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They are negotiating, desperately but Putin's terms are so unhinged as to be ingenuous: "The Russian draft treaties call for NATO to remove any troops or weapon
by emptysongglass 5y ago
They are negotiating, desperately but Putin's terms are so unhinged as to be ingenuous:
"The Russian draft treaties call for NATO to remove any troops or weapons from countries that joined the alliance after 1997, meaning most of Eastern Europe, including Poland, the Baltic states and Balkan countries. It also calls for the U.S. and Russia to refrain from deploying troops in areas where they could be perceived as a threat to each countries' national security, and a ban on sending their aircraft and warships into areas where they could strike each other's territory. The treaty would also ban the deployment of intermediate-range missiles in Europe."
Those countries that joined after '97 are largely ex-Soviet republics seeking succor. Poland would sooner draw a sword through its own belly than agree to the terms of a former autarch with 170,000 troops right at its belly.
Positioning 170,000 troops in a half-circle around Ukraine is not a recipe for diplomacy.
- avgcorrection 5y agoLooks like Putin wants back to the 1990 deal that Gorbachev and President Bush made and that American presidents broke: that Nato wouldn’t expand an inch to the east (to East Germany at the time). His demands will obviously not be met. But is Nato even considering any concessions? You don’t have to accept the initial demand (it’s supposed to be a negotiation, after all).
- emptysongglass 5y ago"In 2014, the former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev marked the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall by noting in an interview that Nato’s enlargement 'was not discussed at all' at the time: 'Not a single Eastern European country raised the issue, not even after the Warsaw Pact ceased to exist in 1991. Western leaders didn’t bring it up, either.'" [1] [1] https://theconversation.com/ukraine-the-history-behind-russias-claim-that-nato-promised-not-to-expand-to-the-east-177085 https://theconversation.com/ukraine-the-history-behind-russi...
- avgcorrection 5y agoMaybe Gorbachev feels embarrassed that he didn’t get any formal guarantees from the West. In any case, declassified US, Soviet, German, British and French documents[1] show that multiple Western leaders assured Gorbachev himself that Soviet security concerns would not be threatened. And, of course, it was specifically Nato that was under discussion. [1] https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/russia-programs/2017-12-12/nato-expansion-what-gorbachev-heard-western-leaders-early https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/russia-programs/2017...