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NATO expansion at heart of Ukraine crisis

16 Comments

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Yes to all, thank you Japan Today, for this rather realistic article, and burning bush for his comment.

For anyone with a head on his shoulders its hard to watch the TV news on this subject, no matter from what country. It is hard to believe that so many countries we remember as more or less civilised, have dropped all pretenses to report facts instead of lies and propaganda.

The whole thing seems to have changed the day the world understood that that Malaysian airliner was obviously shot down by Ukrainian air force and by not the "terrorists".

So we, the people of the world are no stuck without any reporting form the area that is actually worth reading, as both sides are reducing all to lies and propaganda.

People are dying? Tough titties! Hooray for our side! That is all that matters...

We always learned that 20.Century, with Hitler and Stalin and others... that would be the worst century ever. I think we slowly reconsider that conclusion. Iraq and Ukraine are of course only the beginning....

-2 ( +3 / -5 )

Glad I see more people with common sense and not reaction to what the media publishes. Watch the documental on the "money masters" in U-Tube, and that is a big eye opener.

-3 ( +2 / -5 )

This obviously redacted article leaves out a lot. Twenty-four years ago then German Chancellor Kohl promised Gorbachev that NATO would not expand into eastern Europe. That promise was broken. Now Russia fears, rightly, it is being surrounded. Ukraine was the breaking point. Like it or not we are more in danger of nuclear war than we have been since Cuban Missile Crisis, in which a heavily sedated John F. Kennedy nearly pushed us over the brink.

The most important question--that this article does not address--is why Russia was betrayed by the NATO alliance? The West got the Russia they wanted: anti-Communist and conservative. If Putin was an American he would belong to the far right-wing of the Republican party. He is the sort of guy the U.S. usually like to deal with. So why did not NATO dissolve or incorporate Russia into its fold? That would have been the practical thing to do. Nixon did the practical thing is establishing diplomatic relations with Communist China. Communist China has remained Communist China and no one in the world has a problem with that. So what was (and is) the problem with democratic, capitalist and Russian Orthodox Russia?

I am at a loss to explain why the Cold War imperative has continued after the Soviet Union was transmogrified into its present state.

Anyway, the sorry work of NATO over the last quarter century has not brought an "end to history."

-1 ( +3 / -4 )

I don't even read the latest from Burning Bush as it is just praise for Putin, who should be on trial for War Crimes. NATO expansion is still possible: NATO just doesn't care enough about poor countries with big security problems to make a fuss over it. I think that is unfortunate, but then the world is an ugly place and NATO doesn't want to start WW3 over Ukraine. Putin will. For my full analysis of the situation read below:

I thought of a good analogy for the current situation. Imagine a table that is Ukraine. It belonged to Russia for a long time, but due to general moral bankruptcy or whatever, it has been repossessed and given to the EU. How that happened is another tale, but it's got the EU's name written on 3/4 of it. Now Russia does not accept this of course and so it sits down and places its massive gut on the edge. Now the few people that could push Russia aside don't really want to because it will start WW3 and get everyone killed. So that is where we are. The repo truck is here but a huge fat man is blocking everything. Now I say that the EU should just cut off the part of the table under the giant gut, but Poroshenko doesn't want the table damaged anymore.

-3 ( +3 / -6 )

Is the problem that NATO wants to expand, or that Russia wants to prevent Ukraine from achieving freedom? The problems seem to have started when the Ukrainian people voted to reject a grossly corrupt leader imposed upon them by Mr. Dictator, Putin.

2 ( +4 / -2 )

Quite right Burning Bush. The chaos within Kiev's Ukraine is in chaos, which is barely (if at all) reported in the Western mainstream press.

The best part of this article is the title, which lays the blame where it should be. Somehow the gatekeepers missed it.

-3 ( +1 / -4 )

In a lot of ways, the current standoff between the West and Russia is a lot more dangerous than at any time during the Cold War. Back in the Cold War, both the US and the USSR wanted more than anything stability throughout the world and had very established lines of communication and protocols to avoid accidental conflict. None of that exists today where Russian media talk openly of nuclear threats, Russian aircraft fly on civil aviation routes with transponders off, and most diplomatic communication is cut off.

It is very, very likely that Russia will test NATO by staging something in the Baltics. What happens then may determine whether we will survive this century..

3 ( +3 / -0 )

The Baltic states have no choice but join NATO since they have sizable Russian populations.

3 ( +3 / -0 )

and NATO should think twice about incorporating states with large Russian populations because those Russians will have to be accepted into NATO armies and institutions which would give the KGB a handy back door into NATO.

Guess those Baltic states would first have to be good at picking sensitive-security people before earning NATO's complete trust.

If you were a NATO soldier on the front lines facing the Russian army and the battalion next to you was full of Latvian Russians how confident would you feel?

Probably like those Japanese at WW2 internment camps.

0 ( +0 / -0 )

"Moscow’s only buffers to a complete NATO encirclement on its western border are Finland, Belarus and Ukraine."

"Encircle" means to surround in a circle, so this sentence, like Russia's justifications, makes no sense.

AP at its best.

0 ( +0 / -0 )

The recent events in the Ukraine were an attempt at a destabilizing coup backed by countries hostile to Russia ( no free guesses) imagine Russia backing militias in Mexico! what would the US response be? A third world war? That is what the consequences of this bear baiting will be.........

0 ( +0 / -0 )

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