Posted on 01/02/2022 11:06:41 AM PST by RoosterRedux
Russian President Vladimir Putin, on Tuesday, delivered three strong signals that he intends to invade Ukraine.
Addressing military commanders and intelligence chiefs at the Defense Ministry, Putin offered a preemptive casus belli to justify invading Ukraine in order to address an existential threat to Russia. The Russian leader warned that the United States "will supply Ukraine with hypersonic weapons," which would reduce the nuclear strike launch-to-target time against Moscow to "five minutes." This, Putin insisted, would pose "the most serious threat" to Russia's security. One that means "we simply have nowhere to retreat further."
Note the explicitly existential nature of Putin's words: facing annihilation, back against the wall. This is not language that offers hope for credible compromise.
Of course, Putin knows full well that the U.S. is not actually going to deploy hypersonic weapons to Ukraine. To do so would be a provocation that would do little to advance U.S. strategic deterrence while giving Russia justification to attack. But what this hypersonic reference does accomplish is to allow Putin to present Ukraine's democratic sovereignty as an existential threat to the Russian people and nation. This hypersonic threat myth, then, is the military partner to Putin's ideological justification of Ukraine as a necessary subsidiary of Russia proper.
The next signal of invasion came from Putin's close friend and defense minister Sergey Shoygu, who invented the threat of an impending American-led chemical weapons attack, claiming 120 U.S. mercenaries had established themselves in civilian buildings along the battle contact line separating Ukrainian and pro-Russian forces in southeastern Ukraine. Shoygu said these Americans are preparing "Ukrainian special operations forces and radical armed groups for active hostilities" and a "provocation" involving "an unidentified chemical component."
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonexaminer.com ...
Lol, thanks for the crazy Russian point of view
Putin stealing Crimea from Ukraine is wildly popular and totally uncontroversial in Russia.
Sure, that’s why Putin went into southeastern Ukraine, Donbas, in 2014. He thought it would also be a cakewalk. Now Putin is stuck supporting a stalemate with the Ukrainian side getting stronger.
Those two statements seem to me to be mutually contradictory. If there was no signed treaty, there was no agreement. "James Baker said" binds nobody...not even James Baker.
I doubt it. Putin invaded Donbas to stir the pot and keep Ukraine out of NATO. Russia can mostly control Donbas due to geography and corruption. They don’t need to annex it.
It is written in numerous protocols regarding the Soviet withdrawal from Europe and German unification indeed.
Putin’s invasion is a myth. The war was started by Ukraine which bombed Lugansk after the city hall was taken by the protestors who were against the Kiev coup.
If there is war, why Ukraine keeps diplomatic relations and trade with Russia?
A little bit contradictory, isn’t it?
After Afghanistan, Russia and China are telling each other, let’s support each other on Ukraine and Taiwan. While we could defeat China and Russia, it would be with great cost. Russia and China believe a politically divided America does not have the will to intervene. And Russia and China may be willing to risk war to get what they want.
As said prior Ukraine has been a failed state in every sense of the word.....the only reason they have defenses now is because they are now a military welfare state....dependent on hand outs from the US and other nations.
You just don’t get it.....Putin will continue to keep a ‘Live Conflict’ alive and well on Ukraine borders as long as Nato/US continue to camp on his border. And Kiev will co-operate doing so on their end as a means to accumulate foreign military equipment and monetary aide from the IMF etc.
Keeping a Cold War mentality is not a good way of viewing what’s going on in Ukraine....even Nato Military leaders have stated that line of thinking continually gets in the way of what could otherwise be peace.....it’s old school thinking for this century.
“ While we could defeat China and Russia, it would be with great cost”
Sure. We could defeat Russia and China. Just not Afghanistan?
We could have defeated Afghanistan but chose not to.
I believe that we can “win” a nuclear war with China and Russia but maybe not a ground war with China. Either of them would be a tough adversary. Both of them at the same time would not be desirable.
Besides, we have much more important things to do with our military than protecting our nation. There’s a lot of social experimentation that’s a lot more useful than winning wars.
I have a feeling that if we do get into a war with either Russia or China our Democrat leaders (and more than a few Republicans) will be rooting for the other team. So, saying that we could defeat them is much different than saying we would defeat them.
Can you cite that?
Unfortunately, no. I scan a LOT of internet, and keeping track of specific URL's would be "cumbersome".
A quick search turns up this:
LOL, Brookings!
Better than the Babylon Bee.
I thought Brookings was one of the voices of the deep state?
Declassified documents show security assurances against NATO expansion to Soviet leaders from Baker, Bush, Genscher, Kohl, Gates, Mitterrand, Thatcher, Hurd, Major, and Woerner
Slavic Studies Panel Addresses “Who Promised What to Whom on NATO Expansion?”
Washington D.C., December 12, 2017 – U.S. Secretary of State James Baker’s famous “not one inch eastward” assurance about NATO expansion in his meeting with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev on February 9, 1990, was part of a cascade of assurances about Soviet security given by Western leaders to Gorbachev and other Soviet officials throughout the process of German unification in 1990 and on into 1991, according to declassified U.S., Soviet, German, British and French documents posted today by the National Security Archive at George Washington University (http://nsarchive.gwu.edu).
The documents show that multiple national leaders were considering and rejecting Central and Eastern European membership in NATO as of early 1990 and through 1991, that discussions of NATO in the context of German unification negotiations in 1990 were not at all narrowly limited to the status of East German territory, and that subsequent Soviet and Russian complaints about being misled about NATO expansion were founded in written contemporaneous memcons and telcons at the highest levels.
The documents reinforce former CIA Director Robert Gates’s criticism of “pressing ahead with expansion of NATO eastward [in the 1990s], when Gorbachev and others were led to believe that wouldn’t happen.”[1] The key phrase, buttressed by the documents, is “led to believe.”
President George H.W. Bush had assured Gorbachev during the Malta summit in December 1989 that the U.S. would not take advantage (“I have not jumped up and down on the Berlin Wall”) of the revolutions in Eastern Europe to harm Soviet interests; but neither Bush nor Gorbachev at that point (or for that matter, West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl) expected so soon the collapse of East Germany or the speed of German unification.[2]
The first concrete assurances by Western leaders on NATO began on January 31, 1990, when West German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher opened the bidding with a major public speech at Tutzing, in Bavaria, on German unification. The U.S. Embassy in Bonn (see Document 1) informed Washington that Genscher made clear “that the changes in Eastern Europe and the German unification process must not lead to an ‘impairment of Soviet security interests.’ Therefore, NATO should rule out an ‘expansion of its territory towards the east, i.e. moving it closer to the Soviet borders.’” The Bonn cable also noted Genscher’s proposal to leave the East German territory out of NATO military structures even in a unified Germany in NATO.[3]
This latter idea of special status for the GDR territory was codified in the final German unification treaty signed on September 12, 1990, by the Two-Plus-Four foreign ministers (see Document 25). The former idea about “closer to the Soviet borders” is written down not in treaties but in multiple memoranda of conversation between the Soviets and the highest-level Western interlocutors (Genscher, Kohl, Baker, Gates, Bush, Mitterrand, Thatcher, Major, Woerner, and others) offering assurances throughout 1990 and into 1991 about protecting Soviet security interests and including the USSR in new European security structures. The two issues were related but not the same. Subsequent analysis sometimes conflated the two and argued that the discussion did not involve all of Europe. The documents published below show clearly that it did.
The “Tutzing formula” immediately became the center of a flurry of important diplomatic discussions over the next 10 days in 1990, leading to the crucial February 10, 1990, meeting in Moscow between Kohl and Gorbachev when the West German leader achieved Soviet assent in principle to German unification in NATO, as long as NATO did not expand to the east. The Soviets would need much more time to work with their domestic opinion (and financial aid from the West Germans) before formally signing the deal in September 1990.
The conversations before Kohl’s assurance involved explicit discussion of NATO expansion, the Central and East European countries, and how to convince the Soviets to accept unification. For example, on February 6, 1990, when Genscher met with British Foreign Minister Douglas Hurd, the British record showed Genscher saying, “The Russians must have some assurance that if, for example, the Polish Government left the Warsaw Pact one day, they would not join NATO the next.” (See Document 2)
Having met with Genscher on his way into discussions with the Soviets, Baker repeated exactly the Genscher formulation in his meeting with Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze on February 9, 1990, (see Document 4); and even more importantly, face to face with Gorbachev.
Not once, but three times, Baker tried out the “not one inch eastward” formula with Gorbachev in the February 9, 1990, meeting. He agreed with Gorbachev’s statement in response to the assurances that “NATO expansion is unacceptable.” Baker assured Gorbachev that “neither the President nor I intend to extract any unilateral advantages from the processes that are taking place,” and that the Americans understood that “not only for the Soviet Union but for other European countries as well it is important to have guarantees that if the United States keeps its presence in Germany within the framework of NATO, not an inch of NATO’s present military jurisdiction will spread in an eastern direction.” (See Document 6)
More at link
The pro-war pro-eastern-NATO-expansion deep state.
Does Col. Vindman’s wing-chick during the Trump/Ukraine impeachment face Fiona Hill ring a bell?
Fiona was previously a driver of the joint Obama admin/Soros “color revolution” in Ukraine that overthrew the pro-Russian elected leader.
She was also involved in pushing the anti-Trump “dirty dossier.”
Brookings all the way.
https://www.brookings.edu/experts/fiona-hill/
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