December 22, 2021
By Eric Zuesse
Just like when U.S. President John Fitzgerald Kennedy’s American Government, during the 1962 Cuban Crisis, warned that Soviet missiles in Cuba would mean World War 3, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin’s Russian Government warned, on 20 December 2021, that if its adjoining nation of Ukraine becomes a NATO member (which would present the danger of U.S. missiles only a 7-minute flight-time away from Moscow) would mean WW3.
Soviet communism is gone, the Soviet dictatorship is gone, the Soviet response to NATO, the Warsaw Pact, is gone; but America and its allies have continued the Cold War against Russia; and, now, finally (after decades of NATO expansion right up to Russia’s borders), Russia has laid down the gauntlet to them, just as America had laid down the gauntlet to the Soviet Union and its allies, in 1962, regarding Cuba.
Russia’s RT News bannered on December 20th, “Russia promises ‘military response’ to any further NATO expansion”. Of course, any “military response” would be against NATO — all of it — and probably within less than an hour, most people on both sides of that nuclear war would be either dead or doomed soon to die — and even throughout the world there would be billions of deaths. No military conflict between Russia and America (and its ‘allies’ or vassal-nations) would be able to remain non-nuclear, because whichever side would be losing any non-nuclear war would promptly release all of its nuclear stockpile against the other, and so the nuclear exchanges would become a part of any U.S.-v.-Russia war.
The reader-comments at that news-report were informative, especially if a reader there clicks onto “Best” so as to be reading first the most “like”ed of the reader-comments (and this means that the most representative of all of the comments are being posted at the top).
Alex Henderson, AlterNet
December 22, 2021
Russian President Vladimir Putin attends a meeting of the presidential rights
During a video conversation with Russian President Vladimir Putin earlier this month, President Joe Biden warned that there will be “strong economic and other measures” from the United States and its NATO allies in Europe if Russia invades Ukraine. Michael McFaul, a Russia expert at Stanford University, explained, in some Twitter posts this week, why a recent speech by Putin has him worried.
The 58-year-old McFaul, who served as a U.S. ambassador to Russia under President Barack Obama from 2012-2014, noted that he has listened to a lot of Putin speeches — warning that “this speech is something different” and describing Putin’s “threats” as “truly striking and crazy.”
During a meeting with the Russian Defense Ministry, Putin said, “We have nowhere further to retreat. Do they really think we’ll sit idly as they create threats against us?”
"Read this speech and then read Munich 2007," McFaul wrote. "The latter has some relationship to facts (even if I disagreed with his interpretation of those facts.) This speech is unhinged."
Ukrainian officials have recently sounded the alarm that they fear a Russian invasion is imminent. Putin denies he has any plans for an unprovoked attack. However, the ongoing Russian occupation of Crimea, considered to be a part of Ukraine by the international community, has demonstrated Putin's lack of respect for established national boundaries.
Matthew Luxmoore, a Moscow-based journalist, also tweeted about Putin’s speech — saying that Putin offered a “litany of grievances” about the U.S. and complained, “They do whatever they want.” Putin, according to Luxmoore, appears to be “at his wit’s end” and “isn’t hiding his openness to a military solution” with Ukraine.
Putin Warns He’s Ready to Use Military to Counter NATO Challenge
, Bloomberg News
(Bloomberg) -- Russian President Vladimir Putin warned he’s ready to use his military to counter what he called the threat from NATO as he heaped blame on the U.S. for rising tensions in Europe.
Russia is “seriously concerned” about the presence of North Atlantic Treaty Organization forces near its border and can’t allow NATO to deploy missiles in Ukraine that would put Moscow within a few minutes’ strike distance, Putin told senior officers Tuesday at the Russian Defense Ministry.
“If the aggressive line of our Western colleagues continues, we will take adequate military-technical response measures and react harshly to unfriendly steps,” Putin said. “I want to stress that we have every right to do so. We have every right to take actions intended to ensure the security and sovereignty of Russia.”
Putin hit out after Russia demanded last week that NATO withdraw forces to the positions they held in 1997, before the alliance expanded to include former Soviet satellite states in eastern Europe, as part of proposed new security treaties. The U.S. and Europe accuse Russia of a massive build-up of troops near Ukraine in preparation for a possible invasion as early as next month, something Russia denies.
Russia Demands NATO Pullback in Security Talks With U.S.
If U.S. and NATO missiles appear in Ukraine “the flight time to Moscow will be reduced to 7-10 minutes, and if hypersonic weapons are deployed - to within 5 minutes,” Putin said. “This is a serious challenge for us, a challenge for our security.”
Russia can’t trust legal security guarantees offered by the U.S. because Washington easily walks away from its commitments, Putin said. Still, written guarantees are better than oral ones, he said.
©2021 Bloomberg L.P.
Is Putin preparing for war?
As well as continuing to silence dissent, Putin has been building up his military presence close to the Ukrainian border
Putin fans the flames of war
As well as continuing to silence dissent by throwing his critics into prison and closing down independent media and human rights organisations such as Memorial, Vladimir Putin has been fanning the flames of war by building up around 100,000 troops along with tanks, artillery and ballistic missiles close to the Ukrainian border and the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic and Luhansk People’s Republic. These are administered by ultra-nationalist pro-Russian rebels, clandestinely supplied with Russian weapons and military personnel under the guise of ‘volunteers’.
Having annexed Crimea in 2014 to the horror of the international community, Putin appears to want to incorporate yet more territory into the Russian Federation. The questions that no one but Putin can at present answer are ‘how much?’ and ‘for what specific purposes?’
The incorporation of Crimea into the Russia has been costly, in that the peninsula has had to be supplied with utilities from Russia rather than Ukraine. It was precisely because it is logistically easier to supply the peninsula with water, power and food supplies from Ukraine rather than Russia that Khrushchev transferred the area to Ukraine in 1954.
Russia has had to invest heavily in new infrastructure, and not all problems have been successfully solved. For Crimea to have guaranteed water supplies, it would be necessary for Russia to control the Ukrainian territory that used to supply them. Thus, Putin’s principal aim is to take enough territory to secure these supplies.
Forced russification
A third potential aim would be to topple the Ukrainian government by means of a coup, then install a puppet administration which would pursue a ‘unitary state’ solution on the lines of the arrangement currently entered into with Belarus, whereby a quasi-independent leader follows Moscow in domestic security, defence and foreign policy areas. Essentially, this would mean the re-establishment of the Slavic part of the Soviet Union or rather the Russian Empire, since communism is no longer the ideology of the Russian government.
Conquering and occupying the whole of Ukraine by force would be impractical as the Ukrainians are patriotic, would resist and could embark on a guerrilla war, inflicting military and economic losses on the whole of the new state for years to come.
Putin needs a conflict
According to Worldometer, by 21 December, Russia lost 299,249 citizens to the virus and Ukraine 93,688. A potential or actual conflict with Ukraine or the west in general is useful to Putin to cover for his inept handling of the pandemic and the inadequate nature of the Russian health service, as well as for a faltering economy and the increasingly apparent negative effects of climate change.
Putin seems to be actively promoting a conflict with the west in general by pursuing the false narrative of encirclement by NATO. Last week in Moscow, Russia handed the US aset ofdemands that, it claims, will lower tensions in Europe, providing Russia with ‘security guarantees’. These include a ban on Ukrainian membership of NATO and a removal of troops and weapons deployed to countries which joined the alliance after 1997.
Solidarity in the west
Such demands are an attempt to reinvent the concept of major powers with spheres of influence and to deny such countries as Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia and Poland as well as Ukraine, the right to self-determination. As such, these are clearly unacceptable to the west and have already been ruled out. White House Press Secretary, Jen Psaki informed reporters that, “There will be no talks on European security without our European allies and partners”.
NATO’s secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, has also ruled out a ban on Ukraine entering the alliance. Given that Putin has already in effect blocked this happening by occupying Crimea and creating a frozen conflict, it is clear that Putin’s demands are a deliberate provocation and an attempt to raise rather than de-escalate tensions.
On 21 December, Putin reiterated his position in a belligerent speech to military commanders in which he blamed the west for rising tensions by turning Ukraine against Russia. He also raised these issues in a telephone conversation with the new German chancellor, Olaf Scholz.
This is a battle the west cannot afford to lose
Putin may now be seeking to capitalise on perceived weakness on the part of western governments. He may see Biden as weak about defending human rights, given his abandoning of Afghanistan to the Taliban.
The new German government is as yet untested, though Scholz was Angela Merkel’s deputy from 2018 and is therefore not inexperienced on the world stage. It is he who can play one of the strongest hands in defending the status quo by cancelling the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline from Russia to Germany, thus depriving Russia of a major source of revenue. The presence of the Greens in the German coalition will in any case hasten Germany’s transfer to environmentally friendly energy resources away from a dependence on Russian gas.
Putin, now 69 and in power since the start of the century, may feel he needs to take advantage of current world uncertainties if he wants to have any chance of re-establishing Russian hegemony in its former territories. It is important that the west shows a united front and stands up to Putin’s demands and bullying tactics. This is not an ideological conflict, but rather a moral one about human rights and national sovereignty, which the west cannot afford to lose.
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