rt.com

NATO bombing of Serbia: Tragedy in three acts

@RealScottRitter

14-18 minutes

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It is a travesty of international justice that the 1999 bombing remains unrecognized by the perpetrators and unpunished

Twenty-three years ago, NATO bombed Serbia. This act was the opening round of what was to become a 78-day illegal war of aggression, the repercussions of which haunt the world to this day.

Act One: The Encounter

It was a chance meeting – two men who had crossed paths in Iraq two years past, now running into each other on a stretch of highway connecting Kosovo to Macedonia. The date was March 20, 1999. Monitors assigned to the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) Kosovo Verification Mission (KVM) were in the process of being withdrawn from their assigned areas of responsibility to the town of Ohrid, in Macedonia, due to the collapse of diplomatic talks with Serbia about the devolving situation in the Serbian autonomous province of Kosovo, where Albanian separatists were engaged in a quasi-civil war with the Serbian authorities.

The British contingent of the KVM was stopped at the border between Kosovo and Macedonia, awaiting final clearance to cross the border. Among the British observers was a former Royal Marine officer who had previously served with the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) in Iraq, helping oversee the dismantling of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction programs. While he and his fellow observers waited, he watched as other vehicles driven by members of the US observer contingent drove in the opposite direction – into Kosovo. At the wheel of one of these vehicles was a familiar face – a man who was known as 'Kurtz'.

Kurtz was a man of tremendous experience who was brought into UNSCOM in mid-1997 for the purpose of providing operational planning and leadership. 'Kurtz', of course, was not his real name, but rather a nickname derived from the fact that with his shaved head, walrus mustache, and weathered face, he looked like a combination of Robert Duvall's Colonel Kilgore and Marlon Brando's Colonel Kurtz in the movie 'Apocalypse Now'. With a wide-brim Stetson, cowboy boots, and an ever-present wad of chewing tobacco stuck in his cheek, he looked every bit the part.

Kurtz was picked for this job in part because of his background, which was embedded in the world of covert special operations. His most recent assignment prior to coming on board at UNSCOM was preparing diplomats for E&E – escape and evasion – from hostile situations. Given the sensitivity of some of the UNSCOM operations taking place in Iraq at that time, it was thought that such training might be ideal for situations the inspectors might find themselves in.

But Kurtz's background had been his undoing. He was, so to speak, too 'black', or covert, for his own good. Even though he was performing wonderfully in Iraq, his managers in Washington began to panic when the situation in Baghdad began to deteriorate in October 1997. The decision was made to pull Kurtz out of Iraq. It was bitter irony – the one man who was best equipped to deal with a hostage situation, to keep not only himself but other, less fully-trained personnel alive and well, was being withdrawn in haste out of fear of his being taken hostage.

Once Kurtz was assigned to UNSCOM, he was technically UN property for the duration of the assignment, and the US could not just simply snap its fingers and bring him home. But snap, they did, with the US ambassador, Bill Richardson, summoning the Australian diplomat who headed UNSCOM, Richard Butler, to the US Mission in New York for a meeting. "One of the personnel provided to you [Kurtz]," Richardson said, "is a bit too exposed by the current situation, and we feel that it would be best for us all if he were withdrawn at this time."

I oversaw the team in Iraq that Kurtz and the British officer were assigned to. Butler called me up to his office after his meeting with Richardson. "The man's CIA," he told me. "The Americans want him out."

Now, as the Kosovo Monitoring Mission was departing Kosovo, Kurtz was back in action. The Americans, it seemed, wanted this man with the impressive covert operations skill set back in.

The role played by the CIA in the OSCE KVM is quite controversial – at a time when the US and NATO were accusing the Serbian government of committing atrocities, the CIA was using the cover provided by the OSCE observer mission to coordinate with fighters from the Kosovo Liberation Army who were engaged in a guerilla war with the Serbian military. Serbian operations in response to CIA-directed KLA attacks were being characterized by the West as 'genocide', and used to justify a planned NATO aerial bombardment of Serbia.

These facts, however, ran counter to the narrative of a Serbian-initiated campaign of ethnic cleansing which the US and NATO were spinning. The British OSCE observers were well aware of the complex reality of what was transpiring inside Kosovo, where legitimate Serbian military operations against known KLA forces were being described as "massacres of innocent civilians" by the Western media. The truth, however, was often inconvenient, which is why at that moment in time, on March 20, 1999, the British observer contingent found itself exiting Kosovo at the same time Kurtz and his fellow CIA officers were going in.

Act Two: The Phone Call

March 24, 1999. 9:20am. In the White House Situation Room, an aid places a phone call to the Kremlin, where Russian President Boris Yeltsin is waiting. The call goes through, and the aid hands the phone to Bill Clinton, the 42nd president of the United States. The conversation started off with a grim notification: The leaders of NATO, including himself, Clinton said, "have decided we have to launch air strikes against military targets in Serbia soon."

The problem, Clinton noted, was the Serbian leader, Slobodan Milosevic. "He has displaced 30,000 more people just since last Friday," Clinton said. "He is killing innocent people. We have reports of summary executions." Left unspoken was the role played by Kurtz and his fellow CIA operatives in creating the conditions for such actions. Clinton continued. "He [Milosevic] has basically told Russian, EU, and American negotiators that he doesn't care what any of us think."

Clinton was getting worked up by the consequences he had triggered by unleashing the CIA on Kosovo. "My God, they [the Europeans] have nightmares they'll [the Serbs] repeat Bosnia and all the instability and all the problems, and it will spread from Kosovo to Macedonia to Albania and engulf all of their southern flank. They are very, very worried about it. They are right to be worried about it."

Again, left unsaid was the fact that the very scenario that was giving the Europeans nightmares had been carefully crafted by the CIA, at Bill Clinton's direction.

Yeltsin wasn't buying any of it. "It is easy to throw bombs about," he said, dismissing Clinton's characterization of the problem and proffered solution. "It is intolerable because of the hundreds of thousands of people who will suffer and die."

The consequences of any NATO strike, Yeltsin warned Clinton, were dire. "In the name of our future, in the name of you and me, in the name of the future of our countries, in the name of security in Europe, I ask you to renounce that strike, and I suggest that we should meet somewhere and develop a tactical line of fighting against Milosevic, against him personally. And we are wiser, we are more experienced, and we can come up with a solution. That should be done for the sake of our relationship. That should be done for the sake of peace in Europe."

The Russian leader's pleas fell on deaf ears. "Well, Boris," Clinton replied, "I want to work with you to try and bring an end to this, but I don't believe there is any way to call off the first round of strikes because Milosevic continues to displace thousands of people every day… I don't want this to be a great source of a split between Russia and Europe and Russia and the US. We have worked too hard. There are too many economic and political things for us to do together, and I regret this more than I can say."

The American president was outright lying to his Russian counterpart – the events in Kosovo were unfolding along the lines of a carefully scripted game plan that had been in motion for some time. War was inevitable because the US, through the CIA, had shaped the narrative to make it so. Worse, the US president was willing to sacrifice relations between the US and Russia in pursuit of this NATO objective. This fact was driven home by Yeltsin in his closing remarks.

"[O]ur people," Yeltsin lamented, "will certainly from now on have a bad attitude with regard to America and NATO. I remember how difficult it was for me to try and turn heads of our people, the heads of politicians towards the West, towards the United States, but I succeeded in doing that, and now to lose all that. Well, since I failed to convince the President, that means there is in store for us a very difficult, difficult road of contacts, if they prove to be possible. Goodbye."

Act Three: The Bomb

On the evening of March 24, 1999, the secretary general of NATO, Javier Solana, a Spanish diplomat, authorized aircraft operating under the auspices of NATO to begin bombing targets in Serbia. It was no coincidence that the first aircraft to drop bombs on Serbia were F/A-18s belonging to the Spanish Air Force.

When examining the legitimacy of the use of force by Spain against Serbia in March 1999, several facts stick out. First is that Spain, as a member of the United Nations, is bound by its commitment to the Charter of that organization. When it comes to the use of force, the UN Charter is quite clear – there are only two acceptable conditions under which such force might be legitimately employed by a member state. One is an enforcement action to maintain international peace and security, carried under the authority of a resolution passed by the Security Council under Chapter VII of the Charter. The other is the inherent right of individual and collective self-defense, as enshrined in Article 51 of the Charter.

As Spanish bombs fell on Serbian soil, two things were quite clear – there was no Chapter VII resolution in existence which authorized an enforcement action against Serbia, and Serbia had committed no act of aggression against either Spain or its NATO allies that would justify any claim of self-defense in explaining the Spanish (and NATO) military assault on Serbia.

In short, by dropping bombs on Serbia, the Spanish Air Force was initiating an illegal war of aggression. "To initiate a war of aggression," the judges who comprised the International Military Tribunal convened in Nuremburg to judge the crimes of Nazi Germany, declared, "is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulative evil of the whole."

Spain wasn't alone that night – aircraft from the air forces of the United States, Great Britain, Germany, France, and other NATO members participated in this "supreme international crime." Viewed individually, there is no doubt that each nation involved in the attack on Serbia violated the UN Charter and, as such, is guilty of the crime of initiating an illegal war of aggression.

Not so fast! NATO, it seems, had crafted a novel legal argument built around the notion that it had a right to anticipatory collective self-defense under Article 51 of the UN Charter, and that this right was properly exercised under "normative expectation that permits anticipatory collective self-defense actions by regional security or self-defense organizations where the organization is not entirely dominated by a single member." NATO, ignoring the obvious reality that it is, indeed, dominated by the United States, postulates that it is, indeed, such an organization, comprised as it is of "a number of powerful states, three of which are permanent members of the Security Council."

The credibility of the NATO claim of "anticipatory collective self-defense," however, arises from its characterization of the Kosovo crisis as a humanitarian disaster infused with elements of genocide which created not only a moral justification for intervention, but a moral necessity.

Tell that to Kurtz, the man who, together with his fellow CIA operatives acting under the authority given them by the president of the United States, Bill Clinton, worked to create conditions on the ground inside Kosovo that could then be used to manufacture the very narrative of a humanitarian crisis sufficient in scope and scale to allow NATO to craft its novel legal justification for attacking Serbia.

The problem for NATO is that its legal justification was built on a foundation of lies. The fiction that NATO is an organization not entirely dominated by the United States evaporates the moment one understands the role played by the CIA in preparing the script used by NATO to justify its actions. The fact that this script promulgated outright fabrications of alleged crimes perpetrated by Serbia to justify NATO military intervention only underscores the criminal nature of the entire NATO enterprise.

There is no escaping the fact that when the first bomb dropped by the Spanish Air Force on Serbia that evening 23 years ago to this date impacted on the ground, Spain and every other member of NATO had committed the "ultimate crime."

That this crime remains unpunished is a travesty of international justice. That this crime remains unrecognized by those who perpetrated it is a testament to the hypocrisy of nations. That this crime set in motion the events that have led to the current state of affairs between the US and NATO on the one hand, and Russia on the other, is a global tragedy.

The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.

 

b92.net

Europe, welcome to the new reality

7-9 minutes

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The assistance that NATO can provide to Ukraine is limited. What will this war on European soil bring to Europe?

Source: DW Friday, March 25, 2022 | 07:07

EPA-EFE OLIVIER HOSLET

The Alliance has to organize its future. And the ability to defend, says DW Brussels correspondent Bernd Riegert.

NATO must deal with a completely new security situation. Alliance Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg calls it a new reality, a new normality. Russia's attempt to subjugate Ukraine takes the world back 30 to 40 years, during the Cold War, when heavily armed military blocs stood in the middle of Europe facing each other.

When the aggressive war of the Russian ruler ends one day, NATO will have to put Russia and its allies, such as Belarus, behind the Iron Curtain. The new world order imposed on the West by Vladimir Putin will then be characterized by the isolation of hotbeds of danger.

The big question for NATO and the global West then will be: how to approach China? That communist dictatorship seems to be following a similar path as Putin's Russia. Therefore, that country, which could soon become the economically strongest power in the world, will also have to be limited and isolated. The United States and Europe must once again become more independent than China - with its decades long cheap production, where products are exported and from which existential raw materials are imported. Deglobalization or reversal will follow when it comes to international networking, which has been wanted and encouraged for the last 40 years.

A new strategy is needed

NATO must take all this into account in its new strategy, which should be developed by the next summit in June in Madrid. And all that will work only if there is a president in the White House who will turn to Europe and the transatlantic alliance like Joe Biden after 2025. One cannot even imagine what would happen if Donald Trump made decisions in the United States. Russia's aggression shows Europe that it cannot do without the United States.

Sanctions against Russia and Belarus will remain in force even after the end of the war, which we hope will come soon. The goal must remain to disable the activities of the Russian economy and society, at least as long as Putin's system exists. That is why NATO now faces gigantic tasks. It is not enough to transfer several thousand soldiers and establish four new combat battalions to four countries on the eastern borders of the Alliance's territory.

NATO today would not be able to quickly repel a strong Russian attack on land or at sea. Doubts also arise as to whether nuclear intimidation, a key element in the balance of power during the Cold War, still works today. If there is someone in the Kremlin who may not care if the one who uses atomic weapons dies first, then nuclear intimidation does not work.

Grab your weapons

NATO, the EU and the West face a huge task of arming and strengthening armed forces. The first countries, such as Germany, recognized that and announced an increase in their defense budgets. One must now be honest and say that the money must go to rebuild the territorial army, with infantry, tanks, artillery and a strong air force. It will be an immeasurable financial and social task that will be reflected in people's everyday lives.

With a professional army, moderately motivated as it is today, it will be quite difficult to achieve. Germany and other countries could be forced to reintroduce conscription in order to create the necessary army and reserve for effective intimidation. It sounds like a call from a gloomy past that was thought to have been overcome. Unfortunately, this is a new reality. It is clear to NATO who is to blame: it is Putin's war. The only possible conclusion follows: Putin must be removed.

 

rs.n1info.com

Serbia marks 23rd anniversary of NATO bombing

Author:Beta, N1 Belgrade

2 minutes

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On March 24, 23 years ago, the 11-week NATO began bombing of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY) over Belgarde policy in the then Serbia's province of Kosovo, which sought independence.

According to unofficial sources, about 2,500 civilians and about 1,000 soldiers and police officers were killed. Infrastructure, businesses, health facilities, media houses and military facilities were severely damaged in the 78-day bombing.

The central commemoration of the „Day of Remembrance of the Victims of the NATO Aggression" will be held in the central town of Kraljevo.

The FRY Government and many legal experts described the bombing as illegal aggression because it was not approved by the UN Security Council but by the General Assembly.

It followed unsuccessful negotiations held at Rambouillet, France, on resolving the Kosovo crisis, during which Pristina accepted the conditions while Belgrade rejected them.

The bombing ended on June 10, with the adoption of UN Security Council Resolution 1244, followed by the withdrawal of the Belgrade army and police from Kosovo and the arrival of the NATO-led international military troops and the European legal mission.

UNHCR has said that 230,000 Serbs and Roma left Kosovo since the arrival of peacekeepers while 800,000 Albanian refugees have returned.

 

Serbia's Difficult Ukraine Balancing Act

BY

Nikola Mikovic

March 20, 2022

Serbia is in a difficult situation, balancing its economic reliance on Russia against pressure from the EU—which it wishes to join—to take part in sanctions against Russia for its invasion of Ukraine, writes Diplomatic Courier Correspondent Nikola Mikovic.

Serbia remains the only candidate for European Union membership which has not yet imposed sanctions on Russia for its invasion of Ukraine. Belgrade is still trying to find a balance between Brussels and Moscow, although its room for political maneuvering is becoming rather narrow.

According to the Balkan nation's President Aleksandar Vucic, Serbia is facing immense pressure to distance itself from Russia and openly side with the West. Although Serbia voted in favor of a recent United Nations resolution calling on Russia to halt its war on Ukraine and has supported Ukraine's territorial integrity on several occasions, some reports suggest that Germany is demanding Belgrade abandon its neutral position vis-à-vis the Russian invasion of the Eastern European country. In other words, Berlin allegedly insists that Serbia must pick a side. 

A day after the war broke out, Serbia's National Security Council expressed regret at the situation, acknowledging that both Russia and Ukraine have friendly relations with Serbia. Brussels, however, expects Belgrade to harmonize its foreign policy with that of the EU, which means that Serbia would soon have to join the Western sanctions regime. Such a move could have a very negative impact on Serbia's country's economy, particularly given that it is 89% dependent on Russian natural gas. 

"Serbia respects Ukraine's territorial integrity and considers Russia's military action against it to be wrong, but will not impose sanctions against Moscow", Vucic said on February 25. 

According to Michael Siebert, director general of the European External Action Service, Serbia is not convinced that sanctions against Russia are the right answer at the moment. Does that mean that Belgrade could impose sanctions on Moscow in the future?

Serbia is scheduled to hold general elections on April 3, and the vast majority of the ruling Serbian Progressive Party voters have a strong pro-Russian sentiment. That is why the West will unlikely pressure Vucic to join anti-Russian sanctions until after the vote. But if Serbia "picks a side" after April 3, such a decision could affect the upcoming negotiations between Belgrade and Moscow on the price of Russian gas.

Serbia hopes to sign a long-term agreement for natural gas deliveries with Russia's state-owned energy giant Gazprom by May 15. However, if the country joins anti-Russian sanctions, it can hardly count on preferential rates from Russia. In November 2021, Gazprom agreed to continue selling Serbia gas at the price of $270 per 1,000 cubic meters until June 2022. This price is significantly lower than the current market one. Given that a large number of Western and Chinese plants are operating in Serbia, and their production is linked with cheap energy, it is not improbable that Brussels and Washington will allow Serbia to remain nominally neutral until a new gas deal with Russia is signed.

For now, Brussels tolerates Serbia being the only EU membership candidate that still has direct flights to Russia. However, Air-Serbia, which is mostly state-owned, was forced to reduce its operations from Belgrade to Russia after Ukrainian Deputy Foreign Minister Emine Dzheppar accused Serbia of "making money on Ukrainian blood".

"They are not criticizing those that are members of NATO and that are partially in Europe, who have thirty times more flights than us, like Turkey," Vucic reacted. 

Indeed, Turkish Airlines modified a large part of its schedule, increasing the number of flights to certain Russian cities – St. Petersburg, Kazan and Ekatarinburg. Moreover, Turkish officials openly stressed that they do not intend to impose sanctions on Russia, and even the EU's Eastern Partnership members Azerbaijan, Armenia and Georgia refused to join the sanctions. Serbia, however, seems to be an easy target. Air Serbia has been facing with anonymous bomb threats almost on a daily basis, and Ukrainian General Staff members recently accused Russia of recruiting "Serbian militants" to fight in the Eastern European country, which is something that Belgrade strongly denied. 

"Serbia is committed to a peaceful solution to this conflict and will not allow its commitment to peace to be called into question in any way", said Serbian Defense Minister Nebojsa Stefanovic, pointing out that participation of Serbian citizens in armed conflicts abroad is a serious crime punishable by several years in prison.

The country is still widely seen as a "Russian ally", although in reality Serbia declared military neutrality in 2007 and has conducted far more military exercises with NATO countries than with Russia. Moreover, on March 15 Serbia for the first time joined the EU's sanctions on the former President of Ukraine Viktor Yanukovych, who is believed to be a Russian citizen, as well as on leading members of the Ukrainian government from the period 2010-2014. Belgrade complied with that decision together with Montenegro, Albania, Northern Macedonia and Bosnia and Herzegovina. 

Thus, Serbia seems to be slowly distancing itself from Moscow, although the country's authorities would undoubtedly prefer to implement the "non-aligned" policy of the late Yugoslav President Josip Broz Tito, who was successfully balancing between the West and the Soviet Union during the Cold War. But a new Cold War has new rules, and borders of a new Iron Curtain will be very far from Serbia, which will leave the country deeply in the geopolitical zone of the European Union and the United States.

About

Nikola Mikovic

:

Nikola Mikovic is a freelance journalist, researcher and analyst based in Serbia covering foreign policy in Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine.

The views presented in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily represent the views of any other organization.

 

https://www.diplomaticourier.com/posts/serbias-difficult-ukraine-balancing-act

MSNBC   Russia's Ukraine Invasion May Have Been Preventable The U.S. refused to reconsider Ukraine's NATO status as Putin threatened war. Experts say that was a huge mistake. March 4, 2022 By Zeeshan Aleem, MSNBC Opinion Columnist   The prevailing wisdom in the West is that Russian President Vladimir Putin was never interested in President Joe Biden's diplomatic efforts to avert an invasion of Ukraine. Bent on restoring the might of the Soviet empire, this narrative goes, the Russian autocrat audaciously invaded Ukraine to fulfill a revanchist desire for some combination of land, power and glory. In a typical account operating under this framing, Politico described Putin as "the steely-eyed strongman" who proved immune to "traditional tools of diplomacy and deterrence" and had been "playing Biden all along." This telling suggests that the United States exhausted its diplomatic arsenal and that Russia's horrifying and illegal invasion of Ukraine, which has involved targeting civilian areas and shelling nuclear plants, could never have been prevented. But according to a line of widely overlooked scholarship, forgotten warnings from Western statesmen and interviews with several experts — including high-level former government officials who oversaw Russia strategy for decades — this narrative is wrong. Many of these analysts argue that the U.S. erred in its efforts to prevent the breakout of war by refusing to offer to retract support for Ukraine to one day join NATO or substantially reconsider its terms of entry. And they argue that Russia's willingness to go to war over Ukraine's NATO status, which it perceived as an existential national security threat and listed as a fundamental part of its rationale for the invasion, was so clear for so long that dropping support for its eventual entry could have averted the invasion. [Continue Reading]

 

jamestown.org

Russia's War on Ukraine Exposes Western Balkan Divisions and Dangers - Jamestown

6-7 minutes

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European Union High Representative Josep Borrell meets the leaders of the Western Balkans in March 2021 (Source: European Council)

Russia's war on Ukraine reverberated throughout the Balkans, exposing regional divisions, allegiances with foreign powers, and security vulnerabilities. While North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) members Croatia, Montenegro, Albania and North Macedonia offered full support to Ukraine, the reaction of Serbia appeared in stark contrast to the policy of the European Union, which it hopes to join one day. Belgrade not only refused to adopt any sanctions against Russia, but it is also becoming complicit in the Kremlin's war of aggression. As most European countries closed their airspace to Russian airplanes, Serbia's has remained open. Moreover, the state-owned Air Serbia has doubled its flights from Belgrade to Moscow, offering from one to three flights daily (Balkan Insight, March 2).

On February 25, Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić openly stated that although Serbia respects international legal norms, it will protect its own national interests and honor its traditional friendships. Russia is a strategic partner of Serbia, with Belgrade heavily dependent on Russian energy supplies and Moscow's support of Belgrade's Kosovo policy (N1, B92.net, February 25). But aiding Moscow as it bombards civilian targets in Ukraine will put Serbia in the position of an accomplice and may turn it into an international pariah, just like its larger partner.

In the weeks before the war began, Serbia had eagerly embraced Moscow's effort to prevent Balkan volunteers from joining the Ukrainian resistance. Russia's secretary of the Security Council, Nikolai Patrushev, had planned to travel to Belgrade on February 28 to discuss reports that volunteers from Kosovo, Albania and Bosnia-Herzegovina (BiH) were being recruited to fight on the side of Ukraine. But his visit was canceled in the wake of EU sanctions against Russian officials (The Geo Post, February 28).

Milorad Dodik, the Serb member of the tripartite Presidency of Bosnia-Herzegovina, had also warned that the Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov's statement on the question of foreign fighters be taken seriously (Telegraf.rs, February 21). After the war began, Dodik has been advocating for BiH to remain neutral on the war in Ukraine, a position close to that of Serbia. He left the Presidency meeting on March 2 protesting that the Bosniak and Bosnian Croat members, Šefik Džaferović and Željko Komšić, are "using their ambassadors in Brussels and in New York to present exclusively their own positions, positions that were not agreed upon in the Presidency." Dodik claims that the BiH's ambassador to the United Nations, Sven Alkalaj, joined the EU statement on Ukraine on the country's behalf without authorization of the tripartite Presidency; therefore, it must be voided (N1, March 2).

In the meantime, the rest of the Western Balkan states have imposed sanctions on Russia, closed their airspace to Russian planes, and offered military and humanitarian aid to Ukraine. In addition, volunteers from Croatia and Montenegro announced they have already joined Ukrainian fighters to resist the Russian invasion (Balkan Insight, February 28). "Ukraine helped us in 1991, and again after the earthquakes in Zagreb and Banovina. That is why we are going to help Ukrainians in the war," a volunteer told the media (Vecernji Lst, February 27).

In Montenegro, the question of local fighters joining the Ukrainian resistance is more politically divisive. Montenegro criminalized participation in foreign conflicts in March 2015, when some Serbian mercenaries from Montenegro joined the forces of Russian proxies in eastern Ukraine and others fought for the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq. But the opposition of pro-Serb actors looks more politically motivated than driven by the law. The pro-Serb Democratic Front has not surprisingly urged the authorities to stop the recruitment of volunteer fighters for the war in Ukraine. While at the same time, pro-Serb organizations held a pro-Russian rally carrying Russian and Serbian flags in the town of Nikšić, in support of Russia's "attempts to protect their people in Ukraine" (Balkan Insight, March 1).

However, the majority of political parties in Montenegro declared strong support for Ukraine and officially condemned the Russian attack in the parliament, following the government's strong position for the integrity of Ukraine on February 24 (N1, February 24; AA.com.tr, March 2).

On March 2, Serbia eventually joined 141 UN member states in condemning the Russian attack on Ukraine. Previously, Vučić had announced that Serbia would vote against such a resolution if it contained any sanctions against Russia. The Serbian president explained that "The text does not mention any sanctions, but it is certainly very important for us to condemn the collapse of the territorial integrity of any [UN] member state" (Danas, March 2).

Moscow's war on Ukraine is dramatically changing the security environment in the Balkans. Serbia is feeling the pressure when it realized that Russia may face expulsion from the United Nations and possibly war crimes charges. Belgrade now worries whether it would have as much support in the UN Security Council as it used to enjoy (Danas, March 2). And since Kosovo declared its desire to become a NATO member, seemingly supported by Turkey and other North Atlantic allies, Belgrade is now starting to express apprehension about its own regional isolation.

 

chroniclesmagazine.org

Putin, Russia, and Ukraine: Historical Roots of a Tragedy

By Sean McMeekin

15-19 minutes

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When Vladimir Putin channeled history in his Feb. 21 speech justifying Russia's brutal invasion of Ukraine, many Western critics dismissed his remarks as a pack of lies, the ravings of a delusional madman. But things are not always as simple as they seem. While many of the claims Putin made to justify his aggression are dubious, others are not, and it is worth unpacking those to better understand how we arrived at this terrible juncture.

To begin with, despite the long and varied history of Ukrainians as a people, Putin's assertion that "modern Ukraine" was created by "Bolshevik-Communist Russia" is basically true, as are his aspersions against Vladimir Lenin as the main "creator and architect," although Putin oddly left out Lenin's German connections. It is an awkward fact that Lenin first came to the attention of the Central Powers in 1914, when he was agitating amongst Ukrainians in Poronin, near Cracow in what is now Poland but was then Austro-Hungarian territory. He was working for Ukrainian autonomy from the Tsarist empire, which was one of the reasons Germany financed and organized his return to Russia in 1917.

After the Bolsheviks seized power in November 1917, Lenin appealed to the German high command for a ceasefire and signed (along with Stalin, then commissar of nationalities) a declaration on the rights of the peoples of Russia to self-determination, inviting ethnic minorities, including Ukrainians, to declare independence, as the revolutionary parliament in Kiev/Kyiv or "Rada," promptly did. The Rada then sent delegates to the peace talks at Brest-Litovsk, who negotiated with the Central Powers on behalf of Ukraine. By signing a peace treaty with the Rada on Feb. 9, 1918, Imperial Germany officially midwifed Ukraine into sovereign existence. Wittingly or unwittingly, Lenin had thus achieved both goals the Germans had in supporting him: ending Russia's war and prying apart the Russian empire by giving up Ukraine. Small wonder Lenin was denounced as a "German spy," "Judas," and "traitor" when he addressed the Soviet Council of People's Commissars later in February, or that Putin, like most Russian nationalists today, blames Lenin for tearing apart mother Russia.

Of course, there is rich irony in dismissing Ukraine's claim to nationhood, as Putin does, on grounds that the Bolsheviks were illegitimate, anti-Russian usurpers, for Putin has also famously lambasted the 1991 collapse of the Soviet state they created as the "greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century." He cannot have it both ways. If the Bolshevik-Communist USSR was an artificial creation not representative of historic "Russia," then trying to restore its boundaries must be an illegitimate enterprise.

This may explain why Putin has lately taken to invoking Russia's Tsarist past more fervently than the Soviet period. In his article, "On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians," posted on the Kremlin website on July 12, 2021—an article to which Western statesmen should have paid more careful attention—Russia's president asserted that Russians, Ukrainians, and White Russians or "Belorussians" are all "descendants of ancient Rus." Ukrainians would object here that Kyiv (as they call it, or Kiev, as the Russians and most of the Western world until recently called it) was the capital of this ancestral Russian state, giving the Ukrainians claim to its legacy. And yet Putin doesn't really deny this, arguing that a shared heritage is a shared heritage, and that it just "so happened that Moscow became the center of reunification, continuing the tradition of ancient Russian statehood" after the shattering Mongol invasions of the 13^th century.

Just as Putin and Russian nationalists insist, some version of Ukraine has been part of Russia for centuries, even if Ukrainians dispute Russian interpretation of "protection" treaties negotiated in the early Romanov period. After Russia's first annexation of Crimea in 1783, most of what is now central and eastern Ukraine had been absorbed into the Tsarist empire, where it remained until Imperial Russia's comeuppance in 1917-1918. And yet to claim, as Putin does, that Ukraine has never really existed as a separate nation other than in 1917-18 and after 1991 is to ignore not just the contested matters of deep Russian history but, more significantly, the turbulent history of Ukraine during the 20^th century.

However murky Ukraine's brief dawn of independence might have been during the chaos of the Russian Civil War—dependent initially on German arms in 1918 to stave off a Bolshevik takeover and then on a series of agreements with Poland in 1920 to push back the Red Army again—it was in the course of her bloody struggle for independence that modern Ukrainians first developed a strong sense of national identity. This oft-contested borderland was occupied by Germany and Austria-Hungary, invaded and re-invaded again by the Bolsheviks' Red Army, then by the "White" or Volunteer Army which opposed the Reds, by Cossacks who brought terrible anti-Semitic pogroms in their train, then invaded and re-invaded by Poland during the Soviet-Polish war in 1920, before the final Bolshevik expulsion of the "Whites" from Crimea that November. By some estimates, control of the Ukrainian capital, Kiev, changed hands 16 times between 1918 and 1921. Putin might argue that this proves Ukraine was not strong enough to become independent, but the wrenching experience of being fought over by outside powers creates a national identity, all the same. The essence of the national character was forged in this terrible period by pox-on-all-your-houses partisans such as Nester Makhno, a kind of Ukrainian T. E. Lawrence, who specialized in ambushing troop trains of whatever army happened to be ravaging his country.

Ukraine suffered still greater horrors in the forced-collectivization nightmare of the early 1930s, now remembered as the "Holodomor" or Terror-Famine. Whether Stalin's grain-hoarding NKVD kulak-killers starved millions of Ukrainians to death on ethno-genocidal or on ideological grounds can hardly diminish the significance of this terrible human catastrophe for Ukrainians and their burgeoning sense of themselves as a people. 

The history of World War II in Ukraine, after the German invasion of June 1941, was more bloody and painful still. It is true that some (though hardly all) Ukrainians collaborated with the invaders. Even Ukrainians who fought honorably in the Red Army against the Germans, of which there were millions, were sometimes treated differently by the invader after being captured; many were allowed to return to their homes rather than face the terrible privations other Red Army POWs faced in German camps. This selective treatment furnishes the historical basis for Putin's explosive and hate-filled talk about Ukrainian "Nazism" today, a smear amplified by Russian nationalists online in their incessant chatter about "Ukro-Nazis." 

However real Ukrainian collaboration might have been in a few cases, such as that of the notorious Stepan Bandera and his followers, it is grotesque to slander all wartime Ukrainians as Nazis by association, and still more grotesque to apply this label to modern Ukrainian patriots. (Ukraine's president, Volodymyr Zelensky, is Jewish, which makes the Nazi label even more absurd and insulting.) 

The reason some Ukrainians cooperated with the invader in 1941 was that they had suffered terribly under Soviet Communist rule, both during the Civil War and the Holodomor and (lest we forget) in Stalin's Great Purge of the late 1930s, which claimed still more thousands of innocent lives. It did not mean that Ukrainians shared Nazi racial ideology–to the Nazis, after all, they were racially inferior "Slavs" no less than Russians were. Moreover, much of the wartime collaboration, particularly in western Ukraine, wasn't with Germans anyway but with Romanian occupying troops, who might have been antipathetic to the Russians, who had invaded their own country in 1940, but who were not Nazis by any plausible definition. 

As if the trauma of civil war, foreign intervention, pogroms from 1918 and 1921, Holodomor in the early 1930s, Terror in the late 1930s, Germano-Romanian invasion, war and genocide after 1941 were not enough, Ukraine faced another half-decade of horrors after being "liberated" by the Red Army in 1944. These new horrors came from ferocious Soviet "anti-partisan" operations directed by Nikita Khrushchev and from another terrible famine in 1946-1947, which killed hundreds of thousands more Ukrainians. Indeed, when the idea of genuine Ukrainian independence emerged in the glasnost years of the late 1980s, it was largely on the basis of shared national suffering and trauma that Ukrainians came together in the movement called Rukh,or "hand," forming a human chain in 1990 between Kiev and Lvov (also known as Lviv), much as Lithuanians, Latvians, and Estonians had done the previous year, linking the three Baltic capitals of Vilnius, Riga, and Tallinn to mark the 50-year anniversary of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, which had snuffed out their countries' independence. For Putin to dismiss the force of this shared history of trauma in forming a genuine Ukrainian national identity is not just insensitive, but deeply ahistorical. 

Putin is on firmer ground in his invocation of post-Cold War history, as in his complaint in the Feb. 21 speech that the U.S. and its allies had "expanded NATO to the east, moving military infrastructure closer to our borders," a point Putin emphasized at still greater length on Feb. 24, when he announced the start of military operations against Ukraine. In the latter speech, Putin also reminded Russians that NATO had launched "a bloody military operation against Belgrade" in Mar. 1999, "without the UN Security Council's sanction but with combat aircraft and missiles used in the heart of Europe." I was in Moscow when this Kosovo war began, and I can attest that the reaction among many Russians I knew, their sense of rejection and betrayal by an ever-more contemptuous West, was visceral. Whatever the merits of the NATO case against Serbia for cleansing Albanian Muslims from Kosovo, to Russians this looked like a war of aggression against one of their oldest allies.

It was not only Russians and Russian "apologists" who decried NATO expansion, especially after the controversial vow made by then-U.S. Secretary of State James Baker to Mikhail Gorbachev in Feb. 1990 that, if Moscow consented to German re-unification, NATO would "not shift one inch eastward from its present position"–a promise Putin highlighted in his Feb. 24 speech. While it is true that Gorbachev, foolishly, did not get this pledge in writing, multiple witnesses have confirmed the "one inch" phrase was uttered, and it is the kind of memorable line which, oft repeated, Russian nationalists like Putin will never forget. There may have been no binding treaty with Russia limiting NATO expansion, but this does not mean that moving ahead was wise. It was not only anti-war doves but experienced Cold Warriors, such as Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, and even the great architect of the "containment doctrine," George Kennan, who warned loudly in the early 1990s thatto expand NATO would result in "a new Cold War, probably ending in a hot one" (from The Kennan Diaries, page 659).

But NATO expansion proceeded nonetheless, not merely into the former Soviet-allied Warsaw Pact member countries of Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic (1999), followed by Romania and Bulgaria, but also into the Baltic region, where three former Soviet republics abutting Russian territory—Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania—were admitted in 2004, one year after the U.S. had further offended Moscow by invading Iraq over stout Russian opposition. Today there are no less than 30 members of this wealthy, well-equipped military alliance, four of which border Russia overland, with two more former Soviet republics listed on NATO's own website as "aspirant countries" who have "declared their aspirations to NATO membership": Georgia and, yes, Ukraine.

One does not have to be a Russian chauvinist to recognize merit in Putin's complaint about "the eastward expansion of NATO" over Russian objections. If, as a few Western politicians have dubiously claimed, NATO is not really directed against Russia—we are constantly told, it is a "voluntary defensive alliance" that any country can join—then it is worth asking why Russia was never invited to join it. It is not without interest that Putin mentioned, in his otherwise bellicose speech on Feb. 21, that he asked President Clinton in 2000 whether the United States might see Russia joining NATO one day. Although Clinton seemed amenable at the time, the U.S. delegation reportedly became "very nervous." Needless to say, no invitation ever followed for Russia to join NATO. Perhaps this was an impossible fantasy, but if so, does it not rather prove Putin's point that NATO is fundamentally an anti-Russian alliance?

Surely NATO expansion should have stopped at some point, if not with German unification in 1990. Was it wise to push NATO all the way into the Baltic region, turning Russian-held Kaliningrad into a potential nuclear flashpoint, sandwiched between NATO members Poland and Lithuania?  Or to invite Georgia to the NATO summit in Bucharest in April 2008, which helped poison Russia's relations with Tbilisi prior to the Russo-Georgian war later that year? As for Ukraine, experienced American statesmen, from Kissinger and Kennan to Carter's National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, had warned for years that even talking about Ukraine joining NATO might be fatal to peace.

American leaders have done far more than talk. First under President George W. Bush, in the "Orange Revolution" of 2004-5, and then even more brazenly under President Obama and then-Vice President Biden in the overtly U.S.-backed "Euromaidan" revolution, which toppled Russia-friendly Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych in February 2014, the U.S. and its allies threw down the gauntlet to Moscow, which responded by annexing Crimea and moving into Lugansk and the Donbass.  Putin's claims that Ukraine has, since 2014, been carrying out "genocide" against Russian-speakers may be groundless, but his case that the U.S. and its allies have turned Ukraine into a lethally armed catspaw is not. As the leading U.S. realist scholar of international relations, John Mearsheimer, presciently warned in September 2015, "the West is leading Ukraine down the primrose path, and the end result is that Ukraine is going to get wrecked."

In the months leading up to the Russian invasion launched on Feb. 24, it appears to be mostly Western fecklessness which has encouraged Putin's aggression: German politicians signing lucrative pipeline deals with the Kremlin, taking positions on the boards of Russian energy companies, and ratcheting up their abject dependence on Russian energy by shuttering nuclear plants; the Biden administration's humiliating botch of the withdrawal from Afghanistan; Biden's hint that a "minor incursion" into Ukraine might not occasion a decisive response; the withdrawal of U.S. diplomatic personnel from Kiev to Lvov, and so on. There has been no shortage of ineptitude in Western capitals, and this has undermined deterrence of Russia vis-à-vis Ukraine. But we also should not forget the larger story of NATO expansion and the U.S.-backed "color revolutions" in Ukraine and other former Soviet republics, which have fueled Russian fear, anger, and resentment.  It may be too late to wind the clock back and reverse NATO expansion, but it is never too late to learn the lessons of history. 

Unfortunately, it is the people of Ukraine who are paying the price of Western hubris, just as Mearsheimer warned in 2015. By dangling NATO membership and the mirage of an American security umbrella before them, the U.S. and its allies have unleashed the furies of Russian ressentiment, resulting in a devastating and bloody invasion of Ukraine, even while doing almost nothing to assure the country's defense. They deserved better from us.

https://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/blog/putin--russia--and-ukraine--historical-roots-of-a-tragedy/?fbclid=IwAR0GYYhjnauwvlW3yeAR18SoWufOpA43ESvPsvGXsrcc8ZIvghuneb3vof0

nationalinterest.org

The Kosovo Precedent Is Still Haunting NATO

by Ted Galen Carpenter

7-8 minutes

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In his February 22, 2022, television address to the nation on the growing crisis in Ukraine, President Joe Biden expressed outrage at Russia's actions. The previous day, Vladimir Putin's government had recognized two secessionist regions in Ukraine—Donetsk and Luhansk—as independent states. He also announced the deployment of Russian peacekeeping troops to those territories. "Who in the Lord's name does Putin think gives them the right to declare new so-called countries on territory that belong to his neighbors?" Biden railed. "This is a flagrant violation of international law."

It was a valid complaint. However, one must ask: How is Russia's action different from what the United States and its NATO allies did to Serbia in 1999? In that case, an alliance that was supposedly created for purely defensive purposes launched an offensive, seventy-eight-day air war against a country that had not even arguably committed an aggressive act against any NATO member. At the end of that assault, which killed hundreds of Serb civilians and devastated the country's infrastructure, NATO leaders forced Slobodan Milosevic's government to relinquish control of Serbia's Kosovo province to international control. That transfer was made under a fig-leaf resolution the UN Security Council passed despite Moscow's misgivings and reluctance. UN (predominantly NATO) "peacekeepers" moved in to enforce the alliance's diktat—much as Russian "peacekeepers" have now deployed to Donetsk and Luhansk to enforce the Kremlin's orders.

The parallels between the two events should make current Western leaders more than a little squeamish. NATO's violations of international law did not end with an aggressive war, the administrative amputation of Kosovo from Serbia, and the deployment of occupation forces. Nine years later, Western powers engaged in a brazenly cynical maneuver to grant Kosovo full independence. Kosovo wanted to declare its formal independence from Serbia, but such a move would face a certain Russian (and probable Chinese) veto in the UN Security Council (UNSC). Washington and an ad hoc coalition of most European Union countries brazenly bypassed the UNSC and approved Pristina's independence declaration.

Russia's leaders protested vehemently and warned that the West's unauthorized action established a dangerous, destabilizing precedent in international affairs. Washington dismissed their complaints, arguing that the Kosovo situation was unique. Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs R. Nicholas Burns made that argument explicitly in a February 2008 State Department briefing. Because the situation was unique, he insisted, the West's Kosovo policy set no precedent regarding other ethnic secessionist situations. Both the hubris and illogic of the U.S. position were breathtaking.

The Western powers soon discovered that merely saying their actions in Kosovo established no precedent did not make it so. Russia demonstrated that point just a few months later. The Kremlin exploited a military clash with Georgia to reinforce the secession of two Georgian regions, South Ossetia and Abkhazia, and ratify Russia's de facto control over both entities. George W. Bush's administration condemned the Kremlin's actions, as did Washington's NATO allies. But just as Russia was not in a position to do much about NATO's conduct in Kosovo, the Western powers (short of initiating a war against Russia) could do little about Moscow's meddling in Georgia.

The Kosovo precedent haunted the United States again in 2014 when the Kremlin boosted its military presence on the Crimea Peninsula and used it to "supervise" a referendum in which Crimea voted to secede from Ukraine. That step was a prelude to Russia's annexation of the peninsula. Washington reacted with even greater anger than it had following Moscow's amputation of Georgia's territories. At a press conference, President Barack Obama fumed that Russia could not be allowed to redraw "the borders of Europe at the barrel of a gun." He did not bother to explain how the United States and NATO had not done that with Kosovo, nor did the usual sycophantic members of the news media bother to ask.

Now, with the Kremlin's moves regarding Donetsk and Luhansk, the Kosovo precedent has come back to haunt Washington and its NATO allies a third time. Even the argument that Kosovo's majority Albanian population wanted to separate from Serbia and that Belgrade's heavy-handed treatment of the province justified NATO's intervention puts proponents on a slippery slope. Russian officials could use similar rationales to justify their actions in eastern Ukraine.

There is little doubt that many (probably most) inhabitants of Donetsk and Luhansk resent the pro-Western regime in Kyiv and do not want to live under its control. The rebellion that began nearly eight years ago might not have survived without Russian military support, but sentiment for the rebellion was real and extensive. Ukraine's eastern region differs from the western portion of the country in terms of language, religion, and economics. The primary language of the inhabitants in the east is Russian instead of Ukrainian, their religion is Eastern Orthodox instead of Roman Catholic, and their economy emphasizes heavy industry with extensive trade ties to Russia instead of light industry with primary trade ties to Central and Western Europe.

Those differences were creating serious tensions for years. It is no coincidence that the two regions were the bastion of political support for Viktor Yanukovych, the pro-Russia president elected in 2010. Eastern Ukrainians deeply resented the pro-Western demonstrators in Kyiv who illegally overthrew his government—with more than a little support from the United States and several European Union governments. The ongoing rebellion in Donetsk and Luhansk soon followed.

One can make a plausible case that secession (and even a subsequent merger with Russia, a la Crimea) is reasonable for those two regions. However, the Kremlin's current moves do further undermine international law and destabilize the global system.

The international community needs to adopt a consistent set of rules for such situations. Washington and other NATO capitals cannot insist on rigorous respect for the territorial integrity of countries and the sanctity of borders when it suits Western policy but embrace the opposite standard whenever that position suits Western policy. In their handling of the Kosovo question, the NATO powers did exactly that, and the brazen hypocrisy keeps coming back to haunt them.

Ted Galen Carpenter, a senior fellow in defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute and a contributing editor at the National Interest, is the author of twelve books and more than 950 articles on international affairs.

Image: Wikipedia.

 

consortiumnews.com

DIANA JOHNSTONE: US Foreign Policy Is a Cruel Sport

11-14 minutes

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Bear baiting was long ago banned as inhumane. Yet today, a version is being practiced every day against whole nations on a gigantic international scale. 

 NATO officials visit Ukraine, April 7, 2021. (NATO)

By Diana Johnstone
in Paris
Special to Consortium News

In the time of the first Queen Elizabeth, British royal circles enjoyed watching fierce dogs torment a captive bear for the fun of it.  The bear had done no harm to anyone, but the dogs were trained to provoke the imprisoned beast and goad it into fighting back.  Blood flowing from the excited animals delighted the spectators.

This cruel practice has long since been banned as inhumane.

And yet today, a version of bear baiting is being practiced every day against whole nations on a gigantic international scale.  It is called United States foreign policy. It has become the regular practice of the absurd international sports club called NATO.

United States leaders, secure in their arrogance as "the indispensable nation," have no more respect for other countries than the Elizabethans had for the animals they tormented. The list is long of targets of U.S. bear baiting, but Russia stands out as prime example of constant harassment.  And this is no accident.  The baiting is deliberately and elaborately planned.

As evidence, I call attention to a 2019 report by the RAND corporation to the U.S. Army chief of staff entitled "Extending Russia." Actually, the RAND study itself is fairly cautious in its recommendations and warns that many perfidious tricks might not work.  However, I consider the very existence of this report scandalous, not so much for its content as for the fact that this is what the Pentagon pays its top intellectuals to do: figure out ways to lure other nations into troubles U.S. leaders hope to exploit.

The official U.S. line is that the Kremlin threatens Europe by its aggressive expansionism, but when the strategists talk among themselves the story is very different.  Their goal is to use sanctions, propaganda and other measures to provokeRussia into taking the very sort of negative measures ("over-extension") that the U.S. can exploit to Russia's detriment.

The RAND study explains its goals:

"We examine a range of nonviolent measures that could exploit Russia's actual vulnerabilities and anxieties as a way of stressing Russia's military and economy and the regime's political standing at home and abroad. The steps we examine would not have either defense or deterrence as their prime purpose, although they might contribute to both. Rather, these steps are conceived of as elements in a campaign designed to unbalance the adversary, leading Russia to compete in domains or regions where the United States has a competitive advantage, and causing Russia to overextend itself militarily or economically or causing the regime to lose domestic and/or international prestige and influence."

Clearly, in U.S. ruling circles, this is considered "normal" behavior, just as teasing is normal behavior for the schoolyard bully, and sting operations are normal for corrupt FBI agents.

This description perfectly fits U.S. operations in Ukraine, intended to "exploit Russia's vulnerabilities and anxieties" by advancing a hostile military alliance onto its doorstep, while describing Russia's totally predictable reactions as gratuitous aggression.  Diplomacy involves understanding the position of the other party.  But verbal bear baiting requires total refusal to understand the other, and constant deliberate misinterpretation of whatever the other party says or does.

What is truly diabolical is that, while constantly accusing the Russian bear of plotting to expand, the whole policy is directed at goading it into expanding!  Because then we can issue punishing sanctions, raise the Pentagon budget a few notches higher and tighten the NATO Protection Racket noose tighter around our precious European "allies."

For a generation, Russian leaders have made extraordinary efforts to build a peaceful partnership with "the West," institutionalized as the European Union and above all, NATO. They truly believed that the end of the artificial Cold War could produce a peace-loving European neighborhood. But arrogant United States leaders, despite contrary advice from their best experts, rejected treating Russia as the great nation it is, and preferred to treat it as the harassed bear in a circus.

The expansion of NATO was a form of bear-baiting, the clear way to transform a potential friend into an enemy. That was the way chosen by former U.S. President Bill Clinton and following administrations.  Moscow had accepted the independence of former members of the Soviet Union.  Bear-baiting involved constantly accusing Moscow of plotting to take them back by force.

Russia's Borderland

Ukraine is a word meaning borderlands, essentially the borderlands between Russia and the territories to the West that were sometimes part of Poland, or Lithuania, or Habsburg lands.  As a part of the U.S.S.R., Ukraine was expanded to include large swaths of both.  History had created very contrasting identities on the two extremities, with the result that the independent nation of Ukraine, which came into existence only in 1991, was deeply divided from the start.  And from the start, Washington strategies, in cahoots with a large, hyperactive anti-communist anti-Russian diaspora in the U.S. and Canada, contrived to use the bitterness of Ukraine's divisions to weaken first the U.S.S.R. and then Russia.  Billions of dollars were invested in order to "strengthen democracy" – meaning the pro-Western west of Ukraine against its semi-Russian east.

The 2014 U.S.-backed coup that overthrew President Viktor Yukanovych, solidly supported by the east of the country, brought to power pro-West forces determined to bring Ukraine into NATO, whose designation of Russia as prime enemy had become ever more blatant. This caused the prospect of an eventual NATO capture of Russia's major naval base at Sebastopol, on the Crimean peninsula. 

Since the Crimean population had never wanted to be part of Ukraine, the peril was averted by organizing a referendum in which an overwhelming majority of Crimeans voted to return to Russia, from which they had been severed by an autocratic Khrushchev ruling in 1954.  Western propagandists relentlessly denounced this act of self-determination as a "Russian invasion" foreshadowing a program of Russian military conquest of its Western neighbors – a fantasy supported by neither facts nor motivation.

Appalled by the coup overthrowing the president they had voted for, by nationalists threatening to outlaw the Russian language they spoke, the people of the eastern provinces of Donetsk and Lugansk declared their independence.

March 2015: Civilians pass by as OSCE monitors the movement of heavy weaponry in eastern Ukraine. (OSCE, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

Russia did not support this move, but instead supported the Minsk agreement, signed in February 2015 and endorsed by a UN Security Council resolution. The gist of the accord was to preserve the territorial integrity of Ukraine by a federalization process that would return the breakaway republics in return for their local autonomy.

The Minsk agreement set out a few steps to end the internal Ukrainian crisis. First, Ukraine was supposed to immediately adopt a law granting self-government to eastern regions (in March 2015). Next, Kiev would negotiate with eastern territories over guidelines for local elections to be held that year under OSCE supervision.  Then Kiev would implement a constitutional reform guaranteeing eastern right. After the elections, Kiev would take full control of Donetsk and Lugansk, including border with Russia.  A general amnesty would cover soldiers on both sides.

However, although it signed the agreement, Kiev has never implemented any of these points and refuses to negotiate with the eastern rebels.  Under the so-called Normandy agreement, France and Germany were expected to put pressure on Kiev to accept this peaceful settlement, but nothing happened. Instead, the West has accused Russia of failing to implement the agreement, which makes no sense inasmuch as the obligations to implement fall on Kiev, not on Moscow.  Kiev officials regularly reiterate their refusal to negotiate with the rebels, while demanding more and more weaponry from NATO powers in order to deal with the problem in their own way.

Meanwhile, major parties in the Russian Duma and public opinion have long expressed concern for the Russian-speaking population of the eastern provinces, suffering from privations and military attack from the central government for eight years. This concern is naturally interpreted in the West as a remake of Hitler's drive to conquest neighboring countries.  However, as usual the inevitable Hitler analogy is baseless. For one thing, Russia is too large to need to conquer Lebensraum.

You Want an Enemy?  Now You've Got One

Germany has found the perfect formula for Western relations with Russia: Are you or are you not a "Putinversteher," a "Putin understander?" By Putin they mean Russia, since the standard Western propaganda ploy is to personify the targeted country with the name of its president, Vladimir Putin, necessarily a dictatorial autocrat.   If you "understand" Putin, or Russia, then you are under deep suspicion of disloyalty to the West.  So, all together now, let us make sure that we DO NOT UNDERSTAND Russia!

Russian leaders claim to feel threatened by members of a huge hostile alliance, holding regular military manoeuvers on their doorstep?  They feel uneasy about nuclear missiles aimed at their territory from nearby NATO member states?  Why, that's just paranoia, or a sign of sly, aggressive intentions.  There is nothing to understand.

So, the West has treated Russia like a baited bear.  And what it's getting is a nuclear-armed, militarily powerful adversary nation led by people vastly more thoughtful and intelligent than the mediocre politicians in office in Washington, London and a few other places.

U.S. President Joe Biden and his Deep State never wanted a peaceful solution in Ukraine, because troubled Ukraine acts as a permanent barrier between Russia and Western Europe, ensuring U.S. control over the latter.  They have spent years treating Russia as an adversary, and Russia is now drawing the inevitable conclusion that the West will accept it only as an adversary.  The patience is at an end. And this is a game changer.

First reaction: the West will punish the bear with sanctions!  Germany is stopping certification of the Nordstream 2 natural gas pipeline.  Germany thus refuses to buy the Russian gas it needs in order to make sure Russia won't be able to cut off the gas it needs sometime in the future.  Now that's a clever trick, isn't it!  And meanwhile, with a growing gas shortage and rising prices, Russia will have no trouble selling its gas somewhere else in Asia.

When "our values" include refusal to understand, there is no limit to how much we can fail to understand.

To be continued.

Diana Johnstone was press secretary of the Green Group in the European Parliament from 1989 to 1996. In her latest book, Circle in the Darkness: Memoirs of a World Watcher (Clarity Press, 2020), she recounts key episodes in the transformation of the German Green Party from a peace to a war party. Her other books include Fools' Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO and Western Delusions (Pluto/Monthly Review) and in co-authorship with her father, Paul H. Johnstone, From MAD to Madness: Inside Pentagon Nuclear War Planning (Clarity Press). She can be reached at diana.johnstone@wanadoo.fr

The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.

 

b92.net

Putin sharply warned: "Do not try to interfere"

4-5 minutes

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In a special address early this morning, Russian President Vladimir Putin warned all those who could possibly interfere in the situation in Ukraine.

Source: Sputnik Thursday, February 24, 2022 | 08:38

Tanjug/Russian Presidential Press Service via AP

"Now a few very important words for those who might be tempted to interfere in the events that are happening: whoever tries to hinder us, moreover, to address threats to our country and people, should know that Russia's response will be immediate and that it will lead you to such consequences that you have never faced in your history", he warned.

Putin said that all the necessary decisions had been made and that he hoped that someone would hear his message.

It should be reminded that Russian President made a decision on a special military operation in Donbas last night. The head of state pointed out that Russia's plans do not include the occupation of Ukraine.

The escalation of the situation in Donbas began on February 17. The Ukrainian army began to shell the positions of the Donetsk and Luhansk People's Republics intensively.