Article Search

March 7 (EIRNS)—Helga Zepp-LaRouche was one on a panel of three guests on CGTN’s Dialogue broadcast today, responding to Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi’s annual press conference, which lasted at least 90 minutes. The other guests were Peter Kuznick of American University and Prof. Victor Gao Zhikai of Soochow University; the hostess was Li Quiyuan. The discussion focused on China’s role in bringing peace especially in the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, but most importantly to the world as a whole. The half-hour panel discussion is posted on the Dialogue program at 15:30 today. Here are the exchanges between Ms. Li and Mrs. Zepp-LaRouche.CGTN: And Mrs. LaRouche, let me get your take on this: What sort of key messages did you pick up from Foreign Minister Wang’s press conference? HELGA ZEPP-LAROUCHE: I was actually very happy with the tone, because it was like a return of sanity. This is in stark contrast to the atmosphere in the European and American media and politics in the recent days. And I think the focus on solving problems through diplomacy, on upholding the principles of the UN Charter and having a general attitude toward problem solving through cooperation, I think this was really a breath of fresh air. And I’m very, very encouraged because China is really taking a leadership role in the world right now, which is badly needed. CGTN: The Foreign Minister did say, and I’m quoting his words, “China would like to work alongside with international community to facilitate talks when needed,” although he did not specifically say in what ways. But China did stress the importance of keeping dialogue open all the way. Another question being raised by reporters at the press conference is whether this conflict or this crisis in Ukraine would impact China-EU relations. So Mrs. Zepp-LaRouche, let me get your take on this? There’s some concern that this conflict will affect this relationship between China and the bloc. The foreign minister said dialogue and cooperation between China and Europe are on the basis of mutual respect and mutual benefit and that will provide more stability to the turbulent world situation. And he’s also urging the European Union to form an independent China policy. What do you make of this comment? ZEPP-LAROUCHE: I think the situation is very severe, because, for example, the trade between the EU and China, which was a pillar of the world economy so far, is threatened by what is happening between Ukraine and Russia. So I think the sentiment in Europe right now is really terrible, and I can only say that what the foreign minister is giving some hope that new ways can be found. And I really think that the model of Chinese policy, the shared future of a joint future of humanity, I think, is what is needed right now in my view, and I think Professor Kuznick is right in stressing the urgency of the question, you need something completely different. If we continue geopolitics as it has been done in the past, it is a question of time when humanity is crashing against the wall, and it could lead to a nuclear extinction. So I think the model which would fit perfectly, the shared community of the one humanity, would be to convoke a conference, an international conference to take care of the security interests of every single country on the planet. Because you cannot have a peace order without taking care of the interests of every country, and there is a model in European history, that is the Peace of Westphalia. The Peace of Westphalia ended 150 years of religious war, culminating in the Thirty Years’ War, and it was based on the recognition of all war parties that if the war would continue there would be nobody left to enjoy the result. And this is in a certain sense a parallel situation to the one we are facing today, because if it comes to a nuclear war there will be no winner, there will be nobody left to even comment on the result. So I think that should be a motivation to convoke a new Peace of Westphalia conference with the specific aim to conduct an international new security architecture, which would include Russia, include China, and I think this would be in perfect spirit with the policy of President Xi Jinping about the shared community of mankind and the one future we all have. CGTN: China is hosting this year’s BRICS summit. The APEC and G20 would also be held in Asia this year. The Foreign Minister said, “Asia’s time has come in global governance,” and “it would transform from followers to front-runners and even pacesetters.” Mrs. LaRouche let me get your take on this: These are very strong words coming from the foreign minister. What do you make of his assessment here? ZEPP-LAROUCHE: I think it’s absolutely to the point, because the Asian countries in general, not just China, but also some other Asian countries, are very conscious of their 5,000-year-old history, and from that standpoint of a positive tradition they define a future, and they want to develop. And this is the common idea of the BRICS, the SCO, and even other organizations, and that is in stark contrast to Europe and the United States. And I think the idea of a new model of international relations, if these organizations, even if it would be brought into the G20, the idea that you need a new model of international relations which has been stressed by Wang Yi today again, that should be filled with content. Because I think we have either the choice of ending up in a geopolitical confrontation which would be to the detriment of everybody and possible nuclear war, or, we make a jump in the evolution of civilization by defining the international relations, in a certain sense in the tradition of the Non-Aligned Movement, the Bandung Conference, the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence of the UN Charter; but also giving it the vision of solving together the main problems of humanity, such as, that we still have a pandemic, we need a modern health system in every single country to defeat this pandemic and the danger of new ones. We have a world famine of, as Beasley from the World Food Program always says, “of biblical dimensions”: This will get bigger because of the inflation of food prices, of fertilizer, of energy prices. So there is an urgent agenda. And I think if this year could be used to say, we need a new model of international relations which overcomes geopolitics: Foreign Minister Wang Yi and also President Xi Jinping have made references by saying, why not have the Belt and Road Initiative cooperate with the Build Back Better initiative of the United States and the Global Gateway of the European Union. So if these initiatives, rather than being in a competition, be streamlined and say, let’s address together that which is stressing all of mankind, world hunger, epidemics, the poverty—with the present financial system of the trans-Atlantic sector going completely out of whack, we are facing a new collapse much worse than 2008. The Federal Reserve was not able to “taper” the interest rate, because they’re afraid if they increase the interest rate they will have a mass collapse of bankruptcies. So there is an urgent need to have a new financial system, a New Bretton Woods system, a new credit system which provides credit for development of all developing countries—these are some of the points which really will be the test of humanity. Can we, when we face fundamental challenges, give ourselves an order which allows the survival, and happiness, of all people on this planet? I think that will be the agenda.

Feb. 25—Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy spent a portion of today sending out feelers for negotiation with Russia for a cessation of hostilities, then apparently pulled back. He said this morning, “I want to again address the President of the Russian Federation. The fighting continues all over Ukraine. Let’s sit at the negotiation table to stop human fatalities,” reported RT. And a key advisor, Mikhail Podolyak, added his voice: “If negotiations are possible, they must be held.” If Moscow demands it, Zelenskyy and his government are willing to discuss “neutrality status.” Kiev “has always left and [still] leaves space for negotiations” despite a “full-scale invasion” by Russian troops.Various Western media quoted Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov saying this morning, that inherent to a neutral Ukraine, was both demilitarization and de-nazification. With that understanding, the Russian government is ready to send a delegation to negotiate—since Zelenskyy had said he is “ready to discuss the neutral status of Ukraine.” Peskov continued that, Putin had “said from the start that the goal of the military operation was helping [the breakaway regions] L.P.R. and D.P.R., including by demilitarizing and de-nazifying Ukraine. Those are essential parts of a neutral status.” The Russian delegation would include military and civilian officials representing various branches of the government. Belarus, a military ally of Russia, agreed to host the peace talks in Minsk, the site of the original 2015, and much-abused, Minsk Accords Kiev responded by counterposing that the talks should be in Poland. Peskov: “The Ukrainian side said it had reconsidered the idea of holding talks in Minsk, chose Warsaw instead, and then disappeared.” He then pointed to Kiev’s new actions at that point—per foreign advisors—they had begun placing artillery in the center of Kiev and Kharkov. Peskov identified this as the known modus operandi of terrorists. These remarks today were preceded by comments yesterday evening. Peskov had stated that Moscow is willing to negotiate terms of surrender with Kiev. He referred to President Putin’s preparedness to engage in discussions with the Ukrainian President, with a focus on obtaining a guarantee of both a status of neutrality for Ukraine, and the promise of no weapons on its territory. Such terms would address Russia’s announced goal, the demilitarization and de-nazification of Ukraine, eliminating the most immediate threat to the security of Russia and its people. Peskov: “The President formulated his vision of what we would expect from Ukraine in order for the so-called ‘red-line’ problems to be resolved…. The operation has its goals—they must be achieved. The President said that all decisions have been made, and the goals will be achieved,” reported RT. Late last night Zelenskyy responded by way of posting a video on Telegram: “We heard from Moscow today that they want to talk about the neutral status of Ukraine. We are not afraid of Russia, we are not afraid of engaging in talks with Russia, we are not afraid of discussing anything, such as security guarantees for our state, we are not afraid of talking about neutral status.” Zelenskyy’s list of things Ukraine is not afraid of can be read as the only permissible way that Ukraine’s President might open the door for a discussion of neutrality. Zelenskyy also stated that Ukraine would need security guarantees from the West for such a neutrality agreement—something the West has not encouraged up to now.

Feb. 25—Russian President Vladimir Putin met with the Russian Security Council, and gave remarks afterward, in which he called on Ukrainian Armed Forces (UAF) to separate themselves from the radical Stepan Bandera-tied militias. So far, it has been the radical battalion groupings persisting in the fighting. The UAF members are allowed to disarm and go home. Such a policy aims at breaking Ukraine’s institutions free from the neo-Nazi groupings, and to survive intact.Putin also condemned the Kiev leadership’s decision today to base artillery in the residential areas of Kiev and other cities. He posed to the UAF members not to allow Kiev to use their “children, wives and loved ones as human shields” for the militias. Rather, the UAF can choose to “take power” in the country and negotiate peace with Moscow. “Take the power into your own hands!” encouraged Putin, arguing that the army would be a better negotiating partner than “a bunch of drug addicts and neo-Nazis,” who, he claimed, have “entrenched themselves in Kiev,” and have been holding the people “hostage.”

Feb. 25—Natalia Vitrenko, chairwoman of the Progressive Socialist Party of Ukraine (PSPU), and Alessia Ruggeri, of the Comitato per la Repubblica in Italy and also a member of the Committee of Coincidence of Opposites of the Schiller Institute, were on a exclusive TV program broadcast live on the evening of Feb. 23, together with journalists, host Luca La Bella and Gianmarco Landi, and Russian journalist Iryina Mikhaylova, who lives in Italy and volunteered to translate for Vitrenko, whom she knows and admires.In the first 10 minutes of the hour-long interview there were technical difficulties to get Vitrenko connected to the program, and during this time Alessia Ruggeri briefed the audience about her endorsement of Operation Ibn Sina and the fight by Helga Zepp-LaRouche, Schiller Institute President, to not only to prevent a war with Russia, but also to prevent mass starvation in Afghanistan. Natalia Vitrenko then joined the discussion, by means of simply having her cell phone image presented to the camera, and she was able to answer many questions from all three participants. The exchange started with a question on the situation in Ukraine, since Putin’s announcement that Russia recognized the two Donbas republics. She emphasized that the Ukrainian people want peace, but the followers of Stepan Bandera (neo-Nazi militias) in the country are being supplied with weapons from America and Britain, and that makes a war possible. During the broadcast, she insisted that it is the Americans and the British who are pushing for war, not the Ukrainian people, who are against war. To a question from Alessia Ruggeri on President Zelenskyy’s request to join NATO and the EU, Vitrenko replied, “the people in Ukraine do not want to join NATO. There was a referendum in 1991 against joining any military bloc. It is Zelenskyy who wants to join NATO because he does not defend the interests of Ukraine, but that of the United States and the U.K.” Host Luca Di Bella asked Vitrenko about her situation, since she had been attacked at a political rally in the past, and she confirmed that she feels threatened by the Ukrainian neo-Nazis and called for an urgent de-Nazification of the country. There was a question also on the role of Soros in the Euromaidan, and in the present politics there. Vitrenko confirmed that many Soros people are in the government and the Euromaidan coup was also sponsored by his foundation. Alessia Ruggeri asked her about Putin’s statement during his Feb. 21 speech about the Odessa massacre in 2014, for which, he said, those responsible should be punished. Vitrenko replied there must be a Nuremberg Tribunal against such crimes against humanity. An audience of 1,300 people were watching the interview on YouTube, and many of them thanked Natalia Vitrenko for her courage and firsthand report on the situation. Also the hosts thanked her, and concluded that they “pray that Natalia Vitrenko may become President of Ukraine” and that Ukraine may have peace.

Feb. 20—FLASH: It was announced early Feb. 21 (Paris time) by the Elysée, that President Joe Biden and President Vladimir Putin have agreed, in principle, to a summit.French President Emmanuel Macron’s first phone call today with President Putin lasted for an hour and 45 minutes. He next spoke with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and later in the day, Macron spoke with President Biden, for 15 minutes. Then again, Macron and Putin spoke. The Elysée reported this morning that Macron’s intention was also to speak with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz “in the coming hours” — and also was intending to have discussions with the British and Italian Prime Ministers Boris Johnson and Mario Draghi. Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov was also planning speak on the phone to his French counterpart Jean-Yves Le Drian, according to the Russian Foreign Ministry. The Elysée had earlier described Macron’s call to Moscow today as among “the last possible and necessary efforts to avoid a major conflict in Ukraine.” It followed a meeting between the two leaders in Moscow on Feb. 7. In their call today they both agreed that there should be a meeting between the OSCE, Ukraine, and Russia on Monday, Feb. 21. They also agreed that their foreign ministers should meet “in the coming days.” According to the Kremlin, Putin blamed what he called Ukrainian “provocations” over the escalation in fighting with pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine. He also demanded that NATO and the United States “take seriously” Moscow’s demands regarding security—the issue at the heart of the current crisis. In a statement, the Kremlin said that “modern weapons and ammunition being sent to Ukraine by NATO member countries” were encouraging Kyiv to pursue a military solution in the Donbas region, which in turn was forcing civilians to leave. Russia wants guarantees that NATO will halt what it calls the alliance’s eastward expansion, rule out membership for Ukraine and other former Soviet countries, and roll back its military deployments in Central and Eastern Europe.

Feb. 19—Working on a comparison of the current strategic crisis to the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, U.S. historian and political scientist Joshua Shifrinson found documents in the British National Archive which further prove that Western leaders did give Moscow assurances in diplomatic contacts in 1990 and 1991 that NATO would not be expanded Eastward. The documents include one quoting German representative Jürgen Chrobog at a meeting “of the political directors of the foreign ministries of the United States, Great Britain, France and Germany in Bonn on March 6, 1991.” According to the memo, Chrobog expressed, “We made it clear in the two-plus-four negotiations that we would not extend NATO beyond the Elbe. Therefore, we cannot offer NATO membership to Poland and the others.”The documents also show that U.S. Ambassador Raymond Seitz agreed with Chrobog, saying: “We have made it clear to the Soviet Union—in two-plus-four as well as other talks—that we will not take advantage of the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Eastern Europe…. NATO should not expand to the East, either formally or informally.” All mainstream media are covering this archive find. However—such as Der Spiegel—they claim that NATO did not break a promise, which was never laid down in legally binding form, but just made adjustments of their policies after the conciliatory atmosphere of the 1990s ceased to exist afterward, and because Russia was no longer as weak as it had been during the Yeltsin period. The change in NATO attitudes, and openly breaking their promises, was not “intentional,” as Russia charges, but just developed over the time, Der Spiegel proclaims.

Feb. 16—In her weekly webcast today, Helga Zepp-LaRouche stated that the world took a small step back from the brink, as the British-proclaimed deadline for a supposed Russian invasion of Ukraine came and went today without incident. Rather, diplomacy seems to be gathering a bit of a toe-hold, with the back-to-back visits to Moscow and Kiev of French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, along with a growing chorus of American voices demanding strategic sanity from the U.S. government.“This is an important step,” Zepp-LaRouche commented, “but obviously a lot more has to happen.” She noted that an environment is being created “to force a discussion about Putin’s demands to the U.S. and NATO to have security guarantees that NATO will not expand further to the east, and that no offensive weapon systems would be installed along the Russian border.” “I hope that diplomacy can play a bigger role again,” Zepp-LaRouche continued, including the idea that has been circulating that a new “Helsinki 2” agreement among the super-powers should be organized. “But I think even Helsinki 2 is not enough, because we need a new international security architecture which takes into account the security interest of every single country.” What is needed is “a global new security architecture that would mean the end of geopolitics. That is the necessary step mankind has to take if you want to get out of this dilemma of potential world war for good.” Simply appealing for peace is useful, she continued, but “it falls completely short, because it does not address where the war danger comes from. Sure, the war danger comes from the military-industrial complex, who need their wars to keep their machine going. But you cannot separate the interests of the military-industrial complex from Wall Street, the City of London, Silicon Valley, etc. The fact is that the neo-liberal financial system is blowing out and the war danger comes from that, because there are some people in these circles who would rather risk World War III than allow that a multipolar world develop. Especially now with China and Russia being in a new strategic partnership, which is a completely new element in the situation. The war danger comes from the fact that these neoliberal circles are experiencing their Waterloo.” Zepp-LaRouche concluded: “This is the powder keg on which we are sitting…. There is no solution within this system. This system is finished, and the only solution would be to do exactly what Lyndon LaRouche proposed for many years, namely to have a complete reorganization of the bankrupt system, a global Glass-Steagall banking separation, and then go to a Hamiltonian banking system and set up a New Bretton Woods system which provides for a long-term low-interest credit for development of the developing sector in particular. That could be done very easily, in cooperation with the Belt and Road Initiative. So a solution is eminently possible.” Please register to attend the Schiller Institute’s Feb. 19 international conference, “100 Seconds to Midnight on the Doomsday Clock: We Need a New Security Architecture!”

Feb. 15—While there will be multiple shifts of the international political terrain in the next 72 hours, Saturday’s Schiller Institute Conference, “100 Seconds to Midnight on the Doomsday Clock: We Need A New Security Architecture!”, subsumes those momentary shifts in the tactical landscape. As Executive Intelligence Review founder Lyndon LaRouche, once, in a different but comparable circumstance observed, “the world has entered a transitional period in which old habits of judgment and orientation are useless and even contraindicated for practical evaluation of most of the emerging phenomena of the strategic and national-tactical developments. For this reason, very few persons in the world…are intellectually pre-trained to understand those processes which will be decisive in determining the outcome of this immediate several weeks and months directly before us.”Conflicting stories will no doubt appear in the next hours and days — assuming there are next hours and days — as to what is occurring, or will occur, in the various negotiations involving Germany, France, Ukraine, the United States, and Russia. EIR will seek, not merely to “unpack the news,” but, rather, to intervene into current history and advance it, using a method of statecraft based on LaRouche’s Four Laws of physical economy, sometimes referred to in shorthand as “the coincidence of opposites.” This method of policy making advocated by LaRouche, and by Helga Zepp-LaRouche, is seen in strategic proposals such as “Operation Ibn Sina,” recently presented in the now-posted Schiller Institute-Russian International Affairs Council (RIAC) Joint Forum, “The Humanitarian Crisis in Afghanistan: Toward A Long-Term Solution.” The method is to start from the standpoint of the needs of the world as a whole — food, clean water, sanitation, housing, health care, and education — and to devise national policies and practices resulting in the successful creation of a technologically advanced world platform that benefits the greatest number of the world’s citizens, increasing the potential relative-population density of the planet. War, particularly preventive war, condemned at the Nuremberg Trials as a crime against humanity, is antithetical to the general welfare of humanity and its posterity. Whatever its origin, the predator notion that “the fundamental organizing principle of society is for war” should not be allowed to become, at any time, the “organizing principle” of the foreign policy of the United States. A British-dominated United States, an unacceptable condition which has emphatically been the case since the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, must be replaced by a citizenry that re-establishes the true identity of this nation by bringing it into collaboration with Russia, China, India, and other nations based on the American Revolution’s founding documents, including Hamilton’s Four Reports On Economics, advanced by Lyndon LaRouche in his Four Laws proposal. Former French Secretary Roland Dumas, who was a central figure in the post-1989 negotiations involving NATO and the Soviet Union, has left no doubt in his recent Les Crises interview, available on Youtube, that he, James Baker, and other Western representatives had in fact pledged to Russia that NATO would not expand eastward: “…In reality, we realized — Gorbachev, myself and President Mitterrand at the time— that there was no peace treaty to put an end to the war with Germany, and that, therefore, it was necessary to put an end to that unstable situation. That’s the reason we devised, with my friend Hans-Dietrich Genscher, the German Minister of Foreign Affairs, to engage in talks over every shortcoming, since there hadn’t been any peace treaty…. We had meetings in London, meetings in Paris, and, lastly, in Moscow, to bring the last piece of the global agreement together, in the presence of Gorbachev….” As to the later discussion concerning the disposition of NATO forces after a Warsaw Pact withdrawal from Central Europe, Dumas recounted: “The Minister of Foreign Affairs (Shevernadze) spoke and said: ’We, the Russian delegation want to know what will happen to NATO’S armaments as part of the disarmament.” Dumas said that the Russian delegation stated two demands. First, that the monuments to Soviet soldiers who fought against fascism in World War Two be maintained and respected. “Secondly, for troops from both the Warsaw Pact and NATO to make a commitment that there will not be movement of NATO troops into the Warsaw Pact regions that were about to be disarmed…. Gorbachev spoke, Shevardnadze spoke, I spoke. And I put forward the idea that [NATO military] forces must not move into formerly militarized regions.” Dumas stated that the Americans and the Germans agreed with this. “Before [German Foreign Minister] Genscher died, I asked him if he remembered this discussion. He answered; ‘Perfectly.’” At the Malta summit on December 3, 1989, less than one month after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Bush and Gorbachev had “declared the end of the Cold War.” No eastward expansion was to occur. Now, NATO, expanded from 15 nations in 1989, to 30 nations, and seeking to make Ukraine #31 in violation of this earlier promise, stands poised on the Russian border, with the possibility of strategic miscalculation leading to total war higher than at any time since, and perhaps including,1962’s Cuban Missile Crisis. The purpose of Executive Intelligence Review magazine, and the special method LaRouche created to inform the evaluative process of intelligence gathering that he required of his associates, is to encourage that all “self-evident” assumptions governing the “day-to-day” thinking of the citizen, be removed and replaced with a method of formulating the necessary policies, programs, and cooperation for the durable survival and prosperity of all. This is the essence of a sane economic, and therefore a sane security policy. Discussing this method, and proposing such a new security architecture, is the purpose of Saturday’s conference, which all lovers of truth should participate in.

Feb. 14—In a long and very direct address today on the American Committee for U.S.-Russian Accord’s “ACURA Viewpoint,” the last U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union Jack Matlock (1987-92) presents the entire history, which led from the end of the Cold War to the present obvious threat of superpower hot war. Matlock begins by saying he “cannot dismiss the suspicion that we are witnessing an elaborate charade” by Biden to “prevent” a non-existent Russian invasion of Ukraine. And later he notes that Biden campaigned for President in 2008 on the line, “I will stand up to Vladimir Putin,” a particularly absurd posture at that time, but most of his piece is tracing the mistakes of U.S. and NATO policy which turned Russia from virtual NATO ally to adversary in what could become an all-out nuclear war.First, ignorance around nuclear weapons. Matlock admits that as a Moscow embassy staffer in 1962, he translated Khrushchev’s messages to JFK in the Cuban Missiles Crisis, and he and his colleagues were unaware of the actual nature of the settlement of that crisis, and would have cheered for American bombing of Russian sites in Cuba—which would have been fatal to several major cities including Washington, D.C.: “It is quite dangerous to get involved in military confrontations with countries with nuclear weapons.” But for the most part, the hubris of “we won the Cold War,” against which both Pope John Paul II and Lyndon LaRouche warned. Matlock quotes his own testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1997 when the Clinton Administration proposed the expansion of NATO: “I consider the Administration’s recommendation to take new members into NATO at this time misguided. If it should be approved by the United States Senate, it may well go down in history as the most profound strategic blunder made since the end of the Cold War. Far from improving the security of the United States, its Allies, and the nations that wish to enter the Alliance, it could well encourage a chain of events that could produce the most serious security threat to this nation since the Soviet Union collapsed.” Matlock proposes a "common sense" approach: "What President Putin is demanding, an end to NATO expansion and creation of a security structure in Europe that insures Russia’s security along with that of others is eminently reasonable. He is not demanding the exit of any NATO member and he is threatening none. By any pragmatic, common sense standard it is in the interest of the United States to promote peace, not conflict. To try to detach Ukraine from Russian influence—the avowed aim of those who agitated for the “color revolutions”—was a fool’s errand, and a dangerous one. Have we so soon forgotten the lesson of the Cuban Missile Crisis? Now, to say that approving Putin’s demands is in the objective interest of the United States does not mean that it will be easy to do. The leaders of both the Democratic and Republican parties have developed such a Russophobic stance (a story requiring a separate study) that it will take great political skill to navigate the treacherous political waters and achieve a rational outcome. President Biden has made it clear that the United States will not intervene with its own troops if Russia invades Ukraine. So why move them into Eastern Europe? Just to show hawks in Congress that he is standing firm? For what? Nobody is threatening Poland or Bulgaria except waves of refugees fleeing Syria, Afghanistan and the desiccated areas of the African savannah. So what is the 82nd Airborne supposed to do?"

In an op-ed published on Feb. 11, 2022, by the French “souverainist” weekly Marianne, Peter Dittus and Hervé Hannoun, argue in favor of a French exit from the integrated command of NATO. The German economist Peter Dittus is the former secretary general of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), while Frenchman Hannoun is its deputy director general. We reprint it here in full:“Faced with the Ukrainian Crisis, France’s NATO-EXIT Is an Absolute Emergency” Breaking with the policy of non-alignment followed by de Gaulle, Giscard and Mitterrand for 43 years, France once again became a member of the integrated military command of NATO in 2009, without the French people having been consulted by referendum. The current Ukrainian crisis reveals the serious perils to which France is exposed by being attached to a defensive collective security organization under the command of the United States that has become expansionist. Since November 2021, the French, like other peoples of the West, have been subjected to an unprecedented mental conditioning conducted by the United States and NATO on the theme of the “imminent Russian invasion of Ukraine,” which may go down in history as an episode of disinformation along the lines of the fabricated intelligence on Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction in 2003. What is the reality? Millions of Russian-speaking Ukrainians in the two self-proclaimed Donbas people’s republics live under sporadic firing and shelling by the Ukrainian army against separatist forces. The concentration of Russian troops on Ukraine’s borders is obviously aimed at dissuading Kiev from attempting to regain direct control of the enclaves of Donetsk and Luhansk by force. NATO’s successful disinformation on Ukraine has consisted in presenting Putin’s moral obligation to defend these Russian-speaking populations—which Ukraine wants to progressively deprive of the right to speak their language—as a prelude to the total annexation of Ukraine by Russia. The Myth of an ‘Imminent Russian Invasion’ NATO manages to pass off a concentration of Russian troops ready to come to the rescue of Russian-speaking Ukrainians in the Donbas as an “imminent Russian invasion” of the whole of Ukraine, including Odessa, Kharkiv and Kiev. An insane invasion that in reality Russia completely rules out … unless it is pushed into it by a possible prior Ukrainian attack on the Donbas. The only war that NATO seems to be winning is the one of information. We show in our book [OTANexit: Urgence Absolue, Peter Dittus and Hervé Hannoun, Jan. 16, 2022] the striking German propaganda map in the weekly Bild of December 4, 2021, giving an imaginary detailed plan of the “imminent Russian invasion.” The role of propaganda is terrifying, because of the charge of hatred generated by the lies on both sides. On the NATO side, the aggressive and bellicose discourse of Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg is irresistibly reminiscent of the famous Orwellian inversion: “Peace Is War.” And If France Had the Solution? Paris must avoid the military spiral into which the United States and NATO want to drag it. In the coming weeks, it must not allow itself to be involved in a war in Eastern Europe that is not its own. France has already agreed to deploy hundreds of men in a NATO battle group in Estonia. On January 1, it took the lead in the NATO Rapid Response Force, which includes at least 7,700 French soldiers. President Macron has just announced the possible dispatch of 1,000 French troops to Romania under the NATO banner on the “Eastern flank,” in the Black Sea region. The military escalation is dangerous. For the security of the French people, it is necessary to exclude committing the French army under the banner of NATO in a war in Ukraine or Belarus. On the other hand, France has a diplomatic weapon to resolve the serious crisis between NATO and Russia. The detonator of this crisis was the stubbornness of Jens Stoltenberg and the Americans to pursue since 2018 a creeping process of accession of Ukraine to NATO, called “open door policy,” seen by Russia as a threat to its security. To put an end to the current confrontation, President Macron should simply declare solemnly in the name of France that his country will oppose any request from Ukraine to join NATO. As decisions on membership of the Alliance require unanimity, France can exercise a veto. In doing so, the President would be in line with the commitments he made during his 2017 presidential campaign not to support NATO’s expansion to Ukraine. It would be an elegant way out of the crisis. Alas, the French President, during his visit to Moscow and then to Kiev on February 7 and 8, 2022, did not consider this simple solution because French diplomacy did not oppose in the NATO bodies the mad “open door policy” to the membership of Ukraine and Georgia in NATO. On the other hand, France supports NATO and the G7 in their demand for the return of Crimea to Ukraine, knowing full well that it cannot be done without a war, possibly nuclear. American Subordination At the time of the (Maastricht) 1992 referendum on the EU treaty, no one could have imagined that this great project of Mitterrand and Kohl for peace would be deviated from, from 1998 onward, by the American geopolitical project to take de facto control of the European common defense and security policy. This was due to the simultaneous enlargement of the EU and NATO to ten Eastern European countries between 1991 and 2007, and also to President Sarkozy’s decision, with far-reaching consequences, to abandon in 2008 the Gaullist strategic position of refusing to participate in NATO’s integrated military command. From the moment that 21 of the 27 EU countries, including France, became full members of NATO, the initial spirit of Maastricht was betrayed, because “Europe for peace” was inevitably going to be thwarted by the interference of the United States, with its own geopolitical objectives, in the common European defense and security policy. In reality, there can be no independent French or European defense within the current framework of participation in the integrated military command of NATO by France and 21 other European Union states. The concept of “European strategic autonomy” within NATO is an illusion, given the control of the United States over this Alliance. The EU seeks to hide this fundamental flaw behind a vague concept: the “strategic compass.” The fundamental incompatibility between the U.S.-controlled NATO and an independent French or European defense does not prevent our leaders from defending the thesis of complementarity between the EU and NATO in terms of defense, as summarized on December 11, 2021 by the French Minister of Foreign Affairs: “We are keen for the EU and NATO to complement and reinforce each other in order to contribute to strengthening security and defense in Europe. This is the meaning of the strategic compass that will be adopted during the French Presidency of the EU Council.” Defense: The Impasse of ‘At the Same Time’ The EU’s “strategic compass” is above all an effort to provide a conceptual framework for the false idea that “European strategic autonomy” in relation to the United States is compatible with the NATO membership of the vast majority of EU member states. This complementarity between NATO and the EU, the “at the same time” applied to defense, is an illusion. The fussy logic of national independence has given way to the vague and misleading concept of strategic autonomy and the search for interdependence and interoperability with our “allies.” Beyond the immediate crisis surrounding Ukraine, the [French] presidential elections of April 10 and 24 must allow for a decision on the question of NATO. All those who reject NATO’s march towards the war that is brewing on the Eastern borders of the EU have a unique opportunity, with the presidential election of 2022, to send a simple and clear message of peace to the leaders of our country, in one word: NATO-EXIT (Otanexit). It is a question of ensuring that a candidate for peace is elected President, who is committed to putting an end to France’s alignment with NATO. One can think that the outgoing President will want to avoid a debate in the presidential campaign on the question of our military alliances in NATO: alliance with the adventurism of the Anglo-Saxons, whose arrogance was revealed by the Australian submarine affair, unnatural alliance with Islamist Turkey, alliance with Polish nationalism, and tomorrow perhaps, alliance with a Germany that could use NATO as a springboard for its remilitarization, or even alliance with Kosovo against Serbia. This list alone allows us to measure the risks of a collective security system comprising 30 heterogeneous nations, and dominated by one of them. An Unconstitutional ‘Defense Union’ On January 7, 2022, in a joint press conference with President Macron in Paris, the President of the European Commission allowed herself a federalist statement that exceeded her prerogatives: “We agree that we need a real defense union.” In the presence of President Macron, she spoke of adding a “Defense Union” to the Economic and Monetary Union in the future, without taking into account the fact that this statement is contrary to the French Constitution, which is based on national independence, national sovereignty and national defense. It is necessary to oppose the stealthy European federalism that is currently being practiced, which cannot replace a federalism that is democratically accepted—or rejected—by referendum, according to the procedure followed in 1992 by François Mitterrand for the transfer of monetary sovereignty provided for in the Maastricht Treaty. The French people must reject the concept of defense union under the banner of NATO that Ursula von der Leyen wants to impose on them. France’s current alignment with NATO, through its participation in the integrated military command under American leadership, is a strategic dead end for a country with a universal vocation like France. Today, this country has a historic role to play in stopping the march towards war in Europe initiated by the NATO sleepwalkers. France’s exit from NATO, which will mark the end of the alignment of France’s foreign security policy with the United States, will have an immense impact on the world. It will signal Europe’s independence from American exceptionalism, the renewal of multilateralism, the emergence of a multipolar world and the rapid demise of the obsolete NATO framework. France will then rediscover its universal vocation, contributing to the global balance for peace, and playing, thanks to its rediscovered impartiality, a role of synthesis within the P5, the concert of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council (the United States, the United Kingdom, China, Russia, and France), a P5 whose composition must be maintained and whose role as regulator of world peace must be enhanced.

Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, founded in 1945, announced on Jan. 20 that for the third year in a row, their Doomsday Clock remains fixed at 100 seconds to midnight. “Steady is not good news,” said Sharon Squassoni, a professor at George Washington University and a member of the group. “We are stuck in a perilous moment—one that brings neither stability nor security. Positive developments in 2021 failed to counteract negative, long-term trends,” she said.The clock was originally only concerned with the threat of nuclear war, but has recently included the politically correct issues of climate change, disruptive technologies and biological hazards, including sections of their report on these issues. They even bring up Jan. 6. The organization’s website says: “Founded in 1945 by Albert Einstein and University of Chicago scientists who helped develop the first atomic weapons in the Manhattan Project, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists created the Doomsday Clock two years later, using the imagery of apocalypse (midnight) and the contemporary idiom of nuclear explosion (countdown to zero) to convey threats to humanity and the planet.” This year’s report begins by saying the new administration in the U.S. raised hopes of decreasing the danger, with the extension of New START, talks between the U.S. and Russia, and revived talks on the JCPOA. However: “U.S. relations with Russia and China remain tense, with all three countries engaged in an array of nuclear modernization and expansion efforts—including China’s apparent large-scale program to increase its deployment of silo-based long-range nuclear missiles; the push by Russia, China, and the United States to develop hypersonic missiles; and the continued testing of anti-satellite weapons by many nations. If not restrained, these efforts could mark the start of a dangerous new nuclear arms race.” They express hope that the upcoming Nuclear Posture Review will reduce the danger of a nuclear war. They would not be pleased by the new reports by William Arkin and others elsewhere in this briefing.

Saturday, January 22, 2022 Helga Zepp-LaRouche made a video address to the National Congress of Peru’s Christian Democracy, which was translated into Spanish and played at their conference on Saturday, Jan. 22, 2022. Here are her remarks: Helga Zepp-LaRouche: Dear Friends of the Christian Democracy in Peru: It is a great honor and pleasure to send these greetings to your national conference. I think you are all aware that we are at an extremely important moment in history, where world peace is not safe. We are still in an acute danger zone of a reverse Cuban Missile Crisis, over the situation in Ukraine, and the continued expansion of NATO eastward, toward the Russian border. This has been going on despite promises made to Russia during the time of the German unification in 1990-1991, where the promise was given to Gorbachev that NATO would “not move one inch eastward.” But NATO has moved 1,000 km to the east; 14 countries have joined NATO. And right now, you have a very fragile situation where the media are talking about that Russia would attack Ukraine, which Russia has denied. In any case, the situation is extremely volatile. And a little sign of hope comes from the discussions which just took place in Geneva between the United States and Russia, between NATO and Russia in Brussels, and in Vienna in the OSCE discussions, that maybe diplomacy will replace confrontation and that new arms control discussions can actually start in earnest.But the real reason behind this geopolitical crisis is that the systemic crisis of the neoliberal system is coming to a head. My late husband Lyndon LaRouche has made a forecast 50 years ago, in 1971, when President Nixon decoupled the dollar from the gold-reserve standard, and replaced fixed exchange rates with floating ones. My husband at that point said, if the world continues on that course of monetarism, sooner or later, the world would be faced with the danger of a new depression, new fascism, and even the danger of a new world war, unless a new financial system, and a new credit system would be implemented with a new, just world economic order. I think the countries of the developing sector are more acutely aware of this problem than anybody else, that we have now the danger of a hyperinflationary collapse. You see it in the prices of energy, of food, of basic raw materials. And the worst humanitarian crisis, of the many, is naturally happening in Afghanistan now, where after the withdrawal of NATO in August and takeover of the Taliban, when the Western countries cut off the aid to Afghanistan, because they didn’t like the Taliban, but everybody knew at the time that 75% of the budget of Afghanistan came from international aid! And when that money was cut off, all of a sudden, the economy of Afghanistan was plunged into an absolute chaos. Now, the United Nations is warning dramatically, again and again, that there are 8 million people right now, who are in immediate danger of starvation. They’re dying of hunger and freezing right now as you hear my words. The United Nations World Food Program also warned that there is the danger that 23 million people may not outlive this winter if there is not a dramatic change in this situation, and that over 90% of the people in Afghanistan have not enough food, are food insecure, have not enough medicine or no medicine at all, in the middle of a pandemic, and that 98% of the people are in danger of becoming permanently extremely poor, which is a starvation level. Now, this is why I have called for, what I call Operation Ibn Sina, in reference to the great physician who lived 1,000 years ago, who is the father of modern medicine, who was the one who first discovered quarantine, as a symbol that we have to build a modern health system in every single country on the planet, starting with Afghanistan, but not limiting it: Every country must have access to modern medicine, modern hospitals, and this is obviously only possible if you have electricity, if you have clean water—2 billion people in the world have no access to clean water; that has to be immediately reversed. We need basic infrastructure. And this building of a world health system must become the beginning of overcoming underdevelopment and poverty in the world, for good, forever. 2022 is the year when my late husband would celebrate his 100th birthday, and that’s why I have called that the year 2022 must become the Year of LaRouche. It is the year when all the beautiful plans which he developed in his lifetime must be realized. He developed already in the 1970s a plan to develop Africa through a large infrastructure program as the precondition for industrial development. He worked together, as you all know, with López Portillo, the President of Mexico, on what he called Operation Juárez, which was the idea that all of Latin America must be integrated and must have a coherent infrastructure program as the precondition for agriculture and industry to develop. This program of Operation Juárez is actual today than ever before. He also worked with Indira Gandhi: We worked with her on a 40-year development program for India, which was the idea that you need, at that time, in 1979, about two generations to reach a modern development state for the nation of India. After 1991, he proposed the Eurasian Land-Bridge. This has become the basic idea which is now being carried out by China with the Belt and Road Initiative. We published the study, “The New Silk Road Becomes the World Land-Bridge.” Now, this is the hope, because, the fact that China and about 150 nations have signed memorandums of understanding with China, to cooperate in the Belt and Road Initiative is where the development of the world is taking place right now. And we, the LaRouche movement, and the Schiller Institute have made it our commitment to try to convince the United States and Europe to cooperate with the Belt and Road Initiative, and not oppose it for geopolitical reasons. This is the program to overcome poverty and underdevelopment, and create a decent living standard for every person on the planet. Now, this is the obvious task and challenge for us, because it should note be self-evident and accepted that several billion people are living in poverty! Poverty eradication is the absolute demand of this coming year, and the reason why we can be optimistic about the human species finally accomplishing that is because, as my husband said many times, the human species is the only species which has the ability of creative reason: We can do what no animal species can do, we can make fundamental discoveries about physical principles of the universe, and when we apply those principles as technologies in the production process, it leads to an increase of the productivity of the labor force and of the productive forces. And that is the way how to increase the living standard, the life expectancy, and to create the conditions for an improvement of the general welfare. It is the principle of physical economy, and not monetarism, which we have to bring back to the world economy. This coming year, we will see a worsening of the crisis, because there is no way how this casino economy will last forever. It will come to a point of crisis, where we need to put all forces of the world together, people of good will, to implement the Four Laws of Lyndon LaRouche: The first of which is a global Glass-Steagall banking separation, the speculation of the derivatives casino has to come to an end forever, and the economy must again be put to the service of the people. The second is, we need a National Bank in the tradition of Alexander Hamilton in every single country, and when these National Banks among the different countries work together, then that can create a New Bretton Woods credit system which will provide credit lines for long-term investment and the kind of infrastructure program which Latin America needs in the same way as parts of Asia and Africa, and even parts of Europe, which are not yet developed. Now, this can be done. And I think we should be optimistic that this coming year is going to be the year where that is going to be put on the table, because the crisis will demand it. Well, I had the fortune, together with my husband, to visit your country in 1987, and I have the most beautiful memories of that visit, and I think Peru is a great nation, which has an absolutely great population. And I wish you the best possible future, for your country and the great success for your conference. And I look forward to our collaboration, so that we together bring humanity from the abyss of a catastrophe and start to create a new paradigm in international relations, and start a new, more optimistic chapter in the history of humanity. All my greetings to you.

This is translated for publication in EIR from Helga Zepp-LaRouche’s lead article in the January 27, 2022 issue of Neue Solidarität Jan. 23 (EIRNS)—After the hectic diplomacy of this week—Annalena Baerbock in Kiev and Moscow, Antony Blinken in Kiev, then in Berlin to meet with the foreign ministers of the United States, France, Great Britain and Germany, Blinken’s meeting with Chancellor Olaf Scholz and finally the meeting of foreign ministers Sergey Lavrov and Blinken in Geneva—the danger of a world war which could annihilate mankind has not been averted. After the last meeting, Lavrov stated that he expected to receive a written answer from the U.S. and NATO next week concerning the legally binding treaties demanded by Russia, which provide that NATO will not expand further east to Russia’s borders, that Ukraine will not be admitted to NATO, and that no offensive weapons systems will be placed on the Russian border. Blinken referred to further talks with “allies and partners in the coming days,” after which Western concerns and ideas could then be shared with Russia.However, if the U.S. position remains what Blinken, according to RT, told journalists after his meeting with Lavrov—namely that there is no room for compromise on Moscow’s main demand, and that a non-negotiable principle of America and its allies is that the Ukrainian people have the right “to write their own future”—then the very short fuse threatens to burn very quickly. Indeed, the formulation used by Blinken is just a sophistical way of referring to Ukraine’s entry into NATO, which is part of the Anglo-American narrative on “Russia’s aggressions.” But for any honest historian, as well as for everyone who looks at a map, the facts are clear: After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, it was not Russia that moved its borders some 1,000 km westward from the border of the then-Warsaw Pact to reach somewhere in France around Lille, but it was NATO that advanced to the east by 1000 km. Thus, it clearly broke the verbal commitments given to Gorbachev by the George H.W. Bush administration, and especially by then-Secretary of State James Baker III, that NATO would not move “one inch to the east.” A closer look shows that the methods used by NATO to add 14 new member states in Eastern and Central Europe and in the Balkans were not always the most subtle. According to the Western narrative, it was the desire for freedom that pushed these countries into NATO. But the reality is different. After the shock therapy of Jeffrey Sachs and the brutal policy of privatization, with no concern for the social consequences, had drastically impoverished the populations of the former Comecon, a massive network of NGOs was set up with thick checkbooks, with the aim of effecting a paradigm change in favor of the West. In 1990, at the time prior to German reunification and during the upheavals in Eastern Europe, this author personally experienced how the first democratic attempts of self-organization by the people in the East were cold-bloodedly smothered and replaced by compliant opportunists, often enough in positions of government. “Corruption is good” became the motto in many places—then at least we know whom we can trust. So much for the principle of “letting peoples choose their own future.” The latest example just came from the—failed—attempt to carry off a color revolution in Kazakhstan, with the use of “Maidan techniques” as Vladimir Putin correctly pointed out. If Putin is now demanding—in the context of what German Gen. Harald Kujat (ret.) told DLF radio/TV was not in preparation for a military attack, but rather as a threatening backdrop (i.e., the redeployment of about 100,000 Russian troops closer to the Ukrainian border although some of them are still hundreds of kilometers away)—legally binding written assurances that NATO will neither be extended further eastward to the borders of Russia, nor will ever accept Ukraine as a member, then this is simply a way of expressing that for Russia a red line has been reached. Given the fact that there are already 10,000 NATO troops in Ukraine, including some 4,000 U.S. troops, that private mercenary outfits are training Ukrainian military units in eastern Ukraine for false-flag operations, that the U.K. is supplying offensive lethal weapons to Ukraine, that U.S. and British warships and fighter jets are provoking incidents in the Black Sea aimed at providing the reconnaissance aircraft with information about Russian military capabilities—what conclusions is Russia supposed to draw from all these and many other policies? In reality, NATO is already operating practically in Ukraine, but formal NATO membership would definitively confirm that it was no longer possible to defend Russia’s fundamental security interests. Even as the abovementioned diplomatic talks were ongoing, the British broadcaster Sky News reported that the U.K. had deployed 30 members of its “Special Operations Brigade” to Ukraine to train Ukrainian troops on anti-tank weapons that were also supplied by the British. According to the military spokesman for the Donetsk People’s Republic, more than 460 tons of various lethal weapons, including 2,000 NLAWs (anti-tank missiles), have recently been delivered by nine C17 aircraft to Ukrainian forces stationed on the line of contact with the Donbas, which include a considerable number of radical nationalists. Whether these weapons are defensive or offensive in nature depends, as always, on the specific combat situation. Shortly after Moscow presented the two treaties to the United States and NATO on Dec. 15, Putin announced that Russia would respond to their rejection with “appropriate military-technical retaliatory measures.” In a Jan. 15 article in National Interest magazine, David T. Pyne, currently working for the Task Force on National and Homeland Security (a Congressional Advisory Board), cited Brussels-based U.S. analyst Gilbert Doctorow’s interpretation of what these “military-technical retaliatory measures” might entail. Doctorow assumes that it means the additional deployment of Russian nuclear-capable SS-26 Iskander-M short-range missiles to Belarus and Kaliningrad, which would threaten NATO front-line states and eastern Germany. Moreover, the new nuclear-armed Tsirkon sea-launched hypersonic cruise missiles could be stationed off the American coast near Washington. Earlier statements from Russian officials noted that such missiles could destroy the American capital faster than the President could escape on Air Force One. Therefore, if the U.S. and NATO reject Russia’s demands for security guarantees, there is a real probability that we may have to deal very soon with a double Cuba crisis, but without a John F. Kennedy as U.S. President. Rather, we have a President Biden whom the war hawks in his entourage openly refuse to respect and who “correct” him if he says he does not seek war with Russia. It should be clear to all thinking persons that in the event of a war waged with nuclear weapons—be it “limited” or not—no one in Germany would survive. For our new Foreign Minister Baerbock, it is obviously not clear, otherwise she would not fall into NATO jargon in such a synchronized manner with “dear Tony” as she just did at the Berlin press conference. The Greens have completely morphed into a war party. And if someone begins pondering, like former Defense Minister Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, what nuclear options there might be against Russia, then they should seek therapy against suicidal and homicidal thoughts. Under such circumstances, Germany’s membership in NATO can no longer be defended. We immediately need a new international security architecture that takes into account the interests of all countries, explicitly including those of Russia and China. If we have learned anything from history, it is that only those treaties that include the interests of all the states involved, such as the Treaty of Westphalia, can be the basis for lasting peace. Peace treaties that do not do so, such as the Treaty of Versailles, contain the opening salvo for the next war, as we in Germany should have painfully learned. NATO, which unnecessarily excluded Russia from the European house after the dissolution of the Soviet Union and has since increasingly become an offensive alliance, not only no longer corresponds to Germany’s security interests, but has become the primary threat to Germany’s existence. We need a new security architecture that overcomes the geopolitics responsible for two world wars in the 20th century, one that defines the common goals of mankind as its fundamental principle. And this includes, first and foremost, the elimination of the primary cause of war—which is the imminent collapse of the trans-Atlantic financial system—and the creation of a new credit system, a New Bretton Woods system, that vanquishes poverty and underdevelopment everywhere in the world. All peace-loving people in the world are called upon to enter into an open dialogue on this issue.

The following article appeared in Russian press service RIA Novosti today. Expert Black: US Must Be Urged to Seriously Negotiate on the Demands of Russia NEW YORK, January 11 - RIA Novosti. The US authorities should be encouraged to conduct serious negotiations on the requirements and conditions that have been put forward by Russia, Richard Black, a representative of the Schiller Institute in New York, told RIA Novosti.Speaking about the Russian-American negotiations on security guarantees which took place in Geneva on Monday, Black said, “it is too early to say what the outcome of the talks, which will extend through the week, will be.” Talks are expected later this week in the Russia-NATO format, as well as of the OSCE . “We at the Schiller Institute believe that it is necessary to mobilize veteran diplomats and leaders in civil society in the United States who must call on the United States to seriously negotiate the demands and conditions set out by President Putin,” Black said. “We believe that a drastic turnaround is needed on the part of the United States, in terms of goodwill negotiations with Russia,” he added. At the same time, Black expressed doubts about the truth of the allegations promoted by the media and the US authorities, that “Russia is an autocracy, Russia is a strategic enemy, Russia has invaded Ukraine.” “In our opinion, this is an extremely dangerous situation,” he added. Earlier, Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said that there had been no progress in negotiations with the United States on NATO’s non-expansion. Ryabkov said that Moscow needs significant legal guarantees, “reinforced in concrete,” that Ukraine and Georgia will never become NATO members. This is a matter of Russia’s national security, Ryabkov stressed. Moscow and Washington, during January 9-10, held consultations in Geneva on Russia’s proposals on security guarantees. Following this, a meeting of the Russia-NATO Council will take place in Brussels, and consultations on the platform of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe will take place in Vienna. At the end of 2021, Russia had published proposed draft agreements with the United States and agreements with the North Atlantic Alliance on security guarantees. Moscow, in particular, demands from its Western partners legal guarantees to refrain from further expansion of NATO to the east, and guarantees to prevent both Ukraine from joining the North Atlantic Alliance, and to prevent the creation of military bases in post-Soviet countries. However, even before the start of the consultations, the United States had already stated that some of Russia’s proposals were unacceptable. Moscow, in turn, stressed that although the project of the proposed treaties is not an ultimatum, Russia will not agree to any unilateral concessions, especially under pressure. At the same time, Ryabkov did not rule out the possibility that the dialogue with the US might be limited to only one meeting—that there would be no point in continuing it. If so, this threatens a new round of confrontation. Translated By Ilko Dimov

Today a 30-second video was issued by David Beasley, Executive Director of the World Food Program (WFP) on Afghanistan, showing both hungry children, and also food delivery, with the text: “The situation in Afghanistan may have faded from the front page, but don’t let Afghan families fade from your mind. 8.7 million people are on the brink of starvation. Read that again: 8.7 million people are on the brink of starvation. What we do today has the power to change the fate of more than 23 million people. Act now.” Beasley’s immediate message, tweeted with the video, is for WFP donations. He wrote, “The Year 2021 has been a catastrophic year for the people of Afghanistan. Millions of Afghans are counting on WFP for life-saving food this winter. Help us help them.”However, Beasley’s imperative about keeping in our minds what is important about Afghanistan—the value of human life—is what applies across the board to the crises we now face. Think it through. We are capable of mobilizing the physical resources and logistics to stop mass death in Afghanistan. It takes concerted action. The Schiller Institute will host another conference in mid-January (date to be determined soon) on action in Afghanistan. Look at the pandemic in the same way. The same principle applies. In China, concerted action has kept the COVID-19 case rate and death toll very low, with massive testing and contact tracing, as well as localized lockdowns. In contrast, the pandemic virus is now surging in multiple locations elsewhere in Asia, in the trans-Atlantic, the Americas and Africa. On Jan. 4, the daily case count was 2.594 million cases officially reported worldwide (a big undercount), of which 35%, 885,500 cases, were in the United States alone. The Schiller Institute/Committee for the Coincidence of Opposites is preparing an emergency statement of action points required to save lives, and roll back the virus. The outline and principle are the same as in prior statements, but with measures specific to the unfolding events. (Prior statements: “LaRouche’s ‘Apollo Mission’ To Defeat the Global Pandemic: Build a World Health System Now,” April 11, 2020; ’Global Health Security Requires Medical Infrastructure in Every Country—Major Industrial Nations Must Collaborate Now!" May 14, 2021, submitted to the Global Health Summit in Rome; “Open Letter to Virologists and Medical Experts Around the World To Address the COVID-19 Pandemic,” by former Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders, Nov. 23, 2021; and others.) There are initiatives in the needed direction. Yesterday, for example, the importance of rapidly expanding medical staff, by calling back into action retirees, was stressed by Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, when he declared an official state of emergency. There are many measures that are clearly bipartisan and nonpartisan, overriding the non-stop partisan shouting going on in the U.S. For example, use the Defense Production Act, as was done under Trump, to get all needed items, from material for construction of hospitals and medical materials, to COVID-19 therapeutics in quantity. Ramp up production of antiviral medications and all kinds of monoclonal antibodies, currently scarce. Mobilizing for emergency action and a world health platform, with a focus on Afghanistan, are entirely consistent with the drive to stop the nuclear war danger. The meetings set for next week, on the initiative of Russia, are critical for that: Jan. 10 in Geneva, between the U.S. and Russia; Jan. 12 in Brussels, between NATO and Russia; and Jan. 13 in Vienna, with Russia and the OSCE. But there are countermoves underway. Today German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock met in Washington, D.C. with Secretary of State Tony Blinken, giving a joint press conference afterward, to snidely play up threats against Russia over Ukraine, and play down any validity to Russia’s concerns over its security. Also today, the EU Foreign Affairs Representative Josep Borrell was in Ukraine, visiting the perimeter of Luhansk, alongside Ukraine Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba, to make accusations against Russia. On Friday, Jan. 7, there will be a special online NATO meeting of foreign ministers of its 30 member countries, in advance of the NATO-Russia meeting next Wednesday, Jan. 12. Circulate everywhere the new Schiller Institute Memorandum, “Are We Sleepwalking into Thermonuclear World War III?”

Schiller Institute MemorandumDecember 31, 2021 You are being lied to. Russia is not planning to invade Ukraine. Putin is not a “bad actor” out to recreate the Soviet Empire. Ukraine is not a fledgling democracy just minding its own business. As a summary review of the documented record shows, Ukraine is being used by geopolitical forces in the West that answer to the bankrupt speculative financial system, as the flashpoint to trigger a strategic showdown with Russia, a showdown which is already more dangerous than the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, and which could easily end up in a thermonuclear war which no one would win, and none would survive.Consider the facts as we present them in the abbreviated timeline below. Russia, like China, has been increasingly subjected to the threat of being destroyed by two distinct kinds of “nuclear war” by the bellicose and bankrupt UK-U.S. financial Establishment: (1) “first-use nuclear action,” as stated most explicitly by the demented Sen. Roger Wicker (R-MS); and (2) the “nuclear option” in financial warfare—measures so extreme that they would be laying financial siege to Russia to try to starve it into submission, as is being done against Afghanistan. Russia has now announced, for the whole world to hear, that its red line is about to be crossed, after which it will be forced to respond with “retaliatory military-technical measures.” That red line, it has made clear, is the further advance of U.S. and NATO military forces up to the very border with Russia, including the positioning of defensive and offensive nuclear-capable missile systems to within a scarce five minutes’ flight time to Moscow. Russia has presented two draft documents—one, a treaty with the United States, the other, an agreement with NATO—which together would provide legally binding security guarantees that NATO’s eastward march will stop, that Ukraine and Georgia in particular will not be invited to join NATO, and that advanced weapons systems will not be placed at Russia’s doorstep. These are neither more nor less than the verbal guarantees the Soviet Union was given in 1990 by the duplicitous Bush and Thatcher governments, guarantees that have been systematically violated ever since. They are neither more nor less than what President John F. Kennedy demanded of Chairman Nikita Khrushchev during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, which was successfully defused by the deft back-channel negotiations of JFK’s personal envoy, his brother and Attorney General, Robert Kennedy, out of sight of the pro-war military-industrial complex. It is urgently necessary that the United States and NATO promptly sign those proposed documents with Russia—and step back from the edge of thermonuclear extinction. What we chronicle below has been happening, step by step, while most Americans have been asleep at the switch. It is time to wake up, before we sleepwalk into thermonuclear World War III. The Military Component The collapse of the socialist states of Eastern Europe and then the Soviet Union in 1989-91 was a moment of great hope, for an end of the Cold War and the potential for the parties of the Cold War to cooperate in building a new world order based on peace through development. That moment was lost when the Anglo-American elite chose instead to declare itself “the only superpower” in a unipolar world, looting Russia and the former Soviet states, while seeking to either take Russia over, or to crush it. Promises were made to the Soviet Union—and thus to Russia as its recognized legal successor as a nuclear-weapons power—at the outset of this period, all of which have been broken over the past thirty years. Already in February of 1990 in Moscow, then Secretary of State James Baker promised Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachov and Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze that, in the wake of German reunification which came about later that year, if U.S. troops remained in Germany there would be no expansion of NATO “one inch to the East.” (This was confirmed in official U.S. files released in 2017.) At that time, Soviet force structure in East Germany consisted of around 340,000 troops and extensive military infrastructure, weapons, and equipment. The terms of their withdrawal (eventually completed in 1994) and whether or not, under German reunification, NATO forces would replace them in that formerly Soviet-occupied section of Germany, were on the table. Other Eastern European countries, located to the east of East Germany, were still members of the Warsaw Treaty Organization (Warsaw Pact), whose dissolution was not then anticipated; that dissolution happened in July 1991, the month before the Soviet Union itself broke up. But the U.S. Department of Defense was plotting the expansion of NATO eastwards already by October of 1990. Although there were different policies being debated within the U.S. political leadership, planning for expansion was proceeding behind the scenes. On the surface, Russian relations with the trans-Atlantic powers remained non-adversarial for most of the 1990s. In the economic sphere, however, the “takeover” proceeded apace, with the adoption of London- and Wall Street-engineered economic reforms that resulted in the large-scale deindustrialization of Russia, and could have led to the annihilation of its military might. There was some planned dismantling of nuclear weapons in both East and West, with U.S. specialists providing on-site assistance in the transfer of nuclear weapons from Ukraine, Belarus and other now independent ex-Soviet areas back to Russia, as well as in the disposal of some of Russia’s own weapons. On May 27, 1997, the NATO-Russia Founding Act1 was signed, establishing the NATO-Russia Council and other consultation mechanisms. Among other things, the document declared that “NATO and Russia do not consider each other as adversaries.” (Sec. 2, Para. 2) NATO described the document as “the expression of an enduring commitment, undertaken at the highest political level, to build, together, a lasting and inclusive peace in the Euro-Atlantic area.” (Sec. 2, Para. 2) Nonetheless, a shift began to occur in the late 1990s, driven by several events. One was that the imported economic reforms, promoting enormous financial speculation and the looting of Russian resources, led to a blow-out in August 1998 of the Russian government bond market (nearly triggering a meltdown of the global financial system because of bad bets placed on Russian securities by Wall Street and other hedge funds, as ex-Director of the International Monetary Fund Michel Camdessus later acknowledged). In the wake of that collapse, Russia’s London- and Chicago-trained liberal “young reformers” were replaced by a government under the leadership of former Foreign Minister Yevgeny Primakov and military-industrial planner Yuri Maslyukov, who acted swiftly to stem the collapse of the remainder of Russia’s industry. A second factor in Russia’s troubles at that time was the escalation of terrorist separatist movements in Russia’s North Caucasus region, which Russian intelligence services had solidly identified as being backed and egged on not only by Wahhabite Islamic fundamentalists from Saudi Arabia, but also by U.S. and UK intelligence agencies directly. In summer 1999, these networks attempted to split the entire North Caucasus out of Russia. Also in the late 1990s, NATO boosted its involvement in the Bosnian War and other Balkan Peninsula conflicts among the former components of Yugoslavia, which had broken up. This meddling peaked with NATO’s bombing of Belgrade, the capital of Serbia, in March-June 1999 without authorization of the United Nations Security Council. This action shocked Moscow with the realization that NATO was prepared to act unilaterally, as it wished, without international consensus. In July 1997, at a NATO Summit in Madrid, Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic were invited to join NATO, which they formally did in 1999. This was the first of five rounds of NATO expansion. In 2004, all three Baltic countries (formerly republics within the Soviet Union proper), and Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia were admitted. Four more Balkan countries joined in the years following, bringing NATO’s membership up to its current level of 30 countries. Vladimir Putin, in his Dec. 21, 2021 address to an expanded meeting of the Defense Ministry Board, expressed Moscow’s view of the importance of the NATO-Russia Founding Act and its subsequent betrayal by NATO: Take the recent past, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when we were told that our concerns about NATO’s potential expansion eastwards were absolutely groundless. And then we saw five waves of the bloc’s eastward expansion. Do you remember how it happened? All of you are adults. It happened at a time when Russia’s relations with the United States and main member states of NATO were cloudless, if not completely allied. I have already said this in public and will remind you of this again: American specialists were permanently present at the nuclear arms facilities of the Russian Federation. They went to their office there every day, had desks and an American flag. Wasn’t this enough? What else is required? U.S. advisors worked in the Russian government—career CIA officers, [who] gave their advice. What else did they want? What was the point of supporting separatism in the North Caucasus, with the help of even ISIS—well, if not ISIS, there were other terrorist groups. They obviously supported terrorists. What for? What was the point of expanding NATO and withdrawing from the ABM Treaty? As Putin noted, the United States, under the George W. Bush Administration, began to dismantle the system of strategic arms control assembled during the Cold War, beginning in 2002 with the U.S. withdrawal from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty, just a few months after Putin had extended an offer of strategic cooperation with the United States following the 9/11 attacks. The U.S. administration quickly began planning for a global ballistic missile defense system (BMDS) in Europe and Asia, which in Europe led to the first sailing of an American guided missile destroyer equipped with the Aegis anti-missile missiles (the USS Arleigh Burke) into the Black Sea in the spring of 2012. In 2016 would come the inauguration of an “Aegis Ashore” installation—the same system, but land-based—in Romania, and the start of construction of a similar site in Poland. At a conference in Moscow in May of 2012, then Deputy Chief of the Russian General Staff Gen. Valery Gerasimov provided extensive documentation, with video animations, of the fact that the BMDS was not aimed primarily at Iran, but did, in its intended later phases, represent a threat to Russia’s strategic deterrent. Putin and other Russian officials have also emphasized the possibility of the defensive (anti-missile) systems being quickly reconfigured as missile launchers for direct attack. An increasingly sharper Russian response to the U.S./NATO pursuit of these programs and to the rejection of Russia’s offers of cooperation was also evident in the contrast between two speeches President Putin gave in Germany: before the Bundestag (Parliament) on September 25, 2001, and at the Munich Security Conference in 2007. Putin spoke to the Bundestag, in German, just two weeks after the 9/11 terrorist attack on the U.S. in 2001. He had called President Bush within hours of that attack—he was the first foreign leader to call—offering full Russian support for the U.S. in the moment of crisis. He told the Germans: “The Cold War is over,” and posed a vision of global collaboration in building a new paradigm based on collaboration of the nations of the world. Then on February 10, 2007, Putin delivered a landmark speech at the annual Munich Security Conference. The Western media and some people who were present, including the war-monger U.S. Senator John McCain, denounced it as belligerent, and it became a point of departure for the subsequent demonization of Putin. But it was not an aggressive speech. Putin simply made clear that Russia was not going to be trampled underfoot, as a subjugated nation in a unipolar imperial world. Almost all international media ignored how he opened the speech, with a carefully chosen quotation from Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Fireside Chat of September 3,1939, two days after the Nazi invasion of Poland that had marked the outbreak of World War II. FDR said, and Putin quoted, “When peace has been broken anywhere, the peace of all countries everywhere is in danger.” This speech was the signal that, speaking in strategic terms, Russia was “back.” In July 2007, Putin attempted to avert the crossing of a line that Moscow defined as a fundamental threat to Russian security, namely the installation of the American BMDS directly at Russia’s borders. Visiting President George W. Bush in Kennebunkport, Maine, he proposed joint Russian-American development and deployment of anti-missile systems, including an offer to the U.S. administration to use the Russian early-warning radar in Gabala, Azerbaijan as part of a mutual Russian-American missile defense system for Europe, instead of the American BMDS planned for installation in Poland and the Czech Republic (the latter was changed to Romania). Putin also offered to give the U.S. access to a radar facility in southern Russia, and to place coordination of the process with the NATO-Russia Council. Sergei Ivanov, then a deputy prime minister, said that the Russian proposals signified a fundamental change in international relations, and could mean an end to talk about a new Cold War: If our proposals are accepted, Russia will no longer need to place new weapons, including missiles, in the European part of the country, including Kaliningrad. Negotiations between Russian and American officials over the Russian proposal were conducted throughout 2008, before petering out. Key to their failure was the vehemence of Washington’s refusal to abandon construction of the BMDS. In the words of then Acting Assistant Secretary of State for Political Military Affairs Stephen Mull: What we do not accept is that Gabala is a substitute for the plans that we’re already pursuing with our Czech and Polish allies. We believe that those installations are necessary for the security of our interests in Europe. Clearly, the target was not Iran, but Russia, and the opportunity for a new paradigm was lost. At the April 2008 NATO summit in Bucharest, Georgia and Ukraine were promised future NATO membership, although they were not offered formal Membership Action Plans (MAP). Their bids, nonetheless, were welcomed by many and they were left with hopes of MAPs in the future, maybe the near future—enough so that the Georgians declared: The decision to accept that we are going forward to an adhesion to NATO was taken and we consider this is a historic success. In August 2008, while President Dmitri Medvedev was on vacation and then Prime Minister Putin was at the opening of the Olympic Games in Beijing, Mikheil Saakashvili’s Georgia attacked Russian peacekeepers in the breakaway Georgian province of South Ossetia, leading to a short but ferocious war, which Georgia lost. The fact that Saakashvili acted on the assumption he would have full NATO backing, although it proved wrong in the event, was not lost on Moscow and has influenced subsequent Russian thinking about what would happen with Georgia or Ukraine becoming full NATO members. Ukraine In December 2008, in the wake of Georgia’s military showdown with Russia, Carl Bildt and Radek Sikorski, the foreign ministers of Sweden and Poland, respectively, initiated the European Union’s “Eastern Partnership.” It targeted six countries that were formerly republics within the Soviet Union: three in the Caucasus region (Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia) and three in East Central Europe (Belarus, Moldova, Ukraine). They were not to be invited to full EU membership, but were nevertheless drawn into a vise through so-called EU Association Agreements (EUAA), each one centered on a Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Agreement (DCFTA). The prime target of the effort was Ukraine. Under the EUAA negotiated with Ukraine, but not immediately signed, the country’s industrial economy would be dismantled, trade with Russia savaged (with Russia ending its free-trade regime with Ukraine to prevent its own markets from being flooded via Ukraine), and EU-based market players would grab Ukraine’s agricultural and raw materials exports. Furthermore, the EUAA mandated “convergence” on security issues, with integration into European defense systems. Under such an arrangement, the long-term treaty agreements on the Russian Navy’s use of its crucial Black Sea ports on the Crimean Peninsula—a Russian area since the 18th Century, but administratively assigned to Ukraine within the USSR in the early 1950s—would be terminated, ultimately giving NATO forward-basing on Russia’s immediate border. Turning Ukraine against Russia had been a long-term goal of Cold War Anglo-American strategic planners, as it was earlier of Austro-Hungarian imperial intelligence agencies during World War I. After World War II, up until the mid-1950s, the U.S.A. and UK supported an insurgency against the Soviet Union, a civil war that continued on the ground long after peace had been signed in 1945. The insurgents were from the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and remnants of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA). The OUN had been founded in 1929 from a template similar to that which produced the Italian and other European fascist movements. Its leader, Stepan Bandera, was an on-again/off-again ally of the Nazis, and the OUN-UPA, under an ethnic-purist ideology, committed mass slaughter of ethnic Poles and Jews in western Ukraine towards the end of World War II. In Europe after the War, Bandera was sponsored by British MI6 (intelligence), while CIA founder Allen Dulles shepherded Gen. Mykola Lebed, another OUN leader, into the U.S.A., despite strong opposition from U.S. Army Intelligence, based on Lebed’s record of collaboration with the Nazis and war crimes. Next-generation followers of Lebed, whose base of operations—the Prolog Research Corporation in New York City—was funded by Dulles’s CIA for intelligence-gathering and the distribution of nationalist and other literature inside the U.S.S.R., staffed the U.S. Radio Liberty facility in Munich, Germany for broadcasting into Ukraine, up into the 1980s.2 When the U.S.S.R. broke up in August 1991, key Banderite leaders dashed into Lviv, far western Ukraine—a mere 1,240 km from Munich, 12 hours by car—and began to rebuild their movement. Lviv Region, which for many years had been part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, not the Russian, was the stronghold of the OUN’s heirs. The Banderites’ influence got a boost after the 2004 Orange Revolution in Kiev. Backed by the U.S. National Endowment for Democracy and the private foundations of financier George Soros, this was a so-called “color revolution,” which overturned the results of a Presidential election and, in a second vote, installed banker Victor Yushchenko as President. He was voted out in 2010 because of popular opposition to his brutal austerity policies (generated by IMF-dictated formulae for privatization and deregulation), but not before overseeing a revision of the official history of Ukraine’s relations with Russia in favor of a radical, anti-Russian nationalism (whereas, historically, there had been a strong tendency among Ukrainian patriots and advocates of independence to prefer a long-term alliance with Russia). The Lviv-based Banderites, meanwhile, recruited and strengthened their movement, and held paramilitary summer camps for young people in the Ukrainian countryside and elsewhere in Eastern Europe. At times, the instructors included off-duty military officers from NATO countries. In 2008, Yushchenko first applied for NATO to grant Ukraine a Membership Action Plan. The turning point for Ukraine’s status as a potential trigger in the current war danger came in 2014. Ongoing efforts to get Ukraine to finalize its EUAA were rejected as untenable by the Viktor Yanukovych government in November 2013, when it became clear that free-trade provisions giving European goods unlimited access to the Russian market through Ukraine would bring retaliatory measures by Ukraine’s biggest trade partner, Russia, to counter this assault on Russia’s own producers, and thus would backfire against the Ukrainian economy. When Yanukovych on November 21 announced postponement of the EU deal, long-laid Banderite plans to turn Ukraine into a tool for isolating and demonizing Russia were activated. Protesters against Yanukovych’s EUAA postponement decision immediately began to assemble in Kiev’s Maidan (central square). Large numbers of ordinary people turned out, waving EU flags, because of the destruction of the Ukrainian economy under “shock” deregulation in the 1990s and the IMF-dictated policies of privatization and austerity throughout the Orange Revolution years. Many had desperately believed, as Ukrainian economist Natalia Vitrenko once put it, that the EUAA would bring them “wages like in Germany and benefits packages like in France.” A disproportionately high number of the demonstrators hailed from far western Ukraine, and pre-planned violence by the Banderite paramilitary group Right Sector was then used for systematic escalation of the Maidan. Bloodshed and victims, all blamed on the regime, were then used to keep Maidan fervor and outrage going through to February 2014.3 Neo-Nazi and other fascist symbols defaced building walls and placards in the Maidan, but they did not deter public U.S. support of this process. Sen. John McCain addressed the mob in December 2013, while Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland passed out cupcakes and negotiated with the U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt regarding whom to place in office once Yanukovych was ousted. A Nuland-Pyatt phone discussion of this was caught on tape and circulated worldwide. On February 18, 2014, Maidan leaders announced a “peaceful march” on the Supreme Rada (parliament), which turned into an attack and touched off three days of street fighting. Peaking on February 20—a day of sniper fire from high buildings that killed both demonstrators and police—these clashes killed more than 100. Scrupulous research by Ukraine-born Prof. Ivan Katchanovski at the University of Ottawa, using video recordings and other direct evidence of these events, has convincingly shown that the majority of the sniper fire came from the Maidan’s paramilitary positions, not the government’s Berkut special police forces.4 On February 21, 2014, a trio of Maidan leaders, including Arseniy Yatsenyuk, the man hand-picked by Nuland to be Ukraine’s next prime minister, signed an agreement with President Yanukovych, committing both sides to a peaceful transition of power: constitutional reform by September, presidential elections late in the year, and the turning in of weapons. The foreign ministers of France, Germany and Russia helped negotiate it, with a representative from Moscow as an observer. When this document was taken to the Maidan, a young Banderite militant seized the onstage microphone to lead its rejection by the mob, and threatened Yanukovych’s life if he didn’t step down by morning. Yanukovych left Kiev that night. The Rada unconstitutionally installed an acting president. Among the new government’s first measures was for the Rada to strip Russian and other “minority” languages of their status as regional official languages. (As of the 2001 census, Russian was spoken throughout the country and considered “native” by one-third of the population.) This, with other measures announced from Kiev, fanned major opposition to the coup, centered in eastern Ukraine—the Donetsk and Luhansk regions (the Donbas) and Crimea. Civil conflict erupted in both areas, with local groups seizing government buildings. In Crimea, the insurgency against the coup-installed Kiev regime prevailed. A referendum held March 16, 2014 in the Autonomous Republic of Crimea and the city of Sevastopol (a separate jurisdiction on the peninsula), asked voters whether they wanted to join the Russian Federation or retain Crimea’s status as a part of Ukraine. In Crimea, 97% of the 83% of eligible voters who turned out, voted for integration into the Russian Federation; in Sevastopol, the result was likewise 97% for integration, while the turnout was even higher, at 89%. There was no “Russian military invasion of Ukraine.” On March 1 President Putin sought and received authorization from the Federal Assembly (the legislature) to deploy Russian forces on Ukrainian territory, citing threats to the lives of Russian citizens and Russian-ethnic residents of Crimea; these were troops from the Russian Black Sea Fleet facilities in and around Sevastopol, already stationed in Crimea. The fate of two Donbas self-declared republics in Donetsk and Luhansk Oblasts (Regions), was not settled so quickly. Support from within Russia for these insurgents was unofficial, including the involvement of Russian military veterans on a volunteer basis. The Donbas conflict turned into heavy fighting in 2014-15, continuing at a lower level until now; more than 13,000 people have been killed in the past seven years. Defeats of Kiev’s forces by the Donbas militia, including their gaining full control of the Donetsk International Airport in January 2015, set the stage for Kiev’s agreement to a ceasefire. After one false start—the so-called Minsk Protocol in September 2014—an interim state of affairs in the Donbas was agreed to in the February 2015 “Minsk II” accord between the regime in Kiev, then under President Peter Poroshenko, and representatives of the self-declared Donbas republics, which was negotiated by Kiev, France, Germany and Russia with support from the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE). It provided for a ceasefire, pullback of weapons, prisoner exchanges, and humanitarian relief, as well as a political settlement within Ukraine. This envisaged a special status for the Donbas, with extensive regional autonomy including the “right of linguistic self-determination.” Re-establishment of Ukraine’s “full control” over its border with Russia in the Donbas was to occur following provisional granting of the special status and after local elections. The special status was to be enshrined in the Ukrainian Constitution by the end of 2015. The UN Security Council endorsed Minsk II on February 17, 2015. It remains unimplemented, because Kiev almost immediately refused to conduct the elections or fully legalize the special status, until first being given control over the Donbas-Russia border. Today, President Volodymyr Zelensky’s government in Kiev refuses even to meet with Donbas leaders for negotiations, and continues to claim that the Donbas is under Russian “occupation,” and therefore Kiev should talk only with Russia, not the Donbas leaders. Sporadic fighting has continued, with a new escalation of shelling across the “line of contact” between the Donbas entities and the rest of Ukraine. A New U.S. War Posture The Trump Administration accelerated the take-down of the entire architecture of international arms-control agreements by withdrawing the U.S. from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, signed by President Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachov in 1987, and the Open Skies Treaty, negotiated by NATO and the Warsaw Pact nations in 1992. This left the New START Treaty (Measures for the Further Reduction and Limitation of Strategic Offensive Arms, signed by the U.S. and the Russian Federation in 2010) as the last of the existing arms control agreements—the one covering heavy intercontinental missiles. Upon taking office this year, President Joe Biden extended the New START Treaty for five years, a decision welcomed by Moscow. On January 19, 2018, the U.S. Department of Defense released its new National Defense Strategy. “Great power competition—not terrorism—is now the primary focus of U.S. national security,” said the then Secretary of Defense James Mattis in a speech describing the document: We face growing threats from revisionist powers as different as China and Russia, nations that seek to create a world consistent with their authoritarian models—pursuing veto authority over other nations’ economic, diplomatic, and security decisions. Hours later, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said, in response to the release of the new Pentagon strategy: We regret that, instead of conducting a normal dialogue, instead of relying on international law, the United States seeks to prove its leadership through confrontational concepts and strategies. All throughout this time period, Moscow has protested these confrontational actions, but to no avail. “Despite our numerous protests and pleas, the American machine has been set into motion, the conveyer belt is moving forward,” Russian President Vladimir Putin said in his dramatic March 1, 2018 address to the Federal Assembly, in which he publicly announced the new generation of strategic weapons that Russia had under development, at least two of which, the Avangard hypersonic glide vehicle for ICBMs and the Kinzhal aeroballistic missile, have since been introduced into service. The Economic Component Beginning in March 2014, right after the February 2014 coup in Kiev, the United States imposed financial and economic sanctions on Russia, purportedly over Crimea and the Donbas republics. These sanctions have included five Acts of Congess, six Presidential Executive Orders, ten “Directives pursuant to Executive Orders” and two additional Presidential “Determinations.” This, according to the Treasury Department’s sanctions list. There have of course been other sanctions, property seizures, diplomatic expulsions for other alleged reasons, as well as other forms of economic warfare. All of the Ukraine/Crimea-related sanctions remain in effect; none have been lifted. The last major new round of sanctions was imposed in 2018 (the CAATSA Act), coinciding with new sanctions over the Sergei Skripal poisoning case. According to various estimates, the resultant cost to Russia’s economy of all of these sanctions (in GDP accounting) has been in the range of $250-400 billion, with comparable losses imposed on European economies. In addition, in 2016 and 2017, President Putin accused the Barack Obama Administration of having conspired with Saudi Arabia to lower the price of oil and thereby damage the Russian economy. During the Trump Administration, that appeared not to continue, as Russia and Saudi Arabia made two significant production-pricing agreements on oil, the second in 2019 with Trump Administration participation of some kind. In 2021, the crisis came to a head. 2021 TimelineFebruary 2: The U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings published an article by Adm. Charles A. Richard, Commander of the U.S. Strategic Command, in which he claimed that the risk of nuclear war with Russia or China was increasing and called for action. There is a real possibility that a regional crisis with Russia or China could escalate quickly to a conflict involving nuclear weapons, if they perceived a conventional loss would threaten the regime or state. Consequently, the U.S. military must shift its principal assumption from “nuclear employment is not possible” to “nuclear employment is a very real possibility,” and act to meet and deter that reality. March 15: The U.S. Army-led DEFENDER-Europe 21 exercise began and ran through the month of June, involving 28,000 troops from 27 different countries. The exercise included “nearly simultaneous operations across more than 30 training areas” in a dozen countries, reported Army Times. March 16: The UK Government of Prime Minister Boris Johnson released its Integrated Review of security, defense, development, and foreign policy. The report, among other things, announced that the UK nuclear warhead stockpile would be increased from 180 to 260 warheads. This was decided “in recognition of the evolving security environment, including the developing range of technological and doctrinal threats….” April 1: U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin called Ukrainian Defense Minister Andriy Taran “to discuss the regional security situation,” the Pentagon reported, condemning the supposed “escalations of Russian aggressive and provocative actions in eastern Ukraine.” Austin assured Taran: Washington will not give up on Ukraine in case Russia escalates aggression. [And] in the event of an escalation of Russian aggression, the United States will not leave Ukraine to its own devices, and neither will it allow Russia’s aggressive aspirations toward Ukraine to be realized. April 13: Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu visited Northern Fleet headquarters in Severomorsk, where he said that the United States and its NATO allies were building up naval and land forces in the Arctic, increasing the intensity of combat training, and expanding and modernizing military infrastructure. This activity is typical not only for the Arctic region. Over the past three years, the North Atlantic bloc has increased its military activity near the Russian borders. Shoigu then commented on the DEFENDER-Europe 21 exercise: Now American troops are being transferred from the continental part of North America across the Atlantic to Europe. There is a movement of troops in Europe to the Russian borders. The main forces are concentrated in the Black Sea region and the Baltic region…. In total, 40,000 military personnel and 15,000 units of weapons and military equipment, including strategic aviation, will be concentrated near our territory…. In response to the Alliance’s military activities threatening Russia, we have taken appropriate measures. Within three weeks, two Russian armies and three formations of the airborne troops were successfully transferred to the western borders of the Russian Federation performing combat training tasks. The troops have shown full readiness and ability to perform tasks to ensure the military security of the country. April 15: The Biden White House issued an Executive Order (EO 14024) proclaiming that Russia’s various so-called malign actions “constitute an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States.” That EO contained a series of new sanctions against Russia, including expelling ten diplomats, blacklisting six Russian technology companies, sanctioning 32 entities and individuals, and—most importantly—prohibiting U.S. financial institutions from participating in the primary market for ruble or non-ruble denominated bonds issued after June 14, 2021, by the Russian government and its financial institutions. The explicitly stated purpose of the measures was to trigger voluminous capital flight and a “negative feedback loop” that would wreak havoc on the Russian economy. A background briefing by an unnamed senior administration official elaborated: There are elements of this new EO that give us additional authorities that we are not exercising today … We are prepared, going forward, to impose substantial and lasting costs if this [Russian] behavior continues or escalates … We’re also delivering a clear signal that the President has maximum flexibility to expand the sovereign debt prohibitions if Russia’s maligned [sic] activities continue or escalate. The latter was widely understood as a threat that further sanctions could follow barring participation in the far more important secondary bond market, and even escalate to the so-called “nuclear option” of expelling Russia from SWIFT.5 June 14: The EO announced on April 15, 2021 officially went into effect—two days before the June 16, 2021 summit between presidents Biden and Putin. June 23: The Russian Defense Ministry announced that a Russian warship fired warning shots at the Royal Navy destroyer HMS Defender, which it said had violated Russia’s maritime border around Crimea in the Black Sea. HMS Defender had entered waters in the vicinity of Crimea’s Cape Fiolent that are within Russian sovereign territory, and it had ignored warnings to depart the area. Not mentioned in the press coverage but visible on flight tracking websites was an U.S. Air Force RC-135V electronic intelligence aircraft, which was rounding the west coast of Crimea at the time of the Russian naval encounter with the Defender. The BBC, which had one of its own reporters on board the British warship, confirmed that the HMS Defender deliberately entered waters claimed by Russia in order to provoke a response from Russian forces: This would be a deliberate move to make a point to Russia. HMS Defender was going to sail within the 19 km (12 mile) limit of Crimea’s territorial waters. June 23: Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu again warned of the strategic danger facing Europe in an address to the Moscow Conference on International Security: As a whole, the situation in Europe is explosive and requires specific steps to de-escalate it. The Russian side has proposed a number of measures. For example, it put forward a proposal to move the areas of drills away from the contact line. Shoigu also pointed to Russia’s proposal for a moratorium on the deployment of intermediate- and shorter-range missiles in Europe, calling them “a special danger” for Europe because their deployment in Europe “will return to the situation, when the Europeans were hostage to the confrontation between the U.S.S.R. and the U.S.A.” Speaking at the same conference, Gen. Valeriy Gerasimov, the chief of the Russian General Staff, pointed to NATO as a destabilizing factor: NATO’s naval activity near our borders has grown considerably. Warships outfitted with long-range precision weapons are operating in the Black and Baltic Seas constantly, while reconnaissance, patrol and attack aircraft and also unmanned aerial vehicles are performing their flights. The operations by the warships of the United States and its allies are clearly of a provocative nature…. Preconditions are being created for the emergence of incidents, which does not contribute to reducing military tensions. September 20: NATO kicked off Exercise Rapid Trident 21 at the Yavoriv training range in western Ukraine, with 6,000 troops from 15 countries, including 300 from the U.S. The drills are “an important step towards Ukraine’s European integration,” said Brigadier General Vladyslav Klochkov, co-director of the exercises. October 6: NATO ordered the expulsion of eight diplomats from the Russian mission at NATO headquarters in Brussels, alleging that they were “undeclared Russian intelligence officers.” Moscow retaliated Oct 18 by announcing that Russia’s mission to NATO would shut down and the NATO information office in Moscow would be closed and its staff stripped of their accreditation. “If anyone ever believed in the sincerity of those statements [from NATO], there are none left today. Their true price is clear for everyone,” said Russian Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Alexander Grushko, in response to the NATO action. October 19: U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin landed in Kiev and, speaking at a press conference at the Defense Ministry, promised the regime’s leaders that the U.S. will back it in its conflict with Russia: Let me underscore what President Biden said during President Zelensky’s recent visit to Washington. U.S. support for Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity is unwavering. So, we again call on Russia to end its occupation of Crimea … to stop perpetuating the war in eastern Ukraine … to end its destabilizing activities in the Black Sea and along Ukraine’s borders … and to halt its persistent cyber-attacks and other malign activities against the United States, and our Allies and partners. He noted that the U.S. has spent $2.5 billion in support of Ukraine’s military forces “so that they can preserve their country’s territorial integrity and secure its borders and territorial waters.” “I think our posture in the region continues to present a credible threat against Russia and it enables NATO forces to operate more effectively should deterrence fail,” Austin said the following day in Romania. “And I think this is borne out of our commitment to sustaining a rotational U.S. force presence.” October 21: The NATO defense ministers, on the first day of their meeting in Brussels, endorsed “a new overarching plan to defend our Alliance.…” The new plan includes: “significant improvements to our air and missile defenses, strengthening our conventional capabilities with fifth generation jets, adapting our exercises and intelligence, and improving the readiness and effectiveness of our nuclear deterrent.” NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said that the alliance has been increasing its presence on the Black Sea, “because the Black Sea is of strategic importance for NATO.” October 21: Putin warned in a speech to the Valdai Discussion Club in Sochi that Ukraine doesn’t even have to be formally brought into the NATO alliance to pose a strategic threat to Russia: Formal membership in NATO ultimately may not happen, but the military development of the territory is already underway. And this really poses a threat to the Russian Federation … Tomorrow, rockets could appear near Kharkov, what are we going to do about it? It’s not us placing our missiles there, it’s them shoving theirs under our nose. Putin cited NATO’s promise not to move its infrastructure eastwards after the reunification of Germany, a promise which it did not keep: Everyone from all sides said that after the unification, in no circumstances would NATO infrastructure move toward the East. Russia should have been able to at least rely on that. That’s what they said, there were public statements. But in practice? They lied … and then they expanded it once, and then they expanded it again. October 30:The Washington Post, citing unnamed officials, reported that the Russians were engaged in another buildup of troops along the border with Ukraine. The article’s authors said the troop movements have reignited concerns that arose in April. “The point is: It is not a drill. It doesn’t appear to be a training exercise. Something is happening. What is it?” said Michael Kofman, Program Director of the Russia Studies Program at the Virginia-based nonprofit analysis group CNA. November 1:Politico published satellite imagery purporting to show a Russian troop buildup near the Ukrainian border, including armored units, tanks, and self-propelled artillery, along with ground troops massing near the Russian town of Yelnya close to the border with Belarus. Elements of the 1st Guards Tank Army were spotted in the area. The army “has been designed to conduct operations at every level of combat from counterinsurgency to mechanized warfare,” Jane’s analysis reported. Even the Ukrainian Defense Ministry denied the reported Russian military buildup, stating officially: “As of November 1, 2021, an additional transfer of Russian units, weapons and military equipment to the state border of Ukraine was not recorded.” November 2: The Russian Security Council announced that CIA Director William Burns was in Moscow for two days of talks with Nikolai Patrushev, Secretary of the Security Council. According to leaks reported by CNN on November Nov. 5, Biden sent Burns to Moscow to tell the Russians to stop their troop buildup near Ukraine’s border, which the U.S. was monitoring closely. November 8: For the first time, a Resolution passed by both Houses of Congress voiced the demand for “crushing sanctions” on Russia’s economy, purportedly to stop the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, because, in the words of Sen. James Risch, “Russia is creating and weaponizing this energy crisis.” Sen. Ron Johnson said the U.S should “use crushing sanctions to stop the pipeline.” Sen. Tom Cotton added: “The Nord Stream 2 pipeline will expand Russian influence and threaten energy security throughout Europe. Since the Biden administration won’t hold Putin accountable, Congress must take action to ensure our NATO allies aren’t hostage to Russian energy.” November 11: Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov warned that Russia is prepared to act against any NATO provocations: If necessary, we will take measures to ensure our security if there are provocative actions by our opponents near our borders. I’m referring to NATO and NATO forces that are taking rather active and assertive actions in close proximity to our borders, be it in the air, on water, or on land. November 16: British Defense Secretary Ben Wallace met in Kiev with Ukrainian President Zelensky, and signed a joint statement with Ukraine Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov. Zelensky “thanked Ben Wallace for the unwavering support of the UK for the independence and territorial integrity of our country within its internationally recognized borders,” according to a statement issued by his office. Zelensky “also praised the signing of the Ukrainian-British Bilateral Framework Agreement on official credit support for the development of the Ukrainian fleet’s capabilities: The United Kingdom has become our key partner in building the Ukrainian fleet. I expect that future security projects planned under this agreement will be effectively implemented. November 18: During an address to a meeting of the Russian Foreign Policy Board, President Putin protested the repeated flights of U.S. bombers close to Russia’s borders: Indeed, we constantly express our concerns about these matters and talk about red lines, but of course, we understand that our partners are peculiar in the sense that they have a very—how to put it mildly—superficial approach to our warnings about red lines. Putin repeated that Russian concerns about NATO’s eastward expansion “have been totally ignored.” November 19: U.S. Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines landed in Brussels to brief NATO ambassadors on U.S. intelligence on the situation and the possibility of a Russian military intervention in Ukraine. NATO’s Stoltenberg suggested that if the new German government (which was still the subject of coalition negotiations) were to pull out of the NATO nuclear sharing arrangement, the B61 nuclear bombs currently stored in Germany could be moved eastwards: Of course, it’s up to Germany to decide whether the nuclear arms will be deployed in this country, but there’s an alternative to this; the nuclear arms may easily end up in other European countries, including these to the east of Germany. That is, even closer to Russia’s border. November 20: Ukrainian military intelligence chief Brig. Gen. Kyrylo Budanov told Military Times, on the sidelines of the Halifax International Security Conference, that Russia has more than 92,000 troops massed near Russia’s border with Ukraine and is preparing for an attack by the end of January or beginning of February 2022. November 21: Bloomberg published a report citing unnamed sources saying that the U.S. had shared intelligence including maps with European allies that shows a buildup of 100,000 Russian troops and artillery to prepare for a rapid, large-scale push into Ukraine from multiple locations, should Putin decide to invade. November 30: Radio Free Europe reported that U.S. Republicans had blocked voting on the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) until Nord Stream 2 sanctions were added to it, objecting that the Russia-to-Germany Baltic Sea pipeline will deny billions in annual revenue to “ally” Ukraine. (The overland pipeline from Yamal in Siberia to Europe traverses Ukraine, which collects transit fees.) December 5: Neo-con Democrat Michèle Flournoy, former Under Secretary of Defense for Policy under President Barack Obama, appeared on “Fox News Sunday” and declared that President Biden, in his upcoming December 7 video-conference summit with Putin, was going to threaten “much more severe” financial/economic sanctions on Russia than anything previously done: [What] the administration is actively considering with our allies, is an escalating set of sanctions that go beyond what’s been done before. I’m sure they are looking at sanctioning the banking system, sanctioning the energy sector, possibly cutting off Russia from the SWIFT system,@5 which enables all of their international financial transactions. So, they’re looking at much more serious means … much greater level of pain than anything [that Russia has faced to date]. December 6: The day before the Biden-Putin video conference, an anonymous senior White House official briefed the press that all NATO allies had agreed on a package of “financial sanctions that would impose significant and severe economic harm on the Russian economy” should Russia invade Ukraine: We believe that there is a way forward here that will allow us to send a clear message to Russia there will be genuine and meaningful and enduring costs to choosing to go forward—should they choose to go forward—with a military escalation…. We have had intensive discussions with our European partners about what we would do collectively in the event of a major Russian military escalation in Ukraine, and we believe that we have a path forward that would involve substantial economic countermeasures by both the Europeans and the United States, We have put together a pretty damn aggressive package. In its coverage, CNN raised the “nuclear option” directly: Officials have also been weighing disconnecting Russia from the SWIFT international payment system, upon which Russia remains heavily reliant, according to two sources familiar with the discussions. This is being considered a “nuclear” option. The European Parliament passed a nonbinding resolution in the spring calling for such a move should Russia invade Ukraine, and the U.S. has been discussing it with EU counterparts. Later the same day, after Biden had personally spoken with European leaders, the White House issued a statement which did not mention financial sanctions or significant economic damage to Russia. It said, “diplomacy is the only way forward to resolve the conflict in Donbas through the implementation of the Minsk Agreements.” December 7: Presidents Biden and Putin held a video conference summit, after which National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan assured the media that Biden— told President Putin directly that if Russia further invades Ukraine, the United States and our European allies would respond with strong economic measures, and would provide additional defensive material to the Ukrainians, above and beyond that which we are already providing, [and that the United States] would fortify our NATO allies on the eastern flank, with additional capabilities in response to such an escalation. Biden himself emphasized later that he was considering Putin’s demand for security guarantees, which later resulted in Russia’s proposals (see below). December 12: The new German Foreign Minister, Annalena Baerbock, declared on a national television interview that the Nord Stream 2 pipeline could not become operational because, according to the German government coalition agreements, the pipeline was not consistent with European energy law. The previous government of Chancellor Angela Merkel had found the opposite. Baerbock, a war-hawk Green Party leader, did not explain the reversal. The Hill pointed out that the Greens want Ukraine in NATO. December 17: The Russian Foreign Ministry released two draft treaties specifying guarantees for Russia’s security, one, an agreement between Russia and NATO, and the other, a treaty between Russia and the United States. Both documents call for recognizing a principle of “non-interference in the internal affairs” of each other, acknowledge that a “direct military clash between them could result in the use of nuclear weapons that would have far-reaching consequences,” reaffirm “that a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought,” and recognize “the need to make every effort to prevent the risk of outbreak of such war among States that possess nuclear weapons.” The operative part of the U.S.-Russia treaty calls for refraining from taking actions “that could undermine core security interests of the other Party.” Cognizant of the drive for NATO-ization of Ukraine, Article 4 states: The United States of America shall undertake to prevent further eastward expansion of NATO and deny accession to the Alliance to the States of the former U.S.S.R. And, The United States of America shall not establish military bases in the territory of the States of the former U.S.S.R. that are not members of NATO, use their infrastructure for any military activities or develop bilateral military cooperation with them. It goes on to state that the Parties (the U.S. and Russia) will not take military actions outside their own borders that threaten each other’s national security, or fly bombers or sail warships outside of their territorial waters in ways that would threaten each other. On the U.S.’ expansion of its nuclear weapons to include those stored in such locations of Germany, the treaty states, The Parties shall refrain from deploying nuclear weapons outside their national territories and return such weapons already deployed … to their national territories. December 19: An anonymous senior White House official told CNN and other media that there was “only about a four-week window” to compel Russia to de-escalate and that U.S.-planned sanctions “would be overwhelming, immediate, and inflict significant costs on the Russian economy and their financial system.” December 21: In an extensive report delivered to an expanded meeting of the Defense Ministry Board, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu stated: Tensions are growing on the western and eastern borders of Russia. The United States is intensifying its military presence at Russian borders. The United States and NATO are purposefully increasing the scale and intensity of military training activities near Russia. Increasingly, they involve strategic aviation, carrying out simulated launches of nuclear missiles at our facilities. The number of their flights near the Russian borders has more than doubled. NATO pays special attention to the issues of the transfer of troops to the eastern flank of the alliance, including from the continental part of the United States. The exercises are practicing various options for using coalition groups against Russia with the use of non-aligned states—Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine. The presence of more than 120 employees of American PMCs [private military companies] in Avdeevka and Priazovskoe settlements in Donetsk region has been reliably established. They equip firing positions in residential buildings and at socially significant facilities, prepare Ukrainian special operations forces and radical armed groups for active hostilities. To commit provocations, tanks with unidentified chemical components were delivered to Avdeevka and Krasny Liman cities. Speaking at that same meeting of the Defense Ministry Board, Russian President Putin himself sounded the alarm: What they [the United States] are doing on the territory of Ukraine now—or trying to do and going to do—this is not thousands of kilometers away from our national border. This is at the doorstep of our home. They must understand that we simply have nowhere to retreat further…. Do they think we don’t see these threats? Or do they think that we are so weak-willed to simply look blankly at the threats posed to Russia? As I have already noted, in the event of the continuation of the obviously aggressive line of our Western colleagues, we will take adequate retaliatory military-technical measures, and react toughly to unfriendly steps. And, I want to emphasize, we have every right to do so, we have every right to take actions designed to ensure the security and sovereignty of Russia…. We are extremely concerned about the deployment of elements of the U.S. global missile defense system near Russia.