Just 24 hours ahead of the emergency security and peace talks between Russia and the United States, to be held in Geneva, Switzerland – tensions continue to mount as the US and NATO stage new provocations around Ukraine in an attempt to pressurise Russia and create an atmosphere of war. Monday’s emergency summit will be followed by a special Russia-NATO Council session on Wednesday January 12th, followed by security consultations within the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) on January 13th.
This current cycle of tension began following an unconfirmed ‘intelligence leak’ which appeared in the US media in early December – claiming that Moscow was somehow “planning to invade Ukraine” in late January or early February. While the intelligence claim appears to be just another in a long list of fake US intelligence rumours, it was a sufficient pretext to ratchet-up new levels of anti-Russian hysteria, culminating in more US shipments of lethal arms to Ukraine, followed by incessant talk of war coming from Washington.
The situation has forced Moscow to formerly release a new set of security proposals, calling for an immediate halt to NATO expansion eastward, and for the US to provide new security guarantees for Russia.
The response from some western politicians and diplomats has been incredible, with both NATO and Washington now claiming that the alliance ‘never promise not to expand’ – despite the fact that it had made such a promise before, and that global military expansion was never a part of the post-WWII cold war era organisation’s charter.
To make matters worse, Biden’s struggling Secretary of State Antony Blinken (image, above), made a breathtaking statement on Friday, saying that Russia’s security demands were inadmissible, and then went on to deny that there has been any previous promises from Western leaders to Moscow regarding NATO’s hegemonic expansion.
“NATO never promised not to admit new members,” said Blinken, in his press briefing on Friday.
“It could not and would not …. the ‘open door policy’ was a core provision of the 1949 North Atlantic Treaty that founded NATO,” said Blinken.
Incredibly, Blinken went on to deny the fact that former US Secretary of State James Baker gave a guarantee of non-expansion to then Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.
“There was no promise that NATO wouldn’t expand,” he now claims, effectively re-writing the historical record.
According to historical archives, in addition to Baker, President George H.W. Bush, West Germany’s Chancellor Helmut Kohl, CIA Director Robert Gates, French President Francois Mitterrand, and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, and former NATO Secretary General Manfred Woerner – had all provided assurances to Moscow. RT International reports:
“Dozens of documents analyzed by George Washington University National Security Archives researchers Svetlana Savranskaya and Tom Blanton show that many Western leaders were rejecting the idea of the “Central and Eastern European membership in NATO as of early 1990 and through 1991” and that Russian “complaints” about its subsequent expansions were “founded in written contemporaneous memcons and telcons at the highest levels.”
Blinken claims that Moscow had itself recognised every European country’s right to select its own security arrangements under the agreement signed with the Istanbul Charter for European Security in 1999.
Talks begin tomorrow.
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