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11.29.22
BUCHAREST, Romania (AP) — NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg reaffirmed the military alliance’s commitment to Ukraine on Tuesday, saying that the war-torn nation will one day become a member of the world’s largest security organization. Stoltenberg’s remarks came as U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and his NATO counterparts gathered in Romania to drum up urgently needed support for Ukraine aimed at ensuring that Moscow fails to defeat the country as it bombards energy infrastructure. “NATO’s door is open,” Stoltenberg said. “Russia does not have a veto” on countries joining, he said in reference to the recent entry of North Macedonia and Montenegro into the security alliance. He said that Russian President Vladimir Putin “will get Finland and Sweden as NATO members” soon. The Nordic neighbors applied for membership in April, concerned that Russia might target them next. “We stand by that, too, on membership for Ukraine,” the former Norwegian prime minister said.
In essence, Stoltenberg repeated a vow made by NATO leaders in Bucharest in 2008 — in the same sprawling Palace of the Parliament where the foreign ministers are meeting this week — that Ukraine, and also Georgia, would join the alliance one day. Some officials and analysts believe this move — pressed on the NATO allies by former U.S. President George W. Bush — was partly responsible for the war that Russia launched on Ukraine in February. Stoltenberg disagreed. “President Putin cannot deny sovereign nations to make their own sovereign decisions that are not a threat to Russia,” he said. “I think what he’s afraid of is democracy and freedom, and that’s the main challenge for him.” Even so, Ukraine will not join NATO anytime soon. With the Crimean Peninsula annexed, and Russian troops and pro-Moscow separatists holding parts of the south and east, it’s not clear what Ukraine’s borders would even look like. Many of NATO’s 30 allies believe the focus now must solely be on defeating Russia, and Stoltenberg stressed that any attempt to move ahead on membership could divide them. On Wednesday, the ministers will also address ways to step up support for partners who officials have said are facing Russian pressure — Bosnia, Georgia, and Moldova.
NATO renews membership vow to Ukraine, pledges arms and aid
NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg says war-torn Ukraine will one day become a member of the world’s largest security alliance.apnews.com
I don't see NATO membership for Ukraine happening anytime soon. Due to historical ties with Russia, I think European nations like France and Germany will want to avoid embarassing Moscow. To illustrate, Czarina Catherine the Great, the reigning empress of Russia from 1762 to 1796, was born in Stettin, Pomerania, Prussia, (Princess Sophie of Anhalt-Zerbst) is but one example. Royal intermarriage flourished in the era of the ruling dynasties. Many Germans still have a nostalgic attachment to East Germany, a post-war colony of Russian imperialism.
Last I checked we didn't Holodomor West Germany.It was about as much a “colony of Russian imperialism” as West Germany was a “colony of American imperialism”.
Last I checked we didn't Holodomor West Germany.
The Soviets didn’t “Holodomar” East Germany either.
But they did Ukraine, and that's what makes your comment exceptionally odd.
RogueValley claimed East Germany was a “colony of Russian imperialism”, which is simply untrue.
How do you describe the nation that once was Eastern Germany between the years of 1949 and 1990 then please? Did they voluntarily become a Soviet State?
Best I can tell from researching it earlier, when breakup of USSR was negotiated, US, on behalf of NATO, verbally assured Russia (and Gorbachev) of NOT expanding NATO eastward. It then promptly started doing so within a few years
NATO membership for Ukraine (and Georgia) is a thorny issue. This is THE ONLY coherent reason Russia can give its people for its invasion IMO.
Best I can tell from researching it earlier, when breakup of USSR was negotiated, US, on behalf of NATO, verbally assured Russia (and Gorbachev) of NOT expanding NATO eastward. It then promptly started doing so within a few years.
Just like US did not like Russian nukes in Cuba, Russia does not want NATO (and with that, ability to construct military facilities) on its borders.
NATO already added a lot of the countries closer to Russia. With Finland, it will double its border with Russia... Not sure whether admitting Ukraine is the right move for NATO here, as it might make it easy for Russian propaganda to justify some "limited" WMD or other kind of escalation.
Certainly NATO expansion has been played up by Russian propaganda to get its population to support the "special military operation".
The US starved about million Germans to death post WW2.Last I checked we didn't Holodomor West Germany.
What? I'm aware of the blockade of Germany during WWII that caused a large number of deaths, but not of any such event after WWII.The US starved about million Germans to death post WW2.
Putin is a grievance collector, and he's such a good grievance collector he collects grievances that never existed.
The Bush administration was determined to anchor a combined Germany within NATO, but Western officials sought to assuage the Soviets’ concerns about their security. On Jan. 31, 1990, Hans-Dietrich Genscher, the West German foreign minister, said in a speech that there would not be “an expansion of NATO territory to the east, in other words, closer to the borders of the Soviet Union.”
He was talking about whether NATO troops would be stationed in territory then constituting East Germany, not whether other countries would eventually be considered for membership in the alliance. Nonetheless, Mr. Baker picked up on Mr. Genscher’s formulation during a Feb. 9 visit to Moscow.
As an inducement for agreeing to German unification, Mr. Baker offered what he called “ironclad guarantees that NATO’s jurisdiction or forces would not move eastward,” according to a declassified memorandum recording the discussion.
“There would be no extension of NATO’s jurisdiction for forces of NATO one inch to the east,” Mr. Baker told Mr. Gorbachev, coming back to the formula three times during the conversation.
... Mr. Gorbachev agreed that NATO expansion was unnecessarily provocative. “It was definitely a violation of the spirit of the statements and assurances made to us in 1990,” he said.
... in an op-ed in The Los Angeles Times that the alliance consider another possible member: Russia itself.
U.S. Secretary of State James Baker’s famous “not one inch eastward” assurance about NATO expansion in his meeting with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev on February 9, 1990, was part of a cascade of assurances about Soviet security given by Western leaders to Gorbachev and other Soviet officials throughout the process of German unification in 1990 and on into 1991, according to declassified U.S., Soviet, German, British and French documents posted today by the National Security Archive at George Washington University (http://nsarchive.gwu.edu).
The documents show that multiple national leaders were considering and rejecting Central and Eastern European membership in NATO as of early 1990 and through 1991, that discussions of NATO in the context of German unification negotiations in 1990 were not at all narrowly limited to the status of East German territory, and that subsequent Soviet and Russian complaints about being misled about NATO expansion were founded in written contemporaneous memcons and telcons at the highest levels.
The documents reinforce former CIA Director Robert Gates’s criticism of “pressing ahead with expansion of NATO eastward [in the 1990s], when Gorbachev and others were led to believe that wouldn’t happen.”[1] The key phrase, buttressed by the documents, is “led to believe.”
The first concrete assurances by Western leaders on NATO began on January 31, 1990, when West German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher opened the bidding with a major public speech at Tutzing, in Bavaria, on German unification. The U.S. Embassy in Bonn (see Document 1) informed Washington that Genscher made clear “that the changes in Eastern Europe and the German unification process must not lead to an ‘impairment of Soviet security interests.’ Therefore, NATO should rule out an ‘expansion of its territory towards the east, i.e. moving it closer to the Soviet borders.’” The Bonn cable also noted Genscher’s proposal to leave the East German territory out of NATO military structures even in a unified Germany in NATO.[3]
This latter idea of special status for the GDR territory was codified in the final German unification treaty signed on September 12, 1990, by the Two-Plus-Four foreign ministers (see Document 25). The former idea about “closer to the Soviet borders” is written down not in treaties but in multiple memoranda of conversation between the Soviets and the highest-level Western interlocutors (Genscher, Kohl, Baker, Gates, Bush, Mitterrand, Thatcher, Major, Woerner, and others) offering assurances throughout 1990 and into 1991 about protecting Soviet security interests and including the USSR in new European security structures. The two issues were related but not the same. Subsequent analysis sometimes conflated the two and argued that the discussion did not involve all of Europe. The documents published below show clearly that it did.
The “Tutzing formula” immediately became the center of a flurry of important diplomatic discussions over the next 10 days in 1990, leading to the crucial February 10, 1990, meeting in Moscow between Kohl and Gorbachev when the West German leader achieved Soviet assent in principle to German unification in NATO, as long as NATO did not expand to the east. The Soviets would need much more time to work with their domestic opinion (and financial aid from the West Germans) before formally signing the deal in September 1990.
The conversations before Kohl’s assurance involved explicit discussion of NATO expansion, the Central and East European countries, and how to convince the Soviets to accept unification. For example, on February 6, 1990, when Genscher met with British Foreign Minister Douglas Hurd, the British record showed Genscher saying, “The Russians must have some assurance that if, for example, the Polish Government left the Warsaw Pact one day, they would not join NATO the next.” (See Document 2)
Having met with Genscher on his way into discussions with the Soviets, Baker repeated exactly the Genscher formulation in his meeting with Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze on February 9, 1990, (see Document 4); and even more importantly, face to face with Gorbachev.
Not once, but three times, Baker tried out the “not one inch eastward” formula with Gorbachev in the February 9, 1990, meeting. He agreed with Gorbachev’s statement in response to the assurances that “NATO expansion is unacceptable.” Baker assured Gorbachev that “neither the President nor I intend to extract any unilateral advantages from the processes that are taking place,” and that the Americans understood that “not only for the Soviet Union but for other European countries as well it is important to have guarantees that if the United States keeps its presence in Germany within the framework of NATO, not an inch of NATO’s present military jurisdiction will spread in an eastern direction.” (See Document 6)
Putin is a grievance collector, and he's such a good grievance collector he collects grievances that never existed.
Declassified documents from U.S. and Russian archives show that U.S. officials led Russian President Boris Yeltsin to believe in 1993 that the Partnership for Peace was the alternative to NATO expansion, rather than a precursor to it, while simultaneously planning for expansion after Yeltsin’s re-election bid in 1996 and telling the Russians repeatedly that the future European security system would include, not exclude, Russia.
The declassified U.S. account of one key conversation on October 22, 1993, (Document 8) shows Secretary of State Warren Christopher assuring Yeltsin in Moscow that the Partnership for Peace was about including Russia together with all European countries, not creating a new membership list of just some European countries for NATO; and Yeltsin responding, “this is genius!”
Christopher later claimed in his memoir that Yeltsin misunderstood – perhaps from being drunk – the real message that the Partnership for Peace would in fact “lead to gradual expansion of NATO”;[1] but the actual American-written cable reporting the conversation supports subsequent Russian complaints about being misled.[2]
What? I'm aware of the blockade of Germany during WWII that caused a large number of deaths, but not of any such event after WWII.
HNN Debate: Was Ike Responsible for the Deaths of Hundreds of Thousands of German POW's? Pro and Con
In 1989 James Bacque published Other Losses, a shocking account of the treatment of German POW's at the end of World War II. Bacque claimed that Dwight Eisenhower, burning with hatred for Germans, allowed nearly a million POW's to die in camps of starvation and illness. Bacque's book sparked...historynewsnetwork.org
Yeah, I don't find Bacque's entire argument convincing, but Ambrose is a deeply unreliable gatekeeper.The New Orleans panel rebuttal of Bacque...
Contains rebuttals to Bacque's "Other Losses" with footnotes....
NY Times piece kind of supports what I had said though, does not it?... Right here for example:
And in the end Gorbachev did walk away with ...
Yes, there was no formal agreement (which is why I highlighted only "verbal" assurances were given) but I think the "spirit" and a number of specific conversations were pretty unambiguous.
Side note:
My understanding is that Russia, and Putin himself, offered to join NATO at one point. NATO response was to get in line, like everyone else, which he really did not like...
Now, going back to the main topic...
Here is another account for the assurances from declassified documents:
continued...
Countries like Guatemala and Iran didn’t voluntarily become a member of the western bloc, does that mean they were American colonies?
The double standard is really quite amusing.
Maybe you misread my questions or I wasn't clear in the asking but let's try again "How do you describe the nation that once was Eastern Germany between the years of 1949 and 1990 then please? Did they voluntarily become a Soviet State?"
You dodged. Be honest about it.I addressed it, by pointing out the fact
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