Daily Archives: November 28, 2021

NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg is visiting Lithuania and Latvia on Sunday (28 November 2021) together with the President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen, to demonstrate solidarity with NATO Allies and EU member states in the Baltic region, and to further strengthen the cooperation between NATO and the EU.

In Lithuania, the Secretary General had discussions with President Gitanas Nausda and Prime Minister Ingrida imonyt about developments on Lithuania's border and Russia's military build-up near Ukraine. The Secretary General said that, while the Lukashenko regime is exploiting vulnerable people to put pressure on neighbouring countries, "no NATO Ally stands alone." He said that all Allies have expressed solidarity with Lithuania and have provided practical help, including through a recently deployed NATO team of experts to Lithuania to share information, analysis, and experience in countering hybrid threats.

Mr Stoltenberg explained that cooperation between NATO and the European Union is essential to counter this hybrid campaign. "This crisis affects both NATO and the European Union," he said, adding that "Lithuania is a member of both organisations, so it is important for President von der Leyen and me to be here together today. " He recalled that "NATO and the EU work together on a range of security issues, including countering hybrid threats", stressing that "today, we discussed how we could step up our joint work, including though a new joint NATO-EU declaration, because we are stronger and safer when we work together."

On Russia's military build-up near Ukraine, Mr Stoltenberg called on Russia to be transparent, reduce tensions, and de-escalate: "NATO stands ready to defend all Allies, and we will continue to provide our partner Ukraine with political and practical support."

In Latvia, Secretary General Stoltenberg and President von der Leyen had talks with Prime Minister Krijnis Kari. NATO is strongly committed to Latvias security. Including through the presence of our multinational battlegroup in dai, where ten Allies serve alongside Latvian forces, to deter aggression and preserve peace, he said.

On Monday, Mr Stoltenberg will visit the NATO battlegroup in Adai, led by Canada, one of the four NATO multinational battlegroups deployed in the Baltic region and Poland.

The agenda of the joint visit of the Secretary General and the President of the European Commission also includes briefings on current hybrid challenges by the directors of the NATO strategic communications centre of excellence in Riga, the European centre of excellence for countering hybrid threats in Helsinki, and the NATO cooperative cyber defence centre of excellence in Tallinn.

NATO Foreign Ministers will meet in Riga on Tuesday and Wednesday to consult on a wide range of pressing security challenges in the region and beyond.

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Joint NATO-EU visit highlights solidarity and cooperation through visit to Baltic region - NATO HQ

For the second time in a year, Russia is mounting a major military buildup near its border with Ukraine. The last time, in March and April, did not result in an invasion, but Russian leader Vladimir Putin arguably got what he wanted: the worlds attention. In June, U.S. President Joe Biden held a summit with Putin in Geneva that was reminiscent of the Cold War days when Russia was a superpower like the United States.

Putin, who has called the collapse of the Soviet Union the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the [twentieth] century, is eager to restore the level of influence his country has enjoyed, and he has the mineral wealth and military capabilities to achieve his objective. Once again, his military buildup has riveted the world. Headlines proclaim concerns about a Russian invasion of Ukraine and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) iswarning Russiaagainst further aggression.

It seems doubtful that Russia will try to invade and occupy all of Ukraine. Kyiv has an increasingly capable military, and, even if it is defeated, Russia does not want to find itself in another costly guerrilla war like the one in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Putin could more readily expand Russias zone of control in eastern Ukraine, perhaps linking the separatist region of Donbas with Crimea, which was occupied by Russian forces in 2014.

As noted by Eugene Rumer and Andrew S. Weiss of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Ukraine isintegral to Putins hopesof reviving the old empire and creating strategic depth against invasion from the West. Putin published an ominous treatise in July describing Ukraine as an inalienable part of Russia, laying the justification for invading it if he so desires.

How should the United States and its allies respond to the latest threat of aggression against Ukraine? The most powerful deterrent in the Wests arsenal is NATO membership. The only countries that Putin has invadedGeorgia and Ukraineare not NATO members. He has been careful to keep his aggression against NATO members (e.g., disinformation campaigns, cyberattacks, and naval and air operations near members borders) below the threshold of NATOs collective defense provision, known as Article V.

Ukraines pro-West president, Volodymyr Zelensky, has been pressing Washington for a timeline forUkrainian accession to NATO, but he has so far been rebuffed. NATO has repeatedly proclaimed that no outside power (read Russia) will have a veto over NATO expansion, but a de facto Russian veto exists. Putins invasions of Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine in 2014 made those countries too hot to handle for NATO: Most members, including the United States, do not want to expand the alliance to a country that is already locked in hostilities with Russia because they could be drawn into the fight.

But there is a good deal that the United States and its allies can do to buttress Ukraine against Russian aggression even without offering it an Article V guarantee. Biden has been off to a good start in this regard by hosting Zelensky at the White House and making clear that,as he put it, The United States remains firmly committed to Ukraines sovereignty and territorial integrity in the face of Russian aggression.

That is a welcome contrast from the Donald Trump administration, when the president held up military aid to Ukraine to try to force Zelensky to make unwarranted accusations of corruption against then candidate Biden. The United States has resumed military aid to Ukraine, including Javelin anti-tank missilesfirst delivered by the Trump administrationthat would be of great utility in fighting a Russian armored invasion. Since 2014, the United States has provided Ukraine with more than$2.5 billionin military assistance. The latest commitment, $60 million, was announced prior to Zelenskys White House visit.

However, Biden needs to do more to increase the economic cost to Russia of its aggression. One of the biggest points of leverage is the nearly completed Nord Stream 2 pipeline, which will carry natural gas from Russia to Germany underneath the Baltic Sea. It will bypass existing pipelines that run through Ukraine, depriving it of aroundone billion eurosper year in transit payments. Nord Stream 2 will increase Europes dependence on Russian gas and leave Ukraine vulnerable to politically motivated Russian gas shutoffs.

Earlier this year, the Biden administration essentially threw in the towel onNord Stream 2, lifting sanctions on the company building the pipeline and describing its construction as a fait accompli. But now, a German energy regulator has refused to certify the pipeline, raising fresh questions about its future. The Biden administration should reimpose sanctions related to the pipeline, as urged by abipartisan group of lawmakers, while offering to provide Europe with more U.S. natural gas and help in its transition to renewable energy.

John McCain, the late U.S. senator, once described Russia as a gas station masquerading as a country. The most effective way to hurt Putinand protect Ukrainecould be at the pump.

This piece, first published by the Council on Foreign Relations, is used with permission.

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Energize NATO's Response to Russia's Threats Against Ukraine - Defense One

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken speaks about infrastructure investment at the University of Maryland's A. James Clark School of Engineering in College Park, MD, U.S., August 9, 2021. Patrick Semansky/Pool via REUTERS/File Photo

WASHINGTON, Nov 26 (Reuters) - U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken will travel to Latvia and Sweden next week to attend Transatlantic and European security meetings and hold bilateral talks, the State Department said on Friday.

The trip, which will take place between Nov. 29 and Dec. 2, comes at a time of rising tension between Russia and the Western military alliance following a build-up of Russian forces near the border with Ukraine.

While in Riga, Blinken will attend a meeting of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation and hold bilateral talks with NATO counterparts. In the Swedish capital Stockholm, ministers from members of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) will discuss concerns about the Europe-Eurasia region's security environment, the State Department said.

U.S., NATO and Ukrainian officials have raised the alarm in recent weeks over what they say are unusual Russian troop movements closer to Ukraine, suggesting that Moscow may be poised to launch a new attack on its neighbour, accusations Russia has rejected as fear-mongering.

Russia's intentions remain unclear, and East-West tensions are running high with Ukraine, Russia and NATO all conducting military drills and Moscow accusing Washington of rehearsing a nuclear attack on Russia earlier this month.

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Reporting by Humeyra Pamuk and Tim Ahmann, Editing by Timothy Heritage and Philippa Fletcher

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Blinken to visit Latvia and Sweden next week for NATO, OSCE talks - Reuters

Belarusian autocrat Alexander Lukashenko has cleared out the encampment at his border crossing into Poland, where thousands of Middle Eastern migrants had been living in squalor.

Last week, that border crossing was the site of clashes between asylum-seekers trying to push through the razor wire and Polish troops resisting with water cannons.

While the crisis between Warsaw and Minsk has not ended, it appears to have been temporarily eased.

Behind the clash was the recent election in Belarus that the European Union saw as fraudulent and Lukashenko's interception of a commercial airliner to kidnap and imprison a critical journalist.

Lukashenko brought in the migrants from the Mideast and moved them to the border, forcing the Poles to deploy security forces to block their entry. Lukashenko's actions were in retaliation for Poland's support of the sanctions the EU had imposed on Belarus.

So it was that, last week, a NATO ally, Poland, had a confrontation with a close ally of Vladimir Putin's Russia, which could have resulted in a shooting war that could have drawn in Russia and the United States.

While Belarus, perhaps at Putin's insistence, has pulled the migrants back from the border and eased this crisis, the same cannot be said of the crisis developing around Ukraine.

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For days now, U.S. officials have been warning that the 100,000 Russian troops stationed near the borders of Ukraine may be preparing for an invasion.

As Ukraine is not a NATO ally, the U.S. is under no obligation to come to Kyiv's defense. But any Russian invasion to expand the share of Ukraine it now controls could produce a crisis more serious than Putin's annexation of Crimea or support for the separatists in the Donbas.

For Putin, the situation in the Black Sea, where U.S. warships and warplanes lead NATO vessels on regular visitations, must truly stick in the craw.

When Putin was a KGB officer in the last days of the Soviet Empire, Romania and Bulgaria on the Black Sea were Warsaw Pact allies. Ukraine, Georgia and Armenia on the Black Sea were, like Russia itself, Soviet republics of the USSR. NATO Turkey alone excepted, the Black Sea was a Soviet lake.

And today? Romania and Bulgaria are NATO allies of the United States. Ukraine and Georgia, having broken free of the USSR at the end of the Cold War, are independent nations that look to Europe, not Moscow.

The goal of both is become NATO allies under the protection of the U.S. and its nuclear umbrella.

Another consideration: Ukraine and Russia have historic ties -- religious, ethnic, cultural -- that go back 1,000 years.

What Putin sees in Russia's loss of Ukraine and Kyiv's alignment with the U.S. and the West was what Americans of Abraham Lincoln's generation saw when France exploited our preoccupation with the Civil War to turn Mexico into a subject nation of the French Empire.

Every nation involved in the migrant crisis on the Polish border and the gathering crisis around Ukraine was either a Soviet republic or a Warsaw Pact member during the Cold War, when Putin was a KGB officer.

All four nations -- Poland, Lithuania, Ukraine, Belarus -- were, not so long ago, vital interests of Moscow. And none had ever been a vital interest of the distant United States. And no U.S. Cold War president ever thought so.

Dwight Eisenhower did not intervene to save the Hungarian Revolution when it was crushed by Soviet tanks. John F. Kennedy did not tear down the Berlin Wall as it was going up. Lyndon B. Johnson did not intervene to stop Warsaw Pact armies from invading Czechoslovakia to crush the Prague Spring.

And Ronald Reagan did not put the Polish Communist regime in default on its huge unpaid debt when it crushed Solidarity.

Who rules in Minsk has never been a vital interest of the United States. Nor has the location of the Russia-Ukraine border or the political orientation of the regime that rules in Kyiv.

Avoiding a war with Russia that could go nuclear, however, has always been a vital strategic interest, especially since Moscow acquired nuclear weapons. Every American president has known that.

And avoidance of war with the United States has been a guiding principle of Russian foreign policy from Stalin to Putin.

No political dispute in the east of Europe alters these realities.

A NATO alliance built around Article V -- the declaration that a Russian attack on any one of 30 nations will be regarded as an attack on the United States and answered by military action by the United States -- is an anachronistic pledge that belongs to a dead era.

After all, the only war that NATO, "the most successful alliance in history," ever fought, Afghanistan, it lost and left after 20 years.

Let the nations of Eastern Europe solve their problems without the constant intervention of the United States.

Given the disastrous record of the neocon wars of the 21st century, the U.S., facing every new crisis, ought to ask itself before acting:

Why is this quarrel any of our business?

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PAT BUCHANAN: NATO playing with fire on Russia's borders - Sioux City Journal

The EU and NATO leaders pledged today to step up co-operation in the face of "hybrid" threats during their visit to Lithuania, which focused mainly on the Belarus migration crisis and the strengthening of the Russian military presence near Ukraine.

NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg has once again called on Russia to "de-escalate" the crisis on its border with Ukraine and warned of the "costs and consequences" of resorting to violence on its part.

Stoltenberg and Ursula von der Leyen are visiting Lithuania ahead of a meeting of NATO foreign ministers scheduled for Tuesday and Wednesday in neighboring Latvia. US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken will also attend the meeting to express his concerns about the situation on the Russian-Ukrainian border.

Stoltenberg and von der Leyen both accused Belarus of orchestrating the immigration crisis, something Minsk denies. Thousands of people, mostly from Middle Eastern countries, have passed or attempted to cross in recent months from Belarus to EU countries, mainly Latvia, Lithuania and Poland.

"In order to react to such events, it is important that the EU and NATO work hand in hand," von der Layen told a joint news conference with Stoltenberg and the Lithuanian leadership.

"We discussed ways in which we can strengthen our common work, mainly through a new joint declaration, because we are stronger and more secure when we work together," Stoltenberg said.

Ursula von der Leyen stressed that the EU has decided to triple, to 200 million, the resources earmarked for border management in Latvia, Lithuania and Poland for this year and 2022. She clarified that this amount will be given for patrol vehicles and for electronic border surveillance, using unmanned aerial vehicles.

"If the security situation worsens further, we do not rule out the possibility of consultations under Article 4 of NATO," warned Lithuanian President Gitanas Nauseda, referring to the situation on the border with Belarus.

Poland has also warned that it may invoke this article.

For Stoltenberg, the "unusual" reinforcement of Russian forces, with tanks, artillery, drones and thousands of soldiers near the Ukrainian border, is "very worrying for many reasons" and especially "because it was not provoked and cannot be explained." "The message to Russia is that it must de-escalate, reduce tensions and show transparency," he said, adding that if Moscow "decides to resort to violence, there will certainly be consequences."

Source: RES-EAP

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EU, NATO pledge to step up co-operation on 'hybrid threats' - 9.84