Posted on 12/27/2014 2:05:01 AM PST by Cincinatus' Wife
Russia has adopted a new military doctrine, keeping North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) expansion first among its list of primary external threats.
The revised doctrine [PDF in Russian - 29 pages with 58 sections], signed by President Vladimir Putin on Friday, is comparable to a 2010 version, which also listed NATO expansion as a primary threat.
Additions to the doctrine include a highlighting of the threat from "global strategic antiballistic missile systems" and a Russian goal to protect its interests in the Arctic region, according to Russian state-funded news organization RT.
The doctrine’s adoption comes days after Ukraine took a major step toward joining NATO, when its parliament overwhelmingly renounced the country's nonaligned status that prevented it from joining military alliances.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has become the latest Russian political figure to warn Ukraine against trying to join NATO, recently saying on state television that such a move would be "dangerous."
“There are a few Western countries that want to maintain the crisis in Ukraine and to maintain and boost the confrontation between Ukraine and Russia, including through provocative efforts toward membership in the Atlantic alliance,” Lavrov said, according to Reuters.
"The very idea of Ukraine's efforts to join NATO are dangerous, not only for Ukrainian people, because there is no unity over that issue, it is dangerous for European security," he added.
Tensions between Russia and the west, especially the United States, escalated sharply this year when Russia annexed Crimea from Ukraine in March. American officials believe Moscow-backed rebels were responsible for the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over eastern Ukraine in July, which killed all 298 on board.
Thank God only two more years of the Won known as ‘flexable’
Yeah, we’re warning you, if you join NATO, we’ll invade! What maroons.
NATO expansion threat......ha! Compare the process of how a nation becomes a NATO member and how countries “joined” the Warsaw Pact.
Agenda 21ification in progress..the UN wants to head the NWO and the Beast will feed these efforts anyway he can...
Irrelevant to the discussion. If Mexico had pushed to join the Warsaw Pact, we’d be none too happy about it.
...Nuland told the audience the entire structure of procurement and battle management of the Ukrainian military is going to have to be realigned and reformed.“It’s going to take support.
It’s going to take effort; that is why one of our main lines of work with Ukraine is this bottom-up review of the military that European command has been conducting and beginning the equipping and training of Ukrainian military units at their request, so we’re very much focused on that,” she said
It’s very relevant. Nobody volunteered to be a Soviet satellite.
So Russia does not and should not have any vital national interest in preventing Ukraine from joining NATO b/c the Warsaw Pact wasn’t voluntary?
What about Ukraine’s national interest in trying to prevent itself from being invaded by Russia? For the third time?
What benefit does Ukraine hope to get from NATO membership? Do they actually think the rest of the European partners would actually intervene militarily? Other than the U.S. none of the other member states have the ability to do so.
I totally understand where Ukraine stands. The U.S., European NATO countries, Ukraine, and Russia all have competing interests here. The U.S. doesn’t want war with Russia, but we also don’t want to enable potential aggression. Ukraine doesn’t want to be vulnerable to Russia, and becoming a NATO nation would put numerous friends on their side who would be treaty-bound to intervene militarily should Russia attack. Europe depends heavily on oil/natural gas flow from Russia and the BTC pipeline, so they have a significant interest in not provoking Russia. Russia wants buffer zones on its borders and regional dominance while protecting ethnic Russians in some of the former Soviet satellites (Ukraine, in particular).
I think Russia will win this one on the diplomatic and maybe informational fronts, but lose it on the military and economic fronts. The U.S. can pose as the Good Guys For Freedom, stating the right of self-determination of all peoples while allowing the European nations to shoot down the membership proposal for their greedy purposes. Russia maintains Ukraine as a buffer, and Putin further grinds the Russian military and economy into the ground by playing in Ukraine.
I don’t think so; I don’t think the “Won” ever intends to leave office, as we all know that it said “I won.”
It said that because it thinks itself a king that has won a kingdom, and will never relinquish its throne unless it is dead, and then the crown will be passed to a family member (its wife? its children?) who are already groomed for such an event.
Ukraine and NATO have every right to mutually associate with each other to build a defensive alliance.
That’s what I think. NATO won’t help them, so what really is the point?
Of course they have the right. That doesn’t make it a good idea for us or NATO.
may have been the original plan for the Won. Today, reality is setting in and a majority know the Won isn’t the One.
They can be interested all they want, just like they whined about the Baltics joining. Nothing happened because of it. Russia is the one with a history of expansionism by force. To call NATO a threat is laughable.
Why compare Reagan to the evil empire that murdered 10s of millions of people?
Mexico didn’t push to join the Warsaw Pact, did any nation?
Nonsense, what does that even mean?
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