As NATO withdrew from Afghanistan in August 2021, in anticipation of Russian retaliation, it activated the European war front, igniting a proxy war with Russia by using Ukrainians as cannon fodder. On December 17th, Russia proposed a diplomatic solution to the brewing crisis. It called for a new security architecture in Europe, raising the primary Russian issues of NATO’s expansionary agenda and the Nazification of Ukraine as its legitimate security concerns. Russia’s offer was of course swept aside by the braindead machinery of the Western press. Focus was given instead to the Pentagon and White House approved ‘leak’ or limited hangout, of NATO’s supposed ‘secret’ counter-response to Russia’s proposals. The Spanish newspaper ‘El País’ was used as the channel to convey the document on February 2, 2022 to the public, 3 weeks before Russia finally threw in the towel and launched its special military operation (SMO).
The intent was to ‘prove’ how NATO had good intentions in Ukraine and tried hard to do everything it could to prevent the very war it was instigating. Who were they trying to fool? Normally the target audience of such epic gaslighting would be none other than the ‘holy grail’ for Western propagandists – ignorant and naive Western populations. British, American and European satellite governments knew exactly what they were getting themselves into, – energy infrastructure terrorism, genocide and dizzying industrial scale low-IQ propaganda in the run up to the bigger aim of deindustrializing Europe and weakening one of their greatest competitors and at the same time, tightening Anglo-American stranglehold, – otherwise known as ‘bloc discipline’ in NATO circles – over Europe’s bondage to the decaying American imperium. Europe had to be smashed and grabbed before China and Russia could develop better relations with it. That was the age-old Anglo American ‘Mackinderian’ fear. As for Europe’s fate, one day Europeans will wake up out of their ‘honeymoon’ stupor with America and come to realize how badly their futures were sold short by handcuffing the continental European hostage to the sinking Anglo-American Titanic, thanks to their bought-and-paid-for marionettes.
We can now dive into the piece and break it down. There are 9 pages in total and I will be deconstructing the theater of the absurd. Note that credit for the orignal source and all highlights, goes to El País.
NATO begins by claiming it is a ‘defensive’ alliance seeking peace. Its relentlessly expansionary agenda of gobbling up former Soviet and Warsaw Pact states towards Russian borders clearly went against this empty claim. Next, we saw a litany of NATO entanglements in various wars of aggression against Serbia, Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria. Operations which acted to remove in most cases, secular strongmen keeping a lid on religious extremism. Fighting Russia down to the last Ukrainian and destroying the state of Ukraine. ‘Peaceful’ alliance? You be the judge.
The rest of the page rambles on about various ‘well meaning’ Western institutions and initiatives that have apparently acted as guardrails for peace and security: ‘United Nations Charter’, ‘Minsk Agreements’, ‘Rules Based International Order’, ‘1975 Helsinki Final Act’, ‘1990 Charter of Paris’, ‘1999 Istanbul Charter for European Security’ and ‘NATO-Russia Council’.
Lets start with the ‘United Nations Charter‘. The United Nations (UN) was the successor to the failed League of Nations and it looks to be heading that way. The UN Charter is described as something that “codifies the major principles of international relations, from sovereign equality of States to the prohibition of the use of force in international relations”. It sounds great on paper, but how does its track-record stack up? Between 1946-1991, the US made 81 regime changes and participated in 50 foreign military engagements. The USSR made 36 regime changes over the same period. After the Cold War, the US ramped up even more, participating in over 250 foreign military engagements. So much for the UN Charter.
The ‘Minsk Agreements‘, or more aptly the ‘Minsk II Agreement’ was dead on arrival. It was called for by Ukraine’s fascist proxy ‘guarantors’ – Germany, France, Ukraine and the OSCE (another rudderless institution that we’ll get into eventually) because pro-Russian Donbas militias routed Ukrainian nationalists in the battle of Delbastevo (2014). ‘Team Ukraine’ had to sue for ‘peace’ to re-supply and re-group its defeated forces. If you read my words correctly, I am referring to a ‘faux’ peace with ‘faux’ characters here. Ukrainians under the agreement were supposed to recognize autonomy for the DPR and LPR, pull back heavy weaponry past a 30km buffer zone from the line of contact (LOC) and cease artillery shelling of Donbas cities. How did that pan out? Ukraine banned the Russian language and Russian cultural customs in Donbas and began shelling Donetsk with NATO supplied mortars and artillery, killing over 14,000 civilians between 2014 and 2022. Furthermore, in 2022 former Franco-German leaders once signatories to the Minsk Agreements, Angela Merkel and Francois Hollande, publically came out and admitted that the agreements were after all, used to string the Russians along while Ukraine re-armed itself. European perfidy and duplicity to ‘peace agreements’ was paraded in front of the whole world, aimed at Vladimir Putin, who turned out quite naive or overly optimistic in his dealings with the West. Russia’s patience ran for far too long with the non-agreement capable.
To understand the absurdity of the ‘Rules Based International Order’, I suggest you read my book for fuller context. There is not much more that needs to be said about this empty platitude.
The ‘1975 Helsinki Accord‘ was a non-binding declaration (read: insignificant) signed during an era of rapprochement in the Cold War between the Eastern and Western blocs. Referencing a defunct and non-binding agreement in a new reality where geopolitical realities are different, is meaningless. In international law, there exists a concept ‘clausula rebus sic stantibus’ which would normally apply to ratified treaties which the ‘Helsinki Accord’ is not. The concept refers to the fundamental change in the underlying circumstances to which agreements are signed, if they no longer exist, the agreements are void. Both sides – NATO and Russia, are likely to invoke such a concept to the now-defunct agreement. I have no idea why NATO even included it in the paper, – probably for content filling purposes.
The ‘1990 Charter of Paris‘ was signed again between the Eastern and Western blocs, during the twilight years of the USSR when emotions were running high about the end of the Cold War and the future configuration state of European security. At the time, buzzwords like ‘Perestroika’ and ‘Glasnost’ were in vogue, while mantras such as the ‘End of History’ were waiting in the wings to be broadcast by CIA mouthpieces. The West’s impending sense of triumphalism and entitlement in the new era lay the groundwork for the agreement in essence, to open the door to accepting former Soviet satellites into the Western alliance – paving the way for future NATO and EU expansion. The agreement was lop-sided from the start, favoring the victors of the Cold War, therefore from Russia’s perspective, there would be no basis to be negotiating on the basis of an agreement where the West would be seeking to turn former Soviet allies into enemies of Russia. From NATO’s angle, invoking the agreement would provide evidence of former Warsaw Pact participation into Atlanticist structures. NATO would have a point here. However, Russia could easily argue that if embracing its former satellites into Atlanticist structures meant turning them into Russophobic staging areas to be used against its security interests, then the agreement would be invalid vis-a-vis its primary security concerns, which rest fundamentally on Atlanticist expansionism.
The ‘1999 Istanbul Charter for European Security’ or the ‘1999 Istanbul Summit‘ is an interesting agreement to discuss. In 1999, Vladimir Putin came into office, taking the reigns from a frail Yeltsin, who NATO were relying on to extract further humiliating concessions from Russia. Putin began to put the brakes on Western demands. The ‘1999 Istanbul Summit’ was the first agreement where the West and Russia began to clash, under Putin’s new nationalist leadership. The summit brought together the OSCE, which was an institution that brought together American allies and former Soviet allies in a forum centered on de-confliction. In reality, the OSCE during the Ukraine war, as a ‘guarantor’ of the Minsk Agreements, was revealed to be an organization infiltrated by Western intelligence agencies, like most other Western institutions. During hostilities in Ukraine for example, OSCE monitors would secretly convey coordinates and positions of pro-Russian forces to NATO and Ukrainian armed forces, and the Russian GRU was well aware of the fact. This further rendered the OSCE untrustworthy in Russia’s eyes. But coming back to 1999, when the OSCE was still regarded as a somewhat constructive organization by Russia. The first point of contention during the summit was the ‘Adapted Conventional Armed Forces in Europe Treaty’ which was signed during the summit between Russia and OSCE members, stipulating national limits to foreign troop deployments on the territory of signatory states, superceding what were formerly ‘bloc’ level limits to troop deployments during the Cold War. Russia and its core allies (Belarus, Ukraine and Kazakhstan) agreed and signed and ratified the agreement. However, they were the only parties to actually ratify the agreement. No OSCE members ratified the agreement, likely due to American pressure. The American side would have taken a stance against imposed limits on its troop deployments in Europe, preferring Russia to make those commitments instead. This was where tensions began to simmer.
The other aspect to the ‘1999 Istanbul Summit’ was the withdrawal of Russian troops and forces from Moldova and Georgia. The Russians made commitments to do so by the deadline of 31st December, 2002. However, they were unable to honor those commitments by the deadline. Forces in Moldova and Georgia proper were withdrawn, but they remained in ‘separatist’ pro-Russian regions: Transnistria in Moldova and Abkhazia and South Ossetia in Georgia. The Russians claimed separatists in the regions prevented Russian troops from leaving, fearing retribution from non-Russian forces in their wake. The OSCE mentioned this point in a working paper:
“The establishment of Georgia and Moldova as independent, sovereign states and the removal from them of a Russian military presence were difficult and complicated processes. The majority Georgian and Moldovan populations were deeply resentful of what they saw as almost two centuries of Russian and Soviet occupation, and uncompromisingly insistent on national self-determination as the Soviet Union disintegrated in the late 1980s and early 1990s. However, both Georgia and Moldova were part of the Russian empire and Soviet Union for much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and by 1991 both countries had a substantial indigenous ethnic Russian population”
It is likely that in addition to fearing for the safety of pro-Russian ethnic populations, Russia viewed the American non-ratification of the ‘Adapted Conventional Armed Forces in Europe Treaty’ as a posture that all but confirmed the US reluctance to limit its own troop deployments to Europe, therefore, why should Russia have been the only side pulling its troops back home? The ‘1999 Istanbul Summit’ was the first diplomatic tussle that ended in a stalemate between Russia and the West, with both sides sticking firmly to their relative positions. As OSCE panelists discussed the failure of Russia’s commitments to pull its troops out of South Ossetia, Abkhazia and Transnistria, a valid question was asked. The Russian response to remain its forces in Georgia and Moldova was likely solidified by the realization in 2002 that NATO expansion had just begun and troop deployments would serve as a deterrent to NATO expansion in Georgia and Moldova.
“…whether a failure or not, why should the Istanbul commitments and the process of Russian military withdrawal from Georgia and Moldova matter to the U.S.?
Finally, the ‘NATO-Russia Council‘ was always a farce, and as of 2022 was all but dead. Any references NATO makes to this institution in the document are rooted in bad faith. At the 2022 NATO summit in Madrid, the alliance declared Russia as a direct threat to Atlanticist structures, pitting NATO and Russia on a collision course over not only Ukraine, but in the Baltics, Balkans, Caucasus and beyond:
“Allied leaders agreed on a fundamental shift in NATO’s deterrence and defence, with strengthened forward defences, enhanced battlegroups in the eastern part of the Alliance, and an increase in the number of high readiness forces to well over 300,000. Leaders also agreed to invest more in NATO and to increase common funding. During the Summit, NATO’s closest partners Finland and Sweden were invited to join the Alliance, a significant boost to Euro-Atlantic security. Allies further agreed on long-term support for Ukraine through a strengthened Comprehensive Assistance Package.”
On the second page, perhaps the most practical points in the entire NATO document are 7.1, 7.2 and 7.3 which call for hotlines and mutual diplomatic seats to be established between both sides. NATO’s uncompromising insistence in Section 8.2, however, of its ‘Open Door Policy’ is a major security concern for Russia and as such, one of the major reasons for conflict. Raising section 8.3 ignores the context which we discussed about the mutual non-adherence from both sides in the aftermath of the ‘1999 Istanbul Summit’ so NATO here displays a one-sided ‘understanding’ of troop deployments. Section 9 is delusional hogwash, “NATO allies have a long track record of contributing to arms control, disarmement, and non-proliferation”. In 2002, the US pulled out unilaterally from the ‘Anti Ballistic Missile Treaty’ (ABMT) – a landmark Cold War era arms control treaty birthed in 1972 which focused on reducing anti-ballistic missile deployments in order to limit the need for nuclear ballistic missiles. In 2019, the US once again unilaterally pulled out from the ‘Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty’ (INFT). The INFT was birthed in 1987 and its purpose was to eliminate short to medium range (500km – 5500km) land-based nuclear missiles from Europe. In both cases, the American side pulled out shortly before ramping up escalations against Russia. As for disarmament, the NATO bloc has been ramping up armament production and American weapons have been pouring into Europe and all corners of the globe, as it struggles against entropic principles of imperial over-stretch.
Page 3 is mostly filler and duplication of points raised in previous pages. The only point worth discussing is 9.6. Its quite bizarre that NATO is pushing for “responsible behavior in space” given that the US was the first country to weaponize the space domain with the commissioning of a ‘Space Force’ in 2019. Previously, the ‘Outer Space Treaty’ has held among all superpowers to promote the non-weaponization and non-militarization of space for the benefit of all. However, it appears that American imperial strategists rooted in a paranoia of other powers and a desire for full spectrum dominance over the planet, insist on going rogue and against the spirit of non-weaponization of space. Anti-satellite weapons such as Russia’s ‘Nudol’ complex, raised as a concern in the document, are deterrents and not space-based. With the American rush to weaponize space and its ‘Space Force’, such weapon systems can be fully justified as defensive by the Russians, Chinese and others. Again, due to American escalations, space is expected to become further weaponized in the future. A 2023 DoD ‘Space Policy Review’ paper outlines American full spectrum intentions in space. The tone of the paper does not sound like the US is seeking a ‘defensive’ posture at all:
“To preserve U.S. freedom of operations and support deterrence, the United States must be prepared to deny adversaries the ability to utilize space capabilities and services to attack the Joint Force and prevent the United States from advancing critical national security objectives. The Department will leverage a breadth of options across all operational domains to do so.”
From page 4 onwards, the NATO paper takes a turn for the worse, basking in sophistry, intellectual dishonesty, exceptionalism and outright lying. A common area of agreement remains the New START agreement, extended by Russia and the US in 2021 for another 5 years until 2026. So far, both sides have adhered to the following aggregate limits:
- 700 deployed intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), deployed submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs), and deployed heavy bombers equipped for nuclear armaments;
- 1,550 nuclear warheads on deployed ICBMs, deployed SLBMs, and deployed heavy bombers equipped for nuclear armaments (each such heavy bomber is counted as one warhead toward this limit);
- 800 deployed and non-deployed ICBM launchers, SLBM launchers, and heavy bombers equipped for nuclear armaments.
Clearly, the virtue signalling on display in the ‘limited hangout’ is aimed at a Western audience, intended on giving the impression that the West has tried to engage the Russians to prevent conflict in Ukraine, to no avail. Nothing could be further from the truth if one had a good grasp of Psychonomic History between 2014-2022. The Russian side made it abundantly clear of its red lines, however, the West responded with perfidy, arrogance and exceptionalism, not only ignoring them but crossing them, forcing Russia to defend its security interests unfortunately, with direct military force. Such outcomes are all too common during eras where trust at an international level has broken down, with the incumbent Western ‘Rules Based International System’ unable to live up to its claims. War is after all, the failure of diplomacy.