... States and Western Europe fully acknowledged their inability to create an international order that did not centre on the violence of a privileged group. This became, probably, the biggest historical drama since the end of the confrontation between the USSR and the USA, since it meant the impossibility, at least at the present time, of turning away from the path of resolving interstate contradictions with violence. Therefore, the NATO attack on Yugoslavia turned out to be, in fact, the completion of the “end of history” that was proclaimed by some Western publicists in the late 1980s, and with the right reasons was supported by other countries of the world. The events of 1999 ...
... dependent client states as an advantage in Russia's current situation.
“Georgia received the most money per capita in the USSR, and Ukraine received the most money in absolute terms,”
he explained.
“It is no coincidence that, with the loss of ... ... side of ‘Greater Eurasia.’”
“The big question is where Germany will end up,”
he concluded, referring to the dominant NATO power that has embarked on the controversial Nord Stream 2 project with Russia, despite staunch objections from NATO allies ...
... staked a claim to an enormous chunk of the Arctic: 6.8 million square kilometers of sea, declaring it the polar territory of the USSR. As a result, the territory of the Soviet Union grew from the furthermost continental points on the Kola and Chukotka peninsulas ... ... there that the Soviet Navy, with its mighty submarine fleet, was preparing to sail into the Atlantic in the event of a war with NATO. The Arctic airspace also provided the shortest trajectories for U.S. and Soviet intercontinental ballistic missiles aimed ...
... its desire to become part of the extended Euro-Atlantic community: Its pleas to be treated as an equal by the United States did not impress Washington, and its demands that its national security interests be respected were ignored in the process of NATO enlargement. And so from the early 2010s, the Kremlin started charting a course that was clearly at odds with its earlier policies of Western integration.
With the Russian military intervention in Ukraine in 2014, the breakout from the post-Cold ...
... meaning without Russia.
At the same time Moscow was assured that a new Europe would mean a new NATO. The declaration of July 1990 NATO Summit in London did contain plenty of positive statements by its leaders, and it did incorporate much of what the USSR proposed at the onset of perestroika. Among others, NATO promised not to be the first to use force.
Earlier, in March 1987, Thatcher told Gorbachev that NATO would never use force unless in response to an attack.
Twelve years later, NATO bombed Serbia for 78 days, remaining out of reach for Serbian air ...
... of the feeling of insecurity, say, in the indefensible militarily Baltic States, as a function of the temptation to undermine NATO’s credibility ascribed to Moscow; or differences of values within the EU as a result of the thawing of the elements of ... ... shape in another era and lost its raison d’etre with the dissolution of the Warsaw Treaty Organization and the collapse of the USSR, to the Twenty-First Century is fundamentally flawed. Should we be surprised if our continent together with the institutions ...
... confirmed in treaties signed by Moscow. The main irritant in Estonia and Latvia’s relations with Russia since the end of the USSR has been the status of sizeable local ethnic Russian populations who did not automatically receive citizenship rights when ... ... existing realities, but “Russian aggression against the Baltic States” has become a popular narrative and a rallying cry within NATO.
Belarus, which is closest to Russia ethnically and culturally, and since 1999 has formed a “union state” with it, has ...
One of the distinctive features of the modern Western political narrative with regard to NATO is an almost total misunderstanding of how the alliance is perceived in Russia. First and foremost, the Western political establishment seems blithely unaware of the fact that the issue of NATO is the main stumbling block in Russian-Western relations,...
... Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (CFE) also had a major role to play. Under the treaty, the Warsaw Treaty Organization abandoned the idea of military superiority and agreed to parity by reducing its arsenals by 34,700 units, four times the number reduced by NATO (8,700 units)[
3
]. Under the 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START I Treaty), the USSR and the United States reduced their strategic nuclear arsenals, cutting around 25% of their delivery platforms and 50% of their warheads. Furthermore, political commitments by Moscow and Washington allowed for an approximately tenfold reduction of ...
... report reveals that the US intelligence community routinely dismissed the concerns raised by the Soviet leadership relating to the military build-up in Western Europe as ‘propaganda’. Furthermore the warfighting preparation initiated by the USSR in response to Able Archer was not identified as such, with no correlation drawn between the increased readiness of forward-deployed Soviet units and NATO military activity. Even more concerning was that when no intelligence on a particular unit’s operational readiness was available it was routinely assumed to have remained at the same level as the last assessment. As the Board makes clear a ...
