In
the U.S. Russia-hating liberals are joining the neocons in seeking
more war in Ukraine, as the prospects for a rational and peaceful
resolution to the crisis continue to fade.
by
James W. Carden
Part
2 - Ukraine’s Human Rights Abuses
There are a number of objections
to yet another round of NATO expansion. As I reported in February
2015: “The current [Ukrainian] government has, according to
organizations that could hardly be described as Kremlin friendly
(Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, the Organization for
Security and Cooperation in Europe), committed war crimes in its
attempt to defeat the Russian-backed separatists in the Donbas. …
NATO’s principal consideration should not be whether NATO will make
Ukraine more secure, but whether Ukraine will make NATO more secure.
The answer is self-evident.”
It is true that NATO Secretary
General Jens Stoltenberg, as recently as this month, insisted to
Russian state media that NATO is not contemplating Ukrainian
membership, telling Sputnik that “There is no MAP [membership
action plan] on the agenda.” Yet Stoltenberg has also said, as
he did in a speech to the Ukrainian parliament in July, that he
believes Ukraine “has the right to choose its own security
arrangements” further noting that “last month, NATO
welcomed Montenegro as the 29th member of our Alliance. This shows
that NATO’s door remains open.”
So the issue doesn’t seem to be
going away.
Poroshenko’s push to join NATO,
which is being made against the backdrop of ever-worsening relations
between the U.S. and Russia, ignores, perhaps purposefully, one of
the principal causes of the morass in which Kiev and Moscow find
themselves. It was Moscow’s not unfounded fear that Ukraine might
join NATO that helped spark the Ukrainian crisis in early 2014.
In the weeks prior to Russia’s
annexation of Crimea (and just over a month before the outbreak of
full hostilities in the Donbas), three former presidents of Ukraine
(Leonid Kravchuk, Leonid Kuchma and Viktor Yushchenko) called on the
post-Maidan regime to renounce the 2010 Kharkiv agreement which
allowed for Russia to base its Black Sea naval fleet in Crimea (in
return for discounted prices on Russian natural gas).
It is perhaps not unreasonable
that this last move, in addition to the foreign policy and security
protocols embedded within the European Union Association agreement
(which Poroshenko signed in June 2014), would cause the Russian
government to at the very least suspect that NATO was setting the
stage for Ukraine’s eventual absorption into the alliance.
Indeed, Kiev’s launch of its
violent and indiscriminate “Anti-Terrorist Operation” against the
Donbas – with the effect of intimidating and alienating otherwise
loyal Russian-speaking citizens in the eastern part of the country –
surely played a role in the Kremlin’s decision to come to the aid
of the rebels later in the summer of 2014 and again at Debaltseve
early the following year.
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