NATO leaves Black Sea exposed as Russia invades Ukraine
reuters.com
reuters.com
There’s an apt compound word in Russian - “братоубийцы» that translates to brother-murderers. Russia and Russians, regardless of what their feelings about this disgusting act is - will never wash away that stain. There will forever be monuments to remind people of what they have done.
I am Russian-speaking, and when I was younger as I would travel to Western Ukraine or Baltics on some occasions I would encounter hostile treatment that I found so unfair - I enjoyed visiting there, I liked the places, I had no ill will against the people.
Now I’ve come to viscerally understand exactly what they felt towards me.
I am ashamed to the point of anger.
And i think Ukraine has regrets about removing nuclear weapons some 30 years ago:
https://www.npr.org/2022/02/21/1082124528/ukraine-russia-put...
Though I'm glad that we have less nuclear weapons overall.
But this looks more and more like Putins way of creating a legacy or at the very least grabbing some land from Ukraine, to which Russia has no claim.
"NATO’s naval response to Russia also has implications for the West's ability to assert its interests elsewhere, such as the South China Sea, where Beijing claims sovereignty.
"If, with the whole world watching, we cannot deter the Kremlin, I don't think the Chinese will be terribly impressed about what we say about Taiwan or the South China Sea," said retired U.S. General Ben Hodges, who commanded U.S. Army forces in Europe from 2014 until 2017 and who met Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskiy in Kyiv in early February."
You’re right though, it doesn’t spell out any mutual defense statements.
The Russian Federation, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and The United States of America reaffirm their commitment to Ukraine, in accordance with the principles of the CSCE Final Act, to respect the independence and sovereignty and the existing borders of Ukraine.
The Russian Federation, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and The United States of America reaffirm their obligation to refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of Ukraine, and that none of their weapons will ever be used against Ukraine except in self-defense or otherwise in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations.
The Russian Federation, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and The United States of America reaffirm their commitment to Ukraine, in accordance with the Principles of the CSCE Final Act, to refrain from economic coercion designed to subordinate to their own interest the exercise by Ukraine of the rights inherent in its sovereignty and thus to secure advantages of any kind.
The Russian Federation, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and The United States of America reaffirm their commitment to seek immediate United Nations Security Council action to provide assistance to Ukraine, as a non-nuclear-weapon state party to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, if Ukraine should become a victim of an act of aggression or an object of a threat of aggression in which nuclear weapons are used.
The Russian Federation, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and The United States of America reaffirm, in the case of Ukraine, their commitment not to use nuclear weapons against any non-nuclear-weapon state party to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, except in the case of an attack on themselves, their territories or dependent territories, their armed forces, or their allies, by such a state in association or alliance with a nuclear weapon state.
Ukraine, The Russian Federation, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and The United States of America will consult in the event a situation arises which raises a question concerning these commitments.
Edit - Russia is in breach for failing to respect Ukrainian sovereignty. The US and UK are not in breach for failing to send troops. The EU (nor any other member states) wasn't a signatory, so it doesn't apply to them at all.
We do have the Taiwan Relations Act but it's not a treaty. It only requires sales of necessary military equipment. It doesn't require the US to defend Taiwan against China. The US probably would mount some kind of defense against an invasion but ultimately it's up to the President.
It was a strategic ambiguous treaty, so the "obligation" ranges from an US general raise eyebrow or nuke China.
But regardless of the truth (or usefulness of his statement), I am almost certain that he would not extend that to NATO's naval response. Firstly, since NATO straight up said that it's not going to engage Russia in Ukraine, it's not clear what NATO naval forces in the Black Sea would do other than increase the risk of escalation. Second, as the article points out, NATO has to deal with Turkey - a situation that the US does not quite have in the western Pacific (though exactly how supportive South Korea and Japan would be in the case of a Taiwan invasion is a bit of an unknown).
Also, there is nothing that NATO can do to stop Russian Naval deployments into the Black Sea. Asking Turkey to close the straits would a) almost certainly be refused, b) be an incredibly bad look for the side that performs freedom of navigation missions into the south china sea and c) cause a shit load of kerfuffle as the split between Turkey and the rest of NATO gets forced to the surface in an awkward manner.
Finally, we can look at the US Navy's current deployment of major assets - https://news.usni.org/2022/02/24/usni-news-fleet-and-marine-...
There's a carrier strike group deployed in the Mediterranean, and one in the western Pacific. There's a forward deployed carrier in Japan. As the article notes, there's also an French and Italian carrier group deployed into the Mediterranean. There is plenty of "real" naval strength nearby.
If the US were to engage in Ukraine, Taiwan would be up for pickings. I believe it would be a mistake. The US doesn't have the dynamism it once had, it's population in large part isn't fit for combat, or resilient to casualties, and is preoccupied with internal striffe. Defense budgets are high but what a US DoD buys with 1$ is a lot less than what China buys with the same value, since US defense industry is bloated and burning through budgets. All this to say, the US can't sustain two flanks against two strong foes, it needs to pick its focus and China is the real strategic opponent.
I hope this international environment will wake up the US public and industry, and that this will all end better. I also hope that Germany will stop using so much gas and being a pawn to Russia, and that the EU will take care if their defense more, as the US isn't in a position to do like it did during the Cold War.
Now, if Taiwan were to apply for NATO membership, I would expect the Chinese response to be much more swift than Russia's.
This feel like a succinct description of the entire world’s response to the Ukraine invasion.
Any NATO ships in the Black Sea should considered in serious danger. It'd be like "Shooting fish in a barrel."
Mine the Black Sea approaches to the Bosporus or sink a ship or two to block the channel and those ships are 'corked in'.
Other nations have been training Ukrainian Troops and supplying Stinger missiles and so on. Lots of diplomacy and financial sanctions happening.
The step to actually involve an external Army in killing Russian soldiers has big ramifications that shouldn't be ignored.
With friends like Germany, who needs enemies.
Natural gas is also quite common in germany for building heating + cooking.
But for the record, Putin has shown himself to have little regard for anything besides ending up in the history books next to Stalin & Hitler.
This is all very reminiscent of "Hillary is just as bad as Trump". Seems to be a common logical fallacy that you can't have something that is better than the alternative but still not good enough.
Instead people have to exaggerate to make the better one just as bad, which then has the implicit claim that the worse one is just the same as the better one in this metric.
Whatever Germany is doing or not doing, it seems unlikely to approach the same level as invading Ukraine and killing a whole bunch of people.
I am however pointing out that Germany is delaying and holding back the response to a European country being invaded.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/with_friends_like_these_who_n...
"An expression indicating that one's close associates prove more adversarial than one's opponents."
Probably just an unconscious idiom, but the use of the word "enemy" in context of an invasion seemed to be a bit too loaded a term.
Threaten to cut them off from SWIFT and kick them out of NATO. Their military is a joke, and they're clearly freeloading.
Hopefully anonymous and independent hackers don't escalate to infrastructure attacks.
A lot of that has been too little, too late (e.g. last minute transfers of some equipment). Some of it was an embarrassment (Germany sending hats).
IIRC, the US gives far more military assistance to Israel than it ever has to Ukraine. In retrospect, that really should have changed circa 2014. Most of Europe continues to live in a fantasy-land where war is unthinkable and Putin cares about the easy half-measures they're willing to take.
Putin's done a bully thing by making one of his demands that his victims be kept weak. The Western powers more or less obliged him.
> * Ukraine is not a NATO ally, and the alliance is not treaty-bound to protect it.*
I suspect risking a military engagement between NATO and Russia would be to risk a world war.
As disgusting and insane as this invasion of Ukraine is, the current state of European treaties would not necessitate a world war as an outcome.
Putin, the evil war making scum that he is, has been explicit for DECADES that the armament and NATO flirtation with Ukraine is completely unacceptable to Russia, Russia sees Ukraine as a buffer zone against the West, and that Ukraine belongs in the Russian sphere of influence. History does not disagree with him. Ukraine was for centuries part of the Russian empire and then the Soviet Union. Ukraine has a large population of ethnically and/or culturally Russian peoples. All of these facts have been known and communicated for many years. In fact, these are some of the reasons Ukraine has never been on the path to NATO membership.
In other words, while we can and should condemn Russia's invasion of Ukraine, it does not, per se, set us on a deterministic path to a world war.
Quoting Obama circa 2016:
"The fact is that Ukraine, which is a non-NATO country, is going to be vulnerable to military domination by Russia no matter what we do."
Russia has consistently announced that it will invade Ukraine to stop NATO membership.
NATO has consistently announced that it will not defend Ukraine, but it is Ukraine's' decision if it wants to be a member.
You might not like the situation (I don't), but the cards have always been on the table.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukraine%E2%80%93NATO_relations
https://twitter.com/kasparov63/status/1496865471995523080?s=...
Kasparov wrote the book "Winter is Coming" back in 2015.
I understand somewhat US not doing much of anything militarily speaking, and it's nothing new: happened before, it's precisely why Putin does it: he dares the west to do something, because (and this is the bigger, more overlooked picture) he knows he's mainly there to play a role: to distract the west from Taiwan, Kazakhstan[people already forgot about this one, it's critical for China's development of the 'Silk road' train route], etc. If sh1t hits the fan, he also knows China backs Putin.That's why also the Chinese are threatening TW lately: the western leadership(Biden, Germany's Scholz,somewhat even Boris & Macron) is weaker right now.
There are still other sanctions that can be applied. Removal from the Swift network is probably the nuclear option in terms of financial sanctions. But, Germany and Italy (at least), as of yesterday, were opposed because of the likely impact on their own economies.
War is about resources and control. That's it. There are no "good/bad" guys (or more specifically they're all "bad" guys). We're not participating in some grand moral struggle, we're taking calculated risks to maximizes gains when the opportunity appears and minimize losses when we have no other options.
For the last 70 years world power has be set so there was primarily one global hegemon (the US) so there was not much movement on the world stage among powerful nations. Economic strategies remained the safest way to control resources among world powers, but military actions still dominated in cases of extreme power asymmetry. The US has been invading and bombing countries and regions virtually continuously for the last few decades.
The resource situation is starting to change, so risks that made no sense suddenly start to seem more reasonable. But absolutely none of what we're seeing now has anything to do with some silly narrative about NATO powers and Russia. Russia has ceased the opportunity of low risk acquisition of resources, NATO powers have worked to minimize their own loses given the risk of any major action is high.
As resources grow more scare we'll see increased military conflict. The severity of which will be proportional to the scarcity. None of this will "haunt" anybody, it's just a game to survive which as been fairly easy the last few decades and that is changing.
I suppose that includes the one you just spent five paragraphs expounding upon?
> NATO powers have worked to minimize their own loses given the risk of any major action is high.
NATO is avoiding short term losses to risk long term ones.
They are part of the ways power maintains power. Every first king is just a warlord, a thug more brutal than the rest, and after defeating their enemies they suddenly declare the role of king is ordained by the god(s) and to challenge it is heresy. They set up the notion that rulers are more noble than common men, which is why they should rule over them and control the land. In later years they will use these tools to again convince their people to fight for them in the name of "country" or some other such notion.
And what peoples are against "freedom"? Do you really believe terrorists attacked the US because they "hate our freedoms?" No, it's because the US systemically destroyed their homelands, denied them of their own freedoms, and forcibly took their resources. But when you fill your gas tank you aren't comfortable recognizing that a hidden part of the price of the gas is the civilians murdered so you could have it.
I'm endlessly surprised to see educated adults buying into the stories will tell children about how the world works.
It doesn't matter what system or ideology people invent, war will always appear in order to to get power or resources. Or just because there are bored, just like Dostoevsky said it.
You just contradicted your entire first 3 sentences :)