By Leo Hohmann
Article Source
It should be troubling to everyone living in the U.S., Canada and Europe that two days after Joe Biden announced to the world that the U.S. is “running low” on ammunition, he and his NATO partners announce they are doubling down on their support for Ukraine’s inclusion in the NATO military alliance, which is a clear provocation to nuclear-armed Russia.
Sweden will be allowed into NATO immediately and Ukraine is being placed on a “path forward” to full NATO membership, said NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg on Tuesday, July 11, at the NATO summit in Vilnius, Lithuania.
“This will move Ukraine closer to NATO,” he said, adding that the membership process for Ukraine is being fast-tracked “from a two-step process into a one-step process.”
Finland just joined NATO a couple of months ago. Now Sweden. Soon Ukraine.
Russia will be surrounded by heavily armed NATO member states.
The West has now fully played its hand.
The whole reason for the war between Russia and Ukraine is because Russia didn’t want Ukraine joining the Western military alliance known as NATO.
NATO is not like the E.U., which is an economic alliance. NATO is a large and growing military alliance of 31 countries that has more than doubled in size since its founding in 1949 and in recent years has added former Eastern Bloc nations on Russia’s border, in direct violation of verbal assurances made to Russia by then-Secretary of State James A. Baker III, upon the breakup of the Soviet empire in 1990. If one country gets attacked by a non-NATO country, all of NATO is pledged to join in the fighting under a collective defense clause known as “Article 5.”
But what if one NATO member provokes an invasion from Russia or some other country? Then all of the other 30 NATO members are pledged to come to the aid of that one nation that provoked war.
By surrounding a nuclear-armed world power the likes of Russia, NATO is acting in the most reckless and provocative manner possible for a military alliance that is designed with a collective “defense” clause.
Below, watch NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, speaking to the media at the NATO Summit in Vilnius, on Tuesday, July 11, 2023.
Stoltenberg also told assembled media that NATO has agreed to put 300,000 troops on “Stand-by” alert. “This includes air and naval assets” he added.
By stating that Ukraine is on a “multi-year path to NATO membership,” this is the equivalent of a declaration of war against Russia. It gives Russia no incentive to end the war with Ukraine because Russia now knows that as long as there is a sovereign country called Ukraine, it will be on a path to joining a military alliance dedicated to the destruction of Russia, or at the very least greatly weakening it. In fact, there’s already a neocon plan on the books in Washington to defeat Russia militarily and break it up into several separate countries.
At the press conference shown in the above video, Stoltenberg says NATO has granted “security guarantees” to Ukraine in the interim, “so the most important thing we can do is continue to provide weapons, ammunition and military support to Ukraine because unless Ukraine prevails as a nation, as a democratic nation in Europe, there is no issue to be discussed about security guarantees or membership in NATO at all. On the NATO issue we will send a positive message… later today when all allies agree on the text, but I expect that allies will agree on a message which is clear on the need to move Ukraine closer to NATO… this is all about moving Ukraine closer to NATO membership, which will be extremely important for Ukraine and also demonstrate the unity and the strength of the message sent to Ukraine.”
All of the questions from the media at this press conference sounded like pre-rehearsed, planted questions from media outlets that are not independent but rather owned and operated by the same forces that own NATO.
At the same time this group of war-hungry NATO militants announce their plans to militarize Ukraine and make it a pawn of their own agenda, they “condemn” Russia for doing the same in Belarus.
The U.S. and NATO get to add Finland, Sweden and Ukraine into their military alliance, but Russia doesn’t get to include even one country, Belarus, into its military alliance. Now that sounds like a deal made in hell bent on sparking a global conflagration such that no one has ever seen in terms of its potential to devastate nations, destroy human lives and turn the global order on its head.
NATO acts as if it’s not aware that Russia is allied militarily with China. Maybe they know something about China that we don’t. Maybe when the Chinese head of state shook hands and exchanged warm goodbyes with the Russian leader a few weeks ago after their summit it was all an act. Maybe China is really on our side. I don’t know. But it looks to me that we now have all the makings of full-blown world war. All the ingredients needed are set out on the table, just waiting for them to come together. We have Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, Saudi Arabia on one side, and we have the U.S., Western Europe, Australia, South Korea and Japan on the other side. Neither side seems to want to leave the door open, or even slightly cracked, for the possibility of peace.
Yes, Russia invaded Ukraine with the goal of reclaiming the Russian-speaking parts of that country, claiming those Russians had come under harassment and even military attacks from the Ukrainian government in Kiev since a U.S.-sponsored coup took place in 2014, removing a pro-Russian leader.
Let’s summarize what’s happened in just the last couple of months in terms of the West’s response to that invasion. The Western NATO powers led by the United States have:
- Sent F-16s to Ukraine and are now training Ukrainian pilots in how to operate them.
- France announces it will send cruise missiles to Ukraine joining the U.S. and U.K. as the main suppliers of long-range missiles to Ukraine.
- First the U.K. and then the U.S. announce they will send armor-piercing radiological depleted uranium shells to Ukraine, which if used will likely poison that country’s rich farmland for decades to come.
- U.S. announces it will send cluster bombs to Ukraine which are so dangerous to civilian populations that they’ve been banned by 120 nations.
- U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has said the purpose of NATO’s involvement in Ukraine is to “weaken Russia,” and other high-level government officials have made similar comments, making it clear that this expense of money, weapons, and eventually American lives, has nothing to do with liberating anyone in Ukraine from any sort of tyranny in the name of “protecting Democracy.”
- NATO leaders meet at a summit in Vilnius, Lithuania, to declare their eagerness to foment perpetual war in Eastern Europe, while all but guaranteeing that the war will spread to Western Europe and potentially the United States, because Russia now knows that the one thing it most feared, a NATO membership for Ukraine, has been promised to be a reality.
The news out of Vilnius today was horrible news for Ukraine. In the eyes of Putin and any red-blooded Russian patriot, the very existence of Russia now depends on the total defeat of Ukraine. Look for Putin to ratchet up his war machine exponentially, because he now has zero incentive to end this war peacefully. He will annihilate Ukraine and likely have to occupy it forever. Anything short of that invites the West and its weapons to sit on his border providing a clear path all the way to Moscow. To avoid this tragic result, all the West had to do was assure Putin that Ukraine would remain a neutral country. They refused.
From the standpoint of a civilian and a Christian living in the West, these developments are very troubling. We are living in a time of historic global upheaval. Prepare yourselves for catastrophic war-time impacts. It didn’t have to be this way. Ukrainian and Russian leaders wanted to sit down and resolve their differences peacefully in April 2022. But the governments of the U.S. and the U.K. already had something else up their sleeves, which did not in any way involve peace.