The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was founded in response to the alleged threat posed to Western states by the Soviet Union. The cornerstone of the NATO treaty is Article 5 which provides that if a NATO Ally is the victim of an armed attack, each and every other member of the Alliance will consider this act of violence as an armed attack against all members and will take the actions it deems necessary to assist the Ally attacked.
This means if Ukraine joins NATO, any attack on Ukraine by Russia would be considered an attack on New York City, and the US would respond accordingly—dangerous in the era of nuclear weapons.
Despite its purpose of defense against the USSR, NATO not only did not disappear after the end of the Cold War in the 1990s, but continued expanding eastwards, pressing the dagger of its advantage to Russia’s doorstep.
Now, Russia is pushing back.
Talks between Russia and NATO collapsed this week. NATO’s chief said significant differences remained with Russia but expressed hope that Moscow would agree to further talks, after the first joint council meeting between the two since 2019. “We don’t have anything to offer them,” said a European diplomat at NATO. “The only hope is to keep the Russians at the table.”
NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said after discussions Wednesday that differences would be hard to bridge, with Russia increasing pressure on the West to accept its demands for sweeping security guarantees, and the alliance largely refusing to budge. If the situation worsens, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Grushko told reporters, it could lead to “the most unpredictable and serious consequences for European security.”
Ukraine is a dangerous problem for the world, but also has a ready solution already been proposed and accepted — in principle: the Minsk II agreement, adopted by France, Germany, Russia and Ukraine in 2015, and endorsed unanimously by the UN Security Council. The agreement tacitly presupposes withdrawal of George W. Bush’s invitation to Ukraine to join NATO; disarmament of the separatist Russia-oriented region (Donbas) and withdrawal of Russian forces (“volunteers”), and spells out the key elements of settlement, with demilitarization, a restoration of Ukrainian sovereignty, including control of the border with Russia, and full autonomy for the Donbas in the context of the decentralization of power in Ukraine as a whole.
Minsk II has not been implemented because of the refusal of Ukrainian nationalists to implement the solution, hoping to draw in the US-led NATO bloc to fight its battle.
As a result, Russia has gathered tens of thousands of troops around Ukraine and says it wants big changes in European security arrangements, and fast. Moscow is demanding that NATO give a binding guarantee that it won’t offer membership to Ukraine and Georgia, two former Soviet republics that Moscow considers part of its sphere of influence.
But US elites are eager to expand their influence. “We will not slam the door shut on NATO’s open-door policy,” U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman told reporters after the nearly four-hour meeting. NATO has said—since 2008—that Ukraine and Georgia will eventually become members, but it is in no rush to offer them an immediate path into the alliance.
Russia is also concerned about NATO military exercises just across its border, having been invaded twice in the last century from the west. “Without doubt, any expansion of NATO concerns Russia,” spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters Wednesday. “NATO is an instrument of confrontation” that presents a threat, he added. NATO offered Russia further talks to discuss more limited measures allies hope will ease its security concerns. Mr. Stoltenberg said those measures included ways to increase the transparency of military exercises, to prevent dangerous incidents, to reduce space and cyber threats, and to address arms control.
Moscow has long sought to prevent Ukraine from integrating with NATO and the European Union. After a US-backed coup overthrew a pro-Russian president in Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin sent troops to seize Crimea in 2014 and took control of territory in his neighbor’s east with a covert military intervention.
NATO junior imperialists have provided military weapons, equipment and training to Ukrainian nationalists, causing Russia to complain that the alliance was seeking to turn the country into an anti-Russian proxy state.
Russia will clearly not allow US troops conducting ‘peaceful’ military exercises less than a two-hour drive from its own border…it remains to be seen how far US elites and their Frankenstein Monster military industrial complex are willing to lumber, or blunder.
An Ukrainian military serviceman on the front line in Donetsk, eastern Ukraine.
PHOTO:ANATOLII STEPANOV/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES
Notes
https://truthout.org/articles/chomsky-outdated-us-cold-war-policy-worsens-ongoing-russia-ukraine-conflict/