Russia 'not bluffing' on NATO rollback, warns of ‘large-scale conflict in Europe’

[Boats]

Russia 'not bluffing' on NATO rollback, warns of ‘large-scale conflict in Europe’
By: Joel Gehrke - Foreign Affairs Reporter - 12-27-21
Re: https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/p...lict-in-europe

Russia will not drop a demand that NATO “be rolled back” to its 1997 boundaries, according to a senior Russian envoy, a requirement backed by the threat of “a large-scale conflict in Europe” arising out of Ukraine.

“We are not bluffing,” Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said Monday, per state-run TASS. “These are our real proposals. The West’s awareness of this needs to be facilitated, and we are going to make every effort to achieve it.”

Russian President Vladimir Putin has amassed military forces around Ukrainian borders, ostensibly due to the dangers presented by Ukraine joining NATO at some future date. Putin’s team, which oversaw the annexation of Crimea and the invasion of eastern Ukraine in 2014, portrays the latest round of tensions a consequence of NATO expansion over the last 25 years, raising the prospect of a major war in Europe.

“It is important to lower the degree of confrontation caused by the way our U.S. colleagues are looking after their Ukrainian proteges,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said in an interview published Sunday. "The course on dragging Kyiv into NATO with the prospect of deploying attack missile systems near our borders creates unacceptable threats to Russia’s security, thus provoking serious military risks for all parties involved, up to a large-scale conflict in Europe.”

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky wants to join NATO, but that process has been stalled for nearly two decades. President Joe Biden said in July that "it remains to be seen” whether Ukraine ever will “meet [the] criteria” for membership in the trans-Atlantic alliance, but Russian officials want NATO to close the door on the idea.

“We would like to emphasize that the nonexpansion of NATO and preventing the deployment of weapons systems near the Russian border that threaten Russia’s security will be front and center during the upcoming talks with the United States and NATO,” Russian Foreign Affairs Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said Saturday. “This is something those who until now have been unable to grasp Russia’s position must understand.”

NATO leaders agreed in 2008 that Georgia and Ukraine should have the option at some point of joining the alliance, but Russia has invaded both of those countries in the intervening years, creating territorial disputes that short-circuit using the trans-Atlantic alliance’s collective defense guarantee to avert a conflict.

"Yet the Kremlin has, in effect, exercised ... a veto,” former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Steven Pifer wrote in October. “Allies appear unenthusiastic ... because there is no good answer to the question ‘if Ukraine joins NATO tomorrow, does the alliance then find itself at war with Russia?’”

Putin has sought to pose that question even in the absence of any serious progress toward Ukrainian membership in NATO.

“We demand an official withdrawal of the decision made at the 2008 Bucharest summit relating to Ukraine and Georgia’s [intentions] to join NATO,” Ryabkvo said. “When we say that further expansion of NATO needs to be prevented, when we say that NATO facilities and all kinds of activities that are provocative for Russia need to be rolled back to the positions that existed in 1997 when the NATO-Russia Founding Act was signed, we are not bluffing.”
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Personal note: Putin is playing hardball - lets see if NATO has got the grit to stand fast?
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[Boats]

Part II - How NATO Must Respond if Russia Invades Ukraine
By: Andrew A. Michta - 19fortyfive News - 1 min. ago - 12-27-21
Re: https://www.19fortyfive.com/2021/12/...vades-ukraine/

Photo link: https://www.19fortyfive.com/wp-conte.../Ukraine-2.jpg
Russian T-90 Tank. Image Credit: Creative Commons.

Amidst continued speculation as to whether Russian President Vladimir Putin will unleash yet another attack against Ukraine, the focus has been on the likelihood of a kinetic conflict in Europe along NATO’s Eastern Flank. Still, judging by the scope of the demands presented by Russia in the two so-called “draft treaties” with NATO and the United States, respectively, Moscow must have no illusions that these would be accepted, for they would remake Euro-Atlantic security, creating conditions that would undermine NATO and America’s ability to work with its allies. Putin may have already decided to move militarily, and calls for the West to negotiate could create a “maskirovka” and in doing so provide a casus belli for Moscow, which would try to claim that Washington had refused to consider its terms.

If the demands to negotiate have a larger aim it is to divide the alliance. Most importantly, the idea that Russia would need a written treaty guarantee to forestall Ukraine or Georgia’s accession to NATO is absurd. Putin knows that so long as he occupies Donetsk and Luhansk in Ukraine and Abkhazia and South Ossetia in Georgia, the countries have no chance of making it into NATO, for a vote to enlarge the alliance would mean in effect a vote to go to war with Russia. Moscow’s demand that the effective status quo be confirmed by treaty is thus nothing short of an attempt to humiliate the West.

It is critical to consider what might happen should Russia invade Ukraine, and what might happen if we do not start thinking long-term about the impact of this crisis. A second Russian attack on Ukraine, should it happen, ought to serve as a long-overdue wake-up call for the West about Russia’s intentions to establish an exclusive sphere of influence in Eastern Europe and assert Moscow’s claims to exercising influence in Central Europe, within NATO’s perimeter. Assuming the West finally recognizes the immediacy of the threat, the best ancillary outcome would be the rearmament of European NATO allies and an increase in U.S. military presence along the Eastern Flank, including permanent U.S. bases in Poland and Romania. Next, Europeans would need to spend money, not only on developing real, exercised military capabilities, but also on shoring up the infrastructure across the Continent, especially North-South, to ensure that military mobility requirements are met, and to demonstrate this through a series of exercises. Most importantly, the European NATO allies and partners would need to show that they are capable of reaching consensus to respond with meaningful sanctions, beginning with cutting Russian banks off from SWIFT and stopping Nord Stream 2, as well as showing resolve to respond with force should Putin try to use military threats against the alliance. Last but not least, if Ukraine decides to fight back the West should support its resistance against this new Russian assault on its national sovereignty.

The worst-case scenario would be yet another round of verbal condemnations and toothless sanctions, which would serve to strengthen Putin’s belief that Europe lacks the will to match his challenge. Should the response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine be more of the same, Europe’s security would deteriorate dramatically. The zone of competition would shift from Eastern Europe to Central Europe and the Baltic states, where the next round of Putin’s demands could be a de facto “Finlandization” of the Baltic States and pressure on the United States and NATO to remove military assets from the intermarium between the Baltic and the Black Seas, especially from Poland and Romania. In this scenario Putin would target Germany as his “partner of preference,” with the expectation that by applying its energy weapon Moscow could eventually coax Berlin into a “neo-Bismarckian” accommodation that would in effect divide Europe into two spheres of influence, rendering the United States increasingly irrelevant to the overall strategic balance in Europe.

The above worst-case scenario is less farfetched than it may seem. It rests on historical patterns of Russian imperialism going back three centuries and has its roots in how Moscow understands Germany’s role in Europe since Prussia unified the German states. For Putin the two World Wars – which witnessed the German pursuit of empire in opposition to Russia rather than in concert with it – are outliers. Putin appears to believe that he can successfully revisit the past yet again, establishing a new Concert of Great Powers in Europe under which the United States, locked in an increasingly existential competition with China in the Indo-Pacific, will be unable to forestall such an outcome. Putin’s recent expression of support for Xi’s claims to Taiwan, in exchange for Xi’s support for Russia’s sphere of influence in Eastern Europe, are the clearest expressions of this grand design. They underscore the reasons why Russia’s systemic revisionism and China’s drive to replace the existing international system with one built around Beijing’s interests and values go hand in hand. Hence, although historically at polar opposites when it comes to national priorities, and competitors for control of Asia, today Russia and China are allies bound by their common interest in opposing the United States. This alliance has already presented America with a two-front crisis at a time when the country’s resources have been strained by twenty years of counterterrorism operations, the pandemic, inflation, and political divisions at home.

We are fast approaching a point where a crisis in Eastern Europe, especially the fate of Ukraine, could decide Europe’s security, and by extension, its political future. What European governments do going forward will either reaffirm the interests and values of Western democracies or will become our greatest defeat since the end of the Cold War. It is a binary choice that cannot be wished away or obfuscated by compromise. If the West shows that it has a spine when it comes to first principles and national interests, the outcome of the Ukrainian crisis will be a watershed, ending Putin’s neo-imperial drive and offering hope not only in Kiev but also in Minsk, for any lasting solution to the security dilemmas in Eastern Europe must be regional. It will also give Russia itself a chance to abandon the path of empire and become a “normal” state, with influence commensurate with its power. However, if European leaders fail once more to acknowledge reality and stand up to it, in the coming decade the Continent will find itself in an ever-more precarious security situation.

About this writer: Andrew A. Michta is dean of the College of International and Security Studies at the George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany, a former professor at the U.S. Naval War College, and a former Senior Fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis. He is also a 1945 Contributing Editor.

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In this article: Eastern Europe, featured, NATO, Russia, Ukraine
The opinions expressed here are those of the author and do not reflect the official policy or position of the George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies, the U.S. Department of Defense, or the U.S. government.

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Personal note: Here again will Russia make move and start the conflict once and for all?
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