The tensions that had arisen recently between Russia and Ukraine turned into an open war last Thursday, along the borders between the two countries, after Russian President Vladimir Putin announced the launch of what he called a "special military operation" in the eastern regions. to the neighboring country. The announcement confirmed fears that had surfaced in December, and have persisted ever since, that Putin, massing his forces, was bent on invading Ukraine.
The Kremlin leader saw that Russia must take decisive and swift action. He pointed out that Moscow plans to "disarm and de-Nazify" Ukraine, promising also to put an end to the eight-year war that the Kiev government forces were carrying out against pro-Russian separatists.
Shortly afterwards, explosions were reported on the outskirts of the Ukrainian cities of Kharkiv, Kramatorsk and Mariupol, as well as the capital Kiev, which prompted a number of Ukrainian citizens to line up inside supermarkets, in front of ATMs and gas stations, in preparation for the siege or preparing for emigration.
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba declared that Putin had "just launched a large-scale invasion in Ukraine", describing it as a "war of aggression". As for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, he confirmed that his government had begun to implement martial law in various parts of the country, and urged his citizens to stay in their homes as much as possible.
Since then, the country's airports have been temporarily closed, and measures have been taken to counter the possibility of Russian planes landing there, while Russia closed its airspace around the border to civilian movement for the next four months.
At the beginning of the skirmishes, the Ukrainian army announced the destruction of four Russian tanks on a road near the city of Kharkiv in the east of the country, the killing of 50 soldiers near a town in the Lugansk region, and the downing of a sixth Russian plane in the east of the country as well.
According to Zelensky, 137 Ukrainian civilians and soldiers died on the first day of fighting, and 316 were injured. While he appealed to the international community to do more to help his country, he pledged to stand firm in Kiev, as Russian missile strikes began targeting the capital in the early hours of Friday morning.
US President Joe Biden, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, and United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres met with other world powers to condemn the Russian attack, which was described as "arbitrary and unjustified," and vowed to hold it accountable.
Vladimir Putin had previously continued to deny that he had any intention of invading the neighboring country, and presented to the West a series of demands, including an end to the eastern expansion of NATO membership in the former Soviet countries, and a reduction in the military activity of the United States and NATO On the threshold of Russia.
Regional tensions escalated dramatically last Monday, when the Russian president and his security council officially recognized two separatist regions in eastern Ukraine, which were under the control of rebel groups, as independent states, which gave an excuse for his country to send troops across the border, at a time In it, Moscow justified its move by saying it was only aimed at protecting its allies.
Russia's decision to recognize the self-declared "Donetsk People's Republic" (DPR) and "Luhansk People's Republic" (LPR), which declared independence from Ukraine for the first time in May 2014 and entered In a bloody struggle since then, it followed a direct appeal for military and financial aid, made by their leaders, Denis Pushlin and Leonid Pasechnik.
Moscow had previously denied accusations made by Kiev and NATO that it was helping to arm and finance the rebels, in a battle that claimed the lives of more than 14,000 people.
While the international community rushed to immediately condemn the recent Russian move, and the United Nations Security Council expressed its "grave concern" about what is happening, the Russian Permanent Representative to the United Nations Vassily Nebenzia was keen to confirm that there would be no "new bloodbath" in eastern Ukraine, calling on the West to "think twice" before escalating matters and making things worse.
The United Kingdom had announced the imposition of sanctions on five Russian banks and three wealthy Russian influencers, while German Chancellor Olaf Schultz confirmed that regulatory approval of the recently completed "Nord Stream 2" natural gas pipeline between Russia Germany will be "re-evaluated" in light of the new situation.
The military escalation that took place indicates, without any doubt, that the frantic diplomatic efforts of the Western allies to find a peaceful solution to the tensions since the beginning of this year have not led to any results.
United States Secretary of State Antony Blinken, in particular, worked hard to defuse the volatile situation, urging Moscow to avoid a return to Cold War-era hostilities during several rounds of talks with his counterparts in Russia, with President Zelensky, and with other European leaders.
British Foreign Secretary Liz Terrace, French President Emmanuel Macron, and Chancellor Schulz made similar attempts with Moscow, but they seemed to be in vain.
The issue of removing Ukraine from NATO membership has been a long-standing obsession for Russian President Putin, who bitterly remembers the repercussions of the collapse of the former Soviet Union during the reign of his predecessor, President Boris Yeltsin in the 1990s, as a "decade of humiliation", during which The United States under former President Bill Clinton "imposed its vision of order in Europe (including Kosovo in 1999), at a time when the Russians were unable to do anything but stand by and watch," according to James Goldgeyer, an expert in Diplomatic relations.
Former Russian President Yeltsin sent a letter to his US counterpart Clinton in September 1993, expressing similar concerns to him, saying: "We understand, of course, that any possible integration of Eastern European countries into NATO will not It automatically turns this alliance in some way against Russia, but it's crucial to take into account the way our public opinion might react to this move."
To address Russia's concerns, the Founding Act was signed between NATO and Russia in 1997, a political agreement that explicitly stated that "NATO and Russia do not consider each other an adversary." This was followed by the formation of the NATO-Russia Council in 2002.
However, it is said that Vladimir Putin has always been reluctantly watching what he considers a gradual expansion of this Western alliance in the direction of the east, after it included in its membership countries revolving in the orbit of the former Soviet Union such as the republics of the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland in 1999, and then later Bulgaria. and Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia in 2004.
He resorted to interpreting the mobilization of these countries to membership in the "NATO" organization, as a breach by the United States of a promise that he claimed that its then Foreign Minister James Baker had made to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev during a visit to Moscow in February 1990, which was aimed at Discuss German reunification after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Based on what Russian officials said, Baker supposedly pledged to Gorbachev that "there would be no extension of NATO forces' authority even an inch to the east," though the quote remained highly contested, especially since Gorbachev denied, in an interview with the Russian newspaper "Kommersant" in October 2014, that the issue had been raised.
But Vladimir Putin has increased his resentment since then, and undoubtedly keen, regardless of the topic, to nurture anti-Western sentiments at home in Russia and strengthen his base of influence, and strongly opposed the accession of the neighboring republics of Georgia and Ukraine to his country in the Western military alliance.
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He said at the Munich Security Conference that was held in 2007, "It is clear that NATO's expansion has nothing to do with modernizing the alliance itself or ensuring security in Europe. On the contrary, it constitutes a provocation." blatantly would reduce the level of mutual trust between us."
The Russian president was more frank in his expression the following April, when he attended the "NATO" summit in Bucharest, when he said: "No Russian leader can stand idly by in the face of the steps being taken towards accepting Ukraine's membership." In NATO. That would constitute a hostile act towards Russia.
Four months later, Putin invaded Georgia, destroying its armed forces, occupying two autonomous regions and humiliating then-Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, who had openly sought NATO membership. Russia's actions drew new international condemnation.
On the other hand, NATO's official position remained unchanged, summing up that "Ukraine is an independent, stable and sovereign state, firmly committed to the principles of democracy and the rule of law, and is a key to Euro-Atlantic security."
The Western alliance indicates that its ties with Ukraine go back to the stage of the dissolution of the former Soviet Union, considering that it was necessary to intensify cooperation in light of the Russian regional aggression that took place in 2014, when Moscow annexed Crimea and supported the separatist rebellion in " Donetsk People's Republic" and "Luhansk People's Republic".
As for the United States, Ukraine's path to NATO membership remains unclear. And while Secretary Blinken had told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on June 8, 2021: “We support Ukraine's membership in NATO,” his deputy, Wendy Sherman, was more cautious when she touched on the issue. Last month, she said only, "The United States and NATO have made it clear that they will not abandon the organization's open-door policy, which has always been central to NATO."
US President Joe Biden, the former chief of the "Democrats" and the subsequent chairman of the same committee, believed that turning the former Soviet republics into "NATO" allies constituted "the beginning of another 50 years of peace," but he has since changed his position in the direction of Questioning the usefulness of the United States' involvement in "endless wars" in remote parts of the world, hence his decision to quickly withdraw from Afghanistan last summer, after 20 years of occupying the country, motivated by peacekeeping.
It is also known about his positions that he is determined to eliminate political and judicial corruption in Ukraine, but he refrains from provoking the Russian bear, after he lived throughout his life in the era of mutual destructive deterrence (a principle based on the idea that any nuclear attack by a superpower It will be met with a crushing nuclear counterattack, in which both the attacker and the defender are eliminated), especially given the security threat posed by China, a priority at the present time for his administration that cannot be ignored.
At a time when Ukraine has not yet become part of the alliance, the United States and NATO are not subject to any treaty requiring them to come to its aid if Russia attacks it, while these security guarantees give an umbrella to neighboring Baltic states such as Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Since signing her engagement in the military organization in 2004.
However, these three countries may become potential future targets for the logic of Russian annexation, if the current situation gives the Russian president a sense of boldness. However, President Biden's frank and direct speech strongly indicates that he is ready to intervene in some way, even if that does not mean sending US forces to fight on the ground.
It is known that in January (January) the United States provided Ukraine with defense military aid worth 200 million dollars (and it had supported it with two billion and 500 thousand dollars since 2014), at a time when the US Department of Defense (the Pentagon) confirmed that it has so far 200 A National Guard soldier stationed in the country.
In light of Putin's official declaration of war on his neighbor, it has become certain that harsh economic sanctions will be applied to Russia and diplomatic isolation will be imposed on it.
And if the United States were to provide more direct defense reinforcements to Kiev, it would be in a position to provide Ukraine for free with a wide range of assistance, whether at the level of air defense, anti-tank systems, ships, electronic warfare and cyber defense systems, up to supplies Small arms and artillery ammunition.
Finally, it remains to refer to what came in an analysis of the current situation conducted by Seth Jones and Philip Wasilevsky for the Center for Strategic and International Studies, who considered that "the key to thwarting Russia's ambitions lies in preventing Moscow from achieving a quick victory, and increasing Its economic, political and military costs by imposing economic sanctions on it, ensuring its political isolation from the West, and increasing the possibility of a long-term rebellion that would weaken the Russian army over time and make it lose its effectiveness.