Ukraine invasion










 
A non-partisan research post - London
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The Truth About Ukraine Starts to Leak Out

But claiming Russia was provoked into war still means you're a Russian stooge​

"The conspiracies about Ukraine are like all the rest - after a few years the conspiracy theorists are proven correct. First you are called a Russian stooge for suggesting NATO expansion may have provoked Russia to invade Ukraine, before the truth starts to slowly drip out. A few more years and The Guardian will be lecturing us on biolabs in Ukraine! . . ."

None of this should come as any surprise to anyone who follows this thread.

a quick gander and ....​

NATO's rebuttal..copy & past from NATO site (note: within limits of available time did not find any direct Russian 'authoritative' citations for comparison - unhappy YouTubers with psychological and personality disorders grinding their agenda axes are not authoritative or credible)

NATO: Setting the record straight

De-bunking Russian disinformation on NATO​

Russia's illegal war of aggression against Ukraine has shattered peace in Europe. NATO's Strategic Concept states that Russia is the most significant and direct threat to Allies' security and to peace and stability in the Euro-Atlantic area. Russia wants to establish spheres of influence and control other countries through coercion, subversion, aggression and annexation. It uses conventional, cyber and hybrid means – including disinformation – against NATO Allies and partners.

NATO does not seek confrontation and poses no threat to Russia. The Alliance will continue to respond to Russian threats and actions in a united and responsible way. We are significantly strengthening our deterrence and defence, supporting our partners, and enhancing our resilience. This includes calling out Russia's actions and countering disinformation.

Myth:

NATO is at war with Russia in Ukraine​

FACT
NATO is not at war with Russia. We do not seek confrontation with Russia. NATO supports Ukraine in its right to self-defence, as enshrined in the UN Charter. In response to Russia's aggressive actions, we continue to strengthen our deterrence and defence to make sure there is no room for misunderstanding that NATO is ready to protect and defend every Ally.
NATO is a defensive Alliance. Our core task is to keep our nations safe. At the Vilnius Summit, Allies reaffirmed their iron-clad commitment to defend every inch of Allied territory at all times. We will continue to protect our one billion people, and safeguard freedom and democracy, in accordance with Article 5 of the Washington Treaty.

Myth:

NATO promised Russia it would not expand after the Cold War​

FACT
Such an agreement was never made. NATO’s door has been open to new members since it was founded in 1949. This has never changed. No treaty signed by NATO Allies and Russia included provisions on NATO membership. Decisions on NATO membership are taken by consensus among all Allies. Russia does not have a veto.
The idea of NATO enlargement beyond a united Germany was not on the agenda in 1989, particularly as the Warsaw Pact still existed until 1991. Mikhail Gorbachev said in an interview in 2014: "The topic of 'NATO expansion' was not discussed at all, and it wasn't brought up in those years. I say this with full responsibility. Not a single Eastern European country raised the issue, not even after the Warsaw Pact ceased to exist in 1991. Western leaders didn't bring it up either."
Individual Allies cannot make agreements on NATO’s behalf. President Clinton consistently refused Boris Yeltsin's offer to commit that no former Soviet Republics would join NATO: "I can't make commitments on behalf of NATO, and I'm not going to be in the position myself of vetoing NATO expansion with respect to any country, much less letting you or anyone else do so… NATO operates by consensus," he said.

The wording “NATO expansion” is already part of the myth. NATO did not hunt for new members or want to “expand eastward.” NATO respects every nation’s right to choose its own path. NATO membership is a decision for NATO Allies and those countries who wish to join alone.

Myth:

NATO is aggressive​

FACT
NATO is a defensive alliance. It does not seek confrontation and poses no threat to Russia, or any other nations. NATO did not invade Georgia. NATO did not invade Ukraine. Russia did.
NATO made significant efforts over many years to establish a strategic partnership with Russia. We established the NATO-Russia Council and worked together on issues ranging from counter-narcotics and counter-terrorism to submarine rescue and civil emergency planning, even during periods of NATO enlargement.
It was Russia that gradually chipped away at any hopes of peaceful cooperation, with its pattern of increasing aggressive behaviour, from Grozny to Georgia and Aleppo to Ukraine.
NATO Allies engaged in persistent diplomatic efforts to convince Russia to change its course. NATO held a last meeting of the NATO-Russia Council in January 2022 to call on President Putin to step back from the brink. President Putin chose war.

Myth:

NATO's deployments are a threat to Russia​

FACT
In response to Russia's illegal annexation of Crimea and destabilisation of eastern Ukraine in 2014, NATO suspended practical cooperation with Russia, while maintaining political and military dialogue. We deployed four multinational battlegroups to the Baltic States and Poland in 2016. Before Russia's aggressive actions in 2014, there was no deployment of combat-ready NATO troops in the eastern part of the Alliance.
Following Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, NATO has further reinforced its deterrence and defence posture. We have doubled the number of multinational battlegroups in the east of the Alliance from four to eight and put 40,000 troops under direct NATO command. We will continue to do what is needed to protect and defend every inch of Allied soil.
NATO exercises and military deployments are not directed against Russia, or any other country. Outside NATO territory, the Alliance has a KFOR peacekeeping mission in Kosovo based on a United Nations Security Council mandate, and a train and assist mission in Iraq contributing to the fight against terrorism at the request of the Iraqi government.
It is Russia's aggressive actions that have shattered peace in Europe and are undermining international security and stability. As well as its aggression against Ukraine, Russia has military bases and soldiers in Georgia and Moldova without the consent of their governments.

Myth:

NATO is encircling Russia​

FACT
Russia is the world's largest country geographically. It is almost twice the size of the US and China.
When Finland joined the Alliance in April 2023, NATO's land border with Russia more than doubled. Even after Finland's accession, only 11% of Russia's land border is shared with NATO countries.
No one has backed Russia into a corner. It is hard to encircle a country with eleven time zones.
Russian-borders.png


Myth:

Ukraine will not join NATO​

FACT
Ukraine will become a member of NATO. NATO supports the every country's right to choose its own security arrangements, including Ukraine. NATO's door remains open. NATO Allies decide on NATO membership. Russia does not have a veto.
At the Vilnius Summit, Allies reaffirmed the commitment they made at the 2008 Summit in Bucharest that Ukraine will become a member of the Alliance when conditions are met and Allies agree. They agreed to remove the requirement for a Membership Action Plan, changing Ukraine's membership path from a two-step to a one-step process.
NATO is stepping up its political and practical cooperation with Ukraine. President Zelenskyy attended the first meeting of the NATO-Ukraine Council at the Vilnius Summit, a platform for crisis consultation and decision-making between equals.
NATO has also agreed a new multi-year assistance programme to help the Ukrainian armed forces transition from Soviet-era to NATO standards and strengthen Ukraine's security and defence sector to resist further Russian aggression. Ukraine is already closer to NATO that it has ever been. In Vilnius, Allied leaders reiterated that Ukraine's future is in NATO.

Myth:

NATO's out of area operations prove that the Alliance is not defensive​

FACT
NATO intervened in the former Yugoslavia to stop bloodshed and save lives. From 1992-1995, NATO conducted several military operations in Bosnia, including enforcing a no-fly-zone and providing air support for UN peacekeepers. These activities were mandated by the United Nations Security Council, of which Russia is a member. NATO air strikes against Bosnian Serb positions in 1995 helped pave the way for the Dayton peace agreement, which ended the war in Bosnia that had killed over 100,000 people. From 1996, NATO led multinational peacekeeping forces in Bosnia, which included troops from Russia. The European Union took over that mission in 2004.
NATO's operation in Kosovo in 1999 followed a year of intense international diplomatic efforts, which included Russia, to end the conflict. The UN Security Council repeatedly branded the ethnic cleansing in Kosovo and the growing number of refugees as a threat to international peace and security. NATO's mission helped to end large-scale and sustained violations of human rights and the killing of civilians. KFOR, NATO's ongoing peacekeeping mission in Kosovo, has a UNSC mandate (UNSCR 1244) and is supported by both Belgrade and Pristina.
The NATO-led operation in Libya in 2011 was launched under the authority of two UN Security Council Resolutions (UNSCRs 1970 and 1973), neither of which was opposed by Russia. UNSCR 1973 authorised the international community "to take all necessary measures" to "protect civilians and civilian populated areas under threat of attack". This is what NATO did, with the political and military support of regional states and members of the Arab League.

 
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A non-partisan research post - London
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Additional Bonus:

Nations Undergo Rigorous Process to Join NATO


Minimum Requirements for NATO Membership

Ex-Nato head says Putin wanted to join alliance early on in his rule

Vladimir Putin said in 2000 that he ‘cannot imagine my own country in isolation from Europe and what we often call the civilised world’.

Vladimir Putin wanted Russia to join Nato but did not want his country to have to go through the usual application process and stand in line “with a lot of countries that don’t matter”, according to a former secretary general of the transatlantic alliance.

In 2000 Putin told George Robertson, the Secretary General of NATO at that time, that he wanted Russia to join NATO but would not like to go through the usual application process.[32]

NATO OFFICE OF INFORMATION AND PRESS ACADEMIC AFFAIR UNIT : SHOULD RUSSIA JOIN NATO?
(FINAL REPORT)
Prof. Yuriy DAVYDO

Russian president Vladimir Putin wants you to believe that NATO is responsible for his February 24 invasion of Ukraine—that rounds of NATO enlargement made Russia insecure, forcing Putin to lash out. This argument has two key flaws. First, NATO has been a variable and not a constant source of tension between Russia and the West. Moscow has in the past acknowledged Ukraine’s right to join NATO; the Kremlin’s complaints about the alliance spike in a clear pattern after democratic breakthroughs in the post-Soviet space. This highlights a second flaw: Since Putin fears democracy and the threat that it poses to his regime, and not expanded NATO membership, taking the latter off the table will not quell his insecurity. His declared goal of the invasion, the “denazification” of Ukraine, is a code for his real aim: antidemocratic regime change.
 
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Leaked Russian military files reveal Moscow rehearses tactical nuclear weapons response to Chinese invasion

Russia has rehearsed using tactical nuclearweapons at an early stage of conflict with a major world power, the Financial Times reported on Feb. 28, citing leaked military files that include trainingscenarios for an invasion by China.

 
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A non-partisan research post - London
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Putin faces £601m war plane blitz: Ukraine downs 10 Russian warplanes in 10 days including seven £39m bombers, two £34m jets and £260m spy plane in major blow to Moscow
  • Ukraine claims to have downed jets in the occupied east and a plane over Russia
 

 


 
A non-partisan research post - London
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NATO: Russia’s war against Ukraine: Kremlin’s litany of lies​

 
A non-partisan research post - London
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The Truth About Ukraine Starts to Leak Out

But claiming Russia was provoked into war still means you're a Russian stooge​

"The conspiracies about Ukraine are like all the rest - after a few years the conspiracy theorists are proven correct. First you are called a Russian stooge for suggesting NATO expansion may have provoked Russia to invade Ukraine, before the truth starts to slowly drip out. A few more years and The Guardian will be lecturing us on biolabs in Ukraine! . . ."

None of this should come as any surprise to anyone who follows this thread.
Subsequent to : https://www.trade2win.com/threads/ukraine-invasion.240741/page-273#post-3258248

NATO: Russia’s war against Ukraine: Kremlin’s litany of lies

The Breach: Ukraine’s Territorial Integrity and the Budapest Memorandum

In 1994, the three depository states of the Treaty on the Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT)
  1. Russia,
  2. United States,and the
  3. United Kingdom
extended positive and negative security assurances to Ukraine.
The depository states underlined their commitment to Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity by signing the so-called “Budapest Memorandum.”

Russia’s breach of the Memorandum invites strong scrutiny of other security commitments and opens an enormous rhetorical opportunity for proliferators to lobby for a nuclear deterrent.

Using new archival records, this examination of Ukraine’s search for security guarantees in the early 1990s reveals that, ironically, the threat of border revisionism by Russia was the single gravest concern of Ukraine’s leadership when surrendering the nuclear arsenal.

Ukraine insisted that these security commitments be incorporated into a high-level document— preferably involving Russia. After consultations with Washington in December 1992, the US Ambassador in Kyiv Roman Popadiuk presented Ukraine’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) with a draft of such a US-Russian statement.

The draft included:

  1. Positive and negative security assurances of NWS toward NNWS parties to the NPT
  2. Commitment to respect Ukraine’s sovereignty, independence and the inviolability of borders and abstain from economic coercion, in accordance with the CSCE Final Act, and
  3. Commitment not to use force or threat of force against territorial integrity and political independence of Ukraine, in accordance with the UN Charter.
The Ukrainian negotiators signaled that reaffirming existing multilateral commitments did not amount to a sufficient guarantee of Ukraine’s security. Yet, Ambassador Popadiuk informed the MFA that the US was unlikely to undertake any stronger
commitments. Indeed, he proved correct and the wording of this early draft remained substantively unchanged in the Budapest Memorandum signed two years later.


 
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Budapest Memorandum​

According to the three memoranda,[6] Russia, the US and the UK confirmed their recognition of Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine becoming parties to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons and effectively removing all Soviet nuclear weapons from their soil, and that they agreed to the following:
  1. Respect the signatory's independence and sovereignty in the existing borders (in accordance with the principles of the CSCE Final Act).[7]
  2. Refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of the signatories to the memorandum, and undertake that none of their weapons will ever be used against these countries, except in cases of self-defense or otherwise in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations.
  3. Refrain from economic coercion designed to subordinate to their own interest the exercise by Ukraine, the Republic of Belarus and Kazakhstan of the rights inherent in its sovereignty and thus to secure advantages of any kind.
  4. Seek immediate Security Council action to provide assistance to the signatory if they "should become a victim of an act of aggression or an object of a threat of aggression in which nuclear weapons are used".
  5. Not to use nuclear weapons against any non - nuclear-weapon state party to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, except in the case of an attack on themselves, their territories or dependent territories, their armed forces, or their allies, by such a state in association or alliance with a nuclear weapon state.[8][9][10]
  6. Consult with one another if questions arise regarding those commitments.[11][12]
 
A non-partisan research post - London
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Oh, How They Lied. The Many Times Russia Denied Ukraine Invasion Plans​


12 Nov 2021, 00:20

Russia never had plans of invading Ukraine — diplomat​

source : TASS - https://tass.com/world/1360407

5 Dec 2021, 04:05

U.S. claims on Russia’s plans to invade Ukraine earlier proved to be wrong — embassy

The diplomatic mission stressed that Russia is not a threat to any country, the deployment of Russian troops on the national territory is our sovereign right and no one's business : source - TASS - https://tass.com/politics/1370925

5 Dec 2021, 12:57
‘Cheap bit of fake news’: MP blasts Bild’s article on Russian plan to invade Ukraine
: source - TASS: https://tass.com/politics/1371003?u...m_campaign=google.com&utm_referrer=google.com
12 Nov 2021, 00:20

Russia has not aggressive plans against anyone, Kremlin says
23.11.2021 15:28
source : Pravada - https://english.pravda.ru/news/russia/149701-russia_kremlin/
 
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Another leaked document ? Obviously, numerous unanswered questions revolve around said leaked document - is the document authentic ? fake ? a Western ruse ? a Russian ruse ? etc., etc., etc.
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Putin's nuclear weapon playbook: Terrifying leaked military files reveal Russia's threshold for unleashing nukes is lower than ever feared with Kremlin's forces already rehearsing scenarios for tactical strikes
  • A possible nuclear response could be triggered by an enemy entering Russian territory to more specific examples, the documents show
 
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