Defending the Indefensible

"We don't believe this conflict can be solved militarily. We shouldn't even create the impression that with weapons shipments and strengthening the Ukrainian army we could create a solution."
German Chancellor Angela Merkel

"They cheated us again and again, made decisions behind our back, presenting us with completed facts. That's the way it was with the expansion of NATO in the East, with the deployment of military infrastructure at our borders. They always told us the same thing: 'Well, this doesn't involve you."
Russian President Vladimir Putin

"That sounds like Ukraine or some of these other [Baltic] countries should be considered buffer zones for the Russians. They're not. They're independent democratic countries with the same rights to security and self-defence that other countries want."
Senior Canadian government official

"What I think is not open to as much debate is the fact that this is a very strongly-held Russian perception, which the West should have taken far more seriously, instead of asserting our good intentions and the rightness of our position and telling the Russians they have nothing to worry about."
"Not only is this approach rarely factually defensible, given the many sides of most issues, it also misses the point that, to find solutions, we have to be able to take into account what others perceive as their legitimate security concerns."
Peggy Mason [former] Canadian disarmament ambassador, president, Rideau Institute, Ottawa

Photo: Reuters

NATO's latest estimate is the presence of as many as 3,000 Russian soldiers fighting in Ukraine. A NATO Black Sea exercise is set to start on September 8, according to military officials. The U.S. and Ukraine are to lead the exercise with NATO participation, and the involvement of fourteen warships. The exercise, named Sea Breeze is a prescheduled one, ostensibly having no connection to the ongoing Ukraine crisis.

"To divert attention away from its actions, Russia has levelled a series of accusations against NATO which are based on misrepresentations of the facts and ignorea the sustained effort that NATO has put into building a partnership with Russia", noted a NATO spokesperson. For its part, Moscow complains that "The U.S. broke their promise to Russia that NATO would not move eastward and the result is the situation today." Even if Russia has a case for complaint, however, it does nothing to excuse its actions.

"They've backed Russia into a corner and of course the Russians are none too happy about that", asserted Canada's former ambassador to Yugoslavia, Bulgaria and Albania who had lived in Russia for a five-year period. Contradicting Prime Minister Stephen Harper's "militaristic" and "imperialistic" descriptives of the Kremlin moves, and Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird's suggestion that Russia's recent activities were reminiscent of Nazi Germany.

NATO's membership expansion embracing some countries once forcibly aligned with Russia, like Poland, Romania, Lithuania and Estonia, has not endeared it to the Politburo which views the alliance's troops now on its borders with paranoia and anxiety for the future, lest it be invaded by those it had formerly enslaved to its vision of a new world order. Russia has warned since 2008 that NATO's grab of former allies was causing the relationship between the two to decline precipitously.

Germany, sensing the danger inherent in ongoing NATO inclusions, stepped in to block an initiative for expansion to include Georgia and Ukraine, formerly Soviet republics. Russia invaded Georgia, and has done the same with Ukraine, just to remind them forcefully, humiliatingly for both countries, that it still has the power to dominate and control their futures. Demonstrating more than adequately just why it was that former satellites sought to vigorously remove themselves from Russia's talons.

Vladimir Putin's volatile activities, seizing the Crimea and exhibiting hostility toward the West, defying sanctions by an outraged Europe and NATO at his illegal, ill-considered, immoral, reason-defying militaristic interference in the sovereignty of a neighbour have taken everyone by surprise, while delighting the home audience for whom their leader now can be seen to do no wrong, restoring the Russian bear to its entitled lair; absorbing and terrorizing neighbourhoods it views as its territory.

The ceasefire which a triumphant Russia that through foxy moves and a superior military and arms was capable of turning disaster for its proxy ethnic Russian rebels into victory by diverting Ukrainian troops to another area of its threatened territory represents a humiliating loss for Ukraine. Mr. Putin's resolve has finally convinced France to cancel its contract to supply Russia with battleships, and the rest of Europe to increase the level of sanctions by biting the bullet of economic hardship.

"As for the new list of sanctions from the European Union, if they are passed, there will undoubtedly be a reaction from our side," the Russian foreign ministry warned in a Saturday statement, even as doubts are now arising that the ceasefire will hold. At the present time, the secessionist rebels are left with Luhansk and Donetsk, and the land-link of Mariupol to Crimea, and Ukraine is that much poorer, bereft of its vital industrial geography.

Moscow claims the European Union is acting in bad faith by announcing new sanctions; that the EU leadership "is practically sending a signal of direct support to the 'party of war' in Kyiv, which is not happy with the results of the Minsk meeting" according to Russia's foreign ministry. "Instead of feverishly searching for ways to hurt the economies of its own countries and Russia, the European Union would do better to work on supporting the economic revival of the Donbass region", it fumed.


This is called self-interested perspective on a truly massive, self-delusional scale. Russia has done nothing extraordinarily out of character, therefore, it has done nothing to earn the wrath of the EU and NATO. They, on the other hand, allied with traitorous Ukraine, have provoked Russia beyond endurance, ignobly and treacherously, inflicting insecurity on the world order.

Russia's mad and won't take it any more.