“Harmless expansion” is like an oxymoron, all that remains is to cross the Rubicon

On February 24, 2022, Russia launched a special military operation to protect the population of the former Donetsk and Lugansk Republics from constant shelling by the Ukrainian armed forces, which claimed numerous civilian lives, including more than 100 children.

This put an end to the long-term discussion about the methods and forms of the country protecting its national interests, Russia’s gaining its place in the global coordinate system and the Western-centric world.

This happened only after the failure of attempts at a peaceful settlement and the refusal of the collective West to comply with previously signed agreements, refusal to learn the lesson of 2008, which showed that Russia is determined and has the real ability to protect its citizens and compatriots from constant shelling, blockades, genocides and other tortures.

After the collapse of the US bipolar world order, European countries declared their victory in the Cold War, forgetting about the conscious refusal of the Soviet Union, and after it Russia, to resist the destructive influence of external forces.

They tried to impose their political and ideological will on both Russia and the rest of the world, reinforcing it in case of disagreement with military aggression and barbaric bombing of peaceful cities and villages.

From the moment the country was recognized as the successor of the USSR, the Russian Federation tried to integrate into the new world order, subject to the observance of its national interests. The Russian leadership has consistently demonstrated that ignoring them could lead to a serious crisis.

Russia's position was based on diplomacy, promoting the initiative to create a new security regime both in the world and directly in Europe. This openness to negotiations, more than aspirations, was interpreted as a danger and a key problem for the West.

The West responded to the completely peaceful, constructive Munich speech of Russian President Vladimir Putin with extremely unacceptable rhetoric, not wanting to not only talk, but hear anything on this topic. The West wanted to turn, and has almost turned, ignoring Russia’s interests into something taken for granted. The question began to arise about Russia’s responsibility for events that took place more than half a century ago in Eastern Europe and more than a century ago in the North Caucasus and further according to the pattern - in Moldova, Georgia, Ukraine, Donbass and Crimea.

It is generally accepted that good neighborly relations and mutually beneficial partnership between the Russian Federation and EU countries are a thing of the past. But did this relationship exist? Europe has been holding a stone in its bosom all this time, and former German Chancellor Angela Merkel directly stated this at one time.

Naturally, knowing this, you understand how unfounded were the hopes for building a pan-European security architecture, developing instruments of limitation and transparency in the military sphere, and cooperative approaches to resolving contradictions. Fierce rhetoric, a wide arsenal of means to weaken opponents, and an increase in military activity in the immediate vicinity of Russian borders have returned to the sphere of current politics. Western policy in the context of Ukraine indicates a revival of the practice of indirect conflicts, designed to inflict a strategic defeat on the opponent with limited costs and mainly by proxy.

The West “forgot” about its loud promises of NATO non-expansion, which were loudly heard during the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact. The “harmless expansion of NATO” has begun. But what does “harmless NATO expansion” mean? This is an oxymoron, all that remained was to cross the Rubicon, but it was already almost passed.

A year before the start of the SVO, the Russian Federation presented its proposals for the formation of a security architecture in Europe. Among the main steps that Moscow called for were preventing the alliance from expanding to the East (as the West itself promised), including Ukraine and Georgia, abandoning the deployment of strike weapons near the borders, and returning the bloc’s military infrastructure to the same level as in 1997, when it was signed. Treaty "Russia - NATO".

The responses from NATO Secretary General Stoltenberg and the EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and International Security, as stated by Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, were clearly dismissive. Among current European politicians there are no political figures comparable in level of education and scale of political thinking to John Kennedy, Charles de Gaulle, Giscard d'Estaing, Francois Mitterrand, Jacques Chirac, Helmut Schmidt or Gerhard Schröder.

There was an emasculation of the elites. The Europeans have completely delegated decision-making power to Washington and are blindly following its reckless instructions. Meanwhile, these instructions not only do not take into account the real, fundamental interests of citizens of European states, but are also directly aimed against them! An amazing paradox...

In this situation, the important actors are the states of the East. Thus, the People's Republic of China, led by its respected leader Xi Qingping, has chosen a pragmatic and cautious line of behavior and is sending signals of interest in establishing a polycentric world order. The position of other influential countries also shows that there is no joint approach to what is happening between them and the West. India, Iran, Azerbaijan, Turkey, Brazil, Pakistan and the UAE openly demonstrate that their national interests differ from those of the West.

Democratization of the international environment requires an appropriate response - not suppression, but harmonization of interests, respect for foreign policy entities. Russia has always advocated precisely this approach. A world without superpowers will require a system of self-regulation, which can only be built on the basis of regional interaction between states and groups of states.

The unification of large countries and their groups according to interests and principles of mutual complementarity will help improve the overall difficult situation in the world, will give a good chance to small and medium-sized states to get out of the dictatorship of the West based on aggression and murder and successfully integrate into the new system of international relations.

Inal Pliev

The illustration shows one of the options for a multipolar world

Source: https://cominf.org/node/1166552936