Friday 29th of March 2024

pointing the finger...

mattismattis

An adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, Alexey Arestovich, said on Saturday that former president Petro Poroshenko is partly responsible for the ongoing conflict with Russia. The official pointed the finger at Poroshenko’s decision to write NATO aspirations into the country’s constitution.

The clause, outlining Kiev’s pathway to becoming a full-fledged member of the EU and US-led NATO alliance, was added into Ukraine's constitution in February 2019 and shortly before presidential elections. While the move was a pure PR stunt for the former president, it turned out to have long-lasting consequences, Arestovich told local media.

“When Poroshenko introduced this, it was his personal pre-election PR technology. He knew beforehand that NATO would never accept us. Not the least share of the blame for what is happening now in Ukraine lies with those who adopted and promoted this constitutional provision,”he said, implying that those Ukrainian MPs who supported the clause share the blame for it as well. The constitutional change received overwhelming support back then with 334 out of 450 MPs voting for it.

 

Under Poroshenko, the desire to join NATO was also incorporated into the country’s military doctrine in 2015. That document also formally established Russia as a “military adversary” of Kiev.

Ukraine’s NATO aspirations, however, actually date well before the February 2019 constitutional reform. The country was cozying up to the US-led bloc since the late 1990s, sending a “peacekeeping unit” to Iraq in 2002, adopting legislation allowing military access of NATO forces onto its soil in 2004, and so on.

The bloc itself formally recognized Ukraine’s aspirations in 2008, when the alliance announced in the Bucharest Summit Declaration that it welcomed “Ukraine’s and Georgia’s Euro-Atlantic aspirations for membership in NATO.” The summit participants agreed that eventually these countries would “become members of NATO.”

Moscow attacked the neighboring state following a seven-year standoff over Ukraine’s failure to implement the terms of the Minsk ceasefire agreements, and Russia's eventual recognition of the Donbass republics in Donetsk and Lugansk. The German- and French-brokered protocols were designed to regularize the status of the breakaway regions within the Ukrainian state.

Russia has now demanded that Ukraine officially declare itself a neutral country that will never join NATO military bloc. Kiev says the Russian offensive was completely unprovoked and has denied claims it had been planning to retake the two rebellious republics by force.

 

READ MORE:

https://www.rt.com/russia/552297-poroshenko-nato-ukraine-conflict/

 

SEE ALSO:

nazis in neo-liberal suits do some empire building...

 

BACK IN 2017...

 

A scene from Putin’s worst nightmare just unfolded in Ukraine

 

Ukraine celebrated its Independence Day from the former Soviet Union on Thursday with a military parade through central Kiev. 

 

Not only was Defence Secretary James Mattis in attendance, along with eight other foreign defence ministers, but about 230 troops from the US and seven other NATO countries also marched alongside Ukrainian soldiers. 

It was the first time US soldiers ever participated in Ukraine’s Independence Day parade.  

 

 

“We are honored to be here marching alongside other countries showing our support in Ukraine,” 1st Sgt. Clifton Fulkerson said. 

As US troops marched down the street, a wave of cheers and applause reportedly went through the crowd of Ukrainians on hand. 

But not everyone was thrilled with NATO’s involvement. 

“That kind of parade is not a celebration of independence, but rather a show of dependence on the US and NATO,” a pro-Russian Ukrainian politician, Vladimir Oleinik, told Russian media outlet Sputnik, which the Russian Embassy in Canada tweeted. 

“In the reverse, it would be difficult to imagine Poroshenko coming to celebrate the 4th of July in Washington while Ukrainian troops marched in Washington.”

 

 

Two other Russian state owned media outlets, Russia Times and TASS, also uploaded videos headlining NATO’s involvement in the parade.  

The Russian Embassy in Washington D.C. did not immediately respond to Business Insider’s request for comment. 

After the parade, Mattis met with Poroshenko to discuss the possibility of supplying Ukraine with defensive weapons such as the Javelin.

“Have no doubt the United States also stands with Ukraine in all things,” Mattis told reporters while standing next to Poroshenko after they met. “We support you in the face of threats to sovereignty and territorial integrity, and to international law and the international order writ large.”

 

 

“We do not, and we will not, accept Russia’s seizure of the Crimea. And despite Russia’s denials, we know they are seeking to redraw international borders by force, undermining the sovereign and free nations of Europe.”

While he acknowledged that the US just recently approved giving Kiev $US175 million worth of military equipment, he stopped short of saying whether the US would supply Kiev with $US50 million worth of anti-tank missile systems. 

“I prefer not to answer that right now,” Mattis said, adding that the proposal is under review. 

Supplying Ukraine with anti-tank missiles and other defensive weapons has been a controversial proposition. Former President Obama did not support such a move, arguing that it would provoke Russia. France, Germany and some analysts have expressed the same concerns. 

Many Russian politicians and officials have also spoken out against the plan. 

But Mattis appeared to slightly give away his own take. “Defensive weapons are not provocative unless you’re an aggressor,” he said at the press conference, “and clearly, Ukraine is not an aggressor, since it’s their own territory where the fighting is happening.”

 

READ MORE: https://www.businessinsider.com.au/a-scene-from-putins-worst-nightmare-just-unfolded-in-ukraine-2017-8 

 

 

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trump knew the NATO crap...

 

 by  Jeffrey Goldberg — OCTOBER 2019 ISSUE

 

On December 19 of last year [2018], Admiral Michael Mullen, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, met James Mattis for lunch at the Pentagon. Mattis was a day away from resigning as Donald Trump’s secretary of defense, but he tends to keep his own counsel, and he did not suggest to Mullen, his friend and former commander, that he was thinking of leaving.

 

But Mullen did think Mattis appeared unusually afflicted that day. Mattis often seemed burdened in his role. His aides and friends say he found the president to be of limited cognitive ability, and of generally dubious character. Now Mattis was becoming more and more isolated in the administration, especially since the defenestration of his closest Cabinet ally, the former secretary of state Rex Tillerson, several months earlier. Mattis and Tillerson had together smothered some of Trump’s more extreme and imprudent ideas. But now Mattis was operating without cover. Trump was turning on him publicly; two months earlier, he had speculated that Mattis might be a Democrat and said, in reference to NATO, “I think I know more about it than he does.” (Mattis, as a Marine general, once served as the supreme allied commander in charge of NATO transformation.)\

Mullen told me recently that service in this administration comes with a unique set of hazards, and that Mattis was not unaware of these hazards. “I think back to his ‘Hold the line’ talk, the one that was captured on video,” Mullen said, referring to an impromptu 2017 encounter between Mattis and U.S. troops stationed in Jordan that became a YouTube sensation. In the video, Mattis tells the soldiers, “Our country right now, it’s got problems we don’t have in the military. You just hold the line until our country gets back to understanding and respecting each other and showing it.” Mullen said: “He obviously found himself in a challenging environment.”

Many generals and admirals worried that sustained exposure to Trump would destroy Mattis, who is perhaps the most revered living marine.

Mullen’s concern for Mattis was shared by many other generals and admirals, active duty and retired, who worried that sustained exposure to Trump would destroy their friend, who is perhaps the most revered living marine. Mattis had maintained his dignity in perilous moments, even as his fellow Cabinet officials were relinquishing theirs. At a ritualized praise session at the White House in June 2017, as the vice president and other Cabinet members abased themselves before the president, Mattis would offer only this generic—but, given the circumstances, dissident—thought: “It’s an honor to represent the men and women of the Department of Defense. We are grateful for the sacrifices our people are making in order to strengthen our military, so our diplomats always negotiate from a position of strength.”

To some of his friends, though, Mattis was beginning to place his reputation at risk. He had, in the fall of 2018, acquiesced to Trump’s deployment of troops to the U.S.-Mexico border, and he was becoming contemptuous of a Pentagon press corps that was trying to perform its duty in difficult circumstances. 

By last December, Mattis was facing the most urgent crisis of his nearly two years in the Cabinet. Trump had just announced, contrary to his administration’s stated policy, that he would withdraw all American troops from Syria, where they were fighting the Islamic State. This sudden (and ultimately reversed) policy shift posed a dire challenge to Mattis’s beliefs. He had spent much of his career as a fighter in the Middle East. He had battled Islamist extremists and understood the danger they represented. He believed that a retreat from Syria would threaten the security of American troops elsewhere in the region, and would especially threaten America’s allies in the anti-ISIS coalition. These allies would, in Mattis’s view, feel justifiably betrayed by Trump’s decision.

“I had no idea that he was on the precipice of resigning,” Mullen told me. “But I know how strongly he believes in alliances. The practical reasons become moral reasons. Most of us believe that we’ve moved on as a country from being able to do it alone. We may have had dreams about this in 1992 or 1993, but we’ve moved on. We have to have friends and supporters. And we’re talking about Jim Mattis. He’s not going to change his view on this. He’s not going to leave friends and allies on the battlefield.”

 

READ MORE:

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/10/james-mattis-trump/596665/

 

As mentioned before, Trump did not want to play the US Empire expansionist card any more. Trump wanted to bring the troops home... The establishment hated him and hates him for that... The media and the establishment are working hand in hand to stop trump coming bck to the Presidency of the USA...

 

MEANWHILE:

 

On 16 March, The New York Times finally admitted that Hunter Biden's abandoned "laptop from hell" is worth a story and that emails recovered from it were "authenticated", despite previously overlooking and casting doubt on the New York Post's laptop bombshell in October 2020. 

 

"The NYT piece on Hunter Biden's laptop comes as Joe Biden's presidency is mired in messes of his own making", says Wall Street analyst and investigative journalist Charles Ortel. "Decisions early on to attack fossil fuel production while spending trillions more dollars on fantasy programmes have fuelled historically high inflation rates that threaten a vast majority of Americans who have little savings, mounting debts, and live paycheck to paycheck. Abroad, American errors in foreign policies have been compounded by the arrogant, insolent incompetence of Biden, Harris, and their Cabinet who botched the withdrawal from Afghanistan, opened up our now violent southern border and incite mayhem at many flashpoints, especially in Ukraine now and perhaps soon over Taiwan".

It seems the NYT has finally had enough and now will be amenable to housecleaning well before the looming midterm elections this November, according to the Wall Street analyst.

 

 

https://sputniknews.com/20220319/are-bidens-afghanistan--ukraine-blunders-behind-nyts-change-of-heart-about-hunters-laptop-1094010235.html

 

 

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