Mick Hartley

Pavel Stroilov dismantles Putin's NATO claims:

Of all the incredible excuses for his invasion of Ukraine, Putin has picked the worst: that NATO encirclement of Russia makes Russia fear for its security. Like most things Putin says and does, this originates in Cold War era Soviet propaganda, which also justified Soviet militarism by alleged “encirclement” by Western military bases.

One new addition is the allegation that, when Soviet forces retreated from Eastern Europe in early 1990s, the West promised there would be no NATO expansion: “not one inch eastward” is Putin’s favourite quotation now. Since then, of course, a dozen Eastern European countries have joined NATO, and Ukraine wants to be next.

Some of the difficulties with this excuse are obvious. Firstly, look at the map: Russia is not encircled by NATO, and is highly unlikely ever to be. Secondly, if Putin were really “afraid” of NATO, he would have left Ukraine alone: if there is any way of getting NATO to interfere with Russia (which is doubtful), starting a war in the middle of Europe is the surest. Thirdly, he is evidently not afraid of sharing a border with NATO. By capturing Ukraine, he would achieve precisely that — a long border with NATO in western Ukraine. Before the war, Ukraine might or might not have joined NATO in the future, but was neutral for the moment.

Furthermore, the allegation of NATO’s treachery in expanding eastward is a lie. No promises ever remain unwritten in international relations (at least not with Russia); all conversations are recorded, and where there is no treaty, there is a transcript. From the Russian archives, I have copies of verbatim records of virtually all international negotiations between Mikhail Gorbachev and Western leaders from 1989–1991. There were indeed talks about the future of NATO, one could even say there was a deal made — but it was a different deal. It was that NATO may expand, but should be reformed to become more of a cooperation-oriented international organisation, genuinely open to any new members, including Russia if it wants to apply. The following quotation from the US-Soviet summit meeting on 31 May 1990 is typical:

“GORBACHEV: […] I see your efforts to change the functions of NATO, to try and involve new members into that organisation. If you seriously take a course towards a transformation of the alliance and its political diffusion in the common European process, that, of course, makes it an entirely different matter. But that would raise the question about turning NATO into a genuinely open organisation, whose doors would not be closed to any country. Then, perhaps, we also might think about a NATO membership for ourselves.”

The phrase “not an inch eastward” relates to a completely different issue, which arose out of the unification between West Germany, where NATO troops were stationed, and East Germany, with its Soviet troops. It was agreed that, for a transitional period until 1994, all troops would stay where they were. The Soviets would be given time to prepare their withdrawal, while the NATO troops would not move an inch eastwards into former East German territory. That promise was thus time-limited; and it was kept.

So were the wider promises about reforming NATO. NATO is incapable of doing anything military except straightforward self-defence. Even facing naked military aggression in the middle of Europe, NATO stays out of the war because Ukraine is not a member; NATO has not even answered President Zelensky’s desperate pleas to impose a no-fly zone over Ukraine to prevent a massacre of civilian population by bombs and missiles. The original NATO was urgently put in place in 1952 to protect Greece and Turkey from an imminent threat of Soviet invasion. There was no question of doing the same for Georgia in 2008 or for Ukraine now. It is still open to everyone, theoretically including Russia, but there is a complex application process and various criteria of democracy and rule of law to meet. A number of East European countries have chosen to take that trouble, because of concerns about the Russian military threat — concerns proven amply justified by recent events.

And, from Dominic Lawson's latest in today's Sunday Times – If there’s any fascist here, it’s the Russian dictator:

On the BBC news on Thursday an 84-year-old Jewish Ukrainian, Tatiana Zabramnaya, whose aunt and uncle were murdered after the Germans overran Kyiv, tried to find the words: “Who would have thought that what happened on June 22, 1941, would be repeated? From Russia!” Then she broke down.

But it seems most Russians — and certainly those of older generations — regard this “special operation”, as their government terms it, as entirely justified; even admirable. Olexsandra, a woman in bombarded Kharkiv, told the BBC World Service how, even as she rang her parents in Moscow and tearfully informed them of what she and others were experiencing, they just repeated to her the narrative of the official Russian media: “They say Russians are coming to liberate you. They say it’s Ukrainians killing their own people.”

Liberating them, in fact, “from the genocidal Ukrainian Nazi regime”. This is how Moscow, invoking the glorious triumph over the German invaders of 1941, describes the freely elected government in Kyiv of Volodymyr Zelensky. That is, the Jewish president of Ukraine, whose grandfather fought for the Red Army against the Nazis, and whose family had members murdered in the Holocaust.

The tiny grain of historical truth in the Kremlin’s vast store of lies is that thousands of Ukrainian nationalists did collaborate with the Nazis, even to the extent of taking part in the extermination of the Jewish population. But it was Russians who bombed close to the Holocaust memorial at Babyn Yar last week, where 34,000 Ukrainian Jewish men, women and children were forced down a ravine and shot in the space of two days. Moreover, as the leading historian of these events, Timothy Snyder, observed in his book Bloodlands: “Something that is never said, because it’s inconvenient for precisely everyone, is that more Ukrainian communists collaborated with the Germans than did Ukrainian nationalists.”

And in the Ukraine of today the far-right group of parties has not a single seat in parliament, after a miserably low vote tally (2 per cent) in the most recent elections. A similarly derisory proportion of votes was gained by the far-right candidate for the presidency (who came in ninth place).

As for the Russian dictator (let’s give Putin the title he deserves): his address to the nation justifying the invasion of Ukraine was eerily reminiscent of the German chancellor’s speech to the Reichstag on September 1, 1939, explaining why he had to invade Poland. “We have been suffering under the torture of a problem that the Versailles diktat created — a problem that has deteriorated until it becomes intolerable for us. Danzig was and is a German city. Proposals for mediation have failed because … there came as an answer the sudden Polish general mobilisation, followed by more Polish atrocities. I am resolved to remove from German frontiers the element of uncertainty, the everlasting atmosphere of conditions resembling civil war.”

Putin’s speech had the same ingredients as Adolf Hitler’s: an unjust settlement (the dismemberment of Moscow’s “near empire” after the end of the Cold War); the assertion that the territories to be regained are really Russian; the need to end invented atrocities. And all in the same tone of morbid self-pity, appealing, as Hitler did, to a genuine sense of national victimhood among his domestic audience. it’s somehow appropriate that Putin’s go-to mercenary, Dmitry Utkin of the Wagner Group — named after Hitler’s favourite composer — sports SS tattoos.

With references to Nazis buzzing around – most notably, and disgracefully, from the Russian side – and with Godwin's Law in mind ("as an online discussion grows longer, regardless of topic or scope, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Adolf Hitler approaches one"), there's naturally a reluctance to invoke Putin-Hitler analogies. But yes, the comparison of the invasion of Ukraine now and the invasion of Poland then seems to me entirely appropriate – except this time no treaties have been broken, no lines are deemed to have been crossed, no declarations of war will be made, and no military aid to Ukraine will be forthcoming. Russia has nuclear weapons; Nazi Germany didn't.