Ukraine: The Danger is NATO

Fabrizio Casari
Putin-Biden summit focuses on Ukraine. Image: TASS

The West had better abandon the war it has opened against Russia, China, India, Iran and others for absolute domination of the planet by a superpower that loses wars, markets and leadership every day. To think that the world will stand by while a decadent empire feeds on it is a mistake; to think that Beijing or Moscow will do so could be a catastrophic error.

The telephone conversations between Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin do not seem to have had any effect. What is unfolding on the Russia-Ukraine border is a politically and mediatically constructed crisis. No special tension had been added to the general and overt hostility between Kiev and Moscow, and military intelligence from the pro-Nazi regime in Kiev itself did not indicate any danger from Russia.

What Putin tried to explain to Biden in the telephone conversation were three fundamental concepts: Moscow has never thought of invading Ukraine unless it becomes the operational headquarters of a NATO military threat to Russia. He added that the West’s statements about its willingness to help Kiev contain the “Russian threat” were ridiculous and dangerous. Putin reminded that the deployment of Russian troops on national territory is a sovereign right and is nobody’s business. Instead, it is NATO and its member states that are recklessly moving their military forces and infrastructure to Russia’s borders.

Second. Increased U.S. aggression in Europe will not stop Russia’s economic and military development plans. The Kremlin sees the sanctions as a gesture of unprovoked political hostility and a dirty way to wage a trade war in defiance of the vaunted free market.

Third. On international security, Moscow is ready to return to the negotiating table to discuss a new medium- and long-range ballistic missile treaty within the framework of an international balance that respects mutual defense needs. Moscow considers global governance to be a multilateral and certainly not a unipolar issue.

If the phone call had no concrete effect on the necessary de-escalation, one certainty remains: there was never any intention on the part of Russia to invade Ukraine. It is colossal fake news conceived in the Pentagon and in Langley and spread by two friendly press organs including The New York Times and Politico.com, which have been joined by the European media, compliant with US foreign policy.

The crisis, which has run and continues to run the risk of unleashing a conflict of unpredictable but certainly dramatic results, has its origin in the exclusive will of the United States to raise tension in the area beyond all limits for its exclusive commercial and geopolitical interests.

A crisis planned on the table in all its stages, from the dissemination of a completely false information – that Russia is about to invade Ukraine – to the threat of sanctions and military support to Kiev by NATO if this were to happen.

But when the phones are closed and the propaganda is removed from the Western media, it becomes clear that the escalation of this crisis is partly concealing its real reasons and its serious responsibilities. The intention of the United States is to open a new, even more aggressive front in its undeclared war against the Moscow government. In fact, the unleashing and deepening of this crisis is the result of a commercial and strategic design pursued with the greatest possible cynicism at the expense of the Ukrainians and the whole of Europe.

What is Washington seeking?

This campaign has three main objectives: the first is to use a strong media campaign to cover up the truth of what is happening on the Ukrainian-Russian border, i.e. Kiev’s de facto membership in NATO, with the support of US military installations and missile weapons. The blatant intention is to supply Ukraine with armaments until it fills its arsenals, thus obtaining, at the same time, two unquestionable advantages: to place billions of dollars of US-made armaments and to turn Ukraine into a Slavic version of Puerto Rico, that is, into a protectorate to be used as a territory for war experiments.

A new war scenario among those preferred by the military-industrial complex for its business, because it is far from the US and because it is carried out by third parties on behalf of the US. As always, behind every “freedom” narrative, there are the dollars Washington collects. You don’t sell arms to deal with a crisis, you create a crisis to sell arms.

Another objective is to use the Russian threat to Kiev as an excuse to agree on the enlargement of NATO to the East, in violation of the Bush-Gorbachev agreements, which committed the US not to enlarge NATO to the East and to threaten Moscow. Ukraine was to remain a “buffer zone” separating their respective armies, and the same was foreseen for other countries such as Romania and Poland. All these commitments have been ignored by Washington: NATO has not only become a “buffer zone”, but also a “buffer zone” for other countries such as Romania and Poland. All these commitments have been ignored by Washington: NATO has not only expanded disproportionately eastward, but has also established facilities on Ukrainian territory near the Russian border.

NATO’s military buildup in the East is already a serious threat to Russia, but the new military facilities would include ballistic missile launch pads that would take five minutes to reach Russia. This is a blatant provocation and a direct threat to Moscow that could not be expected to go unanswered: to imagine that Russia could ignore a threat on its borders is to be completely out of touch with reality.

In this regard, Putin has already warned Biden and the whole world of the impossibility of crossing what he calls “the red line.” That is why he is deploying soldiers and conventional and nuclear weapons capable of repelling any attack on Russian territory and guaranteeing a military counteroffensive that would make the cost to Kiev and its allies very high. There are no different languages that the United States can understand, and there are no better warnings for those who, following the criminal adventurism that characterizes their foreign policy, risk the total destruction of their political and territorial identity.

It has already demonstrated it in Chechnya, Georgia, Crimea and Syria: Moscow is absolutely capable of intervening against any kind of external and internal threat, acting as many other countries would do to protect their territorial integrity and also their strategic interests. On the other hand, the US withdrawal from any kind of bilateral arms control treaty and the installation of nuclear warheads, the non-recognition of previously signed agreements with Iran, threats (both constant and sterile) to China and North Korea, sanctions on 26 countries and political and commercial aggression against Russia are taken seriously in both Moscow and Beijing.

Moscow has long warned of the unfeasibility of NATO military operations which, year after year, tend to move closer to Russia’s borders, portending an open threat to Russia. The Kremlin has a precise idea of the minimum security distance to be respected between its borders and hostile countries, as does the United States with respect to its borders.

On the other side it is the same and there is no lack of historical precedents, see the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. The US considers that no country in its neighborhood should be equipped with military bases and ballistic weapons, all the more so if it considers these countries to be hostile. It is hard to see why Moscow should allow this, or does it believe that there are two different copies of international law, one written in English and the other in Russian?

The North Stream 2 pipeline

The second objective of the crisis – but no less important than the first – is to raise the level of confrontation with Moscow in order to dissuade Berlin from the implementation of the German-Russian gas pipeline that passes under the Baltic Sea and would put an end to the bribe that Kiev imposes on the whole of Europe for the passage of gas on its territory. Washington wants to take action against the German energy network authority, which has blocked the authorization procedure on formal grounds related to non-compliance with EU legislation, which provides for ownership, management and distribution to be separated.

The US intention is all too obvious: in the event of a conflict, Germany would certainly back down; but even just an increase in tension and new sanctions could further increase the pressure on Moscow and push it to raise the price of supplies, to make the cost of US gas acceptable or competitive.

Nothing new: all US sanctions to which the EU, sick with servility, aligns itself, especially those imposed on Russia and China, have a double objective: to undermine economies that compete with the US and to provide a commercial advantage to US companies that would otherwise have to compete on a level playing field and thus lose.

The new US threats to expel Moscow from international financial circuits are unfeasible, such is the interconnectedness of the entire international community and of the US itself with Russia (a month ago the US had to buy several million barrels of Russian gas oil) and China. Moreover, this would further accelerate the creation of the International Bank, which Russia and China, together with several other countries, have already launched and which is destined to represent a dry alternative to the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.

On the other hand, the counter-sanctions that Moscow and Beijing are considering have not yet been tested. One example is that of China, which has hit Australia hard, with the United States declaring itself “baffled”. Now Canberra will think twice before issuing ridiculous warnings and threats just out of servitude to Washington.

The West had better abandon the war it has opened against Russia, China, India, Iran and others for absolute domination of the planet by a superpower that loses wars, markets and leadership every day. To think that the world will stand by while a decadent empire feeds on it is a mistake; to think that Beijing or Moscow will do so could be a catastrophic error.

Translation by Internationalist 360°