Ukraine: the false alibi of “provocation” Born to hide Putin’s desire for an empire
What provocation would Putin be responding to? There are no US missiles in Ukraine and Kiev's membership of NATO has not been on the agenda for years
They should put it, at this point, as a warning: a crisis with Russia can cause serious side effects, including collective hallucinations. In one of these hallucinations, which we find described in black and white in articles by distinguished journalists, most recently Toni Capuozzo (but he is in excellent and vast company), the crisis in Ukraine is mistaken as an upside-down Cuban missile crisis. According to them, Russia has been deploying, since November, about 100,000 men on the borders of Ukraine, not to threaten to invade it, but only to react to an unacceptable provocation. And they say it is as if NATO had deployed its missiles on Ukrainian territory, aimed at none other than the heart of Russia, exactly as Chrushev did in Cuba in October 1962, where it secretly deployed intermediate-range nuclear ballistic missiles aimed at US cities. . This metaphor should serve to make the general public "understand" why Putin is not an aggressor at all, but rather is forced to react, even threatening the use of military force, if necessary.
The metaphor does not fit with reality, unless you have, in fact, the trivia. In the first place: where would NATO, or even just American, missiles deployed in Ukraine be? What would these missiles be? Where do you have ramps? Because John F. Kennedy, before ordering the naval blockade of Cuba, at least waited to see the photos taken from a reconnaissance plane showing the presence of Soviet missiles in Cuban territory. To an undeclared act of war, Kennedy responded with the utmost caution: blocking the island and negotiating. But there are no American missiles in Ukraine, nor missiles from any other NATO member nation. What provocation, please, would Putin be responding to?
Even if we want to stay within the Cuban metaphor, we can think that a missile crisis is in preparation. That of 1962 was the culmination of a three-year standoff between the new Cuban communist regime born of the 1959 revolution, and the two administrations that followed one another in those years, that of Eisenhower and then that of Kennedy. The tension culminated in the failed Bay of Pigs landing, when a small army of Cuban anti-Communist volunteers tried to overthrow the regime, with tacit American support, and failed. The parallel with Ukraine is convenient, for those who want to believe it, considering that the crisis between Ukraine and Russia began in 2014 with the deposition of the last pro-Russian president of Kiev, Viktor Yanukovic, following the Maidan revolution. Then Russia reacted by taking away a large piece of Ukraine, Crimea. And then fueling a separatist guerrilla warfare in the Donbass which is still ongoing.
But the Ukrainian government is not Castro and Crimea and Donbass are not the Bay of Pigs. The Castro regime was a Communist, openly hostile to the US and immediately took steps to requisition US property on the island. Successive governments and presidents in Ukraine after the Maidan are not openly hostile to Russia. Not the last president, at least: Volodymyr Zelensky was also elected in the predominantly Russian-speaking eastern Ukrainian regions, on the basis of a program that was anti-corruption, but also pro-dialogue. To the great disappointment of many Ukrainians, damaged by the 2014 war, he had in fact initiated a dialogue on the Donbass by accepting many painful concessions, territorial and otherwise. He is not a Castro who immediately places himself in the Soviet camp, antagonistic to his American neighbor: on the contrary, Zelensky immediately said he did not want to join NATO. And the parliament, dominated by his new party, voted accordingly. So what kind of provocation would Putin be responding to?
Having exhausted the Cuban metaphor, the ranks of commentators rushed to justify the Russian mobilization revive in the recent past and speak of "non-respected pacts" by the United States. What agreements? According to the Russians and those who follow the narrative, they are said to be agreements made in 1990 between Gorbachev and Bush (father) in which the US promised not to admit to NATO any member of the then Warsaw Pact. Here too, however, unless one suffers from hallucinations, no such agreement can be found. In 1990 the Warsaw Pact was still there, just as the USSR still was. A little difficult that Gorbachev had sold an agreement that already involved the dissolution of both, especially considering that he was at the head. Agreements were made in September 1990 between Secretary of State James Baker and Michail Gorbachev, in view of the reunification of Germany, in which NATO undertook, at least temporarily, not to deploy foreign troops in the now defunct GDR. But nothing was said about those who, at the time, were full members of the Kremlin-led alliance and who still hosted Soviet troops on their soil.
The scenario changed drastically after December 25, 1991, when the USSR broke up. One of the first acts of the first president Yeltsin was to recognize the independence of the former Soviet republics. Recognizing their independence, it also freed their foreign policy: they had, since then, the right to join other alliances as well. The Warsaw Pact was already dead since July 1991 and the republics born on the ashes of the European Communist regimes were also now free to choose new partners and allies.
After 1991 there is no trace of other agreements, whether written or verbal, which prevented the former Soviet republics or the countries of the former Warsaw Pact from joining NATO, the EU or any other international organization. Preventing their entry into the Western coalition was, if anything, a priority of the Russian nationalist and post-communist parties, but not of official Russian politics. Neither Yeltsin in 1997, albeit with much hesitation and resistance, vetoed the beginning of the path of the former Soviet "satellites" to the west, nor did Putin raise particular objections when they entered NATO and the EU in 2004.
So what kind of provocation would Putin be responding to? It is therefore time to consider these topics, such as "American missiles in Ukraine", or "the annexation of Ukraine to NATO" or "the pacts violated by NATO that has expanded to the Russian borders" for what they are: hallucinations collective. Which in political jargon have a very specific name: propaganda. Who is the use of Russian propaganda in Italy? This, if anything, is the question that journalists and politicians should ask themselves, now that the gravest international crisis involving Europe has begun. In the parties of the right and center-right, above all, it would also be time to have an examination of conscience, before being perceived in the world as the only pro-Russian right in the Western world.
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This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Atlantico Quotidiano at the URL https://www.atlanticoquotidiano.it/quotidiano/ucraina-il-falso-alibi-della-provocazione-nato-per-nascondere-la-voglia-di-impero-di-putin/ on Wed, 26 Jan 2022 03:46:00 +0000.