'Not Smart' to Have Georgia in NATO, Says German Navy Chief
"And my God, giving someone respect is low cost, even no cost," Vice Admiral Schönbach went on, adding that "it is even easy to give him the respect he really demands and probably also deserves."
He further argued that "Russia is an old country, Russia is an important country. Even we, India, Germany need Russia, because we need Russia against China ..."
"From my perspective, I'm a very radical Roman Catholic, I believe in God, and I believe in Christianity, and there we have a Christian country, even Putin says he's an atheist but it does not matter... Having this big country, even if it's not a democracy, at our side, as a bilateral partner... is easy and keeps Russia away from China, because China needs resources of Russia," Schönbach asserted.
Albeit recognizing the need to address Russia's actions in Ukraine, the German Navy Chief also suggested that Kyiv would never regain control of Crimea, annexed by Moscow in 2014, prompting criticism from the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry.
Uttering nonsense and proven falsehoods ... America lies and propagandizes its policy
John McCain about Russia-Georgia war 2008 | YouTube channel Saakashvili |
My diary @BooMan ...
In Georgia's armed assault on South Ossetia about 1,600 civilians were killed | 9 Aug. 2008 |
In South Ossetia and the war zone, there are no western TV crews, just Russian and one Ukrainian. In the initial attack by Georgian forces, 12 Russian peacekeepers were killed and 150 wounded. There are 30,000 refugees crossing the border into North Ossetia. Georgia has send troops reinforcements to the province of Abkhazia. It's clear both sides are using heavy shelling of the capital Tskhinvali and a scorced earth policy as we have seen in neighboring Chechen province.
Ukraine Pravda: War In A Nutshell | 21 July 2023 |
Ukraine's Zelensky sacks ambassador to UK Prystaiko after criticism | BBC News - 21 July 2023 |
EuroTrib archive key word | Stepan Bandera |
Reimagining NATO after Crimea: Defender of the rule-based order and truth? | Norwegian Institute of Foreign Affairs |
Russia's annexation of Crimea in 2014 engendered a turning point in the relations of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) with Russia. The years that followed saw a rapidly deteriorating security climate on NATO's eastern flank that culminated in Russia's full-blown invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022. This prompted unprecedented sanctions against Russia and military support for Ukraine, albeit stopping short of direct military engagement by NATO (see Lupovici, Citation 2023). Indeed, Russia's war on Ukraine has accelerated the trend within NATO discourse and policy towards the comprehensive securitization of Russia across policy domains (Wilhelmsen, Citation 2021). Most eye-catchingly, the onset of the war prompted Germany to overturn 70 years of recalcitrant security policy and commit to spending 2% of its budget on defence in addition to cancelling the Nord Stream II pipeline. Similarly, the war has led both Finland and Sweden to disavow their long-term neutrality and apply and become full NATO members. Most analyses to date have focused on the strategic implications of these developments: the unifying effects and newfound collective will within NATO are said to illustrate Putin's miscalculation and/or irrational worldview (Rak & Bäcker, Citation 2022). Instead of dividing NATO, initial analyses suggest that Putin has instead fermented a new unity of purpose and resolve, and new NATO countries on Russia's border to boot (Flockhart, Citation 2024, p. 471).
Taking a step back, this article joins a smaller branch of scholarship (e.g., Böller, Citation 2018; Mälksoo, Citation 2018, Citation 2021) exploring the social and political side effects of what appears in retrospect like NATO's prudent if patchy securitization of Russia post-Crimea. Revisiting Williams and Neumann's seminal article (2000) on how NATO reinvented itself as a security community (Footnote 1) in the wake of the Cold War, we pay particular attention to how multifaceted but uneven securitization processes have redrawn the self-other nexus that constitutes NATO's identity narrative, thereby changing the bandwidth for what can be both said and done. In other words, rather than asking whether Russia has been securitized (Floyd, Citation 2019) or theorizing how and puzzling over why (Sperling & Webber, Citation 2017), we explore how the substance of these securitizing moves, understood here as representations that position something or someone as a threat to the referent object (Buzan, Citation 1998, p. 25) have transformed NATO. Building upon the well-established discourse-theoretical strand of securitization theory (Hagmann, Citation 2015; Wæver, Citation 1995; Wilhelmsen, Citation 2017), as well as works that draw attention to the illiberal, unintended, and potentially tragic consequences of identity reconstruction processes (Mälksoo, Citation 2018; Van Rythoven, Citation 2020; Wilhelmsen, Citation 2021), this article empirically explores how NATO's evolving discourse on Russia has been transforming NATO self-representations and critically examines the consequences of these processes. Whereas most scholarship on the breakdown in Russia-NATO relations treats NATO's identity as a constant--focusing instead on how its strategy and capabilities have changed--we put it in motion and ask: How have the unfolding securitization processes led NATO to revise its narrative of the self?
NATO under command and leadership of the United States has proven itself to be aggressive and NOT a defensive organization serving the security interests of the European peoples. NATO SHOULD DISBAND and be led by politicians worthy of leadership, using diplomacy, not stupid economic sanctions killing other people of adversaries.
Momentarily NATO's policy is shaped by Cold Warmongers and think-tanks with retired military or a new generation of "scholars" educated by the same cabal.
Playing war games with the lives of innocents.
Opening sentence of abstract is a falsehood, not a "premise" but simply disinformation ...
Russia's annexation of Crimea in 2014 engendered a turning point in the relations of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) with Russia.
The souring of relations with the Russian Republic came with the outside controlled and funded "colour revolutions" a Ross frontline states and setting an abusive narrative towards the intended coup d'état of the Russian government in Moscow (and Minsk) to install Western led puppet leadership. The Maidan massacre and coup led by neo-Nazi stormtroopers from Lvov and surrounding area was the wave that led crossing the clear red line set by Moscow. NATO SG Jaap de Hoop Scheffer has openly admitted such ... so he too was taken for a ride by the Bush-Cheney cabal at the NATO Summit in Bucharest in April 2008. The stupid aggression by Georgian President Saakashvili in August 2008 was a direct signal towards Moscow and a miscalculation by Washington DC. George Bush did not follow through on expectations US military would extend a helping hand. John McCain became a frustrated warmonger and Russophobe. Many episodes of disappointments would follow ... bomb, bomb, bomb Iran 🇮🇷 to this day. Ugly war criminals, all of them.
Bush in Bucharest for the NATO meeting | VOA |
NATO Summit of Bucharest - A Declaration of War Part 2 | @BooMan - Mar. 4, 2017 |
Low point: the summit in Bucharest in 2008, where NATO under De Hoop Scheffer's leadership noted that Georgia and Ukraine would become NATO member. Putin took it as a declaration of war.
"Talking about that: it was not my finest hour, nor of NATO. In retrospect that was a moment of great consequences."
Exactly, a turning point in the relationship between Europe, America and Russia. The Atlantic Council outspoken policy: "We'll make Russia a pariah state."
Putin bristles at NATO | CNN - 6 April 2008 |
Putin, at NATO Meeting, Curbs Combative Rhetoric | NY times - 5 April 2008 |
BUCHAREST, Romania -- President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia complained Friday that NATO was not taking Russia's legitimate security concerns into account, but he also said that President Bush was listening to Moscow's criticisms of a planned missile defense system for Europe, which is to be based in the Czech Republic and Poland.
In a meeting with NATO leaders, Mr. Putin was combative and thoughtful, criticizing NATO's promise to eventually make Ukraine and Georgia members, officials who attended said.
"NATO cannot guarantee its security at the expense of other countries' security," Mr. Putin said, according to one official, and he complained that some NATO members, presumably those that were once under Soviet control, "went as far as total demonization of Russia, and can't get away from this even now."
Mr. Putin denied that Russia had imperial ambitions. He said it wanted cooperation with NATO on joint security problems -- like Afghanistan and terrorism -- and he agreed with Mr. Bush that the cold war was over, another Western official said.
It was Mr. Putin's first visit to a NATO summit meeting as the Russian president; it also was his last, because he is to hand over his job in May to Dmitri A. Medvedev. Mr. Putin gave one of his trademark news conferences, taking questions for nearly an hour in a measured and articulate way. In one of his odder comments about relations with NATO, he said, "Let's be friends, guys, and be frank and open."
It was Mr. Putin's first visit to a NATO summit meeting as the Russian president; it also was his last, because he is to hand over his job in May to Dmitri A. Medvedev. Mr. Putin gave one of his trademark news conferences, taking questions for nearly an hour in a measured and articulate way. In one of his odder comments about relations with NATO, he said,
"Let's be friends, guys, and be frank and open."
Interesting long conversation across the whole spectrum of Putinism and the triangle Russia-Ukraine-United States
Fiona Hill and Lucian Kim, Unfair Triangle: Ukraine-U.S-Russia
19 apr 2025 - Dr. Fiona Hill, a former U.S. national security official and Davis Center alumna, and Lucian Kim, senior analyst for the International Crisis Group, will analyze perspectives on achieving a peaceful resolution of the Russia-Ukraine war in a discussion with visiting scholar Yevgenia Albats.
No Quick End to Russia-Ukraine War, Analysts Say | Davis Center - 11 April 2025 |
Russia President Vladimir Putin has no incentives to end the war, but plenty to engage in talks in hopes of normalizing relations with the U.S., agreed Hill and panelist Lucian Kim, a senior analyst for the International Crisis Group.
Putin's vision for a Russia reunited in some form with Ukraine and his willingness to let casualties mount make getting a lasting deal very limited, she said, as does a relatively inexperienced U.S. negotiating team.
Both Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky know that Trump's primary goal is to broker a peace deal, even if it doesn't last or harms Ukraine, said Hill, now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution's Center on the United States and Europe and a member of the Harvard Board of Overseers.
"Trump is trying to force a peace deal [that] seems to be on Putin's terms," so that he can reset U.S.-Russia relations, something he tried to accomplish in his first term, she added.
Without intelligence and military support from the U.S., the "most likely" outcome for Ukraine is that it will have to cede territory to Russia. At this juncture, the notion that Ukraine could somehow retake Crimea and Donetsk is "almost hard to imagine," said Kim, a former Moscow-based correspondent for NPR and Bloomberg.
But even a negotiated shift of territorial borders won't be enough to satisfy Russia, he added. "Putin is not going to rest until Ukraine is subordinated to the Kremlin."
The conflict in Ukraine has long been seen by Russia and its allies, China, Iran, and North Korea, as a proxy war with the U.S. How they react if the U.S. walks away from the conflict entirely is now the most important question, particularly for Europe, Hill said.
"This is now a European war, very clearly," one that will test the region's security and unity, she said.
Analysts agreed that Europe has more defensive capacity than it gets credit for. Many countries understand Russia poses a threat to their own individual security and have upped defense spending in recent years.
Others have been newly energized to beef up their fighting forces since Trump returned to office. But getting a coalition of individual European armies coordinated, trained, and fully prepared to step in to assist Ukraine if necessary will take time, perhaps more than the besieged nation has.
"The only hope that the Ukrainians have now is the Europeans somehow getting their act together," said Kim.
Ukraine had the firm backing of President Joe Biden, Kim said, but even then the relationship between the two nations was far from perfect.
The Ukrainians had a very "high level of frustration" with the limits the administration put on what weaponry it shared and how it was to be used and the slow pace of deliveries. It was an overly cautious approach, they felt, driven by the fact that Biden and his team did not see the war as an existential threat to the U.S.
Also shaping the U.S. approach to military assistance in Ukraine, Hill said, was that the Biden administration's first priority from the war's earliest days was avoiding a nuclear World War III rather than doing whatever necessary to ensure that Ukraine defeated Russia.
During a recent trip to Ukraine, Kim said he never once heard Biden's name mentioned and got the sense that few missed his administration. As early as last summer, there were signs Ukraine held out "a naive hope" about what might be possible in a second Trump term.
"People thought Trump, despite his record already in Ukraine during his first term, would somehow be able to rattle up the situation enough that there would be a better outcome than if the war simply continued in its present direction," said Kim. But, he said, the Ukrainians have since been "disabused of those illusions."
The U.S. administrations will leave behind Ukraine as a terror state on Europe's Eastern flank with Russia.
Alexander Dugin arrives at the site of the explosion that killed his daughter Daria in Moscow | DW News |
As it happened: Journalist's killing a vile, cruel crime - Putin | BBC News - 22 Aug. 2022 |
There have been multiple terror strikes on individuals inside of Russia by the hand of the SBU. The worst has been a coordinated attack on the theater of Moscow City Hall. A quid pro quo terror act with the Khorasan group located in NW Syria 🇸🇾 , Idlib district a governate of HTS.
