Ivo Rens

Honorary Professor

Law Faculty

Geneva University

February 26, 2022

Of course, the Russian military intervention in Ukraine must be condemned without reservation because it constitutes a blatant violation of the Charter of the United Nations and of international law.

But Vladimir Putin is not the only person responsible for this tragedy. The pushers-to-crime deserve to be implicated as well because it is likely that they have length and carefully devised their project. No doubt they are many, they hold strategic positions at the US establishment, they have accomplices in several European countries, and have they access to NATO.

Created in 1949 at the initiative of Washington, NATO aimed to defend Western Europe then threatened by the expansionism of the Stalinist USSR which had just fomented the coup d’Etat in Prague, tipping Czechoslovakia into Moscow’s orbit. Probably NATO has helped to put an end to this expansionism. But in December 1991, the USSR has given way to about fifteen sovereign states and, instead of disappearing, NATO, converted into a strategic-safe-tool for Washington’s foreign policy and its European vassals has worked intensely to build a plausible enemy by setting Russia of more or less imaginary military threats.

Of the 30 NATO member countries, 14 are Eastern European countries that have joined the organization after 1991. The most advanced NATO position is now located in Narva (Estonia) 160 kilometers from Saint-Petersburg. As a comparison, the distance between Havana (Cuba) and Key West (Florida) is also 160 kilometers away. Everyone knows what happened when the USSR wanted to install missiles in Cuba. Since then, the real reason for NATO is the destruction of Russia. Its past achievements are just the beginnings.

To stick to the post-Soviet period, NATO intervened militarily in Serbia in the spring of 1999 killing some 500 civilians and causing significant destruction. It intervened in Afghanistan from 2003 to 2021 causing some 10,000 deaths among civilians, not to mention the wounded, refugees and other victims. If NATO did not intervene alongside the Americans and their allies in the spring of 2013 in their preventive war against the Iraq of Saddam Hussein, it is because, very exceptionally, France and Germany opposed them. On the other hand, NATO intervened in Libya in 2011 causing the fall and the violent death of President Muammar Gaddafi, but above all the destruction of a prosperous modern state that has given way to a divided and unstable country where the majority of the population suffers from malnutrition.

It is difficult to trace the first NATO approaches to Ukraine. No doubt as the strategy-safe-tool of the USA it had identified in Ukraine the elements likely to cause the Russian ogre, namely the proximity of Moscow and several major cities of Russia, a major Russian-speaking minority and a great political instability. Still, it is on the occasion of the very solemn Declaration of Bucharest that the heads of state or governments of the member countries announced on 3 April 2008 their decision to prepare the accession of Ukraine and Georgia to NATO.  » We agreed today that these countries will become members of NATO  » ** Of course, Russia had made it known that it was absolutely opposed to such decision because it considered the project detrimental to its security. Given the distrust of the relations between the Americans and the Russians, it seems highly probable that the provocation had been well considered.

The trap was posed. Fourteen years later, on February 22, 2022, Putin got in.

** https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natolive/official_texts_8443.htm

Original : French.