..
NATO did promise Moscow it wouldn't expand,
former German defense official
Willy Wimmer told RT he personally witnessed the West vowing that
NATO would not expand to the east
Despite their denials, Western leaders did make a promise to the USSR that NATO would not expand to Central and Eastern Europe when Moscow agreed to Germany’s reunification, Willy Wimmer, a former vice president of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), has claimed in an interview with RT on Saturday.
The veteran politician, who served as parliamentary secretary to Germany’s defense minister between 1985 and 1992, said that he personally witnessed this promise when he “sent Chancellor Helmut Kohl the statement on the Bundeswehr in NATO and NATO in Europe, which was completely incorporated into the treaties on reunification.”
Berlin’s decision at that time “not to station NATO troops on the territory of the former East Germany and to stop NATO near the Oder” was part of this promise, Wimmer added.
The bloc has long denied such a promise had ever been made, insisting it has always had an 'open door policy.' However, a document recently published by Germany’s Der Spiegel weekly purportedly shows that the pledge was made, supporting Moscow's claims the commitments were later broken.
The minutes of a March 6, 1991 meeting in Bonn between the political directors of the foreign ministries of the US, UK, France, and Germany on German reunification appear to show that the Western nations made it “clear” to the still-existing Soviet Union that NATO would not expand further to the east.
Wimmer believes that the promises made by the Western leaders in the early 1990s were eventually dashed by the US ambitions formulated in the infamous 1992 ‘Wolfowitz Doctrine’.
The ‘doctrine’ was in fact a Defense Planning Guidance for the 1994–1999 fiscal years that was leaked to the New York Times at that time and sparked a wave of criticism even in the US itself. The document outlined the policy of unilateralism and pre-emptive military actions designed to suppress potential threats and prevent any supposedly authoritarian states from becoming superpowers. The official text of the guidance was then changed following the uproar but many tenets of the ‘doctrine’ still found their way into the former US President George W. Bush’s foreign policy.
Since that time, the US and its allies have been on the “wrong track” as they have been virtually doing everything to create a fairly “justified” impression in Moscow that the Western nations seek to “kick Russia out of Europe, to build a new wall between the Baltic and the Black Sea” and eventually to “destroy” Russia instead of cooperating with it, Wimmer pointed out.
The root of all the current security problems in Europe lies within America’s policy of continuously antagonizing Russia, according to Wimmer. “All the misery we are dealing with started with the United States conducting the policy aimed at kicking Russia out of Europe for the last 20 or almost 30 years,” he said.
As long as the US continues to “do everything to achieve this goal” both through NATO and bilateral agreements, Europe’s security problems can hardly be resolved, Wimmer warned, adding that it was Washington that should fundamentally change its ways.
The former OSCE vice president also echoed Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, describing the present state of relations between Russia and the West as a conversation between “a mute” and a “deaf.” Moscow's top diplomat made similar remarks earlier in February following talks with British Foreign Secretary Liz Truss.
The US and its partners in Europe have been “certainly deaf” for decades since they “drew no conclusions” from Russian President Vladimir Putin’s landmark speech at the Munich Security Conference back in 2007, when he showed quite clearly “where the problems lie on the Euro-Asian continent,” Wimmer said.
At that time, the Russian leader warned that US unilateral hegemonism and “uncontained” use of force in international relations erode the global security system and weaken international law. It was also one of the first times he mentioned NATO’s promise to Russia not to expand to the east.
Powerful explosions hit another city in eastern Ukraine
One of the two consecutive blasts in Lugansk has affected a gas pipeline
Two explosions rocked the city of Lugansk in eastern Ukraine late on Friday, a Sputnik news agency correspondent has reported. Local media have also confirmed that the first blast affected a pipeline in the area, resulting in a major fire. The second one reportedly took place at a gas station.
The reports of explosions come just hours after the neighboring city of Donetsk was rocked by another blast. It was caused by a car bomb, which targeted a vehicle belonging to the head of the people's militia of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic, and did not result in any casualties.
Earlier, both self-proclaimed republics in Lugansk and Donetsk
ordered a mass evacuation of civilians from the area to Russia, citing fears of a potential attack by the Ukrainian military. Meanwhile, Kiev has denied any plans to take the breakaway regions by force.
ordered a mass evacuation of civilians from the area to Russia, citing fears of a potential attack by the Ukrainian military. Meanwhile, Kiev has denied any plans to take the breakaway regions by force.
Tensions are currently running high in eastern Ukraine, as the two breakaway republics – known colloquially as Donbass – allege the government in Kiev is planning a military operation to claim their territory by force. They have cited a sharp increase in incidents along the armistice line, including the use of artillery, mortars, and tanks by the Ukrainian military.
Meanwhile, the US and NATO have accused Russia of intending to invade Ukraine, though their predicted start date of February 16 came and went without incident. Moscow has repeatedly rejected the accusations as ‘fake news’. Both sides have accused the other of planning a ‘false-flag’ attack to create a pretext for a military operation.
So, none of these are likely to be the anticipated false flag operation; we can expect something far worse. God only knows how many 'operatives' are in the field trying to start something to spur a reaction from Russia. This is a disgraceful period in the history of mankind.
Is NATO America's pretext for military hegemony?
NATO’s campaign made European region ‘a hotbed of crime’
– Lavrov
Russia’s foreign minister says the bloc’s bombing campaign
has not brought prosperity to Kosovo
© Medin Halilovic/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images
Russia finds it hard to believe that NATO is a purely defensive bloc, given its bombing campaign in Yugoslavia in 1999, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov told RT on Friday.
The minister made his comments while speaking about the talks between German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow on Tuesday.
“Scholz and others NATO officials say that NATO is a defensive alliance. Putin reminded Scholz at a joint press conference about the bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999,” Lavrov remarked. “[Scholz] said that NATO had intervened in order to prevent the genocide of Kosovar Albanians. That it was a success, and now the region is prospering. It is far from prospering.”
“Kosovo and some other parts of the Western Balkans are becoming a hotbed of crime. There are terrorists, drug dealers. Mercenaries are recruited there for military conflicts ignited by the US, among others,” the minister said.
“There is information that militants from Kosovo, Albania, and Bosnia and Herzegovina are being recruited to knock Russia off balance, which includes sending them to Donbass [in eastern Ukraine]. We are working to verify it right now.”
“To say that NATO invaded Yugoslavia with noble goals is incorrect and unethical, to say the least,” Lavrov said.
What were NATO's goals? 78 days of bombing moves an awful lot of bombs from America's war inventory and enriches some powerful oligarchs.
In 1999, NATO launched a 78-day bombing campaign, claiming that it was protecting civilians against atrocities committed by Serbian troops and police during an insurgency of ethnic Albanians in Kosovo. UN peacekeepers were deployed in the region after Serbian forces left.
Kosovo’s independence, unilaterally declared in 2008, has been recognized by nearly 100 countries, including the US. Russia still considers Kosovo a part of Serbia.
“The situation described by Scholz – when Yugoslavia was bombed – has nothing in common with genocide. International courts have not made rulings on that matter,” Lavrov argued.
The minister pointed to the high-profile incident in the Kosovar village of Racak, where dozens of bodies were found in 1999. Western countries claimed that they were civilians massacred by the Serbs and used it as a pretext for military action. Their account was disputed by Belgrade, which said that the bodies belonged to Albanian militants.
In 2006, the UN-backed International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia decided not to use the evidence related to the Racak incident in order to “improve the expeditiousness of the proceedings while ensuring that they remain fair.” The court ultimately convicted several Serbian officials of war crimes and crimes against humanity committed in Kosovo, including murders and deportations. Several Albanians were convicted of war crimes against the Serbs as well.
This is how Deep State works! Take a situation, lie about it, make it seem like NATO is a knight in shining armour riding to the rescue, when really, all they want is an excuse to drop a few tens of thousands of bombs on something.
Russians have hacked American military-industrial complex – US
The purported cyber attacks are said to date back at least two years
Russian government-backed hackers have been stealing “sensitive” information from American weapons companies for several years, a recent announcement by US security agencies has claimed.
The FBI, National Security Agency, and US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) released a report on Wednesday alleging that since at least January 2020, the hackers have been collecting information that is unclassified but contains “significant insight into US weapons platforms development and deployment timelines.”
So, if the information was significant, why wasn't it classified? If it is not significant enough to be classified, why are you complaining?
The attacks apparently hit contractors working for all the branches of the military, including the Air Force, Army, Navy, and Space Force, as well as companies working for US intelligence programs. The firms that were targeted include ones involved in aircraft design and the development of combat and weapons systems.
“By acquiring proprietary internal documents and email communications, adversaries may be able to adjust their own military plans and priorities, hasten technological development efforts, inform foreign policymakers of US intentions, and target potential sources for recruitment,” the report states.
On Wednesday, John Reed, Democratic Senator from Rhode Island and chair of the Armed Services Committee, told CNN, “Both the United States and Russia are continually probing, through cyber, to pick up information on weapons systems, on intelligence, etc.”
“The compromise of intelligence information is [on] both sides,” he went on, adding that the US is prepared to use cyber operations to assist Ukraine, where American leaders have been warning Russia could be planning an invasion, an accusation that Moscow has strenuously denied.
Russian officials have not yet commented on the hacking allegations, but in the past have insisted that requests for evidence that Moscow is involved in stealing secrets through cyber attacks have gone unanswered.
Are they 'secrets' if they are not classified? Are you positive that America is not trying to hack into Russian or Chinese military hardware manufacturers?
===========================================================================================
No comments:
Post a Comment