Since the end of the cold war the US has been encircling Russia by bringing the old Warsaw Pact countries into NATO. It's also been putting missles in these former Soviet states. This always struck me as a pretty stupid thing to do. How do you think the US would react if Russia made Mexico part of the Warsaw Pact or put missiles in Cuba. Oh...they already did that. What the dumbshits running this country don't understand is that Russia has been invaded numerous times in the past 300 years and isn't going to let that happen again. They have repeatedly made their concerns known and have been ignored. The line has been drawn in the sand. We are looking at at World War. I haven't been this scared since the Cuban Missile Crises. And we don't have Kennedy in charge, we have Bush. This is the Cuban Missile Crisis in reverse.
Ian has a post everyone should read. Also, as a reminder, give this show Ian and I did with noted Russia specialist Anatol Lieven, where we discuss at length Russia and the Ukraine and NATO a listen.
Everything which transpired over the last week has been about one issue, and one issue only: the Ukraine. Russia will never let the Ukraine join NATO. Not now, especially as they have the power and the means and quite clearly the will to thwart its accession.
Why is Ukraine important? Other than the key points Ian makes there is one other key point that must be made. Had Charles XII, or Napoleon or Hitler had a Western friendly country with borders less than a few hundred kilometers from Moscow their invasions would have ended in a drastically different fashion. It's called 'strategic depth' and the Russians will never give up the Ukraine for that reason. If you think nations change, well they do, but not nearly as fast as you think. And for the Russians the Mongols, the Swedes, the French and the Germans are still very, very real in their collective memory.
We are at a very dangerous point right now. The US is over-extended and to some extent paralyzed by the election that is upcoming. The next 12 months are the perfect time frame, as Ian notes, for Russia to make it very clear that it will not tolerate a Ukraine in NATO.
It won't happen, and if the West persists, Europe will have some damn cold winters ahead and maybe even a fighting war on its hands.
Stay out of the Ukraine. America has its red-lines; the Israelis have theirs, and so do the Russians. We'd be wise to remember that in all our flag waving jingoistic glory.
Hold onto your boots, because this may only be one of a number of "Russian Wars of Reunification." Why do I say so? Well, read this:
Upping the ante, Ukraine said it reserved the right to bar Russian warships from returning to their nominally Ukrainian - formerly Russian - base of Sevastopol , on the Crimean peninsula. On Saturday, Russia accused Ukraine of "arming the Georgians to the teeth."
Given the cease fire, this threat may no longer be immenent, but the situation in Sevastopol is highly flammable.
Sevastopol was founded in 1783 as a naval base by the Russians. In 1954 Russia gave Sevastopol and the Crimea, which it's a part of, to Ukraine, then a province of the USSR. When Ukraine separated it claimed both Crimea and Sevastopol. Russia disagreed and there was some violence over the issue.
In 1991 Crimea voted for independence. In 1994 a referendum passed again for independence and for Crimeans to be able to take Russian citizenship. The Russian parliament voted to rescind the 1954 transfer.
In 1997 a bilateral treaty granted Ukraine both Sevastopol and the Crimea, while another treaty gave Russia the right to use Sevastopol as a naval base for 20 years, though that could be renewed.
This year, the Ukrainian president announced that the Ukraine is presently not planning on renewing the lease. If that happens, Russia loses control of a naval base it had had for over 200 years. It won't be without an outlet to the Black Sea, mind you, but Sevastopol is a superior base.
More importantly, the majority of the population in Crimea (about 60%) identify as Russian. About 70% of the population of Sevastopol identifies as Russian.
I think this is one of the best Nelson Reports I've yet read:
SUMMARY: it may be that a cease-fire now being negotiated by France's Sarkozy will provide Moscow, Tbilisi and Washington with face-saving ways out of the mess in Georgia.
Stay tuned.
But certain to remain a work in progress is how the US and Europe move to address the legitimate great power concerns...and behavior...of Russia. Ten years of not doing so fed directly the current crisis.
Remember..."legitimate" does not have to mean "good"...we're talking about power here, not morality. Morgenthau rules, post Soviet collapse, something the Bush Administration had to learn the hard way, and McCain may not yet grasp.
McCain's statements today apparently seek to "beat" Russia, and recreate the simple, happy days of the Cold War. Obama's statements continue to be unemotional. Whether US voters think "tough" is "smart" could be a decisive question this November.
"Perspective" tonight is from the Nixon Center's Demetri Simes, who knows a thing or two about Soviet brutality. We use it not necessarily because he is 100% right about Georgian provocation, but because if HE sees it this way, so does Russia, and it's Russia we have to deal with here.
"Payback" for Kosovo, NATO expansion, missiles in Poland? Why? If you don't work it out now, will it be easier after a disaster in Ukraine? Lithuania?
The neoconned Bush Regime and the Israeli-occupied American media are heading the innocent world toward nuclear war.
Back in the Reagan years the National Endowment for Democracy was created as a cold war tool. Today the NED is a neocon-controlled agent for US world hegemony. Its main function is to pour US money and election-rigging into former constituent parts of the Soviet Union in order to ring Russia with American puppet states.
The neoconservative Bush Regime used the NED to intervene in Ukrainian and Georgian internal affairs in keeping with the neoconservative plan to establish US-friendly and Russia-hostile political regimes in these two former constituent parts of Russia and the Soviet Union.
The NED was also used to dismember the former Yugoslavia with its interventions in Slovakia, Serbia, and Montenegro.
Allen Weinstein, who helped draft the legislation establishing NED, told the Washington Post in 1991 that much of what the NED does “today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.”
The Bush Regime, having established a puppet, Mikhail Saakashvili, as president of Georgia, tried to bring Georgia into NATO.
For readers too young to know, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization was a military alliance between the US and Western European countries to resist any Soviet move into Western Europe [and to ensure European countries lined up behind the US, and bought its weapons systems. Editors] . There has been no reason for NATO since the Soviet Union’s internal political collapse almost two decades ago. The neocons turned NATO into another tool, like the NED, for US world hegemony. Subsequent US administrations violated the understandings that President Reagan had reached with Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet leader, and have incorporated former parts of the Soviet empire into NATO. The neocon goal of ringing Russia with a hostile military alliance has been proclaimed many times.
US forces to deliver Georgia aid President George W Bush has said the US will use military aircraft and naval forces to deliver aid to Georgia following its conflict with Russia.
And then McCain babbles on about nations not invading nations in the 21st Century. What the hell is Iraq, Afghanistan and talk of Iran?! Bush and his fellow fuckheads will be the death of us all. Madness.
