Attention Cold Warriors: If you are of the mind that the nation of Russia is out to conquer the whole world like from the days of the USSR, then skip reading this. Go ahead, continue to polish that turn nugget of Russophobia. Especially if you are convinced that President Putin is the embodiment of everything evil and dastardly. Refusing to even entertain any consideration or communication like Joe Biden did calling him in a litany of darkest shade: "butcher", "mass murderer", "killer", "crazy SOB", "war criminal", "murderous dictator", "pure thug". Some might take that as propagandizing narrative. If you bought it, then be that way.
... Unless, of course, if you are willing to entertain that Russia has it's own legitimate security concerns. Like the US of A would most certainly have should China, for example, or some other country start training and equipping a military on the soil of Mexico with missiles pointed north.
Psychologically speaking ... We may have opinions on all this. One way or the other. Justified too, one way or the other. Nevertheless, opinions, however well justified, at some point have to have been put on; taken on, decided on ... however you want to put it. What we seem to forget is that it's not the opinion that we're contending with/protecting, it's the justification. So, how about putting opinion aside once in a while and simply look at the facts. If you're brave enough to do the shadow work, then go ahead and reexamine your justifications too. In this, and in anything in the world as well. Carl G. Jung speaks eloquently on this subjects. Dig.
On with the share ...
"Ambassador Charles "Chas" W. Freeman served as US Assistant Secretary of Defense, as US ambassador to Saudi Arabia, and he was Richard Nixon's principal interpreter during his 1972 visit to China which led to the normalization of us China relations."
"15,000 people died from barrages of artillery into the Russian speaking areas and eventually in December 2021 Vladimir Putin demanded negotiations on three topics: [1.] one was the halt to any talk of bringing Ukraine into NATO, or the implication that American and other anti-Russian forces would be stationed on Russia's borders; [2.] the second was to reaffirm the Minsk Accords and the autonomy of Russian speakers in the East and by implication Hungarians and Romanians as well (there are other minorities in Ukraine); [3.] and, finally of course, a broad discussion of European security architecture in with Ukraine as a neutral party to that rather on the model of the Austrian State Treaty of 1955 which was reached at the height of the Cold War, which guaranteed Austria's Independence and democracy, and required Austria to treat its minorities Italians and the Slovenians [and] Hungarians in the very manner that the Conference on Security and Cooperation Europe [CSCE] requires.
Was the Russian invasion unprovoked?
"No, it was not unprovoked. We began to hear as early as 1994 from Boris Yeltson, before Vladimir Putin came to power, that the expansion of NATO and the presence of hostile forces on Russia's borders was unacceptable and would draw a military reaction. That reaction was actually further signaled during the brief war between Georgia and Russia, and there should have been no surprise. [And, BTW, Mikhail Gorbachev reportedly — and disputed — was given assurances in connection of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of Germany that there would be no NATO expansion eastward.] Promises, promises.
"No, it was not unprovoked. We began to hear as early as 1994 from Boris Yeltson, before Vladimir Putin came to power, that the expansion of NATO and the presence of hostile forces on Russia's borders was unacceptable and would draw a military reaction. That reaction was actually further signaled during the brief war between Georgia and Russia, and there should have been no surprise. [And, BTW, Mikhail Gorbachev reportedly — and disputed — was given assurances in connection of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of Germany that there would be no NATO expansion eastward.] Promises, promises.
Chas Freeman:
"The war began actually as a civil war between Ukrainians, Russian speakers and Ukrainian speakers in 2014 after the coup d’รฉtat in Kiev when the new ultra-nationalist government in Kiev outlawed the use of Russian, Hungarian, Romanian and other minority languages at the local level, so that the Russian speakers who were predominant in eastern Ukraine, in some cases 70 — well 75% in Crimea — but sometimes as much as 90% in the Eastern Oblasts, rebelled and Russia naturally supported them.
"So they wanted the right to use Russian to educate their children and to communicate with the local administrations. This actually resulted in a negotiation; two agreements at Minsk sponsored by France and Germany, which were agreed to by the Russians, confirming that the Donbas region Oblasts Luhansk, Kharkiv, and Donetsk would remain part of Ukraine but on a basis similar to that of Quebec and Canada; that is, they would be allowed to have their own language as an official language and educate their children in that language. That agreement was then repudiated, was first vigorously endorsed by Zelensky when he ran for president, and then when he came into office it was repudiated at which point Angela Merkel of Germany and Franรงois Hollande of France both said well we didn't really mean that agreement it was just a means of gaining time for us to arm and train the Ukrainian armed forces against Russia. So the provocation began with attacks by ultra-nationalist Ukrainians on fellow Ukrainians who happened to be Russian speaking in the East it escalated to a Russian intervention against those ultra-nationalist Ukrainians that went on for eight years.
"15,000 people died from barrages of artillery into the Russian speaking areas and eventually in December 2021 Vladimir Putin demanded negotiations on three topics: [1.] one was the halt to any talk of bringing Ukraine into NATO, or the implication that American and other anti-Russian forces would be stationed on Russia's borders; [2.] the second was to reaffirm the Minsk Accords and the autonomy of Russian speakers in the East and by implication Hungarians and Romanians as well (there are other minorities in Ukraine); [3.] and, finally of course, a broad discussion of European security architecture in with Ukraine as a neutral party to that rather on the model of the Austrian State Treaty of 1955 which was reached at the height of the Cold War, which guaranteed Austria's Independence and democracy, and required Austria to treat its minorities Italians and the Slovenians [and] Hungarians in the very manner that the Conference on Security and Cooperation Europe [CSCE] requires.
"So those were the three items for negotiation. They remain the three items for negotiation, with one major difference which is that Russia now having had to go to war against Ukraine and occupying the four all or part of the four Russian speaking Oblasts in the East now demands to keep them because it does not trust guarantees from Ukraine that in fact anything like the Minsk Accords is now possible to be implemented.
"So I'll end here and I think that's a very brief history. There are many twists and turns in this, of course."
No comments:
Post a Comment