Shades of Vietnam, as thousands of NATO “instructors” are reportedly being sent to Ukraine.
As many as 10,000 Western military instructors have been sent to Ukraine to train the Eastern European nation’s soldiers and support its fighting in the Donbass, Moscow has claimed, insisting that 4,000 are Americans. Speaking during a briefing on Friday, Maria Zakharova, spokesperson for Moscow’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, suggested that the presence of foreign military personnel is a sign that Kiev is preparing for a confrontational solution to the ongoing standoff with the two self-declared breakaway republics in the eastern Donbass region.
Meanwhile, if there was ever any doubt as to whether it is the neocons or the Russians who are lying, the Secretary General of NATO has helpfully provided definitive proof of the former.
NATO boss responds to Moscow on bloc’s expansion
NATO “has never promised not to expand,” the bloc’s Secretary General said on Thursday. The Norwegian insisted that the bloc’s founding treaty states that any European nation may join it.
Earlier on Thursday, Putin said during his annual year-end press conference that Moscow was “cheated” by NATO in a “vehement” and “blatant” way as it first swallowed former member states of the Eastern Bloc, which also used to be known as the Warsaw Pact, and then set its eyes on the former Soviet republics.
Stoltenberg denied such promises had ever been made and claimed that even the former Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev – the man most commonly associated with the verbal agreement between NATO and Moscow – agreed NATO expansion had never been raised before the reunification of Germany. However, US government documents, declassified in 2017, appear to confirm that assurances were given.
Stoltenberg engaged in a nice little talmudics dance routine there, as the wording of the founding NATO treaty in 1949 says nothing whatsoever about the various assurances about its expansion that were given to the Russians in the 1990s and 2000s.
In early February 1990, U.S. leaders made the Soviets an offer. According to transcripts of meetings in Moscow on Feb. 9, then-Secretary of State James Baker suggested that in exchange for cooperation on Germany, U.S. could make “iron-clad guarantees” that NATO would not expand “one inch eastward.” Less than a week later, Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev agreed to begin reunification talks. No formal deal was struck, but from all the evidence, the quid pro quo was clear: Gorbachev acceded to Germany’s western alignment and the U.S. would limit NATO’s expansion.
This is a dangerously stupid word game being played by global imperialists, given that the Russians can quite rightly observe that they never struck a formal deal not to invade Western Europe, and the Chinese can similarly point out that they have never struck a formal deal not to invade Taiwan, Japan, or South Korea.