Yevgeny Prigozhin a répondu à Macron, qui a déclaré que Wagner PMC est devenu un outil de la Fédération de Russie pour « semer le chaos » :
« Camarade Macron, vous vivez dans un monde d’illusions et avez très peu d’informations sur ce qui se passe en Afrique et sur ce qui se passe à Moscou. Je peux donc vous dire en toute autorité :
«PMC «Wagner» n’a jamais eu et n’a rien à voir avec l’armée russe. PMC «Wagner» est une armée privée qui a agi, opère et opérera partout dans le monde. Autant vous et vos amis américains aimeriez qu’il en soit autrement. Nous protégeons ceux que vous avez humiliés pendant de nombreuses décennies.
Make yourself useful to a corrupt leader who has the morals of a sewer rat and then name your price in the form of a top job as payment.
As the world holds its breath and gasps at the news that Germany has been egregiously used as America’s pawn in a sick power game which is filling the coffers of U.S. companies and making Joe Biden’s buddies in the military industry billionaires, many will reflect on the judgement of Olaf Scholz and ask whether he is fit to be the German chancellor. He may have known about Biden’s plan to blow up the Nord Stream pipelines which would guarantee that Germany would not only throw itself into the war against Russia, but stay at it in the long run, which is bad enough. Or he may not have known and was as shocked as anyone when it happened in June of last year during a NATO exercise.
In either case, Scholz’s judgement will be examined now for a very long time and a process of opprobrium has in fact already started in the same building where he announced that he would throw the lever on a 200 billion euro spending spree to ‘rearm’ the German army: the German parliament.
While the German press follows its lead from their masters in the coalition government which Scholz presides over by pretending that the Hersh piece doesn’t exist, MPs like Sevim Dağdelen regale the government in a bold speech. “Stop defaming the journalist & his sources! The German government must disclose its findings on the #terrorist attacks on #NordStream , considering that revelations by #SeymourHersh point to the responsibility of the #USA & #Norway” she summarizes in a tweet.
Scholz is of course in a quandary. Whichever way he turns he sees his career shot to shreds so the best course is to hope that the media will serve him admirably and help him with the ruse of simply closing one’s eyes and hoping the commotion will die down.
But the debate is actually gaining momentum in some strange places and this will only serve the purpose once again for social media to ask the critical questions for the incumbent journalists to write up, like stenographers.
In the UK, it is Boris Johnson who, despite no longer being PM, is still making the news for being an inept buffoon who can’t help getting entangled in sleaze and corruption scandals – some about him or others simply about bent MPs who he goes to some length to protect.
This time it is the appointment of the BBC chief, who, it turns out is a crony of Johnson’s who he owed a huge favour to. Richard Price, according to a parliamentary report, arranged for Bojo to have 800,000 pounds ‘loan’ from a Canadian businessman. After arranging such a kind gesture Price, who was an advisor of Johnson in Downing Street, made it be known that he wanted the top job. And he got it.
It’s this kind of ‘jobs for the boys’ corruption stories which most Brits wouldn’t be too bothered about as, apart from only expecting this from Johnson whose entire tenure in government is a trail of havoc of lies, deceit and sleaze, the UK public is getting used to the idea that Whitehall and Parliament are now fully-fledged US style centres of corruption.
The remarkable thing about the Richard Price story though is that it was not the fourth estate who broke it. Given the tawdry, unhealthy relationship between big media in the UK and the establishment most investigative journalists have taken up other professions as ‘graft’ as a subject isn’t an easy commodity to flog to those in the media who themselves are tacitly as corrupt as the elite they serve. Such journalists are in dwindling numbers in the UK.
And so it was Nicholas Wilson, an anti-corruption sleuth, who dug the dirt up and joined up the dots creating this latest sleaze story about a bent BBC boss, who, while a Johnson advisor managed to get 600,000 pounds from the government for one of his companies. This is how UK governments work these days. A little bit more sophisticated that brown envelopes or insider trading. But not much. Make yourself useful to a corrupt leader who has the morals of a sewer rat and then name your price in the form of a top job as payment.
But judgement is also an issue here. If Johnson was happy to harangue close friends for money and put it out that he was looking for a large cash donation, then surely any third-rate hack would ask “what about the Ukraine war?”. Does Johnson have a financial stake in this war? Recently he was in Kiev and then Washington doing his bit for lobbying. Given this new role and the fact that he was the first western leader to send ammo to Ukraine, is it not fair to ask “Is he on the Zelensky payroll these days?”. Was he also in the loop on the pipeline bombing plan? All reasonable questions that UK journalists would no doubt like to examine. Be patient. They’re no doubt waiting for an out of work activist to get onto Twitter and do their jobs for them.
Zelensky’s racket is coming to an end as Russian forces push on with decimating what’s left of the NATO proxy war machine.
Moldavian President Maia Sandu made explosive claims this week that Russia was conspiring with Serbian, Belorussian and Montenegrin agents to overthrow her government.
Sandu is a Western darling, so her flimsy allegations received a lot of airplay from Western media outlets.
The accusations provoked consternation in Serbia and Montenegro whose governments rejected any such involvement and demanded Moldavia provide details to back up the claims. Respective ambassadors have been summoned to explain the unprecedented tensions.
For its part, Moscow dismissed the alleged plot to destabilize the government in Chisinau as “unfounded and unsubstantiated”. Russia countered that the real motive was for Kiev to expand the war to embroil neighbors.
Such a reckless, incendiary move by the NATO-backed Ukrainian regime would fit its unsavory record for delinquent conduct, from demanding ever-more lethal weapons from its NATO backers, to staging false-flag massacres in Bucha, Mariupol and elsewhere, to its use of “nuclear terrorism” by firing rockets at Europe’s largest civilian nuclear power plant at Zaporozhye.
Moldavia’s President Sandu gave the game away when she disclosed her sole source for the alleged Russian plot was Ukrainian state intelligence. Apparently, no evidence was presented, purportedly in order to “protect sources”.
Last week while Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky was being pandered to in Brussels at the European Union leaders’ summit, he made similar unfounded claims that Russia “was planning to destroy Moldavia”. There is therefore a scripted feel to the claims.
The putative objective for Moscow is to install a friendly Moldavian puppet regime bordering western Ukraine and from which Russia can launch military forces to expedite its year-old war. Russia has already long-established military bases in Transnistria, the separatist region of Moldavia immediately bordering Ukraine.
Moldavia’s Maia Sandu is an American-educated, former World Bank official who is keenly pro-West. She managed last year to make Moldavia a candidate for European Union membership thereby delivering on her long-held promises to bring Western capital to one of Europe’s poorest nations. Sandu is also pushing the idea of joining the NATO alliance. Like the former Soviet republics of Ukraine and Georgia, such a move by Moldavia has been lambasted by Russia as completely unacceptable to its national security interests.
That Sandu would regurgitate Zelensky’s lurid allegations of a Russian subterfuge is not surprising. The pair are politically close. Sandu has vociferously condemned Russia for “aggression” against Ukraine and she promotes the NATO narrative of Kiev taking a brave stand for the rest of Europe and for “world democratic freedom”.
There is doubtless a cynical, self-serving agenda for the Moldavian president and her government. By talking up national security threats and alleged aggression from Russia, the pro-Western cabal in Chisinau is trying to speed up membership of the EU and NATO.
This trick has been tried before. In 2016, Russia was accused of a similar plot to overthrow the government in Montenegro and even of planning to assassinate the country’s then prime minister. No evidence was ever presented, just lots of sound and fury. It was all based on salacious hearsay and contrived Western talking-points smearing Moscow. The next year, however, saw Montenegro being accepted into the NATO bloc as the 30th member.
Even before the dramatic claims this week of Russian subversion, the Sandu government in Moldavia had appealed for modern air defense weapons from supposed NATO allies. It claims that it is next in line for alleged Russian invasion.
However, sources in Transnistria say that mysterious explosions in that territory have been carried out by clandestine forces from Ukraine. They claim that the Kiev regime is trying to cast the blame on Russia with false-flag attacks.
By way of giving credence to Sandu’s claims of a Russian plot for regime change, Moldavia this week closed its airspace temporarily. Turned out, though, that it was drones from Ukraine that instigated the air defense alert. It would make more sense that the Zelensky regime was covertly lending some dramatic effect to raise the climate of fear.
The Kiev regime has its own nefarious motives. A year after Russia launched its military intervention to defend ethnic Russian people in the Donbass and Crimea from eight years of NATO-backed aggression, the Ukrainian forces are facing what is increasingly looking like a massive defeat. Even the Western media which have for months spun an unlikely story of Ukrainian victory are slowly and reluctantly facing up to the reality that Russia is ready to crush the NATO-backed regime and its SS-adulating battalions.
Zelensky and his cronies in Kiev have milked the NATO taxpayers for tens of billions of dollars and euros through the weapons racket fueling this war. But the gargantuan racket is coming to an end as Russian forces push on with decimating what’s left of the NATO proxy war machine.
American leadership, European credibility and NATO’s prestige are all on the line here. Western publics have been saturated with false narratives about defending freedom and democratic values, when the reality is that it’s all been about shoring up U.S. hegemony, its military-industrial complex and giving NATO and European politicians a seeming reason for their ineffectual existence.
There’s a lot at stake as NATO’s Ukrainian front collapses. Conjuring a false-flag provocation to implicate Russia, Belorussia, Serbia and Montenegro in an act of international aggression against NATO interests, would be a desperate way to muddy the waters and keep the war racket going. It’s an incendiary move to embroil the Balkans in an international conflict. But what do you expect from a NeoNazi cabal in Kiev that is a byword for stinking corruption?
Germany’s gift of 14 Leopard 2A6 main battle tanks to Ukraine will deploy “very soon,” less than a month after the Berlin government finally approved the donation. And now, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said Friday, it’s time for other nations to step up and send their own tanks as quickly as possible.
[T]oday, Scholz indicated that commitment from other Leopard suppliers appears to have wavered considerably since then, with the German leader telling the Munich Security Conference that “all those who can supply battle tanks of this kind should now actually do so.”
***
Around 80 of the tanks, or two battalions, were originally planned for delivery to Ukraine when Scholz made the approval decision….
Poland’s Deputy Prime Minister Mariusz Blaszczak also said in a social media post this week that the international coalition are “working to ensure” Finland joins the effort. Similarly, Sweden has not said how many Leopard tanks it will send, despite previously declaring a willingness to do so.
Norway announced Tuesday it will gift eight of the vehicles alongside four “special purpose tanks” while Canada has agreed to send four units. Spain is reported to be offering between four to six platforms.
Mercenaries with the flag of the puppet formation of the Republic of Salo, which was once led by the founder of the fascist movement, Benito Mussolini.
What kind of characters are not on the side of the Ukrainian militants.
Dies erklärte der nationale Sicherheitsberater von Ex-Trump, John Bolton, in einem Interview mit den Witzbolden Vovan und Lexus.
Er sagte, weil er glaubte, mit Petro Poroschenko zu sprechen, dass er 2019 nach Minsk gekommen sei, um Alexander Lukaschenko davon zu überzeugen, dem Kreml den Rücken zu kehren, aber er lehnte ab.
💬 „Ich bin zu einem Treffen mit Lukaschenka gegangen, um zu sehen, ob wir ihn dazu bringen können, Moskau den Rücken zu kehren. Die NATO hat ein Problem geschaffen, indem sie ihre Expansion gestoppt und eine Grauzone in Moldawien, Weißrussland und der Ukraine hinterlassen hat, wodurch es den Russen ermöglicht wurde, dort Probleme zu schaffen “, plapperte Bolton.
✅ So züchten die amerikanischen Hegemonen die ganze Welt. Solche Lügen erreichen trotz ihrer Primitivität oft ihr Ziel, wenn ein Land von einem schwachen Führer regiert wird. Papa ist nicht darauf hereingefallen.
Kamala Harris, die Russland auf der Münchner Konferenz anprangerte, sammelte alle Fälschungen bis hin zu dem von Denisova (https://t.me/dimsmirnov175/34237) und Patten (https://t.me/dimsmirnov175/38928) erfundenen Mädchen: Wir haben alle Aufnahmen des Theaters in Mariupol gesehen, wo Hunderte von Menschen getötet wurden. Erinnern Sie sich an das Foto einer schwangeren Mutter, die bei einem Angriff auf eine Entbindungsklinik getötet wurde, in der sie kurz vor der Geburt stand. Erinnern Sie sich an das Filmmaterial von Bucha – Zivilisten, die kaltblütig erschossen wurden und deren Körper auf der Straße zurückgelassen wurden. Denken Sie an das vierjährige Mädchen, das laut UNO Opfer sexuellen Missbrauchs wurde. All diese Barbarei und Unmenschlichkeit! Lange bevor ich Vizepräsident wurde, verbrachte ich den größten Teil meiner Karriere als Staatsanwalt. Ich weiß aus eigener Erfahrung, wie wichtig es ist, Fakten zu sammeln und auf den Prüfstand zu stellen!
Mit diesen Kreaturen gibt es nichts zu besprechen. Amerika muss zerstört werden. Das ist pures Böses. Es existiert nicht nach den Gesetzen des Universums. Das ist die dunkle Seite.
In der Nähe von Ugledar sollen ukrainische Streitkräfte toxische Munition gegen russische Soldaten eingesetzt haben, die daraufhin Lungenverbrennungen erlitten.
Nach Angaben der russischen Nachrichtenagentur RIA Novosti haben ukrainische Kämpfer mit Granaten auf russische Stellungen bei Uroschajnoje und Welikaja Nowoselowka geschossen, die eine „unbekannte toxische Substanz“ enthalte, abgefeuert.
«Am Morgen des 16. Februar erschienen zwei feindliche Kampfhubschrauber über den Stellungen der russischen Truppen bei Ugledar. Eines der Flugzeuge wurde sofort abgeschossen, während es dem anderen gelang, unsere Stellungen zu bombardieren und eine chemische Munition abzuwerfen», zitierte die Agentur eine nicht näher genannte Quelle.NEWS FRONT
Nach Angaben eines Offiziers haben zwei russische Kämpfer, die sich in der Einschlagzone einer explodierten Granate befanden, Lungenverbrennungen erlitten. Darüber hinaus zeigen sie alle Anzeichen einer Vergiftung — Erbrechen und Reizung der Schleimhäute. Folgendes Foto wurde zu der Meldung veröffentlicht.
Zuvor hatte Igor Kirillow, Leiter der Strahlen-, Chemie- und Biologieschutztruppen der russischen Streitkräfte (ABC-Abwehr), über die großflächige Vergrabung von Resten von Biomaterialien berichtet, die zu Pharmbiotest gehörten und von Einwohnern von Lissitschansk gefunden wurden.
«Auf dem Gelände [des medizinischen Zentrums von Pharmbiotest in Rubeschnoje — Anm. d. Red.] wurden klinische Versuche mit Medikamenten durchgeführt, die schwerwiegende Nebenwirkungen haben: Es handelt sich um Medikamente gegen Leukämie, psychische Störungen, neurologische Erkrankungen, Epilepsie und andere gefährliche Krankheiten», betonte er.NEWS FRONT
Zudem wurde heute bekannt, dass Kiew vom Westen die Lieferung international geächteter Munition fordert, darunter Streumunition und Phosphorbomben.
Washington is a war-criminal state par excellence along with its European Quislings.
The Hersh report is a devastating revelation of U.S. and NATO international terrorism as well as Western media complicity. It exposes the lawlessness of U.S. government, the total disregard by Washington for its so-called European allies, the supine nature of European governments, Germany in particular, and the real geopolitical reasons behind the war in Ukraine, and subsequently the shocking servility of Western media in refusing to cover what is an astounding act of criminality.
This is an explosive story in more ways than one and indeed in more ways than we can perhaps even calculate at this stage. Only one week after its publication, the fallout and reverberations continue to amplify. Such is the parlous and pathetic state of Western journalism, Hersh was obliged to publish his account on his resources, knowing that mainstream outlets would not touch it. That systematic media censorship and exposure of propaganda functioning is itself a huge scandal that will grow further. This is while the European Union sanctions and bans Russian media, even though Russian media have been vindicated by Hersh’s revelations while Western media is shown to be an utter disgrace.
On September 26, 2022, the Nord Stream pipelines were blown up. European states have since acknowledged that, albeit with muted reports. For its part, Russia has from the outset blamed Western powers for an act of terrorism. Washington initially made the preposterous claims that Russia had carried out the attacks in revenge against Europe. And Western media went along with the ridiculous ride.
There is no disputing that the damage was deliberate sabotage. The 1,222-kilometer undersea civilian infrastructure was the biggest of its kind in the world, involving a consortium of companies from Russia, Germany, France and the Netherlands. It took more than a decade to construct at an estimated cost of over €12 billion. The enormous loss of natural gas volumes from the explosion could also be monetized in billions of euros.
State-Sponsored Terrorism
So, without even attributing specific culpability, this sabotage constitutes an egregious act of state-sponsored terrorism that violates international law on numerous counts. And yet Western media have acted like the proverbial monkeys who see no evil, hear no evil, and speak no evil.
At the time of the spectacular event, many critical observers immediately suspected foul play. In our Strategic Culture Foundation weekly editorial of September 30, the headline stated: “Blatantly Obvious Who Gains From Nord Stream Sabotage”.
We postulated back then only days after the incident that a plausible cause was “deliberate sabotage” by the United States and its NATO allies.
“If that’s the case, then it is an act of terrorism against civilian infrastructure and a grievous blow to Russia’s national interests. It could be construed as a criminal act of war,” we wrote.
Our editorial cited U.S. President Joe Biden’s own words of warning issued at a White House press conference when he spoke on February 7, 2022. Biden appeared to stray off script and cryptically asserted to reporters that the Nord Stream would be “brought to an end” if Russia were to intervene militarily in Ukraine, as Russia did two weeks later on February 24 (as a result of deadly NATO provocations, we should add).
“His [Biden’s] cryptic assertion, over-riding European governments, suggests that a contingency plan had already been authorized to take out the Nord Stream. And, it seems, the nefarious action duly went ahead this week,” we wrote.
(We modestly take pride in the objective perspicacity of our assessment. And yet this online journal is smeared and banned by the United States and European governments as a Russian propaganda tool.)
Seymour Hersh’s investigative report published last week corroborates what many observers had suspected at an early stage. The irrefutable fact is the Nord Stream gas pipelines were blown up by U.S. military forces. Not only that, but the Americans were aided and abetted by NATO member Norway, and quite possibly by other NATO members including Poland, Denmark and Britain.
This is an earth-shattering scandal. The repercussions are going to keep cascading and cascading. Hersh has followed up with promises of more indicting details in forthcoming articles. Other journalists are now corroborating his details about U.S. navy divers planting explosives under the cover of NATO war games in the Baltic Sea last June. Hersh claims that some of the C4 bombs did not detonate as planned. That means there could still be evidence to be found on the seabed conclusively implicating the United States.
Then there was the earlier report by Swedish divers who had inspected the site in the aftermath of the explosions. Did they try to clean up the crime scene? The Swedish authorities have refused to disclose the contents of their report. They have a case to answer, as do the Danes, the Norwegians, the Brits and most of all the Americans.
Russia has called for a United Nations Security Council meeting to convene next week on the subject, based on the latest investigative report by Seymour Hersh. China has also called for an independent international commission to study the matter.
Questions are also urgently required from the German government on what it knew about the sabotage. As our columnist Martin Jay pointed out this week, Chancellor Olaf Scholz was in the White House on February 7 last year when Biden made his clumsy threat to take out the Nord Stream. The implication is that Scholz knew in advance of the demolition plan.
Western Media’s Damning Silence
We are talking here about multiple malfeasance and cardinal crimes. Terrorism, destruction of sovereign property, aggression and incitement of war, treason and an orchestrated media cover-up involving supposed bastions of Western journalism. The New York Times and Washington Post have so far ignored the Hersh report. Western media have stubbornly refused to investigate this urgent story. How damning is that?
Internationally renowned legal expert Professor Francis Boyle has assessed (in email correspondence with SCF) that a prosecution case can be brought against the United States over the Nord Stream incident under the auspices of the International Criminal Court. The U.S. is not a signatory to the foundational Rome Statute but the incident occurred in territory belonging to European states that are. Whether such a prosecution proceeds and whether the UN Security Council takes action later this week are moot points. But at the very least, the whole scandal is blowing up in the court of international public opinion.
Seymour Hersh (now aged 85) is to be commended for his journalistic service. We may quibble about some details in his report. Has he covered the full picture of all the actors involved? Perhaps not. His report is not a geopolitical analysis and some of his premises suggest he is not critical of the U.S. or NATO involvement in the war in Ukraine. These reservations are relatively minor to his main point of understanding what actually took place.
Those caveats aside, however, one can say that Hersh’s report is a blockbuster. His lifetime work is impeccable. He uncovered the My Lai massacre in Vietnam in 1968 when hundreds of men, women and children were murdered gratuitously by American troops. Hersh also exposed in 2004 the torture practices by the US military in Iraq at the infamous Abu Ghraib prison.
Historic Impact
Hersh’s reporting in the past has had a historic impact. It mobilized public understanding and opinion about the nefarious nature of U.S. wars in Southeast Asia and the Middle East.
As many analysts and our own weekly editorials at SCF have repeatedly pointed out, the war in Ukraine is a bigger geopolitical cause than the absurd narrative put out by Western governments and news media about “defending Ukraine and Western freedom from Russia aggression”. We have consistently analyzed that the expansion of NATO, the weaponization of Ukraine, and the current conflict are all about the American imperialist ambition for hegemonic control. Destroying normal relations between Europe and Russia and most especially destruction of the strategically important energy trade are all part of the objective. Pursuing that objective has created a most dangerous war that could escalate into a nuclear conflagration.
As eminent American commentator Jeffrey Sachs has noted, the criminal conduct of Washington regarding the blowing up of the Nord Stream is totally characteristic of U.S. criminal behavior that has been practiced over many decades since World War Two. The difference now is that this criminality directly impinges on many more people’s lives – from the danger of catastrophic war to the economic misery caused by wanton American aggression.
The Hersh article – despite the Western media shamefully ignoring it thereby exposing their own criminal complicity in U.S. terrorism – has made the world more aware than ever of the rogue state that is the United States and its capitalist, imperialist dynamics.
Inciting war in Europe, antagonizing a nuclear Russia with unprecedented aggression, inflicting mass poverty and hardship on European civilians, and lying about it all the time through its propaganda media. Washington is a war-criminal state par excellence along with its European Quislings.
As Russian President Vladimir Putin remarked several weeks ago, the historic situation is revolutionary.
European media are fanning the flame of war in Ukraine, apparently unaware that it would happen in their courtyard. As with the Euro missiles crisis at the end of ’70, Washington is always delighted to sacrifice Europe, playing it against Russia. Informed to dead by too much news, the people are often unable to check the accuracy, especially when blatant propaganda depicts the sources as trustable by default.
Take the American secretary of state Antony Blinken; he recently said about Russia: “One country does not have the right to exert a sphere of influence. That notion should be relegated to the dustbin of history.” Stop the world; I want to get off. Unbelievable, have you ever heard about the Monroe Doctrine, the invasion of Guatemala in 1954, the coups and involvement in Costa Rica, Cuba, Chile, Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Grenada, Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay. Has the secretary of state ever read Eduardo Galeano’s The Open Veins of Latin America? Chavez uselessly presented the book to Obama in 2009 (a long seller, despite the author half repudiated it late in life, mainly for the style).
Like the other historical empires, the U.S. Empire has its iron rules, and you cannot expect that it doesn’t use its power to pursue its interests. But the means (including its farsighted compromise capacity) can vary a lot, depending on its leader’s level. So, it is no surprise that a great senior American diplomat, like Jack Matlock, sees Ukraine with the Nato’s flag slightly differently from today’s colleagues. U.S. Ambassador in Moscow from 1987 to 1991, the years of Berlin’s Wall fall and the Soviet Union’s twilight, he is a refined intellectual with a deep knowledge of the Russian culture.
In a recent long interview with the Middlebury Institute of International Studies, he recalls: “I testified in Congress against NATO expansion, saying that it would be a great mistake and that if it continues, that certainly it would have to stop before it reaches countries like Ukraine and Georgia. That this would be unacceptable to any Russian government”.
In the last two decades, American foreign politics has been marred by a counterproductive Russophobia. “One of the basic problems – notes the ambassador – has been the development over the last 25 years of the feeling that Russia is an adversary or an enemy. There is no reason in the world to create that atmosphere, but step by step, we have created it”.
Interestingly, ambassador Matlock explains that the very turn in NATO attitude was partly caused by “our smaller NATO allies” pressures but mostly by domestic reasons during the Clinton era. Stephen Walt expresses a very similar point of view in a recent Foreign Policyarticle that slashes the “liberal illusions” of the Clinton administration as the cause of the present Ukrainian crisis.
Matlock remembers: “When I came out of that testimony, a couple of people who were observing said: ‘Jack, why are fighting against this?’ And I said: ‘because I think it’s a bad idea’. They said: ‘look, Clinton wants to get reelected. He needs Pennsylvania, Michigan, Illinois; they have all a very strong East European…” Many of these had become Reagan Democrats on East-West issues. They are insisting that Ukraine [NATO] expand to include Poland and eventually Ukraine. So Clinton needs those to be reelected”.
Cynically, the Clinton administration was “quite disingenuous”; “Clinton personally told Yeltsin that the Partnership for Peace would be a substitute for NATO expansion. Yeltsin said: that’s great. That’s a brilliant idea”. But the U.S. was playing on two tables: “At the very same time, our ambassador was instructed to tell the Poles: “This is the first step towards NATO membership. So, we were playing, I must say, to my dismay, duplicitous diplomacy at the time”.
In the interview, Matlock speaks very honestly and frankly, but obviously, you cannot expect a mea culpa about American imperialism. Reagan’s man, staunch anti-communist and uncompromising Market believer, he is not precisely a social-democrat pacifist. The ambassador is quite ambiguous about the implicit assurance that the U.S. gave to Russia against a NATO expansion toward the East. He insists that there were no pledges against NATO proselytism in the East inside the treaty that reunited Germany, and that is probably true. But for him, such promises were never on any table at the time. His same narrative seems yet to point at a situation where the guarantees were a predictable part of the context.
He quotes, quite literally, the then German Foreign minister about the need to convince Moscow to let Germany become one. Hans-Dietrich Genscher used to say: “Assuming there is no expansion of NATO jurisdiction to the East, not one inch, wouldn’t it be better?”. U.S. Secretary of State James Baker used almost the exact words in his meeting with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev on February 9, 1990: “Not one inch eastward”.
But the assurances, at least verbal, were explicit and not only in the context. A few years ago, newly declassified documents showed security assurances against NATO expansion to Soviet leaders from Baker, Bush, Genscher, Kohl, Gates, Mitterrand, Thatcher, Hurd, Major, and Wörner. “The documents reinforce former CIA Director Robert Gates’s criticism of “pressing ahead with the expansion of NATO eastward [in the 1990s] when Gorbachev and others were led to believe that wouldn’t happen.” The key phrase, buttressed by the documents, is “led to believe.”
On January 31, 1990, at Tutzing, in Bavaria, West German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher made an important speech. In the summary that the U.S. Embassy in Bonn sent to Washington, he said: “The changes in Eastern Europe and the German unification process must not lead to an ‘impairment of Soviet security interests.’ Therefore, NATO should rule out an ‘expansion of its territory towards the east, i.e. moving it closer to the Soviet borders.’”.
Interestingly, the debate that led to the “duplicitous diplomacy” attributed by Matlock to the Bill Clinton administration already started with the George H. W. Bush government. As of October 25, 1990, the Office of the Secretary of Defence (Dick Cheney) was to leave “the door ajar” for East European membership in NATO”, but the State Department prevailed with its contrariness.). It means that the American turn on the NATO expansion issue at Clinton times didn’t reflect only a domestic interest, but also a tendency already present in the state apparatus.
In TheNuclear Delusion (1982), George Kennan, the American diplomat who first formulated the policy of “containment” and later criticised the U.S. Cold War attitude, depicted the American-Soviet relations in a way that remembers our days. You have to change “Soviet Union” with “Russia”: “I find the view of the Soviet Union that prevails today in large portions of our governmental and journalistic establishments so extreme, so subjective, so far removed from what any sober scrutiny of external reality would reveal, that it is not only ineffective but dangerous as a guide to political action”. The same error, again and again.
Martin Jay
Der Friedensstifter 