Posted on 12/21/2021 5:28:07 AM PST by Kaslin
"Get off our front porch. Get out of our front yard. And stay out of our backyard."
This might stand as a crude summary of two draft security pacts Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei A. Ryabkov delivered last week as Russia's price for resolving the crisis created by those 100,000 Russian troops on Ukraine's borders.
Ryabkov's demands appear to be a virtual ultimatum, designed to be rejected by the U.S. and NATO and provide Moscow with a pretext for an invasion and occupation of part or all of Ukraine.
Among the maximalist Russian demands:
Written guarantees from NATO that it will not admit into the 70-year-old Cold War alliance any more ex-Soviet republics, specifically, Ukraine, Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan.
Offensive weapons are to be kept out of nations that border Russia.
The U.S. and Russia should keep their warships and strategic bombers away from each other's territory. The U.S. should forgo planting military bases in any of the five "stans," the Central Asian nations that once were part of the USSR.
NATO should withdraw military infrastructure it has placed in Eastern European states after 1997.
That date is significant. For not until 1999 did Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic join NATO. And the accession of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Bulgaria, Slovakia and Slovenia came only in 2004.
Russia is calling for the creation of a security zone around its borders to include all of the former Soviet Union and beyond, where U.S. and NATO military bases would be prohibited.
That Ryabkov's demands were specific and made public suggests they are to be taken seriously and Russian President Vladimir Putin is behind them. The deputy foreign minister is calling for immediate negotiations over these security pacts to begin in Geneva.
Before dismissing these Russian demands outright, the U.S. should look closely to see if there are not some issues on which compromise is possible and common ground can be found so the Ukraine crisis might be defused. One senior U.S. official has been quoted as indicating such:
"There are some things in those documents that the Russians know will be unacceptable ... but there are other things that we are prepared to work with and merit some discussion."
The U.S. has already signaled, with President Joe Biden's warning to Putin about "severe ... economic sanctions" should Russia invade, that we are ruling out war and confining any U.S. response to nonmilitary means.
British Defence Secretary Ben Wallace has said that the U.K. is also unlikely to send troops to defend Ukraine if Russia invades, as Ukraine is not a member of NATO.
Nor is the U.S. or NATO going to war for Georgia to validate its claims to Abkhazia and South Ossetia, as we showed in 2008. That August, President George W. Bush sat immobile as Putin's Russia threw the invading Georgians out of South Ossetia.
Again, America is not going to war for Georgia or Ukraine. We have demonstrated that with our inaction in the Russian-Georgia war of 2008, in the Crimea and Donbass crises in 2014, and in the Ukraine crisis of 2021. So, why not find a way to convey this reality, to avert a Russian invasion of Ukraine and war Kyiv would surely lose?
If Ukraine and Georgia are not going to be admitted to NATO or given Article V war guarantees, why not say so publicly now?
What is happening today is that, after decades of moving NATO east from the Elbe River to the Baltic states and borders of Russia itself, the chickens of NATO expansion are coming home to roost.
Since the end of the Cold War, NATO has doubled in size.
We now have outstanding U.S.-NATO war guarantees to 28 nations on the other side of the Atlantic, some of them tiny nations deep inside Eastern Europe, in the very shadow of Russia, the largest nation on earth.
The day cannot be far off when the U.S. is going to have to review and discard Cold War commitments that date to the 1940s and 1950s, and require us to fight a nuclear power such as Russia for countries that have nothing to do with our vital interests or our national security.
Ryabkov's call for U.S.-Russia negotiations at Geneva may be the place to begin a public reappraisal of our Cold War commitments.
For any concessions we make on not expanding NATO into Ukraine and Georgia, we can demand reciprocal Russian concessions. New arms agreements to limit U.S. and Russian missiles in Europe and to restrict the number of U.S. and Russia air and naval operations near the borders of our respective countries seem negotiable.
A Russian-Ukrainian war, which Kyiv would almost surely lose, would prove a disaster for both nations.
The winner would be China. For such a war would leave Russia no place else to turn for an economic, political and strategic partner. And U.S. interests are not served by the cementing alliance between Beijing and Moscow.
Pat’s right but I have to wonder about him. 1992 painted him out as a racist but he was Trump before Trump. Then he had to run on the Reform Party ticket with a communist, making it all about him. Perot said the same things so the populism is out there. His earlier writing was against us getting into WW2. It was pretty through and detailed as I remember. The world will end up in Armageddon with or without us. What would China do to Japan if we didn’t occupy them?
Why don’t we quit picking fights with people on the other side of the Globe?
Asking for 72 million friends.
Whatever is the correct solution, count on FJB to do the opposite.
Keeping his track record intact.
Correct, Joe will do the opposite of what is right.
NATO should not agree to defend any country it can’t defend.
I think Ryabkov is presumptuous.
Russia may like to have many things but there is no reason to formally give them to Russia.
The Ukrainian domestic problems should be dealt with by Ukraine in a peaceful manner.
The Russians should also understand that the US wishes to have friendly relations with as many countries as possible, including Russia.
Much of it sounded like they want to return to the glory days of the Soviet Union - get NATO and the west out of their traditional puppet states. Of course nature abhors a vacuum so Russia would of course step back in... Biden and his bozos just might give it to them. That is what it would be, a gift.
That's the real interesting thing that will be telling here. Who ever is really pulling the strings and writing Joe's scripts... What is their relationship with Russia? If Joe backs down then we can reasonably suspect the string-pullers have a cozy relationship with Russia and they may be getting something in return.
The other possible motive for a Biden capitulation would be that the deep dark behind him is/are focused on their takeover of America. Russia could just be taking advantage of the new, weaker America and west.
Whatever happens, you can be sure Biden will send a few million doses of covid vaccinations to Ukraine. That'll help.
But do we? Pretty sure we don’t wish to be peaceful with many nations. I think it will be a good day when Putin takes Ukraine and spits in the face of the transnational Marxists who rule the West.
I'm not in favor of us going to war with Russia or anyone else, but Buchanan is arguing for appeasement. It didn't work so well in the 1930s. Putin is nowhere near as bad as Hitler overall, but he is using the same strategy Hitler used: exploit the other side's desire for peace to get concessions.
Ukraine has a population of 44 million people, of which 17% are ethnic Russians, or about 7.5 million. Even if all the ethnic Russians would prefer to have Ukraine subsumed into Russia (which may not be true), there are 36.5 million non-Russian Ukrainians who would be subjected to authoritarian alien rule, hardly a democratic solution—to send a message to Western Marxists who will ignore the message?
Sounds like Northern Ireland or even South Africa back when.
What the people want will be determined by how they fight in the event of an invasion, which I suspect won’t be very hard. I know it’s hard for Americans to understand but a lot of people, and Eastern Europeans in particular, don’t want Western style ‘democracy’, which hasn’t turned out so well in may regards. Russia and Putin are very far from perfect but they know the difference between a man and woman, etc. Nobody wants to the guaranteed social decay, forced mass immigration from third world countries and destruction of the family that come from being Westernized. In fact, the former Soviet states do the most to resist it.
Fixed it.
The population of Ukraine is 32 million max at this point. 80% are culturally Russian regardless f how they do identify for the pollsters.
Putin has stated publicly that he thinks the demise of the USSR was a catastrophe, one he would like to reverse. This declaration is a step in that direction. By consolidating his alliance with China he is achieving insurance against the imposition of sanctions by the West. Whatever we decide to restrict trade wise he can replace with the assistance of Xi. Europe would be the loser.
Biden still tries to talk tough but clearly he has no leverage to speak of, and his flunkies have no idea what to do, now that they have taken the military threat off the table.
“Putin has stated publicly that he thinks the demise of the USSR was a catastrophe, one he would like to reverse.”
No, he didn’t. The full quote sounds as following: “He who does not regret the break-up of the Soviet Union has no heart; he who wants to revive it has no brains.”
We do not have the logistics to refight the eastern front.
Europe depends on gas from Russia to stay warm in the winter, do you think they will join in the fun?
You don’t have to like it, this is not our circus.
https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna7632057
“First and foremost it is worth acknowledging that the demise of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century,” Putin said.
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