> It is a fact that over the past 30 years we have been patiently trying to come to an agreement with the leading NATO countries regarding the principles of equal and indivisible security in Europe. In response to our proposals, we invariably faced either cynical deception and lies or attempts at pressure and blackmail, while the North Atlantic alliance continued to expand despite our protests and concerns.
He is completely correct. After the collapse of the USSR, Russia repeatedly tried to join NATO. It was rebuffed by the US - why? Instead of forging a new alliance, the west preferred to uphold old friend-enemy distinctions, and instead moved the NATO ever closer to Russia‘s border, ignoring its security needs and breaking old promises (as evidenced by the embassy cable leaks).
Then, Ukraine shelled the Russian civilian minority population for years after the manufactured coup of the 2014 Euromaidan revolution. It started to suppress Russian language and culture. The Azov Nazi army committed cruel war crimes. Guarantees regarding the black sea fleet were no longer trustworthy. Essentially, they „kicked the dog until it bites“ and then blamed the dog. Putin repeatedly and very clearly communicated his (reasonable) terms for peace, and still people act like he can’t be reasoned with. Instead the West decided to send Ukrainian men into a meatgrinder, probably until the supply of recruits is exhausted.
Prominent establishment people like John Mearsheimer have been warning that this would be the inevitable outcome of Nato expansion, all the way back in the 90s, and that it was the greatest strategic error of the west. They were ignored by the same people that lied about Weapons of Mass Destruction to start another war.
The US State Department has a lot of blood on its hands.
>> After the collapse of the USSR, Russia repeatedly tried to join NATO.
That never happened. You will no find no trace of that in State Duma transcripts, policy papers or any other contemporary source. I can show you a long trail of adopted laws and doctrines for countries that eventually joined NATO (or failed in their bid), but nothing of this sort exists for Russia. It's a hoax invented to justify the invasion of Ukraine.
>> instead moved the NATO ever closer to Russia‘s border, ignoring its security needs and breaking old promises
The start of NATO expansion talks were preceded by a treaty between NATO and Russia declaring the respect for third countries freely choosing their allies. The narrative that NATO promised never to accept Eastern Europe (and broke that promise) was invented much later and conflicts with personal accounts and written agreements from that time.
>> Prominent establishment people like John Mearsheimer
His infamous lecture that presents a totally warped view of the world is the single most damaging piece of propaganda related to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. If that's what you're basing your views on, then it's no surprise that you are totally off the mark.
Even left-wing Guardian admits as much, you can find easily find other sources: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/nov/04/ex-nato-head-s...
The West offered the "Partnership for Peace" program at the beginning of the 90s a distraction simply because they didn't see Russia as partners, but as defeated enemies. Even if we concede for a moment that this promise never happened, lots of people, among them Joe Biden, admitted back then that this would be a move that Russia could never accept. I think Bidens words were it would create a "vigorous and hostile reaction".
You can of course claim that this does not justify the invasion, but then you basically say Russia can never have legitimate security interests that run counter to the west.
> The narrative that NATO promised never to accept Eastern Europe (and broke that promise) was invented much later
That has been claimed often but proven wrong by the cable leaks.
> His infamous lecture that presents a totally warped view of the world
This is just a generic ad-hominem. If you have substantial rebuttals, I'm eager to hear them.
I don't put much value into what the Guardian write on topics like these. Joining a major international organization is a huge undertaking that involves thousands of people from many institutions over many years. Countries that joined NATO or tried to (Ukraine, Georgia) have a long paper trail of adopted laws, policy documents, parliamentary discussions and other bureaucratic artifacts. Show me Russia's trail.
For example, here's Polish timeline:
* 31 March 1991. Warsaw Pact dissolved.
* 11 March 1992. NATO secretary general visits Poland and says that the door to NATO is open.
* 10 April 1992. Polish defense minister and chief of staff attend NATO Military Committee meeting for the first time.
* 1 September 1993. Polish president sends a letter to NATO stating that NATO membership was a top priority of Polish foreign policy.
* 10 January 1994. NATO summit in Brussels. NATO proposes partnership in exercises, peacekeeping and humanitarian operations.
* 12 January 1994. Polish president meets with Clinton in Prague and accepts the offer.
* 2 February 1994. Polish prime minister signs partnership framework at NATO HQ in Brussels.
* 12 September 1994. First joint exercises.
* 26 January 1996. NATO invites Poland to individual dialogue with NATO.
* 8 February 1996. Polish ministers of defense and foreign affairs send a latter to NATO accepting the invitation.
* 4 April 1996. Poland presents a vision for cooperation with NATO.
* 7 May 1996. The start of one-on-one meetings between NATO and Poland within the individual dialogue framework.
* 8 July 1997. NATO invites Poland into the organization.
* 16 September 1997. Offical accession talks begin.
* 14 November 1997. Polish foreign minister accepts the invitation.
* 16 December 1997. Polish foreign minister signs the official accession protocols.
* 28 December 1997. Polish ambassador attends a meeting of NATO's North Atlantic Council for the first time.
* 2 February 1998. Canada becomes the first NATO member to ratify Poland's accession protocols.
* 17 December 1998. Polish defense minister attends a meeting of NATO defense ministers for the first time.
* 29 January 1999. NATO secretary general sends a formal NATO invitation to Poland.
* 17 February 1999. Polish parliament ratifies the North Atlantic Treaty.
* 12 March 1999. Poland becomes NATO member and the official ceremony is held.
And this is only a very superficial overview. Every major step was preceded by tons of discussions, minutes from meetings, transcripts from debates. If you printed it all out, you'd need a dump truck to move all those documents.
What's Russia's timeline? What policy papers were adopted, what agreements signed towards becoming a NATO member?
>> That has been claimed often but proven wrong by the cable leaks.
NATO allegedly assured Soviet leadership in 1990 that NATO would not expand eastwards. Multiple Soviet participants of those meetings have denied that. When the hoax first appeared, Soviet foreign minister Shevardnadze gave a lengthy interview, in which he not only denies those claims, but points out that they are anachronistic and don't fit the timeline of events. In 1990, Soviet leadership didn't forsee collapse of Warsaw Pact and the USSR itself. According to him, the possible NATO status of countries like Poland was never discussed, not with NATO, not within Warsaw Pact, not within the Communist Party circles in Moscow. That was totally out of the question and beyond comprehension, there was no need to seek any assurances.
Before Eastern Europe started negotiating entry, NATO and Russia signed a treaty in which they agreed to respect the right of other countries to forge alliances how they prefer. That was in May 1997. Former Warsaw Pact countries were invited into NATO in July 1997 and official negotiations began in September.
So even if such assurance existed, Russia and NATO agreed in that 1997 to the opposite before any Warsaw Pact country started official negotiations with NATO.
>> This is just a generic ad-hominem. If you have substantial rebuttals, I'm eager to hear them.
There are many ways he manipulates facts into his narrative, but I'll give you one very clear and non-political example how he misleads his audience. He shows a map of Russian share in European gas consumption at 8:48 (https://youtu.be/JrMiSQAGOS4?t=525) and says that Eastern Europe is heavily dependant on Russian gas. It shows countries like Finland at 100%. While it is true that all of Finland's gas comes from Russia, natural gas makes up only 2% of all fuels consumed in Finland. This is not by chance, but by official government policy, which keeps Russian gas consumption low in order not to give Russians a way to extort Finland as could happen if Finland depended on Russian gas to a great degree. Other countries in Eastern Europe have pursued the same policy and have low share of gas in overall consumption, even if all of it comes from Russia.
Or if you want another example, then at 6:10 (https://youtu.be/JrMiSQAGOS4?t=370), Mearsheimer shows a map of Ukraine divided into red and yellow depicting Ukrainian and Russian language areas, saying how Ukraine is linguistically (and not only) "a badly divided country". That's extremely misleading. Ukraine is a bilingual country, where Ukrainian language is dominant in western part of the country and Russian language is in the eastern part, but there is no divide, because most people speak both languages and they inhabit a shared cultural space instead of living in parallel societies that don't mix due to language barriers. Here's a great map illustrating that, pay attention to vertical bars: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Map12_b.png Purple bars represent penetration of Ukrainian language and blue bars Russian language.
In regions like Kharkiv, only 10% of the population speaks only one language, evenly either only Russian or only Ukranian, so there's no reason to paint it as Russian. Out of 20 people, 18 speak both languages, 1 speaks only Ukranian, and 1 only Russian. Does this look like a "deep divide" to you?
‘Russia was provoked into this war because of things that happened 30 years ago’ is such bullshit apologia.
NATO was a defensive pact against Russia- and just because the Soviet Union collapsed does not mean Russia is somehow now moral or benign. They are run by brital KGB thug who faked his country’s 9/11 so they could build some patriotic solidarity killing Chechnyans.
What reductionist drivel. Discussion involves making actual points with logic and examples, in this case that would be examples about why Russia's actions (killing tens of thousands of civilians when the year prior to the war only 21 people were killed over territorial conflict, mainly by mines) and motivations (launching a war of aggression against a neighboring country that did nothing in the immediate time frame to justify such a murderous ESCALLATION on Russia's part, there was no immediate need to resort to overwhelming force) and are not evil (even though their troops use rape, pillage, and keep authority over their own through violence).
You can categorize some motives as evil, but the definition of evil is quite relative. You could extend it to "disturbing the peace", which Russia clearly did.
Big fact is that is was not unprovoked. The war started in 2014 when the US forced Ukraine to pick a side. The best thing for Ukrainians would be neutrality. But the US did not allow that.
I mean, "no reason" is understood to mean no good reason.
Say you walk next door and shoot your neighbour dead. Many people, even when they know it's because he made friends with his other next-door neighbour when you demanded he only be your friend, will say that you killed your neighbour for no reason.
> "being evil“ is a child's explanation
Fair enough. It was because Putin is a good person who was lonely and wanted to be loved and appreciated by his closest neighbour. That neighbour made him sad by befriending other people, and Putin had no choice but to slaughter thousands in an attempt to regain the exclusive friendship of his closest neighbour.
I don’t know that I agree. At least personally, I think there is a big distinction between a bad reason and no reason. No reason means random. A bad reason you can at least seek to understand - what caused this person to make this decision? We’re they abused? Mentally ill? Etc etc.
America would be a better place if it had more people furious that America is turning into Russia, and fewer people trying to justify that it's not quite as bad.
There's no comparison at all. The vast majority of the people who died in Iraq were killed by other Iraqis in a sectarian conflict. Yes, it was sparked by the US invasion, and they definitely should be blamed for both invading in the first place and for fucking it up once they did, but American soldiers did not, with very very few exceptions, go around indiscriminately killing civilians and leveling cities block by block WW2-style, like the Russians did in Bucha, Mariupol, etc.
At an individual moral level maybe it’s worse for a soldier to kill civilians directly, than to kill them indirectly by overthrowing the government and destabilizing the health system. But if you’re comparing nations I think you have to look at a macro level, not at the level of individual morality. “Team America: World Police” foreign policy has a much higher aggregate body count than Russia’s territorial expansionist foreign policy.
Yes. Saddam Hussein was one of the worst leaders in history and the neocons legitimately thought they could create a free market utopia in Iraq (lmao), check out Imperial Life in the Emerald City. They fucked up horribly and made Iraq worse because they were incompetent morons who fired the entire army and didn't bother to make sure people actually had basic services. Putin wants to reestablish the Russian Empire and is going to war in Ukraine for that reason, per his speech on February 22nd before the war.
It's like the difference between a drunk driver who runs over 12 kids and a school shooter. Both are bad but one is worse
It was a war done because Cheney and Rumsfeld hated Hussein and justified it with bullshit aspirational nonsense that didn't work. It was out of charity in the same way communist revolutions are, and in practice it was an atrocity.
Funny, that sounds like the Ukrainian public’s opinion about Zelenskyy before the war started. Dismal leader with rock bottom approval ratings and high levels of corruption. Still, that definitely doesn’t justify foreign invasion.
One was an electorate in a democratic country being disillusioned about a leader they freely elected. The other is and a genocidal dictator who murdered the previous dictatorial leadership to get to power, gassed civilians and launched wars of aggression that killed hundreds of thousands. Not sure how those two "sound alike" to you. Care to elaborate?
“Whataboutism” is only a thing if the comparison is in bad faith (i.e. irrelevance or significantly different scales of atrocity).
Directly comparing one unjustified, illegal and unjust war (Iraq) with another one (Ukraine) isn’t whataboutism, it’s a legitimate criticism of hypocrisy.
> It's important to remember that they invaded Ukraine for no reason,
That's extremely reductive. The situation is a bit more complex than that. I don't think they were right to invade -- not remotely -- I think it's abhorrent. But there is a little more historical context with the US and other regional tensions than Putin rolling a 1D6 and deciding that meant "hey, I'm bored, let's invade".
If it's more complex, why not add details of that complexity to the discussion instead your vague comments? You know, add know depth, knowledge, or detail instead of just saying 'but it's more complex'? Perhaps because they details don't justify a war of aggression? Because the details paint the aggressor in a starker light than your incredibly lacking 'a bit more complex'?
Hey ROTMetro, nothing of the kind. I dunno, you sound kind of hostile about it.
All it is that I read up on it last year. I've forgotten most of the details -- I'm not really interested in geopolitics and war, and I'm very interested in accessibility, botany, programming, science fiction and lots of other things, so the boring stuff gets crowded out pretty easily.
I'm sure it's not hard to find the same or similar sources that relate the geopolitical context of the Ukraine Invasion.
Amnesty International, the UN and Human Rights Watch documented very well how Ukrainian extremists and paramilitary organizations tortured and put people randomly into detentions after the allegedly USA friendly government was installed in the Ukraine in 2014. Here are some money quotes which I found interesting:
September 2014:
“Members of the Aidar territorial defence battalion, operating in the north Luhansk region, have been involved in widespread abuses, including abductions, unlawful detention, ill-treatment, theft, extortion, and possible executions.
The Aidar battalion is one of over thirty so-called volunteer battalions to have emerged in the wake of the conflict, which have been loosely integrated into Ukrainian security structures as they seek to retake separatist held areas.
In the course of a two-week research mission to the region, an Amnesty International researcher interviewed dozens of victims and witnesses of the abuses, as well as local officials, army commanders and police officers in the area and representatives of the Aidar battalion.
Our findings indicate that, while formally operating under the command of the Ukrainian security forces combined headquarters in the region members of the Aidar battalion act with virtually no oversight or control, and local police are either unwilling or unable to address the abuses.”
“On the pro-Kyiv side, Amnesty International has particular concerns about Right Sector, a volunteer militia created by a pro-Kyiv nationalist political grouping .2 Former Right Sector prisoners detailed a horrifying spectrum of abuses, including mock executions, hostagetaking, extortion, extremely violent beatings, death threats and the denial of urgently-needed medical care. Using an abandoned Pioneer camp near the village of Velykomyhailivka, near Dnipropetrovsk, as an ad hoc prison, Right Sector has reportedly held dozens of civilian prisoners as hostages, extorting large amounts of money from them and their families”
“On 24 June 2016, a number of IDPs, together with a ‘self-defence’ group in Odesa, seized a communal building after numerous attempts at obtaining support from the regional authority to solve their housing problems.143 OHCHR notes a worrying tendency to resolve pressing socio-economic and political issues with the help of voluntary battalions and paramilitary groups.”
“In most of the nine cases Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch investigated, pro-government forces, including members of so-called volunteer battalions, initially detained the individuals and then handed them over to the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), who eventually moved them into the regular criminal justice system. Some were later exchanged for persons held by separatists and others released without trial.
In three cases detailed in this report the SBU allegedly continued the enforced disappearances, keeping the individuals in unacknowledged detention for periods ranging from six weeks to 15 months. One individual was exchanged, the other two simply released without trial. With regard to two of the individuals, there is no record whatsoever of their detention.
The June 2016 UN report noted that the cases of incommunicado detention and torture brought to their attention in late 2015 and early 2016 “mostly implicate SBU” and specifically mentioned the SBU compound in Kharkiv as an alleged place of unofficial detention.
Based on the research findings detailed in this report, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch believe unlawful, unacknowledged detentions have taken place in SBU premises in Kharkiv, Kramatorsk, Izyum, and Mariupol. We received compelling testimony from a range of sources, including recently released detainees, that as of June 2016 as many as 16 people remain in secret detention at the SBU premises in Kharkiv. Ukrainian authorities have denied operating any other detention facilities than their only official temporary detention center in Kyiv and denied having any information regarding the alleged abuses by SBU documented in this report.
Most interviewees told Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch they were tortured before their transfer to SBU’s facilities. Several also alleged that after being transferred to SBU premises they were, variously, beaten, subjected to electric shocks, and threatened with rape, execution, and retaliation against family members, in order to induce them to confess to involvement with separatism-related criminal activities or to provide information.“
“Members of extreme right-wing groups also conducted forceful and discriminatory actions against the Roma community. On 18 April, members of C14 extreme right-wing group forcibly confined Roma people at the main train station in Kyiv, checking IDs and searching personal belongings.128 Also, following threats to forcefully evict Roma residents, members of C14 burned down a Roma camp in Kyiv on 21 April. The police were present, but did not prevent the attack from happening”
“Since the beginning of 2018, members of radical groups such as C14, Right Sector, Traditsii i Poryadok (Traditions and Order), Karpatska Sich and others have carried out at least two dozen violent attacks, threats, or instances of intimidation in Kyiv, Vinnitsa, Uzhgorod, Lviv, Chernivtsi, Ivano-Frankivsk, and other Ukrainian cities. Law enforcement authorities have rarely opened investigations. In the cases in which they did, there is no indication that authorities took effective investigative measures to identify the attackers, even in cases in which the assailants publicly claimed responsibility on social media.”
Yes, amnesty is certainly flawed and disliked by the USA. They are even banned in Russia. But you're dismissing the reports from Human Rights Watch and the office of the UN for human rights which I linked above. I think the UN's reports are "useful".
So, what do those NGOs have to say about Russia? Ukraine didn't start this little affair, remember. No amount of gaslighting or blogspam is going to change that.
I think you are arguing in bad faith. The UN is an intergovernmental org, which by definition can't be operated outside of government control (it consists out of member states' governments!). And neither Das Erste is an NGO. Das Erste is legitimized through public mandate by the people in Germany.
> So, what do those NGOs have to say about Russia?
Nothing good, but you could click through the links if you were genuinely interested.
