There's a problem with this narrative. Everyone links the "What Gorbachev Heard" article from the NSU, but there was no reason to speculate, because Gorbachev and his team were still alive when the article was written in 2017.
Some others did reach out and ask them directly. Gorbachev, his minister of foreign affairs, and his minister of defense all publicly refuted it. It would have been a major commitment, yet there is no trace of it having been discussed internally in Moscow or with other Warsaw Pact countries. Furthermore, according to the USSR's foreign minister at the time, the speculation of such assurance is anachronistic, because the Soviet leadership did not expect the Warsaw Pact to dissolve and therefore had no reason to discuss anything like this.
You might want to take your own advice, because Cuba is the opposite of the example you're trying to make. The Cuban missile crisis was about nuclear weapons only. Cuba continued to host Soviet fighters, bombers, missile cruisers and many other conventional weapons until the dissolution of the USSR in 1991 - far, far beyond what any NATO member has seen after the Cold War, let alone potential candidates like Ukraine or Georgia.
You are right, I should have mentioned Operation Mongoose instead. The missile crisis was the culmination of the conflict, similar to the invasion of Ukraine.
Would the Bay of Pigs invasion had happened if Cuba was not courted by the USSR ?
Let's assume for a moment that this is true. In 2014, when Russia first invaded Ukraine, European militaries were in the process of unilateral disarmament. Military units were being disbanded, bases were being shut down, equipment like Leopard tanks was being sold to places as far away as Chile. The US removed its last permanent heavy equipment from Europe in 2013. The few countries that still had conscription were debating a move to much smaller professional armies.
If a leader in Moscow had truly feared an invasion from the West, why would they have needed to do anything other than sit and wait for the disarmament trend to continue?
Perhaps it was the other way around: the leader in Moscow saw all that and believed that no one would have the resources to stop him?
Exactly. The West did next to nothing when Russia invaded Chechnya, Georgia, Syria, Crimea, Donbas and Lugansk... no wonder then that Russia kept taking if we kept giving. We should've acted sooner. We would've saved hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian lives if we did.
Couldn't be further from the truth. Just look at how NATO countries have tiptoed around supporting Ukraine. Every major step (artillery shells, tanks, rocket artillery, air defense systems, and fighter jets) took ages of largely pointless discussion before the decision was made. Not to mention the very weak response to Russian military intelligence terror cells that have been caught red-handed across Europe in recent years while they were preparing attacks like smuggling incendiary devices onto DHL cargo airplanes. If this isn't an unbelievably unconfrontational reaction to Russia's actions, then what is?
Absolutely fair point, the response has been weak.
But here's the thing. The official action is slow, but the media stories about the threat are turned up to eleven, 24/7.
For a year & a half the story about the Nord Stream bombing was "Russia did it". End of discussion. Then it turns out it was probably some Ukrainian group, and everyone just shrugs and moves on. The original media-instilled fear doesn't disappear, though.
And that fear is what they use to sell us things like Chat Control.
So... when you mention "Russian military intelligence terror cells caught red-handed," my bar for skepticism is raised. I'm not saying it's impossible (on the contrary, militaries have been doing hybrid warfare for ALL of known human history), I'm just always failing to find the convictions that should follow someone being caught red-handed.
> Consider what Russia could possibly have to gain by randomly flying drones near civilian airports... nothing?
What could Russian military intelligence possibly have to gain from an arson attack on a COOP grocery store in rural Estonia? And yet, they were caught red-handed: https://english.nv.ua/nation/two-gru-arsonists-jailed-in-est... Many other Russian-sponsored terrorist cells have also been caught and are awaiting trial or have been sentenced, the most notable being a network that tried to smuggle incendiary devices aboard DHL cargo planes.
> Oh, I forgot about the supposed Russian drones in Poland too, drones which don't even have the range to get to Poland
Then how do they reach western Ukraine every night? It's much farther away than the distance Russian drones penetrated into Poland.
> Look at this map of NATO's expansion eastward toward Russia, and then please do tell about Russia's supposed expansion plans
Comparing European countries voluntarily joining a mutual defense pact to a foreign invasion is moronic. You could make a similar map for any major international organization: the closer a country was to Russia, the less developed it tended to be (no coincidence) and the later it joined. Has the Council of Europe been slowly expanding towards Russia and threatening them with human rights? Has Starbucks been fighting a shadow war to surround Russia with mediocre coffee?
Peace and stability for about 100 million people in Central and Eastern Europe, who will in turn consume American products and services and cheaply write code for American companies instead of designing nuclear missiles for Russians to target Washington DC. All that the Americans have to do is give a guarantee that essentially costs nothing, if it's believable enough.
> NATO continued expanding after the end of Cold war, without Russia attacking anyone.
NATO is not some loaf of bread sitting on a windowsill that expands on its own. Most countries in Eastern Europe worked feverishly to join NATO. Why? Because their leaders had seen the grainy VHS tapes from the 1994–1996 First Chechen War, showing horrific Russian atrocities against civilians, similar to what many had personally seen or even experienced in the 1940s and 1950s. These images dispelled any illusion that the Russian Federation was more civil than the USSR or that it would respect the sovereignty and self-determination of other peoples.
By the mid-1990s, Russia had already employed its strategy of setting up fake separatist movements to instigate armed conflicts in Europe, and a good chunk of Moldova remains under Russian military occupation to this day: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transnistrian_War
Nobody wanted to become the target of the next artificial "separatist movement" that would drain resources, hinder economic development, block EU integration, and leave the country vulnerable to full-scale invasion like Ukraine experienced in 2014 and then again in 2022. In an alternate timeline, Eastern Europe could have ended up like a series of Moldovas. Very poor, stagnating countries, constantly battling Russian meddling in their internal affairs.
Even 30 years ago, this threat was obvious to anyone familiar with Russia. For example, here's Chechen president Dudayev, a former commander of a Soviet nuclear bomber base, predicting the future in a 1995 interview as the Russians were hunting him: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IavEOx3hUAk
Sorry, but what you're describing is American exceptionalism, in line with PNAC for instance.
> Peace and stability for about 100 million people in Central and Eastern Europe, who will in turn consume American products and services and cheaply write code for American companies instead of designing nuclear missiles for Russians to target Washington DC. All that the Americans have to do is give a guarantee that essentially costs nothing, if it's believable enough.
Precisely what led to this conflict, the idea that the Eastern Europe (or now specifically Ukraine) should be "owned" by some superpower.
I am not a fan of Russia, in fact, I work for American company and I got rich thanks to that, and I generally like Americans, but if you don't see how incredibly patronizing this is, I don't know what to tell you. (I mean, Eastern Europe aside, the idea that for example Germany (or France), one of the largest economies in the world, needs some help from Americans to defend themselves is ridiculous.)
And paradoxically, the islamophobic sentiment is so strong in Eastern Europe today that most people would actually agree with the Russian approach to the Chechen war, unfortunately. Keep in mind Russia is not that different from U.S. when it comes to waging foreign wars.
The idea that war is in any case justifiable is just something that never works out as a consistent moral principle, and that's true for NATO's support for Ukraine as well (though I don't have a problem with Ukrainians defending their country, I think it's the right thing to do).
But once you start using violence as a means to revenge, or to regain the territory, you have morally lost it (which is what NATO is being asked by Ukraine). In Palestine, most of the world recognizes that the problem of Israeli colonization and apartheid has to be resolved through peaceful means (my preferred solution would be one state), not through Palestinian violence, despite all the Israeli violence (which is more than 10x) towards Palestinians. The same principle should be applied to Ukraine-Russia relations.
The article you linked is from 2007. Bush did indeed express strong support for offering Ukraine and Georgia a path to NATO membership at the 2008 NATO summit, but he was overruled by other allies[1] who caved in to pressure from Russia, and the topic was taken off the table and remains there.
Putin's former senior advisor Illarionov maintains that the idea of invading Ukraine goes back much further than the 2008 summit. He says that he personally first heard of the idea from Putin during a closed meeting of senior staff in September 2003, when Russia first violated Ukraine's sovereign territory during the Tuzla Island conflict.[2]
[1] Like Germany under Schröder, who was later rewarded with the well-paid position of chairman of the board of Rosneft, Russia's state-controlled oil company.
Mearsheimer is quite literally Russian propaganda. See the title pages of his books. The books are paid by "the Valdai Discussion Club", a propaganda arm of the Russian government.
Guilt by association is a poor substitute for an argument. The partisan takes on this site have eclipsed actual discussion. Mearshiemer has also appeared with a variety of think tanks, because he is widely respected. It is easy to cherry pick one. It should be obvious how this line of reasoning is flawed, especially in the context of non-prescriptive realism.
Let's go back to the poster's super weird assertion. By definition, a provocation is something which results in a response. Observing that it is a provocation isn't the same as endorsing the response. Knee jerk categorization doesn't remove this discernment. Instead it misleads by glossing over the details. I would regard that to be a byproduct of propaganda.
> Baltic republics were well-represented in party structures and in Soviet elites.
Name one Lithuanian or Estonian member of the Politburo in the half-century spanning 1940 to 1990. I'll save you time: there were none.
Your knee-jerk reaction of trying to shift blame onto historical oddities like the Latvian Riflemen reminds me of neo-nazis pointing out that the Wehrmacht had some 150 000 Jews in its ranks, "proving" that Germans weren't all that antisemitic and that the Holocaust has been exaggerated. Same impulse.
Some others did reach out and ask them directly. Gorbachev, his minister of foreign affairs, and his minister of defense all publicly refuted it. It would have been a major commitment, yet there is no trace of it having been discussed internally in Moscow or with other Warsaw Pact countries. Furthermore, according to the USSR's foreign minister at the time, the speculation of such assurance is anachronistic, because the Soviet leadership did not expect the Warsaw Pact to dissolve and therefore had no reason to discuss anything like this.
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