Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley): During a speech at the EU Parliament’s foreign affairs committee on Thursday, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg clearly and repeatedly acknowledged that Putin made the decision to invade Ukraine because of fears of NATO expansionism.
There are back channel talks going on and what Stoltenberg says here is to soften the blow of a pending negotiated peace where NATO is going to have to make major concessions to Russia . The war has actually empowered Russia and it is in no mood to take any more crap from the West. Putin warned when negotiations broke down there could be "military consequences"-- and he is known as somebody who does not bluff.
The tragedy of this war is that it had to happen before the criminal dumb ass West could be forced to the negotiating table.
I consider this war a war crime. There should be tribunals but these will never happen. NATO deliberately plotted the destruction of Ukraine. From 2014 to 2022 it was preparing the Ukraine military for war against Russia. Zelensky was groomed for 3 years preparing him for his wicked role in this fiasco. He was elected president in 2019on the promise of peace. In April of 2022 he tried to open peace negotiations but British prime minister Boris Johnson was dispatched to Kiev to stop them.
Stoltenberg is a traitor to Europe but apparently most Europeans as gullible as they are don't see him as such.
SNAFU .... Situation Normal All Fucked Up( a popular military acronym)
I keep asking myself where is the outrage? It appears we are incapable of it.
Jens Stoltenberg, gets CAUGHT - saying the quiet parts OUT LOUD.
Sure, it's only confirming what the reality-based-community already KNEW ... But it's nice to hear reality being acknowledged for a change.
Not only was the invasion of Ukraine PROVOKED... It was DELIBERATELY PROVOKED, by the rulers of the Empire, in DC, London and Brussels.
Just as the US was prepared to fight a Nuclear war, over Soviet Missiles in Cuba, just minutes from DC... So too, are the Russians ready to fight - to prevent the US from placing Nukes just minutes from Moscow.
It's sort of like then Ambassador Burns put it, in his famous email on the universal political orientation in Russia, across ALL political tendencies, on NATO Expansion into Ukraine and Georgia (thank you WikiLeaks) ... "Nyet means NYET!". If only the Monoparty's NeoCon Death Cult had listened.
Western War propaganda has a long history. My father who fought and was injured in WW1 told me as WW2 was looming not to believe the war propaganda he had about how evil the Germans were in doing things like ripping babies out of their mothers and dashing on the ground ;or raping nuns and then killing them etc etc. So when the second chapter WW2 arrived I was more sceptical and long after the war had ended I managed to research some of the English war propaganda I had been subjected to. And found like my father before me truth is the first causality of capitalism's wars .Same thing when I was conscripted into. the royal air force and told we were bombing North Korea because they were evil. George Orwell would have been pleased to see how accurate 1984 is.
"Anyone who speaks out against US foreign policy relating to Russia online is always immediately accused of 'parroting Kremlin narratives' by empire apologists mindlessly regurgitating what they’ve been told to believe by outlets like The Washington Post."
The dipshit-brush paints even more broadly than that. I was called a Putin stooge for criticizing Tammy Duckworth for yoking domestic disaster relief to yet more Ukraine largesse, and was told I must have loved GW Bush, yappety yackedy yada. So dumb it was almost brilliant, because what do you tell people with no clue that they're the ones who have moved (of course I hated Bush, for the same reasons I hate the Empire now) and that their brains have been hijacked and their politics subsumed by propaganda-fueled tribalistic infernos?
This proxy war has gifted American sheep the opportunity to wake up and smell the bullshit.
When a superpower taunts and mocks and belittles and provokes a former superpower, that is righteous. When the recipient of the superpower’s audacious behavior responds defensively, that is aggression! Nowhere in any court of law, anywhere on the planet can such utter nonsense be upheld or ruled acceptable.
This divide in the American society where a ludicrous narrative can be swallowed is a microcosm of the pretentious American Experiment.
Most people that I know believe that the first European immigrants didn’t arrive with a thought of adapting to the indigenous population, but saw that power and violence and killing could eventually force the indigenous people to adapt to the new arrivals...or die.
But very few people that I know believe that the American government is wrong to take that same mindset in its interactions with other governments. So the genocide of our founders gives our leaders license to follow no international laws, engage in murder and theft and occupation and dictatorship, and such license is extended to no other nation.
This fallacious patriotism is a great test for our age of social media. Of course the SM is dominated by the false narratives of the imperial power, but whereas those narratives were previously largely uncontested, now they are forced to adapt to the truth, and the acts of censorship, eliminating platforms for communication, smearing truth tellers, is ample evidence that speech isn’t free, and it never was!
So anybody who cares about waking up the American sheep can support the truth tellers that are making the imperialists nervous. Small contributions for many folks can keep a lot of good people doing good work.
Everything you need to see and hear is out there, there are no conspiracy theories. Everything is happening in plain sight and we keep being told not to believe our own eyes. Our natural instincts and sensors are being blunted and confused by awful people on power trips.
“Because the US intelligence and military leaders are looking at the war in Ukraine through this prism, the analysts and their managers, for the most part, face enormous pressure to conclude that Russia is a feckless and incompetent near-peer adversary and cannot last.
I continue to believe that the assumptions about Russia’s alleged failure is ignoring the contravening narrative:
The Russian economy is robust and healthy despite Western sanctions.
Russia’s political influence in the world is growing, not shrinking. BRICS is a case in point.
Russia is inflicting enormous casualties on Ukraine’s military and decimating infrastructure critical to the Ukrainian military campaign.
Russia’s defense industry has ramped up to levels of production that the West cannot match.
Russia’s seemingly unlimited access to natural resources, energy and rare earth minerals strengthens Russia’s military position in the world.
Russia enjoys a massive technological advantage over NATO in terms of electronic warfare, air defense systems, mine laying vehicles and hypersonic missiles.
Russian leaders and their people genuinely believe they face an existential threat from the West.
Ukraine is totally dependent on the West to provide money and weapons to continue to fight.”?
Stoltenberg would have to make that admission -or go down in history as a fool or charlatan. But he likely opines that in spite of that background, Russia still didn't have the moral right to embark on denazification of Ukraine, if he even believes Nazis were running the show in that corrupt country.
Amen, Caitlin, with a few caveats. Stoltenberg is telling only a partial truth here. There is far more in the way of ‘provocation’ than just Ukraine joining NATO. At the risk of being accused of ‘parroting Kremlin narratives’- which I am not; any duplication of these truths by Putin or other members of the Russian government is simply evidence that Putin and/or the Russian government is telling the truth. With that out of the way, off we go:
1. The putsch regime in Kiev came to power by and through the decades long efforts of the US Empire to bring Ukraine into the empire. Nuland has openly bragged about how much money the US has spent over DECADES to bring about the atrocity which is the government of Ukraine since 2014. It conspired with the Nazis who largely inhabit western Ukraine to get it done.
2. Nuland and the US ‘ambassador’ to Ukraine (who now holds that post in Athens; God help the Greeks) were caught on a taped telephone conversation before the coup was over picking the people who were going to be in charge of the putsch regime. Lo and behold, they were precisely the US tools who were put in charge. Quelle surpris! Not.
3. Immediately, the new regime abandoned its constitutional commitment to neutrality, and banned the Russian language in the entire country, including Donetsk and Lugansk, which is the only language the vast majority of the residents there speak.
4. Crimea is a special case. The ban on Russian applied there as well. But, 20 years plus earlier, its residents voted in a referendum to remain in the Russian Federation. Ukraine paid no attention, and marched in. Russia had been too weakened to help Crimea resist, but retained its key port in Sevastopol, by some sort of arrangement with the Ukrainian government.
4. It was clear that said arrangement was going to go away, creating for Russia an immediate existential threat- the takeover of the Black Sea and Russia’s only reliable warm-water port- by the US Empire. So, at the invitation of the vast majority of people in Crimea, Russia took military action to make certain that did not occur.
5. This made Nuland & Company hopping mad, as this was the primary initial goal of installing the putsch regime. The 2d referendum held in Crimea, unsurprisingly, turned out exactly the way the first one did 20 years earlier.
6. Incidentally, although I have not seen any comments on this before, the fact that the putsch took place at the exact same time as the Winter Olympics in Sochi could not have been accidental. The fact that Russia held them was owlshit stupid, but the fact that they have been held at all anywhere- summer and winter- ever since world championships in all of the events in the Games became routine is owlshit stupid.
7. To the extent that the Nazi militias in Ukraine were not already trying to commit obvious genocide on the Russian people living in Donetsk and Lugansk, those efforts began in earnest immediately.
8. An agreement was made to establish a federal structure in the ‘new’ Ukraine that would guarantee that the people in Donetsk and Lugansk would be allowed to live in peace and use their own language. That agreement was agreed with France and Germany as guarantors. It was not paid the least attention by the putsch regime. The people of Donetsk and Lugansk declared their independence, and asked to become a part of the Russian Federation.
9. Putin refused, continuing his, as he has as much as admitted, pointless ‘diplomacy’ with the Empire. It took the public statements of Germany and France that their participation in the agreement above referenced was entirely in bad faith- after the war began in earnest- to convince him how foolish he had been.
10. However, Putin and Lavrov continued to beat that dead horse until it became clear that the Ukrainian army, led now by the Nazis with whom the US for so long supported, was on the verge of a major offensive to de-Russianize the two breakaway provinces. This was after 9 years of efforts to do the same thing that resulted in at least 11,000 deaths of the residents there, and untold devastation.
11. The Russian army began to move closer to Ukraine in response, prompting the U.S. to start predicting an ‘invasion’.
12. At the same time, the Russian Duma, under significant pressure from their constituents to finally DO SOMETHING, passed overwhelmingly what we call legislation that had the twofold purpose of recognizing the breakaway republics of Donetsk and Lugansk, and heeding their desperate requests for help, and Putin finally approved it.
13. At that point, as the Ukrainians were beginning their version of the final solution of the ‘Russian problem’ in Ukraine, Russia ‘invaded’.
14. It is critical to realize that there are huge numbers of people in Russia who think of themselves as Russian who have lots of relations among people who think of themselves as Russian who live in Ukraine. The disinformation manufactured by Nuland & Co. that ordinary Russians cared not a fig about any of this, that it was all ‘Putin’ could not be further from the truth.
15. Ukraine couldn’t keep the lights on without the continuous funneling of cash for that purpose coming from the Empire. It is, for all practical purposes, a part of NATO now. Or, if you prefer, a NATO stooge.
16. Scandinavia had become neoliberal tools of the Empire a while back. It’s official embrace of the Empire had been unofficial for a while; in some cases, a long while. Very little has changed, if you look at it through any Russian eyes.
17. The importance of Ukraine’s push to join NATO means little, in and of itself. It is critical to Russia because of what it signaled- the beginning of the long-held Empire fantasy of destroying Russia. Not just effecting ‘regime change’ as in Putin being gone, but the breakup of the Russian Federation itself, dividing the spoils (so the pathetic Western Europeans hope) with them. I’ve seen the maps these lunatics drew up in places where official US military policy is set forth and discussed. PUBLICLY. This is no secret. A commitment from Ukraine not to join NATO would have signaled to Russia that the Empire was at least considering backing away. Even then, it took the impending slaughter on an industrial scale of its compatriots in Ukraine for Russia to finally do what it did in Crimea 8 years earlier. By then, it was clear that the risks posed to it and its people were as existential as the loss of access to the Black Sea would have been in 2014.
I have nothing but the highest regard for Chris Hedges and Noam Chomsky. They have been leaders in fighting for Justice for, combined, well over 100 years. However, I respectfully disagree with them when they say, though the ‘invasion’ was massively provoked, that it was unjustified. If there has ever been a ‘justified’ use of military force, this was it. And, because of the sequence of events described above, there is more than a fig leaf’s evidence that it wasn’t an invasion at all. It was an intervention on behalf of two independent republics that were in extremis and at their long-pending requests.
That went a little longer than I imagined it might. But, as always, well done, Caitlin.
it's very similar to the UK where criticising the state of Israel is routinely labelled as anti-semitism with the direct aim of shutting down criticism
I just did a search of the NYT and was surprised not to find any mention of Stoltenberg’s statement. Just kidding. ;>) The Times and other western propaganda rags know what to print and what not to print without being told.
The situation is actually a little worse, a little more brazen than described - because admitting a new member to NATO is expected to positively affect the overall security of the alliance. One of the criteria for NATO admission is that doing so would materially enhance the security of NATO as a whole.
Would it be considered an enhancement of NATO security for the admission of a new member to be promised, in writing, to kick off at a minimum a major regional conflict, with the very real possibility that the entire alliance would be dragged into it? I don't see how any reasoning individual would think so. Yet NATO went ahead with it, snickering the whole time because they were 'making Moscow fume' and throwing up ridiculous canards that implied anyone could join NATO if they wished. Russia itself proposed joining NATO, more than once, and was not only soundly rebuffed, it was made clear that no such accommodation would ever be made. I don't doubt that if the west realized its dream of breaking Russia up into 'manageable' ethnic republics, it would be pleased to admit those to NATO one by one. But the whole country as an undivided entity? Never.
The admission of Ukraine not only would not materially enhance NATO security, it guaranteed a war of unknown magnitude with a nuclear power that has not lost a war in recent memory, a country that reacted violently to measures intended to broaden the influence of NATO in its constituent republics as recently as 2008. On that occasion, frantic diplomatic measures had to be employed to prevent the pursuit of fleeing Georgians taking the advancing Russian forces to the gates of Tbilisi itself. Yet the chucklers and mockers in the west apparently learned nothing.
Perhaps the process of acquired wisdom has deteriorated in the west to the extent that it will take an event like a major world land war fought across the breadth and length of Europe, with damage and devastation that cannot now be realistically imagined to reawaken it. It'd be nice if those who keep beckoning it onward were the first killed, but they never are.
There are back channel talks going on and what Stoltenberg says here is to soften the blow of a pending negotiated peace where NATO is going to have to make major concessions to Russia . The war has actually empowered Russia and it is in no mood to take any more crap from the West. Putin warned when negotiations broke down there could be "military consequences"-- and he is known as somebody who does not bluff.
The tragedy of this war is that it had to happen before the criminal dumb ass West could be forced to the negotiating table.
I consider this war a war crime. There should be tribunals but these will never happen. NATO deliberately plotted the destruction of Ukraine. From 2014 to 2022 it was preparing the Ukraine military for war against Russia. Zelensky was groomed for 3 years preparing him for his wicked role in this fiasco. He was elected president in 2019on the promise of peace. In April of 2022 he tried to open peace negotiations but British prime minister Boris Johnson was dispatched to Kiev to stop them.
Stoltenberg is a traitor to Europe but apparently most Europeans as gullible as they are don't see him as such.
SNAFU .... Situation Normal All Fucked Up( a popular military acronym)
I keep asking myself where is the outrage? It appears we are incapable of it.
Jens Stoltenberg, gets CAUGHT - saying the quiet parts OUT LOUD.
Sure, it's only confirming what the reality-based-community already KNEW ... But it's nice to hear reality being acknowledged for a change.
Not only was the invasion of Ukraine PROVOKED... It was DELIBERATELY PROVOKED, by the rulers of the Empire, in DC, London and Brussels.
Just as the US was prepared to fight a Nuclear war, over Soviet Missiles in Cuba, just minutes from DC... So too, are the Russians ready to fight - to prevent the US from placing Nukes just minutes from Moscow.
It's sort of like then Ambassador Burns put it, in his famous email on the universal political orientation in Russia, across ALL political tendencies, on NATO Expansion into Ukraine and Georgia (thank you WikiLeaks) ... "Nyet means NYET!". If only the Monoparty's NeoCon Death Cult had listened.
Western War propaganda has a long history. My father who fought and was injured in WW1 told me as WW2 was looming not to believe the war propaganda he had about how evil the Germans were in doing things like ripping babies out of their mothers and dashing on the ground ;or raping nuns and then killing them etc etc. So when the second chapter WW2 arrived I was more sceptical and long after the war had ended I managed to research some of the English war propaganda I had been subjected to. And found like my father before me truth is the first causality of capitalism's wars .Same thing when I was conscripted into. the royal air force and told we were bombing North Korea because they were evil. George Orwell would have been pleased to see how accurate 1984 is.
"Anyone who speaks out against US foreign policy relating to Russia online is always immediately accused of 'parroting Kremlin narratives' by empire apologists mindlessly regurgitating what they’ve been told to believe by outlets like The Washington Post."
The dipshit-brush paints even more broadly than that. I was called a Putin stooge for criticizing Tammy Duckworth for yoking domestic disaster relief to yet more Ukraine largesse, and was told I must have loved GW Bush, yappety yackedy yada. So dumb it was almost brilliant, because what do you tell people with no clue that they're the ones who have moved (of course I hated Bush, for the same reasons I hate the Empire now) and that their brains have been hijacked and their politics subsumed by propaganda-fueled tribalistic infernos?
Caitlin is in the unenviable position of trying to stem a tidal wave of corrupted journalism with but few that stand with her.
Keep pushing and Posting!
Thank you Caitlin🙏
This proxy war has gifted American sheep the opportunity to wake up and smell the bullshit.
When a superpower taunts and mocks and belittles and provokes a former superpower, that is righteous. When the recipient of the superpower’s audacious behavior responds defensively, that is aggression! Nowhere in any court of law, anywhere on the planet can such utter nonsense be upheld or ruled acceptable.
This divide in the American society where a ludicrous narrative can be swallowed is a microcosm of the pretentious American Experiment.
Most people that I know believe that the first European immigrants didn’t arrive with a thought of adapting to the indigenous population, but saw that power and violence and killing could eventually force the indigenous people to adapt to the new arrivals...or die.
But very few people that I know believe that the American government is wrong to take that same mindset in its interactions with other governments. So the genocide of our founders gives our leaders license to follow no international laws, engage in murder and theft and occupation and dictatorship, and such license is extended to no other nation.
This fallacious patriotism is a great test for our age of social media. Of course the SM is dominated by the false narratives of the imperial power, but whereas those narratives were previously largely uncontested, now they are forced to adapt to the truth, and the acts of censorship, eliminating platforms for communication, smearing truth tellers, is ample evidence that speech isn’t free, and it never was!
So anybody who cares about waking up the American sheep can support the truth tellers that are making the imperialists nervous. Small contributions for many folks can keep a lot of good people doing good work.
Everything you need to see and hear is out there, there are no conspiracy theories. Everything is happening in plain sight and we keep being told not to believe our own eyes. Our natural instincts and sensors are being blunted and confused by awful people on power trips.
From someone who 'knows'?
“Because the US intelligence and military leaders are looking at the war in Ukraine through this prism, the analysts and their managers, for the most part, face enormous pressure to conclude that Russia is a feckless and incompetent near-peer adversary and cannot last.
I continue to believe that the assumptions about Russia’s alleged failure is ignoring the contravening narrative:
The Russian economy is robust and healthy despite Western sanctions.
Russia’s political influence in the world is growing, not shrinking. BRICS is a case in point.
Russia is inflicting enormous casualties on Ukraine’s military and decimating infrastructure critical to the Ukrainian military campaign.
Russia’s defense industry has ramped up to levels of production that the West cannot match.
Russia’s seemingly unlimited access to natural resources, energy and rare earth minerals strengthens Russia’s military position in the world.
Russia enjoys a massive technological advantage over NATO in terms of electronic warfare, air defense systems, mine laying vehicles and hypersonic missiles.
Russian leaders and their people genuinely believe they face an existential threat from the West.
Ukraine is totally dependent on the West to provide money and weapons to continue to fight.”?
https://sonar21.com/u-s-intelligence-community-sending-mixed-messages-on-ukraine/#comment-153879
Stoltenberg would have to make that admission -or go down in history as a fool or charlatan. But he likely opines that in spite of that background, Russia still didn't have the moral right to embark on denazification of Ukraine, if he even believes Nazis were running the show in that corrupt country.
hmm, psychopaths are loosing it!....
Amen, Caitlin, with a few caveats. Stoltenberg is telling only a partial truth here. There is far more in the way of ‘provocation’ than just Ukraine joining NATO. At the risk of being accused of ‘parroting Kremlin narratives’- which I am not; any duplication of these truths by Putin or other members of the Russian government is simply evidence that Putin and/or the Russian government is telling the truth. With that out of the way, off we go:
1. The putsch regime in Kiev came to power by and through the decades long efforts of the US Empire to bring Ukraine into the empire. Nuland has openly bragged about how much money the US has spent over DECADES to bring about the atrocity which is the government of Ukraine since 2014. It conspired with the Nazis who largely inhabit western Ukraine to get it done.
2. Nuland and the US ‘ambassador’ to Ukraine (who now holds that post in Athens; God help the Greeks) were caught on a taped telephone conversation before the coup was over picking the people who were going to be in charge of the putsch regime. Lo and behold, they were precisely the US tools who were put in charge. Quelle surpris! Not.
3. Immediately, the new regime abandoned its constitutional commitment to neutrality, and banned the Russian language in the entire country, including Donetsk and Lugansk, which is the only language the vast majority of the residents there speak.
4. Crimea is a special case. The ban on Russian applied there as well. But, 20 years plus earlier, its residents voted in a referendum to remain in the Russian Federation. Ukraine paid no attention, and marched in. Russia had been too weakened to help Crimea resist, but retained its key port in Sevastopol, by some sort of arrangement with the Ukrainian government.
4. It was clear that said arrangement was going to go away, creating for Russia an immediate existential threat- the takeover of the Black Sea and Russia’s only reliable warm-water port- by the US Empire. So, at the invitation of the vast majority of people in Crimea, Russia took military action to make certain that did not occur.
5. This made Nuland & Company hopping mad, as this was the primary initial goal of installing the putsch regime. The 2d referendum held in Crimea, unsurprisingly, turned out exactly the way the first one did 20 years earlier.
6. Incidentally, although I have not seen any comments on this before, the fact that the putsch took place at the exact same time as the Winter Olympics in Sochi could not have been accidental. The fact that Russia held them was owlshit stupid, but the fact that they have been held at all anywhere- summer and winter- ever since world championships in all of the events in the Games became routine is owlshit stupid.
7. To the extent that the Nazi militias in Ukraine were not already trying to commit obvious genocide on the Russian people living in Donetsk and Lugansk, those efforts began in earnest immediately.
8. An agreement was made to establish a federal structure in the ‘new’ Ukraine that would guarantee that the people in Donetsk and Lugansk would be allowed to live in peace and use their own language. That agreement was agreed with France and Germany as guarantors. It was not paid the least attention by the putsch regime. The people of Donetsk and Lugansk declared their independence, and asked to become a part of the Russian Federation.
9. Putin refused, continuing his, as he has as much as admitted, pointless ‘diplomacy’ with the Empire. It took the public statements of Germany and France that their participation in the agreement above referenced was entirely in bad faith- after the war began in earnest- to convince him how foolish he had been.
10. However, Putin and Lavrov continued to beat that dead horse until it became clear that the Ukrainian army, led now by the Nazis with whom the US for so long supported, was on the verge of a major offensive to de-Russianize the two breakaway provinces. This was after 9 years of efforts to do the same thing that resulted in at least 11,000 deaths of the residents there, and untold devastation.
11. The Russian army began to move closer to Ukraine in response, prompting the U.S. to start predicting an ‘invasion’.
12. At the same time, the Russian Duma, under significant pressure from their constituents to finally DO SOMETHING, passed overwhelmingly what we call legislation that had the twofold purpose of recognizing the breakaway republics of Donetsk and Lugansk, and heeding their desperate requests for help, and Putin finally approved it.
13. At that point, as the Ukrainians were beginning their version of the final solution of the ‘Russian problem’ in Ukraine, Russia ‘invaded’.
14. It is critical to realize that there are huge numbers of people in Russia who think of themselves as Russian who have lots of relations among people who think of themselves as Russian who live in Ukraine. The disinformation manufactured by Nuland & Co. that ordinary Russians cared not a fig about any of this, that it was all ‘Putin’ could not be further from the truth.
15. Ukraine couldn’t keep the lights on without the continuous funneling of cash for that purpose coming from the Empire. It is, for all practical purposes, a part of NATO now. Or, if you prefer, a NATO stooge.
16. Scandinavia had become neoliberal tools of the Empire a while back. It’s official embrace of the Empire had been unofficial for a while; in some cases, a long while. Very little has changed, if you look at it through any Russian eyes.
17. The importance of Ukraine’s push to join NATO means little, in and of itself. It is critical to Russia because of what it signaled- the beginning of the long-held Empire fantasy of destroying Russia. Not just effecting ‘regime change’ as in Putin being gone, but the breakup of the Russian Federation itself, dividing the spoils (so the pathetic Western Europeans hope) with them. I’ve seen the maps these lunatics drew up in places where official US military policy is set forth and discussed. PUBLICLY. This is no secret. A commitment from Ukraine not to join NATO would have signaled to Russia that the Empire was at least considering backing away. Even then, it took the impending slaughter on an industrial scale of its compatriots in Ukraine for Russia to finally do what it did in Crimea 8 years earlier. By then, it was clear that the risks posed to it and its people were as existential as the loss of access to the Black Sea would have been in 2014.
I have nothing but the highest regard for Chris Hedges and Noam Chomsky. They have been leaders in fighting for Justice for, combined, well over 100 years. However, I respectfully disagree with them when they say, though the ‘invasion’ was massively provoked, that it was unjustified. If there has ever been a ‘justified’ use of military force, this was it. And, because of the sequence of events described above, there is more than a fig leaf’s evidence that it wasn’t an invasion at all. It was an intervention on behalf of two independent republics that were in extremis and at their long-pending requests.
That went a little longer than I imagined it might. But, as always, well done, Caitlin.
it's very similar to the UK where criticising the state of Israel is routinely labelled as anti-semitism with the direct aim of shutting down criticism
I just did a search of the NYT and was surprised not to find any mention of Stoltenberg’s statement. Just kidding. ;>) The Times and other western propaganda rags know what to print and what not to print without being told.
The situation is actually a little worse, a little more brazen than described - because admitting a new member to NATO is expected to positively affect the overall security of the alliance. One of the criteria for NATO admission is that doing so would materially enhance the security of NATO as a whole.
Would it be considered an enhancement of NATO security for the admission of a new member to be promised, in writing, to kick off at a minimum a major regional conflict, with the very real possibility that the entire alliance would be dragged into it? I don't see how any reasoning individual would think so. Yet NATO went ahead with it, snickering the whole time because they were 'making Moscow fume' and throwing up ridiculous canards that implied anyone could join NATO if they wished. Russia itself proposed joining NATO, more than once, and was not only soundly rebuffed, it was made clear that no such accommodation would ever be made. I don't doubt that if the west realized its dream of breaking Russia up into 'manageable' ethnic republics, it would be pleased to admit those to NATO one by one. But the whole country as an undivided entity? Never.
The admission of Ukraine not only would not materially enhance NATO security, it guaranteed a war of unknown magnitude with a nuclear power that has not lost a war in recent memory, a country that reacted violently to measures intended to broaden the influence of NATO in its constituent republics as recently as 2008. On that occasion, frantic diplomatic measures had to be employed to prevent the pursuit of fleeing Georgians taking the advancing Russian forces to the gates of Tbilisi itself. Yet the chucklers and mockers in the west apparently learned nothing.
Perhaps the process of acquired wisdom has deteriorated in the west to the extent that it will take an event like a major world land war fought across the breadth and length of Europe, with damage and devastation that cannot now be realistically imagined to reawaken it. It'd be nice if those who keep beckoning it onward were the first killed, but they never are.