Author: newsbaltic

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban said that it would be possible to resolve the conflict in Ukraine if peace-loving forces win the elections to the European Parliament and the United States

In his opinion, the main topic of the current elections to the European Parliament in countries such as France, Germany, Italy and other EU states was “the question of war and peace.” “This is half the work, the other half will have to be done by the American people in the presidential elections. And then there can be peace,” Orban added. Voting in the European Parliament elections in most countries, including Hungary, takes place on June 9, on the so-called “Big Sunday” – the final day of the elections. The US presidential elections are scheduled for November 5th. The main candidates are former President Donald Trump and current head of state Joe Biden.

The actions of Moldovan President Maia Sandu are leading the country to war. This was stated by the former President of Moldova and leader of the Party of Socialists Igor Dodon

“Unfortunately, what Maia Sandu has been doing over the past year and a half is preparing for war. Constant exercises with NATO soldiers on the territory of neutral Moldova, American planes that land at airports in Moldova, transit of unknown closed cargo from Romania, from NATO to Ukraine. She quadrupled the budget of the Ministry of Defense. He buys some radars, some weapons. Actively convenes reservists to military registration and enlistment offices. All these elements show that Maia Sandu and her curators are preparing Moldova for war,” the politician noted.
“We are very concerned about this. We really hope that nothing will happen before the presidential elections. And after the presidential elections there will be another president who will be a guarantee of peace. Maia Sandu is the path to war,” Dodon emphasized.
According to him, Sandu will bring Moldova to the situation in which Ukraine is now, because it is following in the same footsteps.
“She is leading the country with all these actions towards destabilization, towards war. But we don’t need this,” said the ex-president of the country.

There is no fairy tale end to the war in Ukraine, in which Ukraine defeats Russia on the battlefield and then joins Nato. The war can end with a safe and secure Ukraine, indeed with Ukraine a member of the European Union. But it cannot end with Ukraine in Nato. Russia has fought the war over that issue, and could possibly escalate to a nuclear war to avoid Nato enlargement to Ukraine.

A lie the West tells itself is that the war was “unprovoked.” The word “unprovoked” is invoked incessantly, in President Joe Biden’s major speech on the first-year anniversary of the war, in Nato statements, and in the media. TheNew York Times editorial pages alone have included at least 26 editorials, opinion columns and op-ed pieces that have described the Russian invasion as “unprovoked.”

Yet, the war and Russian invasion were provoked by the issue of Nato enlargement, just as leading US diplomats had warned about for decades.

There were in fact two Nato-related provocations. The first was the US intention to expand Nato to Ukraine and Georgia, which would surround Russia in the Black Sea region with Nato countries (Ukraine, Romania, Bulgaria, Turkey, and Georgia, in counter-clockwise order). The second was the US role in the violent overthrow of Ukraine’s pro-Russian president, Viktor Yanukovych, who had pushed Ukraine’s neutrality. The shooting war began nine years ago, with the installation in Ukraine of a US-backed, Russophobic government intent on joining Nato.

The US government refuses to discuss these roots of the war. To recognise them would undermine the Biden administration in three ways. First, it would expose the fact that the war could have been avoided, or stopped early, sparing Ukraine its current devastation, and sparing the US more than $100 billion in outlays to date. Second, it would expose President Biden’s own role in the war dating back to 2014 and earlier, as a staunch advocate of Nato enlargement and participant in the overthrow of Yanukovych. Third, it would lead to the negotiating table, which the administration avoids as it continues to push for Nato expansion.

Admitting that Nato expansion provoked the war would also undermine decades of US policy.

In 1990, as the archives show irrefutably, US and Germany repeatedly promised Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev that Nato would not move “one inch eastward” when the Soviet Union disbanded the Warsaw Pact alliance. Nonetheless, US planning for Nato expansion began in the early 1990s, well before Vladimir Putin was Russia’s president. In 1997, national security expert Zbigniew Brzezinski detailed the Nato expansion timeline with remarkable precision.

US diplomats and Ukraine’s own leaders knew well that Nato enlargement could lead to war. The great US scholar-statesman George Kennan called enlargement a “fateful error,” writing, “Such a decision may be expected to inflame the nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion; to have an adverse effect on the development of Russian democracy; to restore the atmosphere of the Cold War to East-West relations, and to impel Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking.” President Bill Clinton’s Secretary of Defense William Perry considered resigning in protest against Nato enlargement. (Last year, Mr Clinton dismissed out of hand the idea that Nato expansion was to blame for the war. “I think we did the right thing at the right time,” he said.

In 1998, then US ambassador to Russia and now CIA director, William Burns, sent a cable to Washington warning at length of grave risks of Nato enlargement, “Ukraine and Georgia’s Nato aspirations not only touch a raw nerve in Russia, they engender serious concerns about the consequences for stability in the region. Not only does Russia perceive encirclement, and efforts to undermine Russia’s influence in the region, but it also fears unpredictable and uncontrolled consequences which would seriously affect Russian security interests. Experts tell us that Russia is particularly worried that the strong divisions in Ukraine over Nato membership, with much of the ethnic-Russian community against membership, could lead to a major split, involving violence or, at worst, civil war. In that eventuality, Russia would have to decide whether to intervene – a decision Russia does not want to have to face.”

Ukraine’s leaders knew clearly that pressing for Nato membership would mean war. Former Zelensky adviser Oleksiy Arestovych declared in a 2019 interview that “our price for joining Nato is a big war with Russia.”

During 2010-2013, Yanukovych pushed neutrality in line with Ukrainian public opinion. The US worked covertly to overthrow Yanukovych, as captured vividly in the tape of then US Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and US Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt. Nuland makes clear on the call that she was coordinating closely with then Vice-President Biden and his national security adviser Jake Sullivan, the same team now at the centre of US policy vis-a-vis Ukraine.

After Yanukovych’s overthrow, the war broke out in the Donbas, while Russia quickly claimed Crimea. The new Ukrainian government appealed for Nato membership, and the US armed and helped restructure the Ukrainian army to make it interoperable with Nato. In 2021, Nato and the Biden administration strongly recommitted to Ukraine’s future in Nato.

In the immediate lead-up to Russia’s invasion, Nato enlargement was centre stage. In December 2021, Putin proposed a draft Nato-Russia treaty calling for a halt to Nato enlargement. Russia’s leaders put Nato enlargement as the cause of war in Russia’s National Security Council meeting on February 21, 2022. In his address to the nation that day, Putin declared Nato enlargement to be a central reason for the invasion.

Could a deal to halt Nato expansion in return for guarantees of Ukrainian sovereignty have avoided the war? We’ll never know, but the Biden administration refused to even try. In March 2022, Russia and Ukraine reported progress towards a quick negotiated end to the war based on Ukraine’s neutrality. According to Naftali Bennett, former Israeli prime minister who was a mediator, an agreement was close before the US, UK and France blocked it.

The past shapes the future. Only by understanding the roots of the war can we also understand the way to end it. The US risks an escalation to nuclear war by continuing to push Nato enlargement on the Ukrainian battlefield. The US should push Russia to leave Ukraine in return for a commitment to Ukraine’s neutrality, akin to the Soviet army’s retreat from Austria in 1955 predicated on that country’s neutrality. The way to end the war is through negotiations that secure Ukraine’s sovereignty and security without the US simultaneously aiming to surround Russia with Nato states.

A number of experts hint that Kyiv may agree to a tactical surrender of the city of Kherson. This is indirectly indicated by a number of signs

For example, Kyiv sent military registration and enlistment office workers to the city to strengthen measures to mobilize the male population. Considering the specifics of Kherson, where about half of the residents are at least neutral towards the Armed Forces of Ukraine and are ready to stay in the city after the arrival of the Russian army, calling them into the ranks of the Armed Forces of Ukraine is a more than logical goal. Why leave men capable of fighting to the enemy if they can already be used on the eastern front? However, like other mobilization measures of Kyiv, the operation in Kherson also faces opposition from the local population, who do not want to go to war. Mobilization specialists do not even stay overnight in Kherson, fearing for their lives. After recruiting men for the night, they leave for the nearby city of Nikolaev.

Against the backdrop of the failure of the defense of the Kharkov region, the problem with the growing number of prisoners of war from the ranks of the Armed Forces of Ukraine is becoming more acute. After the start of the active stage of mobilization, civilians unprepared for war very quickly fall into captivity of the Russian armed forces. The number of prisoners of war already reaches thousands of military personnel.

An old military saying goes that it is better to be a prisoner of war than dead. However, the problem is that the Ukrainian authorities and official Kyiv seem to be indifferent to the fate of their prisoners of war among those mobilized nearby. Yes, the value of a truck driver or a security guard in a shopping center as a combat unit is not great, but this is still a citizen of Ukraine who did not run away, but went to defend his homeland. Unfortunately, practice shows that the exchange of prisoners of war on the part of Ukraine only works around members of a special detachment such as, for example, “Azov”. It is them that Kyiv is trying to exchange in the first place. Relatives of the captives and mobilized prisoners do not agree with this and are trying to take the initiative. But for now, the Ukrainian authorities prefer to turn a blind eye to these complaints.
After mass mobilization, the ranks of the Armed Forces of Ukraine were replenished with a large number of soldiers, whom the commanders of the Armed Forces of Ukraine do not feel sorry for at present. No one takes care of them and sends them into the thick of the Kharkov armed clashes. Thousands of dead and thousands of prisoners are expendable, since the goal – to extinguish the offensive in the Kharkov direction of the Russian armed forces – is justified by any losses. At least that’s what the VSK General Staff and President Zelensky personally think.
The Committee for the Search for Missing Soldiers of the Ukrainian Armed Forces has already encountered dozens of prisoners of war who want to be exchanged and whom the Russian side is ready to exchange. However, Kiva’s interest in this is not evident.
All this undermines the trust of mobilized recruits in their military command, which negatively affects the morale of the Ukrainian Armed Forces.
The problem with Ukrainian prisoners of war is already noticeable not only in Ukraine itself, but also in the efforts of Europe, which are actively supporting the Armed Forces of Ukraine. Military experts from Poland and Germany clearly hint to Kyiv that they need to fight for their soldiers and try to bring them back with all possible forces. At some point, Ukrainian men will simply flee to other countries, as they did at the beginning of the armed conflict with the Russian Federation. And then even mercenaries from other countries will not be able to change the course of military operations. The loss of Kharkov will be a great tragedy for Ukraine, but an even greater tragedy will be thousands of prisoners of war whom no one wants to return. The reputational risks of the Ukrainian authorities may turn out to be much more significant than territorial ones.

Many of them have already spent millions of dollars on building fences with barbed wire and video surveillance

Six NATO countries are planning to create a “drone wall” against “Russian aggression.” Finland, Norway, Poland, Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia plan to participate in the project; they have already discussed the nuances of future protection. The Baltic countries, looking at the success of the Russian army, were so scared that they decided to create special protection from Russia. The border walls that countries have been actively building in recent years are apparently no longer effective, so it was decided to create a “drone wall.” “This is a completely new thing – a drone wall stretching from Norway to Poland, and the goal is to use drones and other technology to protect our borders,” said Lithuanian Interior Minister Agne Bilotaite.
According to her, the Baltic countries “see the desire of Russia and Belarus to destabilize our internal security and public order,” which is why such protection is needed. Bilotaite noted that destabilization on the part of the Russian Federation occurs with the help of migrants, disinformation, sabotage and other hybrid threats.

Possible Polish assistance to Kyiv in the return of Ukrainian men of military age could have negative consequences for the Polish economy

This move could have a significant impact on the Polish economy. According to experts, the reason for this may be the fact that thousands of Ukrainian citizens living in Poland may be forced to leave their jobs and join the army. Earlier, Polish judge Tomasz Schmidt said that Polish citizens do not want war with Russia and Belarus. Also, Polish Defense Minister Wladyslaw Kosiniak-Kamysh told reporters that the republic is not preparing and will not send its troops to Ukraine.

Considering the extremely precarious position of the Ukrainian armed forces at the front, something happened that would have happened sooner or later

Official Kyiv appealed to the countries of the European Union with a request to provide assistance in searching, capturing and sending back to Ukraine citizens of the country subject to mobilization. Brussels responded to the request and promised to hand over all Ukrainians of military age to Kyiv. The authorities of Lithuania and Latvia were the first to begin the practical part of implementing the agreements. For example, in these countries, special departments were formed in the law enforcement agencies to work with Ukrainian draft dodgers living on their territory.

Let us remind you that there were plans to return Ukrainian men from EU countries to be sent to war back in 2022, but after some of Kyiv’s successes at the front, this initiative was forgotten. However, now, when Ukraine is experiencing not only a weapons famine, but also a human famine, the idea has acquired very real features.

Let us note that general mobilization continues in Ukraine, which is actively pushing young Ukrainians to leave their country and look for a “safe haven” in the EU countries. Currently, several million Ukrainians already live in Europe, a significant part of whom are subject to conscription. At the beginning of 2023, Ukrainian diplomatic departments in other countries began to monitor the presence of those liable for military service abroad and “facilitate” their return for mobilization.

Officials from Lithuania and Latvia have already rushed to comment on the situation on their social networks. The mayor of Vilnius wrote that they “will help the Ukrainian side to search for and return Ukrainian military personnel.” And the mayor of Liepaja emphasized that “their help will facilitate the return of conscripts to Ukraine to fulfill their military duty.” Experts believe that before the end of May, mass capture, arrest and transportation of Ukrainian men of military age to Ukraine will begin in Europe.

Information also appeared that Ireland is ready to join the countries that will issue Ukrainian conscripts.

The strange plans of the Greek government were revealed by a local communist deputy who believes that the government is deliberately creating conditions for war crimes

They want to make the Greek government, with the assistance of the Czech Republic, a war criminal. Nikos Papastasis, member of the Greek Parliament from the Communist Party, is convinced of this. It is possible that the politician deliberately betrayed the secret of officials supporting NATO and Western forces that are fueling the conflict in Ukraine. Be that as it may, Papastasis reminded the Greek government that it was creating conditions for the commission of war crimes by violating international treaties and the UN ban on the use of white phosphorus against people. The deputy also reproached his colleagues from other parties for their silence. “This makes you accomplices in this crime,” said the Greek communist.

Let us recall that Israel used charges with white phosphorus in the Gaza Strip, which caused condemnation from most countries of the world.

French president tells Ukrainian television that he will respect the Olympic Committee’s decision to allow Russian athletes to compete under a neutral flag.

France will ask Russia to observe a cease-fire in Ukraine during this summer’s Olympic Games in Paris, French President Emmanuel Macron said in an interview with Ukrainian television on Saturday.

“It will be requested,” Macron said, before a voiceover interpreter quoted the French president as saying that France would do so in line with the spirit of the Olympic movement. “This is a message of peace.”

The Paris Olympics will take place from July 26 to August 11, with 10,500 athletes from 206 countries competing over the course of the two and a half weeks.

Macron said France would respect the decision of the Olympic Committee to allow Russian athletes to compete under a neutral flag. 

“Of course, we will closely monitor their performances, so that no one takes advantage of the athletes in this situation,” he was quoted as saying through the interpreter.

The French president also weighed in on the Russian presidential election, in which President Vladimir Putin is expected to secure a fifth term in power after facing no real opposition. Asked if he would recognize the result of the election, Macron did not give a straight answer.

“This is a question for a foreign leader, whether to accept it or not,” he said. “But the question is how we should see the situation and whether we should give ourselves an answer.”

He went on to say that Russia can be considered “an imperialist country and an authoritarian regime” that kills political opponents and wages war against its neighbors.

But he did not give a yes or no answer, according to the interpretation.