WARNING: GRAPHIC CONTENT - Servicemen of the Ukrainian National Guard take positions in central Kyiv, February 25, 2022. REUTERS/Gleb Garanich
Patrick J. Buchanan: Did We Provoke Putin’s War in Ukraine?
Whatever we may think of Putin, he is no Stalin. He has not murdered millions or created a gulag archipelago. Nor is he “irrational,” as some pundits rail. He does not want a war with us, which would be worse than ruinous to us both. Putin is a Russian nationalist, patriot, traditionalist and a cold and ruthless realist looking out to preserve Russia as the great and respected power it once was and he believes it can be again.
When Russia’s Vladimir Putin demanded that the U.S. rule out Ukraine as a future member of the NATO alliance, the U.S. archly replied: NATO has an open-door policy. Any nation, including Ukraine, may apply for membership and be admitted.
We’re not changing that. In the Bucharest declaration of 2008, NATO had put Ukraine and Georgia, ever farther east in the Caucasus, on a path to membership in NATO and coverage under Article 5 of the treaty, which declares that an attack on any one member is an attack on all.
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WNU Editor: The world does not revolve around the U.S.. There are many reasons why this invasion was launched at this point of time. The lack of leadership and diplomacy from the U.S. and a failure to truly understand the dynamics at play from the US President is certainly one of them, but not the main one.
I first blame President Putin for starting this war, and a failure of the Russian Foreign ministry to use diplomacy with Europe to resolve the Ukraine war in the Donbas. Regular readers of this blog know that I have been saying this for years. Resolve Donbas, and you will deflate all the tensions and national security concerns of the Kremlin. Putin had all the cards in his hand to build a European coalition to make this happen, but he failed, and catastrophically.
The second person I blame is Ukraine President Zelensky. He was overwhelmingly elected as President on the promise to end the conflict in eastern Ukraine. His solution which was accepted by all sides in the conflict, was to accept Minsk 2 and give the Russian regions of Ukraine a degree of autonomy concerning language and culture. Why he decided to drop this promise and commitment right after he was sworn into office will be something that historians will look at and say was the major mistake in his Presidency. They will also say that his sworn commitment in October of last year to use military force to retake the Donbas AND Crimea set into motion the war that we are seeing now, and what finally made the decision for Putin to launch an invasion was Zelensky's musings last weekend before the war to make Ukraine a nuclear military power.
The third group I blame are the leader's of Europe. They all saw and knew what would happen if the Ukraine war in the eastern regions were not resolved. Instead, they choose to stay on the sidelines and hope everything would work itself out. Sighhh .... hope is not a strategy, and now Europe's leaders and their governments are terrified on what is happening.
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