Demonstration outside US Embassy, London, January 2025. Photo Workers.
Why have peace talks between Ukraine and Russia been so difficult ever since the invasion in February 2022? The answer: NATO…
Provoked: how Washington started the new cold war with Russia and the catastrophe in Ukraine, by Scott Horton, paperback, 678 pages, ISBN 978-1733647373, Libertarian Institute, 2024, £23.63. Kindle edition available.
NATO endlessly repeats that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was unprovoked. So insistent is this assertion that it must make anyone ask whether NATO is protesting too much. In this extraordinary book, Scott Horton details exactly how the US government led NATO into provoking Russia to wage an unnecessary war against Ukraine.
Over the years NATO promised repeatedly not to extend to the east. After meeting US Secretary of State James Baker in 1990, the West German foreign minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher said there was no intention of doing so.
At the time Genscher was deeply involved in the process of German reunification and he sought to reassure the USSR about the outcome. A few days after their meeting, Baker directly and categorically told Mikhail Gorbachev, then president of the Soviet Union, that even if the United States kept its presence in Germany as part of NATO (which of course it was intending to do), then “…not an inch of NATO’s present military jurisdiction will spread in an eastward direction.”
Jack Matlock, former U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union, stated, “we gave categorical assurances to Gorbachev back when the Soviet Union existed that if a united Germany was able to stay in NATO, NATO would not be moved eastward.”
Expansion
Matlock summed up, “there would have been no basis for the present crisis if there had been no expansion of the alliance following the end of the Cold War, or if the expansion had occurred in harmony with building a security structure in Europe that included Russia.”
NATO was purportedly created to guard against the supposed threat from the USSR, but it showed its true aggressive nature as it broke all its pledges. It added more and more countries to NATO, brushing aside Russia’s protests.
The NATO powers pledged to get Ukraine into NATO, knowing full well that no Russian government could accept this.
US Professor John Mearsheimer presciently warned in 2015, “The West is leading Ukraine down the primrose path, and the end result is Ukraine is going to get wrecked.”
In 2023, NATO secretary-general Jens Stoltenberg admitted the war was launched in response to NATO’s encroachment. He said Russian President Vladimir Putin presented a draft treaty which promised no more NATO enlargement as a precondition for not invading Ukraine. Stoltenberg added, “Of course we didn’t sign that…So he went to war to prevent NATO, more NATO, close to his borders.”
Negotiations blocked
After Russia’s forces invaded on 24 February 2022, President Volodymyr Zelensky briefly backed peace talks. But then NATO, with Boris Johnson pushing hardest, told him not to. Horton records that a former UN assistant secretary-general said that NATO decided at its special summit on 24 March 2022 to oppose these peace negotiations. Zelensky defended the preliminary results of the Ukrainian-Russian peace negotiation for a few days longer, then gave in to NATO pressures and opted for a continuation of the war.
But President Zelensky only rules on sufferance. A group calling itself the Capitulation Resistance Movement arose in 2019 and is still influential. Under the guise of being pro-democracy, it opposes all moves towards peace. It accuses Zelensky of being a “servant of the Kremlin” and of trying to “strike a deal with the devil”. He has faced several overt death threats from Ukraine’s neo-Nazis if he does not hold out for total victory, for the full restoration of the country’s territorial integrity.
‘Putin made a serious mistake in allowing NATO to provoke him into launching an invasion…’
The neo-Nazis hold Zelensky hostage, preventing any peace negotiations, any peace agreement. They are doing what NATO wants, and NATO is doing what the neo-Nazis want. Together they decide his policy, and therefore – together – they decide NATO’s policy. In effect, NATO is letting Ukraine’s neo-Nazis hold all of us hostage, binding us into a forever war in Ukraine, against Russia.
And Zelensky is powerless to do anything about extensive and widely reported corruption. The EU interferes, trying to impose itself on what’s happening inside the country in the name of democracy – as it does everywhere. The more likely reality is that this is a symptom of an internal power struggle.
The other big lie is that President Putin, if not checked in Ukraine, will go on to attack other European countries. But even US war advocate Robert Kagan conceded, “… there is no way that Putin’s conquest of Ukraine has any immediate or even distant effect on American security.”
Nor is it any threat to Britain’s security. Putin is not a new Hitler. There has only ever been one Hitler – thankfully. But Putin made a serious mistake in allowing NATO to provoke him into launching an invasion, costing the lives of over a million Russians.
Yet NATO, with the Labour government pushing hardest, is preparing for a forever war. In September 2024, NATO members agreed a ten-year plan to rebuild the Ukrainian defence industry.
By contrast, the peoples of the NATO member countries want peace. In summer 2024, 94 per cent of the American people, and 88 per cent of Europeans, said they wanted a negotiated settlement. And in February 2024, 72 per cent of Ukrainians said the same.