The Peninsula Foundation

Tag: NATO

  • The NATO Declaration and the Deadly Strategy of Neoconservatism

    The NATO Declaration and the Deadly Strategy of Neoconservatism

    For the sake of America’s security and world peace, the U.S. should immediately abandon the neocon quest for hegemony in favour of diplomacy and peaceful co-existence.

    In 1992, U.S. foreign policy exceptionalism went into overdrive. The U.S. has always viewed itself as an exceptional nation destined for leadership, and the demise of the Soviet Union in December 1991 convinced a group of committed ideologues—who came to be known as neoconservatives—that the U.S. should now rule the world as the unchallenged sole superpower.

    Despite countless foreign policy disasters at neocon hands, the 2024 NATO Declaration continues to push the neocon agenda, driving the world closer to nuclear war.
    The neoconservatives were originally led by Richard Cheney, the Defense Secretary in 1992. Every President since then—Clinton, Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden—has pursued the neocon agenda of U.S. hegemony, leading theU.S. into perpetual wars of choice, including Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, and Ukraine, as well as relentless eastward expansion of NATO, despite a clear U.S. and German promise in 1990 to Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would not move one inch eastward.
    The core neocon idea is that the U.S. should have military, financial, economic, and political dominance over any potential rival in any part of the world. It is targeted especially at rival powers such as China and Russia and, therefore, brings the U.S. into direct confrontation with them. The American hubris is stunning: most of the world does not want to be led by the U.S., much less led by a U.S. state clearly driven by militarism, elitism and greed.
    The neocon plan for U.S. military dominance was spelt out in the Project for a New American Century. The plan includes relentless NATO expansion eastward and the transformation of NATO from a defensive alliance against a now-defunct Soviet Union to an offensive alliance used to promote U.S. hegemony. The U.S. arms industry is the major financial and political backer of the neocons. The arms industry spearheaded the lobbying for NATO’s eastward enlargement starting in the 1990s. Joe Biden has been a staunch neocon from the start, first as Senator, then as Vice President, and now as President.
    To achieve hegemony, the neocon plans rely on CIA regime-change operations; U.S.-led wars of choice; U.S. overseas military bases (now numbering around 750 overseas bases in at least 80 countries); the militarization of advanced technologies (biowarfare, artificial intelligence, quantum computing, etc.); and relentless use of information warfare.
    The quest for U.S. hegemony has pushed the world to open warfare in Ukraine between the world’s two leading nuclear powers, Russia and the United States. The war in Ukraine was provoked by the relentless determination of the U.S. to expand NATO to Ukraine despite Russia’s fervent opposition, as well as the U.S. participation in the violent Maidan coup (February 2014) that overthrew a neutral government and the U.S. undermining of the Minsk II agreement that called for autonomy for the ethnically Russian regions of eastern Ukraine.
    The NATO Declaration calls NATO a defensive alliance, but the facts say otherwise. NATO repeatedly engages in offensive operations, including regime-change operations. NATO led the bombing of Serbia in order to break that nation into two parts, with NATO placing a major military base in the breakaway region of Kosovo. NATO has played a major role in many U.S. wars of choice. NATO bombing of Libya was used to overthrow the government of Moammar Qaddafi.
    The U.S. quest for hegemony, which was arrogant and unwise in 1992, is absolutely delusional today since the U.S. clearly faces formidable rivals that can compete with the U.S. on the battlefield, in nuclear arms deployments and in the production and deployment of advanced technologies. China’s GDP is now around 30% larger than the U.S. when measured at international prices, and China is the world’s low-cost producer and supplier of many critical green technologies, including EVs, 5G, photovoltaics, wind power, modular nuclear power, and others. China’s productivity is now so great that the U.S. complains of China’s “over-capacity.”

    Sadly and alarmingly, the NATO declaration repeats the neoconservative delusions.
    The Declaration falsely declares that “Russia bears sole responsibility for its war of aggression against Ukraine,” despite the U.S. provocations that led to the outbreak of the war in 2014.
    The NATO Declaration reaffirms Article 10 of the NATO Washington Treaty, according to which NATO’s eastward expansion is none of Russia’s business. Yet the U.S. would never accept Russia or China establishing a military base on the US border (say in Mexico), as the U.S. first declared in the Monroe Doctrine in 1823 and has reaffirmed ever since.
    The NATO Declaration reaffirms NATO’s commitment to biodefense technologies, despite growing evidence that U.S. biodefense spending by NIH financed the laboratory creation of the virus that may have caused the Covid-19 pandemic.
    The NATO Declaration proclaims NATO’s intention to continue to deploy anti-ballistic Aegis missiles (as it has already done in Poland, Romania, and Turkey) despite the fact that the U.S. withdrawal from the ABM Treaty and placement of Aegis missiles in Poland and Romania has profoundly destabilized the nuclear arms control architecture.
    The NATO Declaration expresses no interest whatsoever in a negotiated peace for Ukraine.
    The NATO Declaration doubles down on Ukraine’s “irreversible path to full Euro-Atlantic integration, including NATO membership.” Yet Russia will never accept Ukraine’s NATO membership, so the “irreversible” commitment is an irreversible commitment to war.
    The Washington Post reports that in the lead-up to the NATO summit, Biden had serious qualms about pledging an “irreversible path” to Ukraine’s NATO membership, yet Biden’s advisors brushed aside these concerns.

    The neoconservatives have created countless disasters for the U.S. and the world, including several failed wars, a massive buildup of U.S. public debt driven by trillions of dollars of wasteful war-driven military outlays, and the increasingly dangerous confrontation of the U.S. with China, Russia, Iran, and others. The neocons have brought the Doomsday Clock to just 90 seconds to midnight (nuclear war), compared with 17 minutes in 1992.

    For the sake of America’s security and world peace, the U.S. should immediately abandon the neocon quest for hegemony in favour of diplomacy and peaceful co-existence.
    Alas, NATO has just done the opposite.

     

    Feature Image Credit: Bloomberg

  • An Asia-Pacific NATO: fanning the flames of war

    An Asia-Pacific NATO: fanning the flames of war

     

    Former President Trump sidelined NATO to such an extent that European members were disillusioned with American leadership and NATO was in a state of fragmentation. With Biden’s presidency unleashing its Ukraine strategy and war against Russia, NATO has solidified with blind subservience to American leadership. Building on imagined threats from Russia and China, the US is now seeking to make a NATO alliance format for security across Asia as well. On the eve of the 33rd summit at Vilnius on 11-12 July 2023, Türkiye dropped its objections for Sweden to become the 33rd member of NATO, abandoning its 150-year tradition of proud neutrality and peace in favour of war-mongering. With an eye on Asia, the summit invited four Asian countries – Japan, South Korea, Australia, and New Zealand – as observers at the summit. The summit statement is, as expected, replete with anti-Russian rhetoric but more importantly extensive in its focus on the ‘China threat’ thus paving the way for NATO’s role in Asia. Jeffrey Sachs, in a speech in Australia in early July (reproduced below), has warned forcefully about the peril that NATO poses to global peace and security.                                           – TPF Editorial Team

    “My country, the U.S., is unrecognisable. I’m not sure who runs the country. I do not believe it is the president.”, says Jeffrey Sachs in a speech at a Saving Humanity and Planet Earth (SHAPE) seminar, Melbourne, Australia. “U.S. actions are putting us on a path to war with China in the same way that U.S. actions did in Ukraine.”

    “the idea of opening NATO offices in Asia is mind-boggling in its foolishness. Please tell the Japanese to stop this reckless action.”

    Jeffrey Sachs
    Speech to Shape (Saving Humanity and Planet Earth)
    July 5, 2023

    Good afternoon to everybody. I want to thank you for inviting me and to thank SHAPE for its leadership. I just had the privilege to listen to Alison Broinowski and Chung-in Moon. We have been treated to brilliant and insightful statements. I absolutely agree with all that has been said. The world has gone mad but especially the Anglo-Saxon world, I’m afraid. I don’t know whether there is any sense in our little English-speaking corner of the world. I’m of course speaking of the United States, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

    There’s something profoundly disheartening about the politics of our countries right now. The deep madness, I’m afraid, is British Imperial thinking that has been taken over by the United States. My country, the U.S., is unrecognisable now compared even to 20 or 30 years ago. I’m not sure, to tell you the truth, who runs the country. I do not believe it is the president of the United States right now. We are run by generals, by our security establishment. The public is privy to nothing. The lies that are told about foreign policy are daily and pervasive by a mainstream media that I can barely listen to or read anymore. The New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal and the main television outlets are 100 per cent repeating government propaganda by the day, and it’s almost impossible to break through.

    it’s about a madness of the United States to keep U.S. hegemony, a militarised foreign policy dominated by the thinking of generals who are mediocre intellects, personally greedy, and without any sense because their only modus operandi is to make war.

    What is this about? Well, as you’ve heard, it’s about a madness of the United States to keep U.S. hegemony, a militarised foreign policy dominated by the thinking of generals who are mediocre intellects, personally greedy, and without any sense because their only modus operandi is to make war.

    And they are cheer-led by Britain, which is unfortunately, in my adult life, increasingly pathetic in being a cheerleader for the United States for U.S. hegemony and for war. Whatever the U.S. says, Britain will say it ten times more enthusiastically. The U.K. leadership could not love the war in Ukraine more. It is the great Second Crimean War for the British media and for the British political leadership.

    Now, how Australia and New Zealand fall for this idiocy is really a deep question for me and for you. People should know better. But I’m afraid that it is the Five Eyes and the security establishment that told the politicians, to the extent that the politicians are involved in this, ‘well this is how we have to do it’. This is our Security State and I don’t think our politicians necessarily have much role in this. By the way, the public has no role in U.S. foreign policy at all. We have no debate, no discussion, no deliberation, no debates over voting the hundred, now $113 billion, but in fact much more money spent on the Ukraine War.

    So far there’s not been an hour of organised debate even in the Congress on this, much less in the public, but my guess is that your security establishment is really the driver of this in Australia, and they explain to the Prime Minister and others: ‘you know this is the utmost National Security, and this is what America has told us. Let us, your security apparatus, explain what we’re seeing. Of course, you cannot divulge this to the broader public, but this is, at the essence, a struggle for survival in the world’.

    Everything I see myself, and I’m now 43 years in this activity as an economic advisor all over the world, suggests that this message is nonsense. One thing that would be interesting for people to look at, in order to understand these developments, is a very telling article by a former colleague of mine at Harvard, Ambassador Robert Blackwell and Ashley Tellis, written for the Council on Foreign Relations in March 2015. I want to read a couple excerpts from it because it laid out the plan of what’s happening right now pretty directly. This is how things work in the U.S., in which future plans are laid out to the establishment in such reports.

    “Since its founding, the United States has consistently pursued a grand strategy focused on acquiring and maintaining preeminent power over various rivals. First on the North American continent, then in the Western Hemisphere, and finally, globally. Preserving U.S. primacy in the global system ought to remain the central objective of U.S. grand strategy in the 21st century.”    

     – Robert Blackwill and Ashley Tellis in a March 2015 article for Council on Foreign Relations.

    We’re basically told in 2015 what’s going to happen in US-China relations. The deterioration of relations was planned — it’s not ad hoc. So, here’s what Blackwell and Tellis wrote in 2015. First, “Since its founding, the United States has consistently pursued a grand strategy focused on acquiring and maintaining preeminent power over various rivals. First on the North American continent, then in the Western Hemisphere, and finally, globally.” And then they argue that “preserving U.S. primacy in the global system ought to remain the central objective of U.S. grand strategy in the 21st century.”

    So, what’s the U.S. goal? The goal is very straightforward, it is the primacy of the United States globally. Blackwell and Tellis lay out the game plan for China. They tell us what to do.

    Here’s the list, though I’m only excerpting: “Creating new preferential trading arrangements among U.S. friends and allies to increase their mutual gains through instruments that consciously exclude China.” This is the game that Obama already started with TPP, though he couldn’t get it through domestic political opposition. Second, “create, in partnership with U.S. allies, a technology control regime vis-à-vis Beijing,” to block China’s strategic capabilities. Third, build up “power-political capacities of U.S. friends and allies on China’s periphery,” and “improving the capability of U.S. military forces to effectively project power along the Asian rimlands despite any Chinese opposition.”

    This foreshadowing of US policies by way of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) is well-known in recent history.

    What I find especially remarkable about this list is that it was made in 2015. It’s the step-by-step plan of action actually being carried out. This foreshadowing of US policies by way of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) is well-known in recent history. In 1997 in the CFR’s journal Foreign Affairs, Zbigniew Brzezinski laid out with precision the intended timeline for NATO enlargement and specifically the intention to include Ukraine in that NATO enlargement. Of course, that NATO enlargement plan has led us directly to the Ukraine War, which is indeed a proxy Russia-US war over NATO enlargement.

    Now the friends and geniuses that brought you the Ukraine War are on their way to bringing you a new war in your neighbourhood. As Professor Moon noted, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization is starting to open its offices in East Asia, which is not exactly the North Atlantic.

    So, this is where we are. It’s not absolutely simple to see through for one main reason, at least in the U.S. I’m not sure what it’s like in Australia but I expect that it’s pretty much the same as in the U.S., where we have no honesty or public deliberation about any of this. The policies are owned entirely by the security establishment, the military-industrial complex, the network of “think tanks” which are in fact non-think tanks in Washington, with almost all funded by the military-industrial complex.

    The military-industrial complex and its corporate lobby have taken over the East Coast universities where I teach. I taught at Harvard for more than 20 years, and now I teach at Columbia University. The influence of the intelligence agencies on the campuses is unprecedented, in my experience. All of this has happened without much public notice, almost a silent coup. There is no debate, no public politics, no honesty, no documents revealed. Everything is secret, confidential and a bit mysterious. Since I happen to be an economist who engages with the heads of state and ministers around the world, I hear a lot of things and see a lot of things that help me to pierce through the official “narratives” and pervasive lies.

    You will not find any of this in our public discourse. And just a word, if I may, about the Ukraine War. The war was completely predictable, and resulted from a U.S. plan for hegemony based on NATO enlargement that dates back to the early 1990’s. The U.S. strategy was to bring Ukraine into the U.S. military orbit. Brzezinski, again in 1997 in his book The Global Chess Board, laid out the strategy. Russia without Ukraine is nothing, he argued. Ukraine, he wrote, is the geographical pivot for Eurasia. Interestingly, Brzezinski warned American policymakers to ensure that they don’t push Russia and China into an alliance. In fact, that would be so antithetical to U.S. interests that Brzezinski clearly believed that it would never happen. But it has, because U.S. foreign policy is incompetent as well as profoundly dangerous and misconceived.

    During 1990-91, I happen to have been an advisor to Gorbachev, and during 1991-94, to Boris Yeltsin and Leonid Kuchma, spanning the late days of perestroika and the early days of Russian and Ukrainian independence after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. I watched very closely what was happening. I saw that the United States was absolutely uninterested in any way in helping Russia to stabilise.

    The idea of the U.S. security establishment from the early 1990s was U.S.-led unipolarity or U.S. hegemony. In the early 1990s, the U.S. rejected measures to help stabilise the Soviet economy and then the Russian economy, while it also began planning NATO enlargement, in direct contradiction to what the U.S. and Germany had promised Gorbachev and Yeltsin. So, the issue of NATO enlargement, including to Ukraine, is part of a U.S. game plan that started in the early 1990s, and eventually led to the Ukraine war.

    By the way, the U.S. was deeply involved in the overthrow of Ukraine’s pro-Russian president in 2014. Yes, this was a coup, and to an important extent, a regime change operation of the United States. I happen to have seen a part of it, and I know that U.S. money poured into supporting the Maidan. Such U.S. meddling was disgusting and destabilising, and all part of the game plan to enlarge NATO to Ukraine and Georgia.

    When one looks at the map it’s indeed Brzezinski’s 1997 idea: surround Russia in the Black Sea region. Ukraine, Romania, Bulgaria, Turkey and Georgia would all be members of NATO. That would be the end of Russian power projection in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East. So it went for these “security” geniuses.

    Putin put forward diplomatic responses that were repeatedly rejected by the U.S. and its NATO allies, including the Minsk II Agreement endorsed by the U.N Security Council, but then ignored by Ukraine.

    On December 17, 2021, Putin put on the table a perfectly reasonable document as the basis for negotiation, A Draft U.S.-Russia Security Agreement. At the core was Russia’s call for an end to NATO expansion. Tragically, the U.S. blew it off. I called the White House at the end of December 2021, spoke with one of our top security officials, and pleaded, “Negotiate. Stop the NATO enlargement. You have a chance to avoid war.” Of course, to no avail. The United States’ formal response to Putin was that NATO enlargement was non-negotiable with Russia, a matter in which Russia has absolutely no say.

    This is a mind-boggling way to pursue foreign affairs because it is a direct road to war. I hope everybody understands this war in Ukraine was close to ending as early as March 2022 with a negotiated agreement just one month after Russia invaded on February 24th. The negotiated agreement was stopped by the U.S. because it was based on Ukraine’s neutrality. The U.S. told Ukraine to fight on, end negotiations, and reject neutrality.

    And so we are in a war that continues to escalate towards possible nuclear war, which is what would happen if Russia were to suffer deep defeats on the battlefield. Russia is not losing on the battlefield just now, but if it did, it would likely escalate to nuclear war. Russia is not going to be pushed out of the Donbas and Crimea and meekly go home with apologies. Russia is going to escalate if it needs to escalate. So, we are right now in a spiral that is extremely dangerous.

    Japan plays utterly into this spiral. And Australia does as well. It’s so sad to watch Australia accepting to be used in this reckless way. To pay a fortune for new military bases in a reckless, provocative, and costly way, that will feed the U.S. military-industrial complex while weighing heavily on Australia.

     

    Such U.S. actions are putting us on a path to war with China in the same way that U.S. actions did in Ukraine. Only an Asia-Pacific war would be even more disastrous. The whole idea of the U.S. and its allies fighting China is mind-boggling in its implications, its stupidity and its recklessness. All of this is utterly divorced from Australia’s real security interests. China is not a threat to Australia. It is not a threat to the world.

    I don’t know of a single Chinese overseas invasion in its history, by the way, except when the Mongols briefly ruled China and tried to invade Japan. Other than the Mongol invasion, defeated by a typhoon, China has not launched overseas wars. It’s just not part of China’s statecraft, nor would such wars be in China’s national interest.

    What worries me about the world is a deeply neurotic United States (in)security leadership that aims to be number one, but that can’t be number one in the way that it believes. This is pathetic, yet is applauded each day in London, a place that still dreams of the glory of global empire from a long bygone era.

    RCEP is the correct concept for the region to bring together China, Korea, Japan, the ten ASEAN countries, Australia and New Zealand in a coherent framework, especially around the climate challenge, energy policy, trade policy, and infrastructure and investment policy. A well-functioning RCEP would do a world of good, not only for the 15 countries in RCEP but for the entire world.

    Permit me, in conclusion, to take one minute to say what should be done.

    First, the war in Ukraine could end the day Biden steps up and says NATO will not enlarge to Ukraine. The basis for a negotiated security arrangement has been there for 30 years, but has been rejected so far by the U.S.

    Second, the idea of opening NATO offices in Asia is mind-boggling in its foolishness. Please tell the Japanese to stop this reckless action.

    Third, the U.S. approach to arming Taiwan is profoundly dangerous, provocative and deliberately so.

    Fourth, what is needed most in the Asia-Pacific is regional dialogue amongst Asia-Pacific nations.

    Fifth, the Asia-Pacific should build on RCEP [Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement]. RCEP is the correct concept for the region to bring together China, Korea, Japan, the ten ASEAN countries, Australia and New Zealand in a coherent framework, especially around the climate challenge, energy policy, trade policy, and infrastructure and investment policy. A well-functioning RCEP would do a world of good, not only for the 15 countries in RCEP but for the entire world.

    Sorry to have run on so long but it’s so important what SHAPE is doing. You’re completely on the right track and all best wishes to your efforts.

     

    This transcript of Jeffrey Sach’s speech was published earlier in Pearls and Irritations.

    Feature Image Credit: bnn.network

    Cartoon Credit: Global Times

  • The War in Ukraine Was Provoked—and Why That Matters to Achieve Peace

    The War in Ukraine Was Provoked—and Why That Matters to Achieve Peace

    By recognizing that the question of NATO enlargement is at the center of this war, we understand why U.S. weaponry will not end this war. Only diplomatic efforts can do that.

    George Orwell wrote in 1984 that “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.” Governments work relentlessly to distort public perceptions of the past. Regarding the Ukraine War, the Biden administration has repeatedly and falsely claimed that the Ukraine War started with an unprovoked attack by Russia on Ukraine on February 24, 2022. In fact, the war was provoked by the U.S. in ways that leading U.S. diplomats anticipated for decades in the lead-up to the war, meaning that the war could have been avoided and should now be stopped through negotiations.

    Recognizing that the war was provoked helps us to understand how to stop it. It doesn’t justify Russia’s invasion. A far better approach for Russia might have been to step up diplomacy with Europe and with the non-Western world to explain and oppose U.S. militarism and unilateralism. In fact, the relentless U.S. push to expand NATO is widely opposed throughout the world, so Russian diplomacy rather than war would likely have been effective.

    The Biden team uses the word “unprovoked” incessantly, most recently in Biden’s major speech on the first-year anniversary of the war, in a recent NATO statement, and in the most recent G7 statement. Mainstream media friendly to Biden simply parrot the White House. TheNew York Times is the lead culprit, describing the invasion as “unprovoked” no fewer than 26 times, in five editorials, 14 opinion columns by NYT writers, and seven guest op-eds!

    There were in fact two main U.S. provocations. The first was the U.S. intention to expand NATO to Ukraine and Georgia in order to surround Russia in the Black Sea region by NATO countries (Ukraine, Romania, Bulgaria, Turkey, and Georgia, in counterclockwise order). The second was the U.S. role in installing a Russophobic regime in Ukraine by the violent overthrow of Ukraine’s pro-Russian President, Viktor Yanukovych, in February 2014. The shooting war in Ukraine began with Yanukovych’s overthrow nine years ago, not in February 2022 as the U.S. government, NATO, and the G7 leaders would have us believe.

    The key to peace in Ukraine is through negotiations based on Ukraine’s neutrality and NATO non-enlargement.

    Biden and his foreign policy team refuse to discuss these roots of the war. To recognize them would undermine the administration in three ways. First, it would expose the fact that the war could have been avoided, or stopped early, sparing Ukraine its current devastation and the U.S. more than $100 billion in outlays to date. Second, it would expose President Biden’s personal role in the war as a participant in the overthrow of Yanukovych, and before that as a staunch backer of the military-industrial complex and very early advocate of NATO enlargement. Third, it would push Biden to the negotiating table, undermining the administration’s continued push for NATO expansion.

    The archives show irrefutably that the U.S. and German governments repeatedly promised to Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would not move “one inch eastward” when the Soviet Union disbanded the Warsaw Pact military alliance. Nonetheless, U.S. planning for NATO expansion began early in the 1990s, well before Vladimir Putin was Russia’s president. In 1997, national security expert Zbigniew Brzezinski spelled out the NATO expansion timeline with remarkable precision.

    U.S. diplomats and Ukraine’s own leaders knew well that NATO enlargement could lead to war. The great US scholar-statesman George Kennan called NATO enlargement a “fateful error,” writing in the New York Times that, “Such a decision may be expected to inflame the nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion; to have an adverse effect on the development of Russian democracy; to restore the atmosphere of the cold war to East-West relations, and to impel Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking.”

    President Bill Clinton’s Secretary of Defense William Perry considered resigning in protest against NATO enlargement. In reminiscing about this crucial moment in the mid-1990s, Perry said the following in 2016: “Our first action that really set us off in a bad direction was when NATO started to expand, bringing in eastern European nations, some of them bordering Russia. At that time, we were working closely with Russia and they were beginning to get used to the idea that NATO could be a friend rather than an enemy … but they were very uncomfortable about having NATO right up on their border and they made a strong appeal for us not to go ahead with that.”

    In 2008, then U.S. Ambassador to Russia, and now CIA Director, William Burns, sent a cable to Washington warning at length of grave risks of NATO enlargement: “Ukraine and Georgia’s NATO aspirations not only touch a raw nerve in Russia, they engender serious concerns about the consequences for stability in the region. Not only does Russia perceive encirclement, and efforts to undermine Russia’s influence in the region, but it also fears unpredictable and uncontrolled consequences which would seriously affect Russian security interests. Experts tell us that Russia is particularly worried that the strong divisions in Ukraine over NATO membership, with much of the ethnic-Russian community against membership, could lead to a major split, involving violence or at worst, civil war. In that eventuality, Russia would have to decide whether to intervene; a decision Russia does not want to have to face.”

    Ukraine’s leaders knew clearly that pressing for NATO enlargement to Ukraine would mean war. Former Zelensky advisor Oleksiy Arestovych declared in a 2019 interview “that our price for joining NATO is a big war with Russia.”

    Nuland makes clear on the call that she was coordinating closely with then Vice President Biden and his national security advisor Jake Sullivan, the same Biden-Nuland-Sullivan team now at the center of U.S. policy vis-à-vis Ukraine.

    During 2010-2013, Yanukovych pushed neutrality, in line with Ukrainian public opinion. The U.S. worked covertly to overthrow Yanukovych, as captured vividly in the tape of then U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and U.S. Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt planning the post-Yanukovych government weeks before the violent overthrow of Yanukovych. Nuland makes clear on the call that she was coordinating closely with then Vice President Biden and his national security advisor Jake Sullivan, the same Biden-Nuland-Sullivan team now at the center of U.S. policy vis-à-vis Ukraine.

    After Yanukovych’s overthrow, the war broke out in the Donbas, while Russia claimed Crimea. The new Ukrainian government appealed for NATO membership, and the U.S. armed and helped restructure the Ukrainian army to make it interoperable with NATO. In 2021, NATO and the Biden Administration strongly recommitted to Ukraine’s future in NATO.

    In the immediate lead-up to Russia’s invasion, NATO enlargement was center stage. Putin’s draft US-Russia Treaty (December 17, 2021) called for a halt to NATO enlargement. Russia’s leaders put NATO enlargement as the cause of war in Russia’s National Security Council meeting on February 21, 2022. In his address to the nation that day, Putin declared NATO enlargement to be a central reason for the invasion.

    Historian Geoffrey Roberts recently wrote: “Could war have been prevented by a Russian-Western deal that halted NATO expansion and neutralised Ukraine in return for solid guarantees of Ukrainian independence and sovereignty? Quite possibly.” In March 2022, Russia and Ukraine reported progress towards a quick negotiated end to the war based on Ukraine’s neutrality. According to Naftali Bennett, former Prime Minister of Israel, who was a mediator, an agreement was close to being reached before the U.S., U.K., and France blocked it.

    While the Biden administration declares Russia’s invasion to be unprovoked, Russia pursued diplomatic options in 2021 to avoid war, while Biden rejected diplomacy, insisting that Russia had no say whatsoever on the question of NATO enlargement. And Russia pushed diplomacy in March 2022, while the Biden team again blocked a diplomatic end to the war.

    By recognizing that the question of NATO enlargement is at the center of this war, we understand why U.S. weaponry will not end this war. Russia will escalate as necessary to prevent NATO enlargement to Ukraine. The key to peace in Ukraine is through negotiations based on Ukraine’s neutrality and NATO non-enlargement. The Biden administration’s insistence on NATO enlargement to Ukraine has made Ukraine a victim of misconceived and unachievable U.S. military aspirations. It’s time for the provocations to stop, and for negotiations to restore peace to Ukraine.

    This article was published earlier in commondreams.org and is republished under Creative Commons(CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

    Feature Image Credit: columbian.com

  • What Ukraine needs to learn from Afghanistan about proxy wars

    What Ukraine needs to learn from Afghanistan about proxy wars

    The greatest enemy of economic development is war. If the world slips further into global conflict, our economic hopes and our very survival could go up in flames. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has moved the hands of the Doomsday Clock to a mere 90 seconds to midnight. The world’s biggest economic loser in 2022 was Ukraine, where the economy collapsed by 35% according to the International Monetary Fund. The war in Ukraine could end soon, and economic recovery could begin, but this depends on Ukraine understanding its predicament as a victim of a US-Russia proxy war that broke out in 2014.

    The US has been heavily arming and funding Ukraine since 2014 with the goal of expanding Nato and weakening Russia. America’s proxy wars typically rage for years and even decades, leaving battleground countries like Ukraine in rubble.

    Unless the proxy war ends soon, Ukraine faces a dire future. Ukraine needs to learn from the horrible experience of Afghanistan to avoid becoming a long-term disaster. It could also look to the US proxy wars in Vietnam, Cambodia, Lao PDR, Iraq, Syria, and Libya.

    Starting in 1979, the US armed the mujahideen (Islamist fighters) to harass the Soviet-backed government in Afghanistan. As president Jimmy Carter’s national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski later explained, the US objective was to provoke the Soviet Union to intervene, in order to trap the Soviet Union in a costly war. The fact that Afghanistan would be collateral damage was of no concern to US leaders.

    The Soviet military entered Afghanistan in 1979 as the US hoped, and fought through the 1980s. Meanwhile, the US-backed fighters established al-Qaeda in the 1980s, and the Taliban in the early 1990s. The US “trick” on the Soviet Union had boomeranged.

    In 2001, the US invaded Afghanistan to fight al-Qaeda and the Taliban. The US war continued for another 20 years until the US finally left in 2021. Sporadic US military operations in Afghanistan continue.

    Afghanistan lies in ruins. While the US wasted more than $ 2 trillion of US military outlays, Afghanistan is impoverished, with a 2021 GDP below $400 per person! As a parting “gift” to Afghanistan in 2021, the US government seized Afghanistan’s tiny foreign exchange holdings, paralysing the banking system.

    The proxy war in Ukraine began nine years ago when the US government backed the overthrow of Ukraine’s president Viktor Yanukovych. Yanukovych’s sin from the US viewpoint was his attempt to maintain Ukraine’s neutrality despite the US desire to expand Nato to include Ukraine (and Georgia). America’s objective was for Nato countries to encircle Russia in the Black Sea region. To achieve this goal, the US has been massively arming and funding Ukraine since 2014.

    The American protagonists then and now are the same. The US government’s point person on Ukraine in 2014 was Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, who today is Undersecretary of State. Back in 2014, Nuland worked closely with Jake Sullivan, president Joe Biden’s national security adviser, who played the same role for vice president Biden in 2014.

    The US overlooked two harsh political realities in Ukraine. The first is that Ukraine is deeply divided ethnically and politically between Russia-hating nationalists in western Ukraine and ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine and Crimea.

    The second is that Nato enlargement to Ukraine crosses a Russian redline. Russia will fight to the end, and escalate as necessary, to prevent the US from incorporating Ukraine into Nato.

    The US repeatedly asserts that Nato is a defensive alliance. Yet Nato bombed Russia’s ally Serbia for 78 days in 1999 in order to break Kosovo away from Serbia, after which the US established a giant military base in Kosovo. Nato forces similarly toppled Russian ally Moammar Qaddafi in 2011, setting off a decade of chaos in Libya. Russia certainly will never accept Nato in Ukraine.

    At the end of 2021, Russian president Vladimir Putin put forward three demands to the US: Ukraine should remain neutral and out of Nato; Crimea should remain part of Russia; and the Donbas should become autonomous in accord with the Minsk II Agreement.

    The Biden-Sullivan-Nuland team rejected negotiations over Nato enlargement, eight years after the same group backed Yanukovych’s overthrow. With Putin’s negotiating demands flatly rejected by the US, Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022.

    In March 2022, Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky seemed to understand Ukraine’s dire predicament as a victim of a US-Russia proxy war. He declared publicly that Ukraine would become a neutral country, and asked for security guarantees. He also publicly recognised that Crimea and Donbas would need some kind of special treatment.

    Israel’s prime minister at that time, Naftali Bennett, became involved as a mediator, along with Turkey. Russia and Ukraine came close to reaching an agreement. Yet, as Bennett has recently explained, the US “blocked” the peace process.

    Since then, the war has escalated. According to US investigative reporter Seymour Hersh, US agents blew up the Nord Stream pipelines in September, a claim denied by the White House. More recently, the US and its allies have committed to sending tanks, longer-range missiles, and possibly fighter jets to Ukraine.

    The basis for peace is clear. Ukraine would be a neutral non-Nato country. Crimea would remain home to Russia’s Black Sea naval fleet, as it has been since 1783. A practical solution would be found for the Donbas, such as a territorial division, autonomy, or an armistice line.

    Most importantly, the fighting would stop, Russian troops would leave Ukraine, and Ukraine’s sovereignty would be guaranteed by the UN Security Council and other nations. Such an agreement could have been reached in December 2021 or in March 2022.

    Above all, the government and people of Ukraine would tell Russia and the US that Ukraine refuses any longer to be the battleground of a proxy war. In the face of deep internal divisions, Ukrainians on both sides of the ethnic divide would strive for peace, rather than believing that an outside power will spare them the need to compromise.
    Feature Image Credit: politico.eu

    This article was published earlier in dailymaverick.co.za and is republished with the permission of the author.

  • Ukraine War Tolls Death Knell for NATO

    Ukraine War Tolls Death Knell for NATO

    President Vladimir Putin addressed an expanded meeting of the Russian Defence Ministry Board, Moscow on Dec. 21, 2022

    The defining moment in US President Joe Biden’s press conference at the White House last Wednesday, during President Zelensky’s visit, was his virtual admission that he is constrained in the proxy war in Ukraine, as European allies don’t want a war with Russia. 

    To quote Biden, “Now, you say, ‘Why don’t we just give Ukraine everything there is to give?’  Well, for two reasons. One, there’s an entire Alliance that is critical to stay with Ukraine.  And the idea that we would give Ukraine material that is fundamentally different than is already going there would have a prospect of breaking up NATO and breaking up the European Union and the rest of the world… I’ve spent several hundred hours face-to-face with our European allies and the heads of state of those countries, making the case as to why it was overwhelmingly in their interest that they continue to support Ukraine… They understand it fully, but they’re not looking to go to war with Russia.  They’re not looking for a third World War.”

    Biden realised at that point that “I probably already said too much” and abruptly ended the press conference. He probably forgot that he was dwelling on the fragility of Western unity.

    The whole point is that the western commentariat largely forgets that Russia’s core agenda is not about territorial conquest — much as Ukraine is vital to Russian interests —but about NATO expansion. And that has not changed.

    Every now and then President Putin revisits the fundamental theme that the US consistently aimed to weaken and dismember Russia. As recently as last Wednesday, Putin invoked the Chechen war in the 1990s — “the use of international terrorists in the Caucasus, to finish off Russia and to split the Russian Federation… They [US]claimed to condemn al-Qaeda and other criminals, yet they considered using them on the territory of Russia as acceptable and provided all kinds of assistance to them, including material, information, political and any other support, notably military support, to encourage them to continue fighting against Russia.”

    Putin has a phenomenal memory and would have been alluding to Biden’s careful choice of William Burns as his CIA chief. Burns was Moscow Embassy’s point person for Chechnya in the 1990s! Putin has now ordered a nationwide campaign to root out the vast tentacles that the US intelligence planted on Russian soil for internal subversion. Carnegie, once headed by Burns, has since shut down its Moscow office, and the Russian staff fled to the West!

    The leitmotif of the expanded meeting of the Board of the Defence Ministry in Moscow on Wednesday, which Putin addressed, was the profound reality that Russia’s confrontation with the US is not going to end with the Ukraine war. Putin exhorted the Russian top brass to “carefully analyse” the lessons of the Ukraine and Syrian conflicts.

    Importantly, Putin said, “We will continue maintaining and improving the combat readiness of the nuclear triad. It is the main guarantee that our sovereignty and territorial integrity, strategic parity and the general balance of forces in the world are preserved. This year, the level of modern armaments in the strategic nuclear forces has already exceeded 91 per cent. We continue rearming the regiments of our strategic missile forces with modern missile systems with Avangard hypersonic warheads.”

    Equally, Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu proposed at Wednesday’s meeting a military build-up “to bolster Russia’s security,” including:

    • Creation of a corresponding group of forces in Russia’s northwest to counter Finland and Sweden’s induction as NATO members;
    • Creation of two new motorised infantry divisions in the Kherson and Zaporozhya regions, as well as an army corps in Karelia, facing the Finnish border;
    • Upgrade of 7 motorised infantry brigades into motorised infantry divisions in the Western, Central and Eastern military districts, and in the Northern Fleet;
    • Addition of two more air assault divisions in the Airborne Forces;
    • Provision of a composite aviation division and an army aviation brigade with 80-100 combat helicopters within each combined arms (tank) army;
    • Creation of 3 additional air division commands, eight bomber aviation regiments, one fighter aviation regiment, and six army aviation brigades;
    • Creation of 5 district artillery divisions, as well as super-heavy artillery brigades for building artillery reserves along the so-called strategic axis;
    • Creation of 5 naval infantry brigades for the Navy’s coastal troops based on the existing naval infantry brigades;
    • Increase in the size of the Armed Forces to 1.5 million service personnel, with 695,000 people serving under contract.

    Putin summed up: “We will not repeat the mistakes of the past… We are not going to militarise our country or militarise the economy… and we will not do things we do not really need, to the detriment of our people and the economy, the social sphere. We will improve the Russian Armed Forces and the entire military component. We will do it calmly, routinely and consistently, without haste.”

    If the neocons in the driving seat in the Beltway wanted an arms race, they have it now. The paradox, however, is that this is going to be different from the bipolar Cold War era arms race.

    If the US intention was to weaken Russia before confronting China, things aren’t working that way. Instead, the US is getting locked into a confrontation with Russia and the ties between the two big powers are at a breaking point. Russia expects the US to roll back NATO’s expansion, as promised to the Soviet leadership in 1989.

    The neocons had expected a “win-win” in Ukraine: Russian defeat and a disgraceful end to Putin’s presidency; a weakened Russia, as in the 1990s, groping for a new start; consolidation of western unity under a triumphant America; a massive boost in the upcoming struggle with China for supremacy in the world order; and a New American Century under the “rules-based world order”.

    But instead, this is turning out to be a classic Zugzwang in the endgame — to borrow from German chess literature — where the US is under obligation to make a move on Ukraine but whichever move it makes will only worsen its geopolitical position.

    Biden has understood that Russia cannot be defeated in Ukraine; nor are Russian people in any mood for an insurrection. Putin’s popularity is soaring high, as Russian objectives in Ukraine are being steadily realised. Thus, Biden is getting a vague sense, perhaps, that Russia isn’t exactly seeing things in Ukraine as a binary of victory and defeat, but is gearing up for the long haul to sort out NATO once and for all.

    The transformation of Belarus as a “nuclear-capable” state carries a profound message from Moscow to Brussels and Washington. Biden cannot miss it. (See my blog NATO nuclear compass rendered unavailing, Indian Punchline, Dec. 21, 2022

    Logically, the option open to the US at this point would be to disengage. But that becomes an abject admission of defeat and will mean the death knell for NATO, and Washington’s transatlantic leadership goes kaput. And, worse still, major west European powers — Germany, France and Italy — may start looking for a modus vivendi with Russia. Above all, how can NATO possibly survive without an “enemy”?

    Clearly, neither the US nor its allies are in a position to fight a continental war. But even if they are, what about the emerging scenario in the Asia-Pacific, where the “no limits” partnership between China and Russia has added an intriguing layer to the geopolitics?

    The neocons in the Beltway have bitten more than what they could chew. Their last card will be to push for a direct US military intervention in the Ukraine war under the banner of a “coalition of the willing.” 

     

    This commentary was published earlier on the author’s website – indianpunchline.com

    Feature Image Credit: Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation

     

  • Putin’s statements suggest the Ukraine conflict could last for years

    Putin’s statements suggest the Ukraine conflict could last for years

    Most likely, the fighting will continue into 2023, and quite probably beyond, until either Moscow or Kiev is exhausted, or one side claims a decisive victory. For the US, Ukraine is a matter of principle; for the Kremlin, the matter is simply existential – the conflict with the West is not about Ukraine, but about the fate of Russia itself.

    Last week, Russian President Vladimir Putin commented, during a meeting with soldiers’ mothers, that he now regards the Minsk agreements of 2014 and 2015 as a mistake. This confession was stark in the context of the possibility of peace negotiations to end the fighting in Ukraine.

    Russian President Vladimir Putin commented, during a meeting with soldiers’ mothers, that he now regards the Minsk agreements of 2014 and 2015 as a mistake.

    It is worth remembering that in 2014, Putin acted on a mandate from the Russian parliament to use military force “in Ukraine,”not just in Crimea. In fact, Moscow did save the cities of Donetsk and Lugansk from being overrun by Kyiv’s army, and defeated Ukraine’s forces, but rather than clearing the whole region of Donbass, Russia stopped, and agreed to a cease-fire brokered in Minsk by Germany and France.

    Putin explained to the mothers that at the time, Moscow did not know for sure the sentiments of the Donbass population affected by the conflict, and hoped that Donetsk and Lugansk could somehow be reunited with Ukraine on the conditions laid down in Minsk. Putin might have added – and his own actions, as well as conversations with then-Ukrainian President Pyotr Poroshenko, confirm it – that he was prepared to give the new Kyiv authorities a chance to settle the issue and rebuild a relationship with Moscow. Until rather late in the game, Putin also hoped that he could still work things out with the Germans and the French, and the US leadership.

    Admissions of mistakes are rare among incumbent leaders, but they are important as indicators of lessons they have learned.

    Admissions of mistakes are rare among incumbent leaders, but they are important as indicators of lessons they have learned. This experience has apparently made Putin decide not that the decision to launch the special military operation last February was wrong, but that eight years before, Moscow should not have put any faith in Kyiv, Berlin, and Paris, and instead should have relied on its own military might to liberate the Russian-speaking regions of Ukraine.

    In other words, agreeing to a Minsk-style ceasefire now would be another mistake which would allow Kyiv and its backers to better prepare to resume fighting at the time of their choosing.

    The Russian leader realizes, of course, that many nations in the non-West, those who refused to join the anti-Russian sanctions coalition and profess neutrality on Ukraine, have called for an end to hostilities. From China and India to Indonesia and Mexico, these countries, while generally friendly toward Russia, see their economic prospects being impaired by a conflict that pits Russia against the united West. The Western media also promote the message that global energy and food security is suffering because of Moscow’s actions. Russia’s arguments and protestations to the contrary have only limited impact since Russian voices are rarely heard on Middle Eastern, Asian, African, or Latin American airwaves.

    Be that as it may, Moscow cannot ignore the sentiments of the larger part of humanity, which is now increasingly referred to in Russian expert circles as the Global Majority. Hence, official Russian statements that Moscow is open for dialogue without preconditions. However, any Russian delegation to talks would have to take into account the recent amendments to the country’s Constitution, which name the four former Ukrainian regions of Donetsk, Lugansk, Kherson, and Zaporozhye as part of the Russian Federation. As Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has put it, Russia will only negotiate on the basis of existing geopolitical realities. It should be noted that the Kremlin has not retracted the objectives of the military operation, which include the demilitarization and denazification of Ukraine, which means ridding the state and society of ultra-nationalist, anti-Russian elements.

    As for Kyiv, it has gone back and forth on the issue. Having nearly reached a peace agreement with Moscow in late March, it later reversed course to continue fighting (the Russians believe this was done on Western advice). Having achieved operational successes on the battlefield this past fall, Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky had all contacts with the Kremlin formally banned and formulated extreme demands which he addressed to Putin’s successors, whenever they may emerge. For the West, this was bad from the perspective of public relations, and Zelensky was asked to make it appear as if he was open for talks, but in reality, nothing changed.

    The reality is that the principal parties involved in the conflict in Ukraine, namely Washington and Moscow, do not consider the present, or the near future, as a good time for negotiations.

    The reality is that the principal parties involved in the conflict in Ukraine, namely Washington and Moscow, do not consider the present, or the near future, as a good time for negotiations. From the US perspective, despite the unprecedented sanctions imposed on Russia by the West and the recent setbacks that the Russian Army has experienced in Kharkov and Kherson, Moscow is far from being defeated on the battlefield or destabilized domestically. From the Kremlin’s perspective, any truce or peace that leaves Ukraine as an ‘anti-Russia’, hostile state, is tantamount to a defeat with highly negative consequences.

    Instead, both sides believe they can win. The West, of course, has vastly superior resources in virtually every field that it can use in Ukraine. But Russia is working to mobilize its own substantial reserves in both manpower and the economy.

    Where Moscow has an advantage is in escalatory dominance. For the US, Ukraine is a matter of principle; for the Kremlin, the matter is simply existential – the conflict with the West is not about Ukraine, but about the fate of Russia itself.

     

    It looks as if the war will continue into 2023, and possibly beyond that. Talks will probably not start before either side is prepared to concede due to exhaustion, or because both parties have reached an impasse. In the meantime, the death toll will continue to mount, pointing to the essential tragedy of major power politics. In the fall of 1962, then-US President John F. Kennedy was ready to walk to the edge of the nuclear precipice in order to prevent the Soviet Union from turning Cuba into its missile base. Sixty years later, Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered a military action to make sure that Ukraine does not become an unsinkable aircraft carrier for America.

    Whatever Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev thought about his right to counter US missiles pointed at Moscow from Turkey with weapons of his own targeting Washington and New York from Cuba (with Havana’s consent), and whatever successive US presidents thought about their right to expand the NATO military bloc to include Ukraine (at Kyiv’s wish), there is always a horrendous price to pay for the failure to take into account the rival power’s security interests.

     

    There is a lesson to be learned from this. Whatever Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev thought about his right to counter US missiles pointed at Moscow from Turkey with weapons of his own targeting Washington and New York from Cuba (with Havana’s consent), and whatever successive US presidents thought about their right to expand the NATO military bloc to include Ukraine (at Kyiv’s wish), there is always a horrendous price to pay for the failure to take into account the rival power’s security interests. Cuba went down in history as a narrow success for common sense. Ukraine is an ongoing story, with its outcome still hanging in the balance.

    Feature Image: rt.com

    Image: Khrushchev and Kennedy – rferl.org

    Image: Robert and Jack Kennedy – bostonglobe.com – The most important lesson of the Cuban Missile crisis.

  • The Great Game in Ukraine is Spinning out of Control

    The Great Game in Ukraine is Spinning out of Control

    Former US National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski famously described Ukraine as a “geopolitical pivot” of Eurasia, central to both US and Russian power.  Since Russia views its vital security interests to be at stake in the current conflict, the war in Ukraine is rapidly escalating to a nuclear showdown.  It’s urgent for both the US and Russia to exercise restraint before disaster hits.

    The current conflict is, in essence, the Second Crimean War.  This time, a US-led military alliance seeks to expand NATO to Ukraine and Georgia, so that five NATO members would encircle the Black Sea.

    Since the middle of the 19th Century, the West has competed with Russia over Crimea and more specifically, naval power in the Black Sea.  In the Crimean War (1853-6), Britain and France captured Sevastopol and temporarily banished Russia’s navy from the Black Sea.  The current conflict is, in essence, the Second Crimean War.  This time, a US-led military alliance seeks to expand NATO to Ukraine and Georgia, so that five NATO members would encircle the Black Sea.

    The US has long regarded any encroachment by great powers in the Western Hemisphere as a direct threat to US security, dating back to the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, which states: “We owe it, therefore, to candour and to the amicable relations existing between the United States and those [European] powers to declare that we should consider any attempt on their part to extend their system to any portion of this hemisphere as dangerous to our peace and safety.”

    In 1961, the US invaded Cuba when Cuba’s revolutionary leader Fidel Castro looked to the Soviet Union for support.  The US was not much interested in Cuba’s “right” to align with whichever country it wanted – the claim the US asserts regarding Ukraine’s supposed right to join NATO.  The failed US invasion in 1961 led to the Soviet Union’s decision to place offensive nuclear weapons in Cuba in 1962, which in turn led to the Cuban Missile Crisis exactly 60 years ago this month.  That crisis brought the world to the brink of nuclear war.

    Yet America’s regard for its own security interests in the Americas has not stopped it from encroaching on Russia’s core security interests in Russia’s neighbourhood.  As the Soviet Union weakened, US policy leaders came to believe that the US military could operate as it pleases.  In 1991, Undersecretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz explained to General Wesley Clark that the US can deploy its military force in the Middle East “and the Soviet Union won’t stop us.” America’s national security officials decided to overthrow Middle East regimes allied to the Soviet Union and encroach on Russia’s security interests.

    In 1990, Germany and the US gave assurances to Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev that the Soviet Union could disband its own military alliance, the Warsaw Pact, without fear that NATO would enlarge eastward to replace the Soviet Union. It won Gorbachev’s assent to German reunification in 1990 on this basis.  Yet with the Soviet Union’s demise, President Bill Clinton reneged by supporting the eastward expansion of NATO.

    America’s dean of statecraft with Russia, George Kennan, declared that NATO expansion “is the beginning of a new cold war.”   

    Russian President Boris Yeltsin protested vociferously but could do nothing to stop it.  America’s dean of statecraft with Russia, George Kennan, declared that NATO expansion “is the beginning of a new cold war.”

    Under Clinton’s watch, NATO expanded to Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic in 1999.  Five years later, under President George W. Bush, Jr. NATO expanded to seven more countries: the Baltic states (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania), the Black Sea (Bulgaria and Romania), the Balkans (Slovenia), and Slovakia.  Under President Barack Obama, NATO expanded to Albania and Croatia in 2009, and under President Donald Trump, to Montenegro in 2019.

    Russia’s opposition to NATO enlargement intensified sharply in 1999 when NATO countries disregarded the UN, attacked Russia’s ally Serbia, and stiffened further in the 2000s with the US wars of choice in Iraq, Syria, and Libya. At the Munich Security Conference in 2007, President Putin declared that NATO enlargement 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 [of no NATO enlargement] our western partners made after the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact?”  – Putin at the Munich Security Conference in 2007.

    Putin continued: “And we have the right to ask: against whom is this expansion intended?  And what happened to the assurances [of no NATO enlargement] 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 of 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?”

    In 2007, with the NATO admission of two Black Sea countries, Bulgaria and Romania, the US established the Black Sea Area Task Group (originally the Task Force East).  Then in 2008, the US raised the US-Russia tensions still further by declaring that NATO would expand to the very heart of the Black Sea, by incorporating Ukraine and Georgia, threatening Russia’s naval access to the Black Sea, Mediterranean, and the Middle East.

    Also in 2007, with the NATO admission of two Black Sea countries, Bulgaria and Romania, the US established the Black Sea Area Task Group (originally the Task Force East).  Then in 2008, the US raised the US-Russia tensions still further by declaring that NATO would expand to the very heart of the Black Sea, by incorporating Ukraine and Georgia, threatening Russia’s naval access to the Black Sea, Mediterranean, and the Middle East.  With Ukraine’s and Georgia’s entry, Russia would be surrounded by five NATO countries in the Black Sea: Bulgaria, Georgia, Romania, Turkey, and Ukraine.

    Russia was initially protected from NATO enlargement to Ukraine by Ukraine’s pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovych, who led the Ukrainian parliament to declare Ukraine’s neutrality in 2010.  Yet in 2014, the US helped to overthrow Yanukovych and bring to power a staunchly anti-Russian government.  The Ukraine War broke out at that point, with Russia quickly reclaiming Crimea and supporting pro-Russian separatists in the Donbas, the region of Eastern Ukraine with a relatively high proportion of Russian population.  Ukraine’s parliament formally abandoned neutrality later in 2014.

    Ukraine and Russian-backed separatists in the Donbas have been fighting a brutal war for 8 years.  Attempts to end the war in the Donbas through the Minsk Agreements failed when Ukraine’s leaders decided not to honour the agreements, which called for autonomy for the Donbas.  After 2014, the US poured in massive armaments to Ukraine and helped to restructure Ukraine’s military to be interoperable with NATO, as evidenced in this year’s fighting.

    The Russian invasion in 2022 would likely have been averted had Biden agreed with Putin’s demand at the end of 2021 to end NATO’s eastward enlargement.  The war would likely have been ended in March 2022, when the governments of Ukraine and Russia exchanged a draft peace agreement based on Ukrainian neutrality.  Behind the scenes, the US and UK pushed Zelensky to reject any agreement with Putin and to fight on.  At that point, Ukraine walked away from the negotiations.

    The nuclear threat is not empty, but a measure of the Russian leadership’s perception of its security interests at stake. 

    Russia will escalate as necessary, possibly to nuclear weapons, to avoid military defeat and NATO’s further eastward enlargement.  The nuclear threat is not empty, but a measure of the Russian leadership’s perception of its security interests at stake.   Terrifyingly, the US was also prepared to use nuclear weapons in the Cuban Missile Crisis, and a senior Ukrainian official recently urged the US to launch nuclear strikes “as soon as Russia even thinks of carrying out nuclear strikes,” surely a recipe for World War III.  We are again on the brink of nuclear catastrophe.

    President John F. Kennedy learned about nuclear confrontation during the Cuban missile crisis.  He defused that crisis not by force of will or US military might, but by diplomacy and compromise, removing US nuclear missiles in Turkey in exchange for the Soviet Union removing its nuclear missiles in Cuba.  The following year, he pursued peace with the Soviet Union, signing the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.

    In June 1963, Kennedy uttered the essential truth that can keep us alive today: “Above all, while defending our own vital interests, nuclear powers must avert those confrontations which bring an adversary to a choice of either a humiliating retreat or a nuclear war. To adopt that kind of course in the nuclear age would be evidence only of the bankruptcy of our policy–or of a collective death-wish for the world.”  

    It is urgent to return to the draft peace agreement between Russia and Ukraine of late March, based on the non-enlargement of NATO.  Today’s fraught situation can easily spin out of control, as the world has done on so many past occasions – yet this time with the possibility of nuclear catastrophe.  The world’s very survival depends on prudence, diplomacy, and compromise by all sides.

     

    This article is republished with the permission of the author. It was published earlier in www.other-news.info

    Image Credit: Scroll.in

  • Putin’s Folly: The Long Road to Self-Destruction

    Putin’s Folly: The Long Road to Self-Destruction

    Ever since President Putin ordered the occupation of Ukraine in a ‘Special Military Operation’ this February, he has been at the receiving end of a stream of bad news. Neither were the Russian Armed Forces welcomed with open arms, as they had expected, nor were they able to capture Kiev and force a regime change, as Putin had wanted. In the process, both their leadership and rank and file displayed spectacular incompetence and irretrievably destroyed the reputation of what was till then seen as one of the strongest militaries in the world.

    However, nothing could have truly prepared him for the nightmarish turn of events this September. In a brilliant display of operational art, the Ukrainian defence forces launched a counter offensive in the Kharkiv region, catching the Russian military leadership completely by surprise. Having earlier deceived them into reinforcing the Kherson sector by denuding forces deployed in the Kharkiv sector.

    The ensuing rout, it clearly was no organised retreat, resulted in prisoners being taken in their thousands, along with all manner of serviceable weapons, ammunition and equipment. This includes hundreds of tanks and armoured personnel carriers which the Ukrainians can use. Ironically, this may well make Russia the largest donor of military equipment to the Ukrainians! In addition, the Ukrainian military have been able to grab back approximately 9000sq kms of occupied territory in the Kharkiv

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  • Ukraine War: India’s Stature in the Emerging World Order

    Ukraine War: India’s Stature in the Emerging World Order

    The war between Russia and Ukraine has caused a major disruption not only in that region, but the entire world. Power centres are shifting; a new world order is emerging out of this global churn. The world anxiously waits for India to take a more active role in a bid to end hostilities. What will India do?

    India’s firm stand of neutrality about the conflict in Ukraine has attracted considerable attention from the world’s strategic thinkers and governments. In this regard, many see the rise of India as a future pole power of the 21st century, as the current world order has entered a phase of instability, conflict, and competition. The Ukraine war may be the tipping point for the Euro-American dominance in the last three centuries, as a multi-polar world order is emerging, albeit slowly. India’s stature in this world order transformation is critical, as the non-western countries that constitute two-thirds of the world will meticulously observe and monitor it. A careful analysis of the ongoing transformation of the world order amidst the massive cacophony of propaganda and a plethora of biased reports (masquerading as research and academic outputs) is a huge challenge for serious researchers and policymakers.

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  • TPF Analysis Series on Russia – Ukraine Conflict #2

    TPF Analysis Series on Russia – Ukraine Conflict #2

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    The First Paper of the Series – TPF Analysis Series on Russia – Ukraine Conflict #1
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    What’s in Ukraine for Russia? 

    In a press conference marking his first year in office, President Biden, on the question of Russia invading Ukraine, remarked that such an event would, “be the most consequential thing that’s happened in the world, in terms of war and peace, since World War Two”. [1] It has now been two months since Russia officially launched its “special military operation” in Ukraine, which the US and its allies consider an unjustified invasion of a sovereign state. The conflict in the Eurasian continent has drawn global attention to Europe and US-Russia tensions have ratcheted to levels that were prevalent during the Cold War. The conflict has also raised pertinent questions on understanding what exactly are Russian stakes in Ukraine and the latter’s role in the evolving security architecture of Europe. The second paper in this series will delve into these questions.

    The current Russian position stems from the experience that Russia, and Putin, gained while dealing with the West on a host of issues, not least of which was NATO expansion.

    The Ties that Bind

    An examination of post-Soviet history reveals that Russian preoccupation with security threats from NATO is not embedded in Russian geopolitics; instead, it has been reported that, early on, Russia was even agreeable to joining the military alliance. The current Russian position stems from the experience that Russia, and Putin, gained while dealing with the West on a host of issues, not least of which was NATO expansion. A line of argument sympathetic to Russia is President Putin’s contention that terms dictated to Russia during the post-Cold War settlements were unfair. The claim is a reference to Secretary of State James Baker’s statement on the expansion of NATO, “not an inch of NATO’s present military jurisdiction will spread in an eastern direction”, in 1990 in a candid conversation with Mikhael Gorbachev on the matter of reunification of Germany. [2] It could be argued that it is this commitment and subsequent violation through expansions of NATO is one of the main causes of the current conflict. 

    At the root of the problem was Russia’s security concerns – regarding both traditional and hybrid security – that ultimately led to the centralisation of power after a democratic stint under Yeltsin. Accordingly, Putin had put it in late 1999, “A strong state for Russia is not an anomaly, or something that should be combated, but, on the contrary, the source and guarantor of order, the initiator and the main driving force of any changes”. [3]

    Historically being a land power, Russia has viewed Ukraine as a strategically critical region in its security matrix. However, as the central control of Moscow weakened in the former USSR, the nationalist aspirations of the Ukrainian people began to materialise and Ukraine played a crucial role, along with the Russian Federation and Belarus, in dissolving the former Soviet Union. The two countries found themselves on opposite sides on extremely fundamental issues, such as security, economic partnership, post-Soviet order, and, not least, sovereignty. In Belovezh, in early December of 1991, when Russian President Boris Yeltsin, Ukrainian President Leonid Kravchuk and Belarusian leader Stanislav Shushkevich met to dissolve the USSR, major disagreements regarding the transitional phase and future of the republics erupted. Yeltsin expressed his desire for some sort of central control of the republics, whereas Kravchuk was vehemently opposed to any arrangement that might compromise his country’s sovereignty. Later, at the foundational ceremony of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), he stressed a common military, the most potent rejection of which came from Kravchuk. [4]

    Source: Wikimedia Commons

    The elephant in the room, however, was the status of Sevastopol, which housed the headquarters of the Black Sea Fleet. Yeltsin was quoted saying that “The Black Sea Fleet was, is and will be Russia’s. No one, not even Kravchuk will take it away from Russia”. [5] Though the issue was soon temporarily resolved –with the two countries dividing the fleet equally amongst themselves, it continued to dominate and sour their relationship. Russia, as the successor state of the USSR, wanted the base and the entire fleet in its navy. Yeltsin even offered gas at concessional rates to Ukraine if it handed over the city and nuclear weapons to Russia. The issue remained unresolved until the 1997 Friendship Treaty under which Ukraine granted Moscow the entire fleet and leased Sevastopol to Russia until 2017 (later extended).

    Ukraine, under Kravchuk and, later, Leonid Kuchma, struggled to tread a tightrope between Russia and the European Union. On one hand, it was economically knit with former Soviet Republics, and on the other, it was actively looking to get economic benefits from the EU. However, soon a slide towards the west was conspicuous. In 1994, it preferred a Partnership and Cooperation Agreement with the EU over CIS Customs Union, which was a Russian initiative. Later, in 1996, it declined to join a new group consisting of former Soviet Republics ‘On Deepening Integration’, scuttling the initiative, since its purpose was to bring Ukraine back into the Russian fold. [6] By 1998, the Kuchma government had formulated a ‘Strategy of Integration into the European Union’. [7]

    Nuclear weapons were another point of contention between the two. Ukraine was extremely reluctant to give up its arsenal, citing security threats from Russia. Kravchuk received a verbal ‘security guarantee’ from the US which forced Russia to “respect the independence, sovereignty, and territorial integrity of each nation” [8] in exchange for surrendering Ukraine’s nuclear weapons. 

    Notwithstanding the disputes, there was a great deal of cooperation between the two, especially after Kuchma’s re-election in 1999. Kuchma’s hook-up with authoritarianism distanced Kyiv from Brussels and brought it closer to Moscow. Ukraine agreed to join Russian initiatives of the Eurasian Economic Community as an observer and Common Economic Space as a full member. At home as well, his support in the eastern parts of the country, where ethnic Russians dwelled, increased dramatically, as evident in the 2002 Parliamentary Elections. [9] However, the bonhomie was soon disrupted by a single event.

    The Orange Revolution was Russia’s 9/11. [10] It dramatically altered Russian thinking on democracy and its ties with the West. It raised the prospect in Russia that Ukraine might be lost completely. It further made them believe the colour revolutions in former Soviet republics were CIA toolkits for regime change. More importantly, it made the Russians apprehensive of a similar revolution within their borders. As a result, the distrust between Russia and the West, and Russia and Ukraine grew considerably. As a nationalist, Victor Yushchenko formulated policies that directly hurt Russian interests. The two countries fought ‘Gas Wars’ in 2006 and 2009, which made both the EU and Russia uncomfortable with Ukraine as a gas transit country. Furthermore, Yushchenko bestowed the title of ‘Hero of Ukraine’ upon Stepan Bandera, a Nazi collaborator and perpetrator of the Holocaust, a decision that surely did not go well with Moscow.

    Geoeconomics: Ukraine as a Gas Transit Country

    The current war is the worst in Europe since the Second World War. Still, Ukraine continues to transit Russian gas through its land, Russia continues to pay for it, and Western Europe continues to receive the crucial resource. The war has shattered all the big bets on Russian dependence on Ukraine for delivering gas to Western Europe and has renewed the discourse on reducing European energy dependence on Russia. Since the EU imports 40% of its gas from Russia, almost a quarter of which flows through Ukraine, Kyiv has had leverage in dealing with Russians in the past. It has been able to extract favourable terms by either stopping or diverting gas for its own domestic use at a time of heightened tensions between Ukraine and Russia. As a result, the EU was directly drawn into the conflict between them, infructuating Moscow’s pressure tactics for a long.

    Moscow has made numerous attempts in the past to bypass Ukraine by constructing alternate pipelines. Nord Stream, the most popular of them, was conceived in 1997, as an attempt to decrease the leverage of the transit states. The pipeline was described as the “Molotov-Ribbentrop Pipeline” by Polish Defence Minister Radoslaw Sirkosi for the geoeconomic influence it gave to Russia. [11] Another project – the South Stream – was aimed at providing gas to the Balkans, and through it to Austria and Italy. The pipeline was conceived in the aftermath of the Orange Revolution and its construction was motivated by geoeconomics, rather than economic viability. It would have led to Russia bypassing Ukraine in delivering gas to the Balkans and Central Europe, thus seizing its significant leverage, and relegating it to vulnerable positions in which Moscow could have eliminated the gas subsidies Ukraine was being provided. [12]As a result of economic unviability, the project was abandoned in 2014.

    To a certain extent, the European Union has been complicit in making matters worse for Russia. For instance, during the 2009 ‘Gas War’ – that began due to Ukraine’s non-payment of gas debt to Russia – instead of holding Ukraine accountable, the EU countries blamed Russia for the gas crisis in Europe and asked Russia to resume gas supply to Ukraine. Later, realising the importance of Ukraine as a transit country, it reached an agreement with Kyiv that “recognized the importance of the further expansion and modernization of Ukraine’s gas transit system as an indispensable pillar of the common European energy infrastructure, and the fact that Ukraine is a strategic partner for the EU gas sector”. The agreement excluded Russia as a party, which saw it as undermining the collaboration between itself and Ukraine, and injuring its influence on the country. [13] The Russian grievance becomes even more palpable when we view the significant gas subsidies it has provided to Ukraine for more than two decades. 

    Similarly, the EU countries viewed Nord Stream 2 from a geostrategic and geo-economic perspective. In December last year, German Economic Affairs Minister Robert Habeck warned Russia of halting Nord Stream 2 if it attacks Ukraine. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz was quoted saying that he would do ‘anything’ to ensure that Ukraine remains a transit country for Russian gas. [14] In fact, the pipeline – that is set to double the capacity of gas delivered to the EU – has faced opposition from almost all Western European countries, the US, the EU as well as Ukraine, which has described it as ‘A dangerous Geopolitical Weapon’. [15] The pipeline had raised concerns amongst Ukrainians of losing a restraining factor on Moscow’s behaviour. [16] However, with the pipeline still inoperable, the Kremlin has already made the restraining factor ineffective.

    The Security Objective

    The Russian Federation is a country which spreads from the European Continent to Asia. In this giant nation, the hospitable region where people live is mainly on the European side, which also comprises main cities like St. Petersburg, Volgograd and the Capital City Moscow. Throughout history, Russia has seen invasions by Napoleon as well as Hitler, and the main area through which these invasions and wars happened was through Ukrainian land which gave them direct access to Russia – due to the lack of any geographical barriers. It was certainly a contributing factor towards the initial success of these invasions. Today, we might understand these events as Russia’s sense of vulnerability and insecurity if history is any indicator. 

    The Russian Federation also follows a similar approach to ensuring its security, survival and territorial integrity. Russia’s interest in Ukraine is as much geopolitical as cultural. Since Russians and Ukrainians were intrinsically linked through their culture and language, Ukraine quickly came to be seen as Russian land, with Ukrainians being recognized as ‘Little Russians’ (Kubicek, 2008), as compared to the “Great Russians”. They were consequently denied the formation of a distinct Ukrainian identity. Putin gave substance to this sentiment as, according to a US diplomatic cable leak, he had “implicitly challenged the territorial integrity of Ukraine, suggesting that Ukraine was an artificial creation sewn together from the territory of Poland, the Czech Republic, Romania, and especially Russia in the aftermath of the Second World War” during a Russia-NATO Council meeting. [17]

    Crimea and much of eastern Ukraine are ethnically Russian and desire closer ties with Russia. But moving further west, the people become increasingly cosmopolitan and it is mostly this population that seeks greater linkage with the Western European countries and membership into the EU and NATO. This in addition to the Euro Maidan protests is what Putin has used to justify the annexation of Crimea in 2014. The other security consideration was the threat it faced from the likelihood of NATO establishing a base in Crimea given its own presence in Sevastopol in the Black Sea. 

    In the current scenario, the second phase of Russian Military operation in the East and South has shown us the larger vulnerabilities Moscow has which are being countered through control of certain points in the region. By liberating the Donbass region in the east, Russia plans to create a buffer zone between itself and the west to stop future aggression and keep enemies at bay. But the extension of this buffer zone all the way to Odessa is indicative of other strategic considerations. Mariupol in the south of Ukraine is one of the many extended strategic points Russia now controls leading us to ask just why Mariupol is a game-changer in this conflict?

    The port city of Mariupol is a small area geographically, but it provides the land bridge for the Russian forces in the Crimean Peninsula to join the Military operation in the Donbas region. Moreover, it gives Russia a land bridge to Crimea from the Russian Mainland. According to General Sir Richard Barrons, former Commander of UK Joint Forces Command, Mariupol is crucial to Russia’s offensive movement, – “When the Russians feel they have successfully concluded that battle, they will have completed a land bridge from Russia to Crimea and they will see this a major strategic success.” [18]

    Source: ISW (Assessment on 09 May, 2022)

    If the port city of Mariupol is important for the creation of a land corridor, then the Sea of Azov which is adjacent to it is even more important due to its strategic position. [19] The three geopolitical reasons why this sea is important are as follows:

    1. The Sea of Azov is a major point for the economic and military well-being of Ukraine. Proximity to the frontlines of the Donbass region where the fighting between Ukrainian forces and Pro-Russian separatists is taking place makes the control of this sea vital to the Russian military as it helps weaken Ukrainian defence in the region via control of the Kerch Strait.
    2. Controlling the Sea of Azov is strategically important for Russia, to maintain its control in the Crimean Peninsula, which allows Moscow to resupply its forces through the Strait of Kerch.
    3. Finally, it also involves Eurasian politics into why Russia needs to control this region and here the discussion of the Volga-Don canal which links the Caspian Sea with the Sea of Azov comes to the fore. Russia has always used this canal to move warships between the Caspian Sea to the Black Sea and project its power in both regions. Moreover, Russia sees this connection as a significant strategic advantage in any future crisis.

    If Mariupol and the Sea of Azov are considered the most important strategically valuable features by Russia, there also exists the crucial points of Kherson and Odessa which will give Russia complete dominance of the Ukrainian coast line, thus giving larger access and control in the Black Sea region that has the potential to be militarised in the future in conflicts with the West. Moreover, it gives Russia a land corridor to Transnistria which is a Pro-Russian separatist area in Moldova and an opening into the Romanian border through Odessa, thus balancing the build-up of NATO forces in the region. 

    Conclusion

    The Ukrainian crisis is as much the West’s doing as Russia’s and an ear sympathetic to the Russian narrative might even say that the West took advantage of Russia when it was vulnerable immediately following the collapse of the Soviet Union in negotiations regarding the German state reunification and NATO enlargement.

    The bottom line is that, presently, Putin views NATO as an existential security threat to the Russian state and sees the US and its allies’ support of Ukraine as a challenge. Ukraine’s membership in the EU and NATO is a non-starter for Russia and pitting a Ukraine, that has a symbiotic relationship with Russia at all levels, against a slightly diminished but still formidable great power will have consequences for the security architecture and geopolitics of the region.  The Ukrainian crisis is as much the West’s doing as Russia’s and an ear sympathetic to the Russian narrative might even say that the West took advantage of Russia when it was vulnerable immediately following the collapse of the Soviet Union in negotiations regarding the German state reunification and NATO enlargement. On some level, NATO countries recognize the fact that Ukraine and Georgia can never be allowed membership into the North Atlantic alliance because the alternative of wilfully ignoring Russia’s security and national interests is just a recipe for disaster and might just launch the region into the single biggest armed conflict since World War 2. 

    References:

    [1] The White House. (2022, January 20). Remarks by president Biden in the press conference. https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/2022/01/19/remarks-by-president-biden-in-press-conference-6/

    [2] Savranskaya, S., Blanton, T. S., & Zubok, V. (2010). Masterpieces of history: The peaceful end of the Cold War in Europe, 1989. Central European University Press.

    [3] Putin, Vladimir. “Rossiya na Rubezhe Tysyacheletii,” Nesavisimaya Gazeta, December 30, 1999, quoted in D’Anieri, Paul (2019). Ukraine and Russia: From Civilized Divorce to Uncivil War. Cambridge University Press.

    [4] Ibid

    [5] Rettie, J. and James Meek, “Battle for Soviet Navy,” The Guardian, January 10, 1992

    [6] Ibid, no. iii

    [7] Solchanyk, R., Ukraine and Russia: The Post-Soviet Transition. Rowman and Littlefield Publishers. 2000.

    [8] Goldgeier, J. and Michael McFaul. “Power and Purpose: U.S. Policy Toward Russia after the Cold War”, Brookings Institution Press, 2003

    [9] Ibid, no. iii

    [10]  The comment was made by Gleb Pavlovskii, a Russian Political Scientist. quoted in Ben Judah (2013), Fragile Empire: How Russia Fell In and Out of Love with Vladimir Putin. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, p. 85.

    [11] Ibid, no. iii

    [12] Wigell, M. and  A. Vihma, Geopolitics versus geoeconomics: the case of Russia’s geostrategy and its effects on the EU. International Affairs, 92: 605-627. May 6, 2016

    [13] Ibid, no. iii

    [14] Harper, J. (2021, December 23). Nord stream 2: Who wins, who loses? Deutsche Welle. https://www.dw.com/en/nord-stream-2-who-wins-who-loses/a-60223801

    [15] Ukraine: Nord stream 2 a ‘dangerous geopolitical weapon’. (2021, August 22). DW.COM. https://www.dw.com/en/ukraine-nord-stream-2-a-dangerous-geopolitical-weapon/a-58950076

    [16] Pifer, S. “Nord Stream 2: Background, Objectives and Possible Outcomes”, Brookings, April 2021 https://www.brookings.edu/research/nord-stream-2-background-objections-and-possible-outcomes/

    [17] WikiLeaks. (2008, August 14). UKRAINE, MAP, AND THE GEORGIA-RUSSIA CONFLICT, Canonical ID:08USNATO290_a. https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/08USNATO290_a.html

    [18] Gardner, F. (2022, March 21). Mariupol: Why Mariupol is so important to Russia’s plan. BBC News. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-60825226

    [19] Blank, S. (2018, November 6). Why is the Sea of Azov so important? Atlantic Council. https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/ukrainealert/why-is-the-sea-of-azov-so-important/

    Featured Image Credits: Financial Times

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    TPF Analysis Series on Russia – Ukraine Conflict #1
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