Six on History: Russia and Ukraine
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1) US envoy: Greece partnership no threat to Turkey | eKathimerini.com, 11-5-22, (Greece, Eng. Edition)
"The partnership between the US and Greece in eastern Macedonia and Thrace “is not a threat to Turkey,” the US Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt insisted Thursday, reiterating that the new Mutual Defense Cooperation Agreement (MDCA) is another step in bilateral relations which are “at a peak, but not at the summit.”
Pyatt’s remarks were made amid mounting concern and speculation among Turkish media and politicians over the use of the port of Alexandroupolis by US troops and that it may be targeting the neighboring country.
Speaking in Thessaloniki where he participated in the “Thessaloniki Summit 2021, Pyatt said the the US consider Greece to be a country with which it shares common strategic interests.
2) US urges Russia to make the 'smart choice' to de-escalate tensions on Ukraine's border, EURONews
"I hope that the Russian delegations go back to Russia, speak to President [Vladimir] Putin and he makes the smart choice to choose de-escalation and diplomacy as opposed to deterrence and [the] very significant costs to Russia if they choose invasion, subversion or coercion," Sherman told Euronews.
"The militarization of American foreign policy has evolved over the past thirty years. Ironically, this took place in the wake of the dissolution of the Soviet Union, which should have led to reassessing U.S. national security policy and defense spending. Democratic presidents have played a major role in this militarization because they are unwilling to challenge the Pentagon and the defense industry.
Bill Clinton was initially responsible for the militarization. He abolished the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, and began the expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Barack Obama believed that war in Afghanistan was a “good war,” and reappointed Robert Gates as secretary of defense to appease the uniformed military. President Joe Biden even appointed a retired four-star general to the position of secretary of defense, and has given diplomacy a back seat in the twin struggles with Russia and China. The postwar presidents understood the need to divide Moscow and Beijing, but Biden has taken actions that have inspired Russia and China to grow closer.
But it all started with Clinton, whose relations with the Pentagon were tenuous from the outset. Clinton came into office with a reputation for manipulating the draft laws in 1969 to avoid service in Vietnam. Clinton, moreover, alienated the military shortly after his inauguration when he suggested that he would allow homosexuals to serve openly in the military. Of course, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and William Cohen avoided Vietnam, but Republicans typically get a pass from the Pentagon and the press when avoiding service. Former senator John Kerry was a Vietnam War hero, but his ultimate criticism of the war was highlighted by the mainstream media and his Republican opposition.
Clinton bowed to military pressure time and time again on numerous national security issues. His capitulations weakened or abandoned agreements dealing with the International Criminal Court; a ban on landmines; the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty; and the Chemical Warfare Convention. Clinton bowed to the Democratic Party’s right wing in naming James Woolsey as director of the Central Intelligence Agency. When Woolsey, a Cold Warrior, wore out his welcome on the Hill, he was forced to resign. Clinton then named an Air Force general to succeed Woolsey; the general was forced to withdraw his nomination, but this earned no mention in Clinton’s autobiography. Similarly, Clinton’s book makes no mention of his efforts to name Admiral Bobby Inman, another Cold Warrior, as secretary of defense. Clinton’s CIA directors, John Deutch and George Tenet, contributed to the decline of the CIA.
The Pentagon had so little respect for Clinton that, in 1994, it did not respond to the efforts of the White House to create military options for stopping the genocide in Rwanda or for countering al Qaeda in Afghanistan. Conversely, Clinton ordered the bombing of a pharmaceutical plant in Khartoum, Sudan in 1998 in the wake of the bombings of the U.S. embassies on the Horn of Africa. The White House argued the plant was producing lethal chemicals; no, it was producing aspirin for all of Africa and this was known to the intelligence community. Clinton’s White House and the Pentagon ignored the warnings of the Department of State and the CIA to avoid using Yemen as a refueling stop for U.S. warships because of the threat of terrorism. As a result, the U.S.S. Cole was targeted in 2000 with a loss of 17 U.S. sailors.
We are still dealing with the results of Clinton’s ill-informed decision making, particularly with regard to the current crisis with Russia over Ukraine. Clinton’s decision to expand NATO virtually ensured that there would be little progress in developing a strategic approach toward Russia. The liberated states of East Europe, in the wake of the dissolution of the Soviet Union, wanted to be anchored to the West, but the proper vehicle for such an arrangement was the European Union, not NATO. Indeed, the greatest strategic failure of the Clinton administration was its marginalization of Russia rather than anchoring Russia to the West, as suggested by the late George Kennan in his strategy of containment.
The expansion of NATO marked a betrayal of President George H.W. Bush and Secretary of State James A. Baker III’s commitment in 1990 to not “leapfrog” East Germany if the Soviets removed their 380,000 troops from the East. The continuing flirtation of membership for both Ukraine and Georgia, which started in 2008, has caused Russia anxieties over the changing European balance. Expanding NATO was a gratuitous provocation, which belies U.S. accusations from high-level officials that the crisis over Ukraine is a “manufactured” one by Russian President Vladimir Putin. In January 1990, the West German foreign minister confirmed that there would not be an “expansion of NATO territory to the east” in the wake of the Soviet military withdrawal. In my interviews with Baker and Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze in 1994, Baker acknowledged (and Shevardnadze confirmed) that he told the former foreign minister the United States would not “leapfrog” over a reunified Germany to move closer to the borders of the Soviet Union. There are reports that Baker was willing to put this commitment in writing, but that national security adviser Brent Scowcroft convinced the president not to do so.
The sad fact is that the international calculus had nothing to do with Clinton’s decision to expand NATO. He was concerned that his Republican opponent in1996, the late Robert Dole, was going to use the failure to expand NATO in the campaign for the presidency. Clinton, a masterful domestic politician, moved to take the NATO issue off the table by endorsing expansion. This played well domestically among East European communities in key states such as Michigan and Wisconsin. George W. Bush worsened the strategic situation by recruiting former Soviet republics, the three Baltic states, for NATO and deploying a regional missile defense in Poland and Romania.
Overall, the Clinton presidency weakened the national security process by compromising the balance between the key instruments of foreign policy, ending the once central role of the Department of State. The end to the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency and the United State Information Service as well as the weakening of the Agency for International Development deemphasized the civilian agencies in the formation and conceptualization of U.S. foreign policy. The Pentagon was the major winner in this rebalancing; similarly, the Pentagon’s control over the intelligence community was bolstered. To paraphrase Mark Twain, when the only tool in the toolbox is a hammer, then all of our problems will look like nails."
Melvin A. Goodman is a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and a professor of government at Johns Hopkins University. A former CIA analyst, Goodman is the author of Failure of Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA and National Insecurity: The Cost of American Militarism. and A Whistleblower at the CIA. His most recent books are “American Carnage: The Wars of Donald Trump” (Opus Publishing, 2019) and “Containing the National Security State” (Opus Publishing, 2021). Goodman is the national security columnist for counterpunch.org.
AMY GOODMAN: President Biden said Wednesday he expects Russia will invade Ukraine, but predicted Russian President Vladimir Putin does not want a full-blown war. Russia has reportedly stationed about 100,000 troops on its Ukraine border and sent troops into Belarus, which also shares a border with Ukraine. Biden said Washington’s response to a Russian invasion will depend on its severity.
PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: Russia will be held accountable if it invades. And it depends on what it does. It’s one thing if it’s a minor incursion, and then we end up having to fight about what to do and not do, etc. But if they actually do what they’re capable of doing with the force amassed on the border, it is going to be a disaster for Russia.
AMY GOODMAN: Biden’s remarks about a “minor incursion” alarmed officials in Ukraine. Shortly after the news conference ended, Biden’s press secretary, Jen Psaki, released a statement clarifying Biden’s comments about a “minor incursion” by saying, quote, “If any Russian military forces move across the Ukrainian border, that’s a renewed invasion, and it will be met with a swift, severe, and united response from the United States and our Allies.”
During the news conference, President Biden also predicted Russian President Vladimir Putin will move troops into Ukraine. This is Biden responding to a question from David Sanger of The New York Times about Putin.
PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: I think he still does not want any full-blown war, number one. Number two, do I think he’ll test the West, test the United States and NATO as significantly as he can? Yes, I think he will. But I think he’ll pay a serious and dear price for it that he doesn’t think now will cost him what it’s going to cost him. And I think he will regret having done it. …
I’m not so sure he has — is certain what he’s going to do. My guess is he will move in. He has to do something. And, by the way, I’ve indicated to him — the two things he said to me that he wants guarantees on: One is Ukraine will never be part of NATO, and, two, that NATO — or, there will not be strategic weapons stationed in Ukraine. Well, we can work out something on the second piece, [inaudible] what he does along the Russian line, as well, or the Russian border, in the European area of Russia. …
DAVID SANGER: Mr. President, it sounds like you’re offering some way out here, some off-ramp. And it sounds like what it is, is at least an informal assurance that NATO is not going to take in Ukraine anytime in the next few decades. And it sounds like you’re saying we would never put nuclear weapons there. He also wants us to move all of our nuclear weapons out of Europe and not have troops rotating through the old Soviet Bloc. Do you think there’s space there, as well?
PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: No. No, there’s not space for that. We won’t permanently station, but the idea we’re not going to — we’re going to actually increase troop presence in Poland, in Romania, etc., if in fact he moves, because we have a sacred obligation in Article 5 to defend those countries. They are part of NATO. We don’t have that obligation relative to Ukraine, although we have great concern about what happens in Ukraine.
AMY GOODMAN: That’s President Biden speaking at his two-hour news conference Wednesday.
Secretary of State Tony Blinken is planning to meet with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov Friday. Blinken is meeting with some of his NATO counterparts in Berlin today and was in Kyiv Wednesday.
Interviewer: Nikita Gryazin, UC Fellow
Nikita Gryazin is reading for an MPhil in International Relations at the University of Oxford. Currently, he is a UC Fellow, YGLN Member and ELN Officer at the European Leadership Network, Research Assistant in the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Oxford, and Co-Editor for the UK Politics section of the Oxford Political Review.
Interviewee: Sir Roderic Lyne
Sir Roderic Lyne, KBE CMG, is a former British diplomat who served in various positions from 1970 to 2004. Among his roles, he served as Foreign Affairs Advisor to the Prime Minister (1993-6), UK Ambassador to international organisations in Geneva (1997-2000) and UK Ambassador to Russia (2000-04). Sir Roderic subsequently served as a member of the Iraq Inquiry (2009-16); Deputy Chairman of the Royal Institute of International Affairs (2008-16); and Chairman of the Governors of Kingston University.
" ... The issues around Russia's borders were acutely sensitive to anybody in the Russian political firmament, Ukraine and Belarus in particular. There was a great belief in Russia in the sort of Russian version of the Monroe Doctrine, and they took a very zero-sum view of the fact that Western influence was seen to increase in Ukraine. I was warning before I left Moscow in the summer of 2004 that any push for Ukrainian membership in NATO was absolutely fissile material. It was clear to me all along, but I'm not sure all Western leaders really understood. I think there were people, particularly in America, in the neoconservative circles, the “John Bolton Brigade”, who simply didn't understand that because they actually had very little understanding of Russia.
In the 2004 Ukrainian elections, Putin invested very heavily in Yanukovych. He sent his own advisers, he personally went to Kiev just before the election. So, when Yanukovych was turned over – that was the most humiliating defeat that Putin ever suffered in his life. I remember that Putin was very angry at the time. I was still in quite close contact with people in the Kremlin, and some officials were saying to me, “he is so angry that when he comes into the office, we all hide under the desks”.
It weakened him significantly; serious political observers were speculating that he wouldn't last in power until the next election in 2008. In this situation, his old KGB friends came saying that this was all done by the West. He refused to take phone calls from Western leaders for quite a long time. And from that point on there are two Putins. There's quite rational Putin who had accepted the case for modernising Russia including some westernizing policies. And there is the paranoid, insecure Putin, a very suspicious person. I don't know if I quoted this in the Russia challenge piece, but Stalin once said to Mikoyan: “I don't trust anybody, not even myself”, and I feel that Putin is like that. People close to him confirm the same thing: he is absolute paranoid about his personal security and really overdoes it, he knows many people would like to kill him. Ukraine only played into Putin's paranoia and the paranoia of people around him.
All this works to the advantage of quite a lot of people in Moscow: if you are in the intelligence organisations, if you are in the military, you need to have an enemy to justify your budgets. In the sense, these people had to reinvent NATO and the West as an enemy to reinforce their own power and to justify their budgets and their actions. That's why I think Ukraine was critically important turning point, and then you just go forward from there.
Nikita: That's why we had this famous Munich speech in 2007.
Sir Roderic: In fact, we have a continuum that starts in 2005 with the Orange Revolution and runs through the Munich speech. People should not have been as surprised by the Munich speech as they were; at least I wasn't. But it made the world sort of wake up.
And then we arrive to the 2008 Bucharest summit of NATO, which was a massive mistake on the Western side trying to push Georgia and Ukraine into NATO. It was stupid on every level at that time. If you want to start a war with Russia, that's the best way of doing it. Moreover, any poll in Ukraine showed that two thirds of the Ukrainian public did not want NATO membership. Joining NATO is also not a simple process, and Ukraine was not physically in the state to join NATO. Georgians did want to join. But they thought NATO would save them, which was a miscalculation. Georgia is too small, honestly, to be of much use to NATO. Moreover, it is a divided country, and putting NATO’s footprint, into a very unstable region of the Caucasus did not make any strategic sense.
We should have thought: how will this be perceived in Russia? Not as a question of Moscow having a veto on NATO membership, but as a matter of calculation. And the answer to that takes about two and a half seconds of thinking: there are no benefits and huge drawbacks. At the NATO Summit, Angela Merkel quite rightly tried to block it.
The final compromise communique, to me, is one of the most stupid documents in modern diplomacy. The paragraph in the Bucharest communique about Georgia and Ukraine should be framed and put on the wall of every Western diplomat as an example of what not to do. It combines the worst of both worlds: it upsets the Georgians and the Ukrainians by not giving them a Membership Action Programme and it upsets the Russians by saying someday these guys are going to join NATO. That gave every excuse needed to the hardliners in Moscow to say: “NATO is declaring war on us. They're coming to take Georgia and Ukraine.” And, as a result, Russian troops were marching towards Tbilisi later that year.
Round two of the Ukrainian battle came when, again, I think the EU rather overplayed its hand. There were exactly the same factors involved, and it led to Crimea and the little green men, to the Donbass and Lugansk, to sanctions, and that takes us to where we are now. And then just mix in a little bit of the unbelievable stupidity of using biological weapons to try to kill people in Salisbury to cement the image of the Putin regime as being a rogue state, a pariah state, a state that has zero respect for international law, international treaties, and international conventions. And I just don't see that this can change.
Nikita: Perhaps with Joe Biden as US President we can expect another reset with Russia?
Sir Roderic: The American reset last time was a disaster. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama got that completely wrong, and it led nowhere. If Biden gets elected, I don't think the Americans will try another reset, so I think we are stuck at the moment. On the Russian side, for several years now, people in the political military leadership, like Gerasimov, say that the West is waging economic war against Russia through sanctions, and that it is completely justified to respond by other means. Besides using various forms of cyber and political action, even trying to kill traitors like Skripal is completely justifiable because, you know, it is a war. We're not firing, thank God, nuclear missiles, but we are at war from their perspective. And I cannot see that changing while Putin and his group are in power and I do think it will change afterwards. ... "
"Russia has begun moving troops to Ukraine’s northern neighbour Belarus for joint military exercises, in a move likely to increase fears in the west that Moscow is preparing for an invasion.
The joint military exercises, named United Resolve, are to take place as Russia also musters forces along Ukraine’s eastern border, threatening a potential invasion that could unleash the largest conflict in Europe for decades.
Social media videos from Belarus appeared to show artillery and other military vehicles arriving on flatbed carriages owned by the Russian state railway company, and Alexander Volfovich, the head of Belarus’s security council, said in a briefing that troops were already arriving before exercises scheduled for February.
Some military analysts have suggested Russia could send its forces through Belarus in the case of a broad invasion, effectively stretching out Ukraine’s defences by taking advantage of the two countries’ nearly 700-mile border. Others believe Belarus would not play a serious role in the conflict if Russia were to launch an attack on Ukraine.
The Belarusian leader, Alexander Lukashenko, has responded to international pressure and isolation by strengthening ties with Russia, giving vocal support for Putin’s military buildup as he receives diplomatic and economic support from the Kremlin to battle western sanctions. He has also abandoned his country’s supposedly neutral stance on the Ukraine conflict and publicly endorsed Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea.
The exercises are to be held in the west of Belarus, near the borders of Nato members Poland and Lithuania, and its southern flank with Ukraine, Lukashenko said.
“Set an exact date and let us know, so we aren’t blamed for massing some troops here out of the blue as if we are preparing to go to war,” he told top military officials.
Reports from Russia have also shown more military equipment, including tanks and short-range ballistic missiles, being transported across the country toward Ukraine within the last week.
The German foreign minister, Annalena Baerbock, said before a meeting with her Russian counterpart on Tuesday that she hoped the tensions could be resolved by diplomacy but if not Moscow would pay a “high price” for aggressive acts toward Ukraine.
No concrete troop numbers or timeframe have been named for the joint Russia-Belarus exercises, which Putin announced during a summit with Lukashenko in late December. Lukashenko said on Monday that the exact dates in February were still being determined.
He said during the briefing that the exercises were needed because of the presence of Nato forces in neighbouring Poland and the Baltic states, as well as Ukraine’s deployment of troops to the border in response to the migrant crisis that he helped create last year.
2. Eastern Ukraine
Russian mechanised forces encircle and cut off major cities such as Kharkiv, Dnipro and Kyiv
3. Dnieper River
Most Russian forces expected to stop their advance at the river, with the exceptions of those heading for Kyiv
4. Black Sea coast
Seizing Odessa via Transnistria, Crimea and/or the sea would help Russia gain effective control of Ukraine’s coastline
5. Kyiv
Russian forces could avoid having to cross the Dnieper inside Ukraine by advancing on Kyiv from south-east Belarus
6. South-west Belarus
Advancing on Kyiv from farther west would mean Russian forces could bypass the Pripet marshes and Chernobyl area
He also echoed aggressive Kremlin rhetoric that may be used to justify a military intervention in Ukraine, claiming that Kyiv was preparing battalions of “radical nationalists”. A Ukrainian official called the remarks manipulative and “part of an information war”.
Volfovich said the exercises would involve Belarusian and Russian soldiers training to repel air and land attacks, neutralise enemy saboteurs and practise other manoeuvres. He also played down the significance of their timing, saying that there was “nothing extraordinary” in them because they were announced late last year, according to a report in the state-run Belta news agency."
There are signs, however, that Belarus has taken a more active role in its support of Russia in its ongoing conflict with Ukraine and the west.
Kyiv initially said it believed a hacking team tied to Belarusian state intelligence may have played a role in a major cyber-attack on government websites late last week, and Russian nuclear-capable bombers have recently flown over western Belarus.
Lukashenko has strengthened ties with Putin since 2020, when he launched a bloody crackdown on protests sparked by vote-rigging during presidential elections. He was driven further into international isolation after he grounded a RyanAir flight in order to arrest a critic of his government and helped manufacture a migrant crisis on EU borders, prompting a humanitarian emergency.
Belarus adopted an ostensibly neutral position in 2014 and avoided recognising Russia’s annexation of Crimea, but the dynamic has changed considerably as the country has relied more on Russian diplomatic and material support in the last two years."
TRAILER: The Surge: the Untold Story
