Dr. Putin explained in depth why he launched a punitive expedition into Ukraine.
Unlike the dozen wars the West has launched, his reasoning and justification are impeccable: it is a matter of Russia's life or death.
In the summer of 1997, Joe Biden put out a statement explicitly saying that NATO expansion in the Baltic regions would rightly provoke Russia to take military actions. Biden even suggested that NATO would be responsible for creating a “vigorous and hostile” Russian response.
Biden said: “I think the one place where the greatest consternation would be caused in the short-term for admission [to NATO], having nothing to do with the merit and preparedness of the country to come in, would be to admit Baltic states now in terms of NATO-Russian, US-Russian relations. If there was ever anything that was going to tip the balance, were it to be tipped, in terms of a vigorous and hostile reaction in Russia, I don’t mean military, it would be that.” https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/video-of-joe-biden-warning-of-russian-hostility-if-nato-expands-resurfaces/ar-AAUMVjI
In 2007, in Munich, Dr. Putin told a Western audience, “It turns out that NATO has put its frontline forces on our borders, and we continue to strictly fulfil the treaty obligations and do not react to these actions at all. I think it is obvious that NATO expansion does not have any relation with the modernization of the Alliance itself, or with ensuring security in Europe. On the contrary, it represents a serious provocation that reduces the level of mutual trust. And we have the right to ask: against whom is this expansion intended? And what happened to the assurances our western partners made after the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact? Where are those declarations today? No one even remembers them.”
Putin added, “But I will allow myself to remind this audience what was said. I would like to quote the speech of NATO General Secretary Mr Woerner in Brussels on 17 May 1990. He said at the time that: “the fact that we are ready not to place a NATO army outside of German territory gives the Soviet Union a firm security guarantee”. Where are these guarantees?”
That was 15 years ago.
The referendums conducted by the two self-proclaimed Republics of Donetsk and Lugansk in May 2014, were not referendums of “independence” (независимость), as some unscrupulous journalists have claimed, but referendums of “self-determination” or “autonomy” (самостоятельность).
The qualifier “pro-Russian” suggests that Russia was a party to the conflict, which was not the case, and the term “Russian speakers” would have been more honest. Moreover, these referendums were conducted against the advice of Vladimir Putin.
After the election of the post-coup new model Ukrainian government in 2014, opposition parties were declared illegal and some leaders were arrested for “treason,” the media was censored and the parliament outlawed Russian, the language of a third of the population, as an official language. Then the government declared war on the predominantly Russian Eastern provinces and, for past eight years, has killed 14,000 people.
Ukraine is not a human catastrophe like Vietnam, where the US burned children to death and poisoned those that survived, eventually killing 3,000,000 civilians. It's not a war. It's a police action, like the Korean War in '51 (but it killed 3 million). And it's not a criminal act, because UN Article 15 applies to Russia as it did when the US invoked it against Iran. Against Iran, for God's sake.
The Ukrainian population normally speaks both Russian and Ukrainian, but often also Hungarian (or Magyar), since 1st September 2020 the use of any language other than Ukrainian has been strictly forbidden in public administrations and schools.
Russian- and Magyar-language schools have been closed, prompting official protests from Russia and Hungary. On 21 July 2021, President Volodymyr Zelensky signed the law on the “Indigenous Peoples of Ukraine.” It stipulates that only Ukrainians of Scandinavian origin, as well as Tatars and Karaites have “the right to fully enjoy all human rights and all fundamental freedoms” (sic), thereby depriving Ukrainians of Slavic origin of the same rights.
"The choice that we faced in Ukraine — and I'm using the past tense there intentionally — was whether Russia exercised a veto over NATO involvement in Ukraine on the negotiating table or on the battlefield," said George Beebe, a former director of CIA's Russia analysis and special adviser to VP Cheney, "and we elected to make sure that the veto was exercised on the battlefield, hoping that either Putin would stay his hand or that his military operation would fail."
Apparently the US forgot Montgomery's Two Rules of War: Don't march on Moscow and don't start a land war in Asia.
China has been using this idea of “exclusive security,” which it borrowed from the Russians, to rationalize its illegal invasion of Ukraine??
It's not my field of study but your verdict seems premature to say the least.
Godfree Roberts <godfree@gmail.com>
10:51 AM (53 minutes ago)
to tonlib, Philip
Dr. Putin explained in depth why he launched a punitive expedition into Ukraine.
Unlike the dozen wars the West has launched, his reasoning and justification are impeccable: it is a matter of Russia's life or death.
In the summer of 1997, Joe Biden put out a statement explicitly saying that NATO expansion in the Baltic regions would rightly provoke Russia to take military actions. Biden even suggested that NATO would be responsible for creating a “vigorous and hostile” Russian response.
Biden said: “I think the one place where the greatest consternation would be caused in the short-term for admission [to NATO], having nothing to do with the merit and preparedness of the country to come in, would be to admit Baltic states now in terms of NATO-Russian, US-Russian relations. If there was ever anything that was going to tip the balance, were it to be tipped, in terms of a vigorous and hostile reaction in Russia, I don’t mean military, it would be that.” https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/video-of-joe-biden-warning-of-russian-hostility-if-nato-expands-resurfaces/ar-AAUMVjI
In 2007, in Munich, Dr. Putin told a Western audience, “It turns out that NATO has put its frontline forces on our borders, and we continue to strictly fulfil the treaty obligations and do not react to these actions at all. I think it is obvious that NATO expansion does not have any relation with the modernization of the Alliance itself, or with ensuring security in Europe. On the contrary, it represents a serious provocation that reduces the level of mutual trust. And we have the right to ask: against whom is this expansion intended? And what happened to the assurances our western partners made after the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact? Where are those declarations today? No one even remembers them.”
Putin added, “But I will allow myself to remind this audience what was said. I would like to quote the speech of NATO General Secretary Mr Woerner in Brussels on 17 May 1990. He said at the time that: “the fact that we are ready not to place a NATO army outside of German territory gives the Soviet Union a firm security guarantee”. Where are these guarantees?”
That was 15 years ago.
The referendums conducted by the two self-proclaimed Republics of Donetsk and Lugansk in May 2014, were not referendums of “independence” (независимость), as some unscrupulous journalists have claimed, but referendums of “self-determination” or “autonomy” (самостоятельность).
The qualifier “pro-Russian” suggests that Russia was a party to the conflict, which was not the case, and the term “Russian speakers” would have been more honest. Moreover, these referendums were conducted against the advice of Vladimir Putin.
After the election of the post-coup new model Ukrainian government in 2014, opposition parties were declared illegal and some leaders were arrested for “treason,” the media was censored and the parliament outlawed Russian, the language of a third of the population, as an official language. Then the government declared war on the predominantly Russian Eastern provinces and, for past eight years, has killed 14,000 people.
Ukraine is not a human catastrophe like Vietnam, where the US burned children to death and poisoned those that survived, eventually killing 3,000,000 civilians. It's not a war. It's a police action, like the Korean War in '51 (but it killed 3 million). And it's not a criminal act, because UN Article 15 applies to Russia as it did when the US invoked it against Iran. Against Iran, for God's sake.
The Ukrainian population normally speaks both Russian and Ukrainian, but often also Hungarian (or Magyar), since 1st September 2020 the use of any language other than Ukrainian has been strictly forbidden in public administrations and schools.
Russian- and Magyar-language schools have been closed, prompting official protests from Russia and Hungary. On 21 July 2021, President Volodymyr Zelensky signed the law on the “Indigenous Peoples of Ukraine.” It stipulates that only Ukrainians of Scandinavian origin, as well as Tatars and Karaites have “the right to fully enjoy all human rights and all fundamental freedoms” (sic), thereby depriving Ukrainians of Slavic origin of the same rights.
"The choice that we faced in Ukraine — and I'm using the past tense there intentionally — was whether Russia exercised a veto over NATO involvement in Ukraine on the negotiating table or on the battlefield," said George Beebe, a former director of CIA's Russia analysis and special adviser to VP Cheney, "and we elected to make sure that the veto was exercised on the battlefield, hoping that either Putin would stay his hand or that his military operation would fail."
Apparently the US forgot Montgomery's Two Rules of War: Don't march on Moscow and don't start a land war in Asia.