V8Granite wrote: ↑Tue Oct 11, 2022 11:38 pm
I think it should never have started.
Hasn’t the west been slowly pushing east despite agreeing with Russia that it wouldn’t push further east? That was the early 90s.
As the entire point of this comment revolves around this, allow me to
expand upon it. This is one of the articles Rob is talking about - there are dozens of them
Main point:
‘Not one inch eastward’ – and what it really meant
Did NATO make a binding promise to refrain from eastward enlargement, only to make a clandestine volte-face?
After the fall of the Berlin Wall, German and Soviet leaders had to confront a number of complex problems, including what would happen to the 380,000 Red Army soldiers stationed in East Germany (GDR) and when and how the USSR would give up its Allied reserved rights over Germany. Eventually, Moscow agreed to withdraw its troops and to relinquish its rights as WWII victor power. As part of this negotiation, a unified Germany also gained full sovereignty. It was therefore free to choose its alliance affiliation, which resulted in it remaining a NATO member, even though it had grown in size.
In Putin’s narrative, Moscow only conceded on these issues because NATO had assured the Kremlin that it would not expand ‘one inch eastward’. US Secretary of State James Baker uttered these much-quoted words on 9 February 1990. (They were not, as is sometimes claimed, made by US President George H.W. Bush, who had ultimately responsibility for American policy.) Baker’s main aim was to allay Soviet fears of a larger, unified Germany by offering assurances that neither NATO command structures nor NATO troops would be transferred to the ‘territory of the former GDR’. Yet Baker’s ‘not one inch eastward’ formula would have made it impossible to apply NATO security guarantees (especially Article 5) to the whole of Germany. Bush therefore suggested to Chancellor Helmut Kohl that he should, in the future, speak of a ‘special military status’ for the GDR. A meeting in Camp David on 24/25 February 1990 confirmed this wording. Special provisions and obligations as regards the GDR territory were subsequently included in the text of the Two Plus Four Treaty (under Articles 4 and 5), which formally re-established German unity. This treaty placed significant restrictions on the deployment of foreign NATO troops and nuclear weapons on East German soil. In return for his willingness to compromise on these points, Kohl granted Gorbachev, in bilateral talks, a financial package totalling around DM 100 billion, in the form of loans and economic aid, which financed the withdrawal of the Red Army soldiers.
To be clear, then, the talks in February 1990 were never about NATO expansion into Eastern Europe. They were confined to the specific issue of NATO’s defence in the wake of German unification – and the two issues should not be conflated. It is also important to remember that the Warsaw Pact was still in existence during these talks, so NATO enlargement was a moot point
--snip - the full article is worth a read though --
As soon as the new Russian Federation sank into political chaos in 1993 (giving rise to ultranationalist voices), the governments of Zwischeneuropa embarked on an active search for security, which inevitably meant ever closer ties with the ‘institutional West’. Many US politicians, believing in the inexorable ‘universalisation of Western liberal democracy’, greeted this search with glee. It is crucial to remember, however, that the push for NATO’s opening eastward above all came from the Eastern Europeans and Balts. Contrary to the claims of current Russian propagandists, NATO had no institutionally driven expansion plans aimed at ‘encircling’ Russia.
The whole argument is bunk - Russia, frankly, wholesale fabricated the concept of NATO expansionsim. NATO doesn't expand as a policty - other countries join it of their own volition
should they feel that they could do with a defensive pact against an aggressive, unstable neighbour, something NATO is broadly, but not always, comfortable agreeing with, and the agreements following the collapse of the Soviet Union are entirely set up to allow this level of autonomy for post-soviet states.
If Russia had actually reformed in the 90s instead of diving headfirst into bitter ultranationalism, heroic levels of corruption and comedic internal 'stronk man' propaganda, they wouldn't have the problem in the first place.
So yes, at a high level, this is
all Russias fault.
Russia have been like the fat, stupid, drunken twat going around the pub slagging off peoples mums and spilling pints, generally fucking about internally (take a look at the ethnicities of the conscripts) and on the international stage (Syria, Ukraine, Georgia, Central African Republic)
They are currently at the 'finding out' stage of 'fucking about about finding out'.
