... anyone.
For years, Russia has been trying to make Washington, London and Brussels, overwhelmed by their own complexes of exceptionalism and impunity, understand this seemingly simple truth in the context of European security. Although the Western countries initially promised not to expand NATO, and in 1999 and 2010 they signed the official documents of OSCE summits setting forth their commitment not to ensure their own security at the expense of others, in fact NATO has been carrying out its geopolitical and military expansion in Europe ...
... militarily neutral country enjoying the trade, investment, and logistical benefits of its position between Russia and the European Union was dismissed by Washington as “giving the Kremlin a veto right” over its neighbor’s security status. Instead, NATO’s unrestrained expansion was upheld as almost a sacred principle. This led to an outcome that many had predicted: Moscow’s pushback.
Rather than reaching for a compromise settlement via the Minsk accords, the West and its Ukrainian protégés used diplomacy ...
... immediately able to act within the framework of this institution with a consolidated position, which excluded even minor manifestations of justice in relation to the basic interests of others: Russia, Kazakhstan or smaller states outside the European Union and NATO.
The fact that only Russia actively opposed it is connected solely with its own capabilities and ambitions. Small countries are aware of their insignificance and vulnerability and prefer to remain silent even when their positions are humiliating....
... case no longer performs the basic function of facilitating compromise in the diplomatic field. Moreover, the beginning of this state of affairs happened much earlier, when the West freely interpreted the resolutions on Yugoslavia. This pushed that country to form separate, much weaker associations, and NATO ensured its further disaggregation by force. The reflections of that fire are still visible, as we know. The American masters only pointed out the need for Pristina to postpone the adoption of restrictive anti-Serb measures, but there is no doubt ...
... following question remains unanswered: "
Will the US sacrifice Washington for Paris (not to say Warsaw)?
" If, for instance, nuclear powers formally agreed that the only reason to strike is because of a direct threat to other's territory, NATO would lose much of its rationale.
Great powers, inevitably, could potentially be drawn by their junior allies into an escalation as a result. Incidentally, this also applies to bilateral relations between allies. What scale of a military clash between the US and China would prompt Russian intervention? The same question applies to potential conflicts ...
... UN Charter. Russian daily newspaper Rossiyskaya Gazeta reached out to Prof. Sachs, asking him to share some of his thoughts on the critical challenges that we are going through.
University of Chicago political scientist John J. Mearsheimer puts it bluntly: the main reason for the ongoing Ukrainian crisis is NATO’s expansion towards the East. In your recent interviews (to German news outlet “Spiegel” and the Greek “Kathimerini”) you argue the same thing: reckless promises of NATO membership made to Ukraine provoked Russia to the highest degree. ...
... think a non-nuclear medium-sized country like Ukraine would ever attack a nuclear giant like Russia? And how can you think this is a Nazi country with a Jewish president elected with over 70% of the votes?
«Ukraine was being built by the US and other NATO countries as a spearhead, maybe of aggression or at least of military pressure, to bring NATO’s military machine closer to the heart of Russia. We can see now how well their forces had been preparing for a war. And Nazis were not only about killing jews....
... the same yardstick to everybody, so that everyone falls into a single file.
While reflecting on linguistics, worldview, sentiment, and the way they vary from one nation or culture to another, it is worth recollecting how the West has been justifying NATO’s unreserved eastward expansion towards the Russian border. When we point to the assurances provided to the Soviet Union that this would not happen, we hear that these were merely spoken promises, and there were no documents signed to this effect. There ...
... due to the inability of the UN to carry out effective peacekeeping operations, its security functions were being transferred to NATO as the leading, legitimate and most effective military-political alliance of the 21st century. He also called on the NATO countries to increase their defense spending to 5 percent of their respective GNPs and to reintroduce a universal draft in its member-states.
Russia and China refused to recognize NATO’s legitimacy as a peacekeeping organization, and even less so to take ...
