Putin: Ukraine Is to Russia What Cuba Was to America
in the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis
Eric Zuesse, Dec. 06, 2021
In an almost universally ignored speech by Putin, on December
1st (titled “Ceremony for presenting foreign ambassadors’ letters of credence”), he said, merely as an
aside [and I here shall add clarifications in brackets]:
By the way, the threat on
our western border [he was referring mainly to Ukraine] is
really growing, and we have mentioned it many times. It is enough to see how
close NATO military infrastructure has moved to Russia’s borders. This is more
than serious for us. [He meant that it is an existential threat
against Russia, just as the Soviet Union’s placement of nuclear weapons in Cuba
would have been an existential threat to America in 1963. But he always tries
to be non-alarmist, because his real audience regarding such matters is the
people who control U.S. foreign policies, and he doesn’t want to draw the
public’s attention to matters of existential consequence between the
superpowers.]
In this situation, we are
taking appropriate military-technical measures. But, I repeat, we are not
threatening anyone and it is at the very least irresponsible to accuse us of
this, given the real state of affairs. This would mean laying the blame at the
wrong door, as the Russian saying goes.
In my speech at the Ministry
of Foreign Affairs I already stressed that the priority facing Russian
diplomacy at this juncture is to try to ensure that Russia is granted reliable
and long-term security guarantees.
While engaging in dialogue
with the United States and its allies, we will insist on the elaboration of
concrete agreements that would rule out any further eastward expansion of NATO
and the deployment of weapons systems posing a threat to us in close proximity
to Russia’s territory. We suggest that substantive talks on this topic should
be started.
I would like to note in
particular that we need precisely legal, juridical guarantees, because our
Western colleagues have failed to deliver on verbal commitments they made.
Specifically, everyone is aware of the assurances they gave verbally that NATO
would not expand to the east. But they did absolutely the opposite in reality.
In effect, Russia’s legitimate security concerns were ignored and they continue
to be ignored in the same manner even now.
We are not demanding any
special terms for ourselves. We understand that any agreements must take into
account the interests of both Russia and all other states in the Euro-Atlantic
region. A calm and stable situation should be ensured for everyone and is
needed by all without exception.
That said, I would like to
stress that Russia is interested precisely in constructive collaboration and in
equitable international cooperation, and this remains the central tenet of
Russian foreign policy. I hope that you will convey this signal to the leaders
of your states.
He was referring there to the fact that the
U.S. Government — which had, in 2013,
been planning to replace Russia’s largest naval base, which had long been on
Crimea, and to transform it into yet another U.S. naval base, and which U.S.
Government, since 2011, had been planning and then in February 2014 actually
perpetrated a coup in Ukraine so as to have a new Ukrainian government which
would join NATO and allow America to position U.S. nuclear weapons less than a
ten-minute flight-time away from nuking Moscow — that this U.S.
Government had broken its repeated verbal promises to Mikhail
Gorbachev in 1990 that if the Soviet Union would end its side of the Cold War,
then America would do likewise, and NATO would not expand “one inch to the
east” (toward Russia’s border).
Putin has many times expressed his regret that
the Soviet Union had agreed to quit (in 1991) the Cold War without
getting ironclad commitments from the U.S. to simultaneously do the same on its
side. However, this new speech from Putin (as was so brilliantly pointed
out by the great geostrategic analyst Alexander Mercouris in this recent
video from him — starting at 9:55 in that video) is entirely new from
Russia: “The Russians have never actually set out their position on NATO’s
eastward expansion in this way. They have never previously, at any point since
the end of the Cold War [on Russia’s side — America never left the Cold War], or even, by the way
during the Cold War, said that they now insist that there is to be in effect an
international treaty which will limit the expansion of NATO eastward and which
will reduce NATO military forces in areas close to Russia’s borders. The fact
that Putin is talking in this way is a sign of growing Russian confidence. …
(18:35) For the first time, since the end of the Cold War [on Russia’s side],
it is the Russians who are now making demands of The West [the U.S. regime and
its satellite states or colonies —
‘allies’]. They are saying that they now want legal guarantees that NATO’s
expansion eastward [i.e., closer to Russia’s border] must stop. What they are
saying is that they will not tolerate NATO expansion into places like Ukraine,
Georgia, Moldova, and the rest, and that they insist that there must be a
treaty agreed by the Western powers, that that will not happen. They also want
some form of treaty which will restrict the deployment of Western military
systems close to Russia’s borders. The Russians have never made this sort of
demand before, but they are making it now. … It speaks of a major belief in
Russian self-confidence. … Putin, in that speech which he made, at the Russian
Foreign Ministry — a speech which, to my mind is going to become one of the
most important speeches of the Cold War era — is going to become gradually
understood to mark a fundamental break in Russian foreign policy. … until the
point is finally reached, when the NATO powers, the Western powers,
finally accept that the Russians have fundamental security
interests in Eastern Europe, and negotiate in earnest to acknowledge those [as
Khrushchev did with JFK in October 1963 regarding Cuba]. … It may take five
years, it might take ten years; it might take even longer than that. But in
time that negotiation … will take place, and an agreement will be reached; or,
alternatively, there will be something far more dramatic.”
Mercouris’s statement got me to wondering why
Putin would be demanding, now, after all of these decades when he wasn’t,
that the lying promises that George Herbert Walker Bush’s representatives had
been making to Gorbachev and to his representatives, that the U.S. and its
allies had no goal of conquering Russia if the Soviet Union and its communism
and its Warsaw-Pact copy of America’s NATO military alliance, all would end,
and that NATO would then NOT expand closer to Russia’s border, turned out to
have been lies (by G.H.W. Bush) that were clearly demonstrated by all
subsequent U.S. Presidents to have been lies. WHY
would Putin now want those lies to be signed by the U.S. Government and its
vassal-nations, after the U.S. regime’s entire record ever since the end of WW
II has been one of lying? Why would he want the U.S. signature being now placed
on those promises? It’s a worthless signature, entirely untrustworthy, isn’t
it? Look at what the U.S. regime did to the START Treaty, Intermediate Nuclear
Forces Treaty, the Iran Nuclear Agreement, and to so many other Treaties that
it had signed-onto — unilaterally trashed them, by unilaterally abandoning the
Agreement on its side. What would actually be to be gained by such a trashy
signature — a signature from a nation whose trustworthiness has been so
conclusively disproven?
Maybe Putin’s strategy is to get it in writing
(though the U.S. routinely cancels its international agreements and therefore
its “signature” is meaningless), in order subsequently to
announce that if and when the U.S. ever violates what it had
signed (and this follow-up by Russia will then automatically make the signed
Agreement effectively inviolable-noncancellable), then, at that moment,
both the full force of the Russian (and maybe also of the Chinese) nuclear
forces that are targeted against the snake’s head (D.C., NYC, London, Toronto,
Canberra, and Israel) will be promptly unleashed. That would be an unannounced
and unwarned first-strike nuclear attack against the snake’s head. Then Russia
(and maybe also China) will wait for any possible counter-attack (body-twitches
from the snake) before unleashing a second unannounced nuclear attack, which
would be against and destroying all nations that had participated in that
counterstrike against those participating U.S.-allied nations’ counter-attack.
Iff that is the reason why he is now demanding
that the promise be put in writing, then I think that he was correct to assert
what he said. Indeed: what OTHER geostrategy from a Russian (and perhaps
also from a Chinese) leader who has been placed (by that snake) into such an
existentially precarious position, would make any sense, at all?
(I say this in full recognition that any WW
III would produce nuclear winter and terminate all
human life and perhaps all life on this planet; however, the U.S. regime, ever since at least 2006, has been
planning to ‘win’ such a war; and the only way that
Russia and China might possibly be able to deter such insanity would be for
them to pursue a very clear path forward that includes the real possibility of
their initiating the nuclear stage of the conflict. The U.S. — including NATO —
regime’s rabidly neoconservative presumptions are that it will scare its
opponents into ultimately complying with the regime’s imperialistic demands. If
a slave is about to be killed by its master, then its only choice — if any — is
to kill its master in the process, regardless whether that will save the
slave’s life. If this is the only way to end imperialism, then still it must be
done, and the side that issues the first-strike will be on the right side of
it, and the imperialist opponent will be on the wrong side of it. The slave who
kills its master is in the right, because the slave-master is always on the
wrong side of the relationship. My next book, due out soon, will be about this,
and will be titled America’s Empire of Evil.)
—————
Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the
author of They’re Not
Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST’S
VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.
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