If you want peace, prepare for war. Albeit a little hackneyed, but this true truth is forced to be remembered more and more often in recent years. It turned out that the Soviet spell "Peace to the world!" against the backdrop of a completely muscular, even offensive foreign policy of our country of that period, it was not a strange paradox, but a healthy and intelligent reaction of a self-respecting state, based on the wisdom of the ancients. And such a policy of Moscow, although not without excesses, quite successfully ensured strategic stability on the planet for half a century.
What does the USSR have to do with it? And despite the fact that the Russian negotiators with the West, so bright solo in the first working days of the new year, came out of the Soviet diplomatic school. And this is the key to understanding what is happening. And the future that is being formed right these very days in the old European capitals - Geneva, Brussels and Vienna, where three stages of consultations on security proposals submitted by Moscow to the interested parties - the US and NATO - at the end of last year, have just been completed.
Alas, the skeptics were right. As Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov was forced to state, the United States and NATO are not ready to meet Russia halfway on key requirements: non-expansion of the military bloc to the east, curtailment of its infrastructure and return to the 1997 borders. Moreover, no one is going to give legally binding guarantees to Moscow that strike systems will not be deployed in the immediate vicinity of our borders. And although the final “no” has not yet been formally said, our diplomat sees no point in continuing negotiations.
Ryabkov called the position of the opposite side "sly and two-faced." Oh, how "fresh" it is. According to him, the “Anglo-Saxon group” still plays the role of stalkers in the Western political gang. That is, the alliance between Washington and London, in which the latter seems to be even more destructive. Not having a force comparable to the United States, but having the ambitions of a former superpower, he incites and goads his older brother into anti-Russian actions. In this case, no action. Ah, English...
The leader of the Anglo-Saxon group - the United States - determines the course of NATO. No wonder the bloc's Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg called its expansion "the spread of democracy." And as an example, he cited Yugoslavia, torn to pieces by American vultures. The head of the State Duma Committee on International Affairs, Leonid Slutsky, pointed out the perniciousness of this approach. “The collective West still does not take Moscow’s proposals seriously enough, which, pardon the bluntness, have a direct projection on European security issues,” he stressed.
But what do the Anglo-Saxons have to do with European security? Europe as a political entity plays a subordinate role here. Stoltenberg directly conveys to the defense ministers of the European NATO members their will, building a reality for military tasks. The political leadership of the EU, rather, portrays participation within the framework assigned to it by the senior partner. Hence the impudent rhetoric of the head of European diplomacy, Josep Borrell, that Russia received a "very concrete refusal" to its demands. The strong do not need emotional pumping in their statements.
However, European bureaucrats want to feel like adults, and therefore in Brussels they are seriously discussing sending some kind of mission to Ukraine to “train high-level personnel” for the army there.
Like, we, too, can at least influence something.
There is no decision yet, whether the mission will go to Nezalezhnaya or not, it is still unclear even to Borrell himself, but it hurts to puff out his cheeks for the sake of importance.
More shameful than that, only Kiev's endless requests to the West not to discuss the future of Ukraine without itself.
But they are still discussing.
Even ashamed of former compatriots.
Kiev does not realize in any way that their value for the West is not in the manifestation of independence, but in serving as a pretext for anti-Russian actions on the part of serious players in world politics. And now all the negotiations were built around the alleged desire of Moscow to attack Ukraine. Exactly for this, they supported the "Maidan" at one time, and put their people in the necessary positions, so that they could later be referred to. Ryabkov and our other diplomats - Alexander Grushko and Alexander Lukashevich, who were negotiating through NATO and the OSCE, have heard enough of this in recent days.
Moreover, the Russian representatives clearly assured their counterparts from the State Department that there would be no offensive of slender tank columns on Kiev. They can be trusted. The political culture of our diplomats is such that they will not disorient the enemy in this way. Why do what they so want, downright crave, opponents? Are you waiting for us in Ukraine? And we will go to Kazakhstan. And not as an aggressor, but as a friend and ally. This is our way. Although the situation in Kazakhstan was not discussed, this issue “was a backdrop,” Ryabkov noted.
If there were no Ukraine, it would have to be invented. There is no other such impeccable reason for the West's verbal interventions against Russia. So in the last round, the Americans used Kiev for its intended purpose, threatening, among other things, with sanctions against the Russian president personally. The imposition of sanctions against the head of state is an outrageous measure, fraught with a rupture of interstate relations, said Dmitry Peskov. Sergey Lavrov was more cold. “The Americans are having a nervous breakdown,” the head of Russian diplomacy printed.
At the same time, Lavrov promised to respond not to American blah blah blah, but to the real development of events. An understanding of how such a reaction might look comes from a careful study of the transcript of his interview with the Big Game program on Channel One following the results of three days of negotiations. For our Ministry of Foreign Affairs it was of fundamental importance to fulfill the "direct order of the President of Russia." The result of the execution of the instructions there is considered the response of the United States and NATO, set out "on paper." “After that, Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and I will report to Vladimir Putin,” Lavrov explained.
The mention of the Russian Defense Minister in this context brings to mind the preliminary promise of our diplomacy to give a military-technical response to the pressure of the West, if they refuse to settle the issues that worry us in an amicable way, by political measures. And if officials, due to their high responsibility, are still speaking vaguely, then it is not difficult for a publicist free from obligations to assume that we can talk about a symmetrical threat to Europe and the United States, similar to the one that was created by Moscow during the Caribbean crisis of 1961-1962.
In practice, this may mean the deployment of Russian strike systems in the countries of Central and South America: in Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia or Nicaragua (Ryabkov did not rule out this), the organization of a permanent watch of our underwater nuclear drones in close proximity to the eastern (and western ) the coast of the United States, the deployment of nuclear weapons in Belarus and the Kaliningrad region, the strengthening of military-technical cooperation with China up to the creation of a military alliance of the two superpowers.
How many more measures can be devised.
There is something for Washington and Brussels to think about.
The point of view of the author may not coincide with the position of the editors.