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NATO commits to future Ukraine membership, drums up aid

Rogue Valley

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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.


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.
 




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.

It was about as much a “colony of Russian imperialism” as West Germany was a “colony of American imperialism”.
 
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.
 
But they did Ukraine, and that's what makes your comment exceptionally odd.

East Germany, in case you hadn’t noticed, isn’t Ukraine.

RogueValley claimed East Germany was a “colony of Russian imperialism”, which is simply untrue.
 
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?
 
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?

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.
 
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".
 
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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


President Vladimir V. Putin and other Russian officials have asserted that Mr. Baker ruled out NATO expansion into Eastern Europe when he served as President George H.W. Bush’s top diplomat. The West’s failure to live up to that agreement, in this argument, is the real cause of the crisis now gripping Europe as Mr. Putin demands that NATO forswear membership for Ukraine as the price of calling off a potential invasion.

But the record suggests this is a selective account of what really happened, used to justify Russian aggression for years. While there was indeed discussion between Mr. Baker and the Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev in the months after the fall of the Berlin Wall about limiting NATO jurisdiction if East and West Germany were reunited, no such provision was included in the final treaty signed by the Americans, Europeans and Russians.

“The bottom line is, that’s a ridiculous argument,” Mr. Baker said in an interview in 2014, a few months after Russia seized Crimea and intervened in eastern Ukraine. “It is true that in the initial stages of negotiations I said ‘what if’ and then Gorbachev himself supported a solution that extended the border that included the German Democratic Republic,” or East Germany, within NATO. Since the Russians signed that treaty, he asked, how can they rely “on something I said a month or so before? It just doesn’t make sense.”

In fact, while Mr. Putin accuses the United States of breaking an agreement it never made, Russia has violated an agreement it actually did make with regard to Ukraine. In 1994, after the Soviet Union broke apart, Russia signed an accord along with the United States and Britain called the Budapest Memorandum, in which the newly independent Ukraine gave up 1,900 nuclear warheads in exchange for a commitment from Moscow “to respect the independence and sovereignty and the existing borders of Ukraine” and “to refrain from the threat or use of force” against the country.

Continued in the next post.
 
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.

Back in Washington, the National Security Council staff was alarmed. The word “jurisdiction” could imply that the NATO doctrine of collective defense would apply only to part of German territory, limiting German sovereignty. It was one thing to agree not to move troops into the East right away, as far as American officials were concerned, but all of Germany had to be part of NATO.

“The N.S.C. got to him pretty quickly and said that language might be misinterpreted,” Condoleezza Rice, then a Soviet adviser to Mr. Bush and later secretary of state under President George W. Bush, remembered in an interview for a biography of Mr. Baker.

Mr. Baker got the message and began walking back his words by ditching the term “jurisdiction” from all future discussions. Chancellor Helmut Kohl of West Germany likewise rejected Mr. Genscher’s formulation.

“I may have been a little bit forward on my skis on that, but they changed it and he knew that they changed it,” Mr. Baker recalled of Mr. Gorbachev. “He never once again in all the months that followed ever raised the question of NATO expanding its jurisdiction eastward. He then signed documents in which NATO did expand its jurisdiction.”

When Mr. Baker returned to Moscow in May, he offered what were called the nine reassurances, including a commitment to allow Soviet troops in East Germany to remain for a transition period and not extend NATO forces into that territory until they left. This was hardly a promise not to extend the alliance east, but he insisted to the Soviets that this was the best the United States could do.

Mr. Gorbachev eventually agreed. The final treaty unifying Germany later in 1990 barred foreign troops from the old East Germany, but German troops assigned to NATO could be deployed there once Soviet forces withdrew by the end of 1994. Nothing in the treaty addressed NATO expansion beyond that.

“Now remember, it’s not clear the Soviet Union is going to collapse at this point,” Dr. Rice recalled. “It’s not even clear that the Warsaw Pact is going to collapse. This is about the unification of Germany.” She added, “The expansion of NATO was just not on the table as an issue in ’90-’91.”

No less a witness agreed than Mr. Gorbachev. “The topic of ‘NATO expansion’ was not discussed at all, and it wasn’t brought up in those years,” he told an interviewer after Russia’s intervention in Ukraine seven years ago. The issue was foreign troops in eastern Germany. “Baker’s statement” about not one inch “was made in that context,” Mr. Gorbachev said. “Everything that could have been and needed to be done to solidify that political obligation was done. And fulfilled.”

Having said that, 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.

As it happens, one of those who suggested a different approach was Mr. Baker. In 1993, as NATO was contemplating admitting Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic, he proposed in an op-ed in The Los Angeles Times that the alliance consider another possible member: Russia itself.

The idea would be to force democratic change before it could join, while making clear that Russia was not an enemy. “For our relations with Russia, it can both encourage reform and hedge our bets against a return to authoritarianism and expansionism,” Mr. Baker wrote. That obviously never happened.
 
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".

Putin is a grievance collector, and he's such a good grievance collector he collects grievances that never existed.

He does this to improve Russia's bargaining position, because it forces the West to wrangle over illusory issues while enabling Russia to focus on the things it really cares about.

This is how the Russians negotiate and we should not blind ourselves to their true intent.
 
The US starved about million Germans to death post WW2.
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.
 
Putin is a grievance collector, and he's such a good grievance collector he collects grievances that never existed.

NY Times piece kind of supports what I had said though, does not it?... Right here for example:

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.

And in the end Gorbachev did walk away with ...
... 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.

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:
... in an op-ed in The Los Angeles Times that the alliance consider another possible member: Russia itself.

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:

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.”

continued...
 
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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)

A lot more there...
 
That'll upset ole Putin, and we should all enjoy that.
 
Putin is a grievance collector, and he's such a good grievance collector he collects grievances that never existed.

To add to prior 2 posts ...

Another account for later years, involving Yeltsin:

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.
 

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...

This is very interesting and I read through many of the source materials. And it appears the situation is far more complicated than what the Washington Post suggests. The argument Russians have been making have far greater weight than I thought, but it appears there is still significant disagreement among scholars about the extent of these assurances though, and I think a big part of this is the context in which these discussions took place (the Soviet Union had not yet collapsed).

I think what is far more important are the discussions with Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union, because to the extent assurances were made, I find it less persuasive that the West somehow betrayed present-day Russia, because these assurances were made to a government that no longer exists. I think our conversations with present-day Russia are far more important.

Read this article:

 
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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?"
 
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?"

I addressed it, by pointing out the fact that the label of “colony” doesn’t apply in the first place. After all, we don’t apply that label to countries the United States brought into its sphere in the exact same way.
 
I addressed it, by pointing out the fact
You dodged. Be honest about it.

It was a request for a name or title and not a paragraph. So 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?"

The first question could be answered with a maximum of 4 words and the second question requires a simple yes/no response.

Please try again.
 
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