” and growls so much, would lose face. The whole move initiated by Moscow with the demand for “security guarantees” is not theatrical. It is serious. It would be good if our media, our experts and our politicians would report on (and read) the documents proposed by Moscow.
The draft agreement proposed to the United States to de-escalate the tension states in Article 1 that the two sides, “should not undertake actions affecting each other’s security”, and in Article 2 it proposes that the international organizations and military alliances of which they are part, “adhere to the principles contained in the Charter of the United Nations”. There are many other interesting aspects, for example in Article 7 it is stated that “the parties should refrain from deploying nuclear weapons outside their national territories and repatriate to their territory those already deployed”. The same article notes that the parties “shall not train civilian and military personnel of non-nuclear-weapon states to use nuclear weapons”, nor “conduct exercises involving the use of nuclear weapons”. It is NATO that does all this: it maintains nuclear weapons in countries such as Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, Turkey and Italy, and its military is trained in the operation of nuclear-capable bombers.
Russia demands that NATO cease all efforts to expand eastward, particularly into Ukraine and Georgia. That it guarantee that it will not station missile batteries in countries bordering it. That the INF agreement that the United States unilaterally abandoned in August 2019 be reinstated and that an East/West security dialogue be opened. All of this is manifestly reasonable and deserves public discussion for all intents and purposes.
It is obvious that the United States wants nothing to do with the matter and the reasons are clear: although Washington’s real adversary is in Asia, the great American imperial power would cease to be one as soon as it ceased to dominate Europe. This is precisely NATO’s mission. Henry Kissinger puts it this way: “Without Europe, America would become an island distant from the shores of Eurasia, it would find itself in the solitude of a minor status”. So it is imperative to keep up the tension in Europe and to do that we must continue to poke the Russian bear in the eye. But does that have anything to do with “European interests”?
With rare exceptions, European journalists and experts contribute to this senseless and alien crusade. They explain the chronology of Russian aggressiveness starting with the 2008 Russian invasion of Georgia, continuing with the 2014 annexation of Crimea and concluding with the fomenting of the separatist rebellion in the Donbass region a few months later.
They fail to explain that the Russian entry into Georgia took place after the Georgian army penetrated South Ossetia – one of the ethnic regions of Georgia quarreling with the government of that republic – where the Russian army had the status of a United Nations peacekeeping force, in what was an episode of blitzkrieg by Georgian President Mikhail Sakashvili blessed by President George W. Bush and taking advantage of Putin traveling to China for the Beijing Olympics.
They do not explain that Russia annexed Crimea only after the United States and the European Union promoted a regime change on the wave of a huge popular protest that toppled the legitimate government of Ukraine, and whose defining moment was the dark and deadly shooting of civilians in Kiev, probably by the coup plotters and their Western godfathers.
The West, which has never lifted a finger for the annexation of East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights by Israel, for the occupation of Western Sahara by Morocco, or for the occupation of half of Cyprus by Turkey, all operations carried out against the will of the majority of the population, imposed by repression and ethnic cleansing, makes a big fuss about the Russian annexation of Crimea, which was bloodless and had the overwhelming support of its population.
Our journalists and pundits also do not want to put the current crisis in its thirty-year perspective and prefer to omit the scenes in which Putin explains it with meridian clarity. Instead, they offer us daily the detailed chronicle of the excesses and misdeeds of Putin’s regime, or of Xi Jinping, most of them completely real, without comparing them with the much worse crimes and misdeeds of the Western powers. The elimination of adversaries with polonium in London, the infamous denial of responsibility for the downing of the Malaysia Airlines flight of July 17, 2014, with its 300 dead, and Moscow’s other flourishes more or less coincided with the time when a Nobel Peace Prize-winning U.S. president was having breakfast every day in the White House signing lists of people his military was eliminating with drones everywhere in the world. Hundreds of extrajudicial killings.
Brutal is the illegalization of the Russian organization “Memorial”, dedicated to the memory of the crimes of Stalinism in the terrible Soviet 1930s. The outrage over the treatment of this organization of furious anti-communist liberals, whose promoters have always considered the massacres of Stalin and his regime as a logical consequence of the October Revolution, is more than justified, but it will always be an ambiguous and incomplete outrage without addressing the holocaust of Washington’s post-9/11 wars of 2001. To what memory will the 38 million displaced persons that these wars have produced from Afghanistan to Libya, passing through Yemen, Pakistan, Iraq, Somalia, Syria or the Philippines be entitled in the West?
It is possible that because of its strategic stupidity and hand in hand with the United States, Europe is entering a dangerous and turbulent phase with Russia. From the point of view of European interests, nothing would be simpler than to renounce nuclear weapons in the eastern part of the continent and establish a status of neutrality for the countries of Eastern Europe, or at least for Georgia, Ukraine and the Baltic countries. The hysteria with which people respond to such scenarios, saying that any concession in this direction would mean a “new Yalta” (Borrell) or making these countries “satellites of Russia”, is absurd.
Neither Austria (whose 1955 Staatsvertrag gave it full sovereignty, without foreign military in exchange for a status of neutrality), nor Finland were satellites, at a time when Moscow’s power was infinitely superior, and they will not be now. It is not the subjugation of any country to Moscow that is at stake. It is the security of Russia, a fragile country that should not be agitated because of its high potential for internal instability. It is peace and sovereignty, properly understood, in Europe.
_____________
The original link contains a wealth of English-text links inside, so make sure to check it out.
1 comment
That Russia is going to “invade Ukraine”, occupying the whole country, is completely out of the question. Traces of the Soviet occupation of 1956 are still visible in the streets of Budapest. What happened then in Hungary would be laughable compared to what would happen in Ukraine in such a case. This is obvious to anyone who is even minimally informed, so it is not worth going into further detail.
Another thing is that, given the total lack of results of Russia’s complaint to the United States and NATO, demanding security guarantees, there should be a “strong” response from Moscow. Russia announced “military measures”. Which ones? At a minimum placing “tactical” nuclear missiles in Belarus, Kaliningrad and so on. At most, an annexation of the Donbass with the approval of the local population. The current rising oil prices and the expectation that they will continue to rise allow the Kremlin to more than cover the economic costs of such operations.
They could also militarily take over the area south of Donbass (Mariupol) to organize a security belt in a south-west direction and link the two rebel areas with Crimea, but the latter seems to me extremely risky. The population of the Ukrainian districts of Zaporozhia and Kherson, mostly Russian-speaking like that of Odessa, does not carry their Russophilia to the extreme of wishing to join Russia and break with Ukraine, as was clearly the case for the population of Crimea in 2014. In that extreme scenario, there would be a lot of violence and the Russian occupation would become hell….
What is clear is that Moscow will do something. Otherwise, it would all look like a bluff. The Russian bear, who after twenty-five years of ignoring it has proclaimed a “red line” and growls so much, would lose face. The whole move initiated by Moscow with the demand for “security guarantees” is not theatrical. It is serious. It would be good if our media, our experts and our politicians would report on (and read) the documents proposed by Moscow.
The draft agreement proposed to the United States to de-escalate the tension states in Article 1 that the two sides, “should not undertake actions affecting each other’s security”, and in Article 2 it proposes that the international organizations and military alliances of which they are part, “adhere to the principles contained in the Charter of the United Nations”. There are many other interesting aspects, for example in Article 7 it is stated that “the parties should refrain from deploying nuclear weapons outside their national territories and repatriate to their territory those already deployed”. The same article notes that the parties “shall not train civilian and military personnel of non-nuclear-weapon states to use nuclear weapons”, nor “conduct exercises involving the use of nuclear weapons”. It is NATO that does all this: it maintains nuclear weapons in countries such as Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, Turkey and Italy, and its military is trained in the operation of nuclear-capable bombers.
Russia demands that NATO cease all efforts to expand eastward, particularly into Ukraine and Georgia. That it guarantee that it will not station missile batteries in countries bordering it. That the INF agreement that the United States unilaterally abandoned in August 2019 be reinstated and that an East/West security dialogue be opened. All of this is manifestly reasonable and deserves public discussion for all intents and purposes.
It is obvious that the United States wants nothing to do with the matter and the reasons are clear: although Washington’s real adversary is in Asia, the great American imperial power would cease to be one as soon as it ceased to dominate Europe. This is precisely NATO’s mission. Henry Kissinger puts it this way: “Without Europe, America would become an island distant from the shores of Eurasia, it would find itself in the solitude of a minor status”. So it is imperative to keep up the tension in Europe and to do that we must continue to poke the Russian bear in the eye. But does that have anything to do with “European interests”?
With rare exceptions, European journalists and experts contribute to this senseless and alien crusade. They explain the chronology of Russian aggressiveness starting with the 2008 Russian invasion of Georgia, continuing with the 2014 annexation of Crimea and concluding with the fomenting of the separatist rebellion in the Donbass region a few months later.
They fail to explain that the Russian entry into Georgia took place after the Georgian army penetrated South Ossetia – one of the ethnic regions of Georgia quarreling with the government of that republic – where the Russian army had the status of a United Nations peacekeeping force, in what was an episode of blitzkrieg by Georgian President Mikhail Sakashvili blessed by President George W. Bush and taking advantage of Putin traveling to China for the Beijing Olympics.
They do not explain that Russia annexed Crimea only after the United States and the European Union promoted a regime change on the wave of a huge popular protest that toppled the legitimate government of Ukraine, and whose defining moment was the dark and deadly shooting of civilians in Kiev, probably by the coup plotters and their Western godfathers.
The West, which has never lifted a finger for the annexation of East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights by Israel, for the occupation of Western Sahara by Morocco, or for the occupation of half of Cyprus by Turkey, all operations carried out against the will of the majority of the population, imposed by repression and ethnic cleansing, makes a big fuss about the Russian annexation of Crimea, which was bloodless and had the overwhelming support of its population.
Our journalists and pundits also do not want to put the current crisis in its thirty-year perspective and prefer to omit the scenes in which Putin explains it with meridian clarity. Instead, they offer us daily the detailed chronicle of the excesses and misdeeds of Putin’s regime, or of Xi Jinping, most of them completely real, without comparing them with the much worse crimes and misdeeds of the Western powers. The elimination of adversaries with polonium in London, the infamous denial of responsibility for the downing of the Malaysia Airlines flight of July 17, 2014, with its 300 dead, and Moscow’s other flourishes more or less coincided with the time when a Nobel Peace Prize-winning U.S. president was having breakfast every day in the White House signing lists of people his military was eliminating with drones everywhere in the world. Hundreds of extrajudicial killings.
Brutal is the illegalization of the Russian organization “Memorial”, dedicated to the memory of the crimes of Stalinism in the terrible Soviet 1930s. The outrage over the treatment of this organization of furious anti-communist liberals, whose promoters have always considered the massacres of Stalin and his regime as a logical consequence of the October Revolution, is more than justified, but it will always be an ambiguous and incomplete outrage without addressing the holocaust of Washington’s post-9/11 wars of 2001. To what memory will the 38 million displaced persons that these wars have produced from Afghanistan to Libya, passing through Yemen, Pakistan, Iraq, Somalia, Syria or the Philippines be entitled in the West?
It is possible that because of its strategic stupidity and hand in hand with the United States, Europe is entering a dangerous and turbulent phase with Russia. From the point of view of European interests, nothing would be simpler than to renounce nuclear weapons in the eastern part of the continent and establish a status of neutrality for the countries of Eastern Europe, or at least for Georgia, Ukraine and the Baltic countries. The hysteria with which people respond to such scenarios, saying that any concession in this direction would mean a “new Yalta” (Borrell) or making these countries “satellites of Russia”, is absurd.
Neither Austria (whose 1955 Staatsvertrag gave it full sovereignty, without foreign military in exchange for a status of neutrality), nor Finland were satellites, at a time when Moscow’s power was infinitely superior, and they will not be now. It is not the subjugation of any country to Moscow that is at stake. It is the security of Russia, a fragile country that should not be agitated because of its high potential for internal instability. It is peace and sovereignty, properly understood, in Europe.
_____________
The original link contains a wealth of English-text links inside, so make sure to check it out.
Translated with [www.DeepL.com/Translator](https://www.deepl.com/Translator) (free version)