U.S. Air Force General Philip Breedlove, the Supreme Allied Commander of NATO, said Sunday Russia is using snap military exercises in preparation of a military invasion of Ukraine.
“A snap exercise puts an incredible force at a border. The force that is at the Ukrainian border now to the east is very, very sizeable and very, very ready,” Breedlove said.
“You cannot defend against that if you are not there to defend against it. So I think we need to think about our allies, the positioning of our forces in the alliance and the readiness of those forces… such that we can be there to defend against it if required, especially in the Baltics and other places.”
He said Russia has its military “postured on the eastern border of Ukraine to run to Trans-Dniester if the decision was made to do that, and that is very worrisome.” Trans-Dniester is a region on the border of Ukraine and neighboring Moldova. It has autonomous status and a large Russian majority.
Breedlove made the remarks during an event held by the German Marshall Fund. Members of the globalist think tank include David Rockefeller of Chase Manhattan Bank. The Ford Foundation, the Club of Rome, the Committee of 300, the Aspen Institute, and other internationalist organizations also collaborate with the think tank. In addition to creating NATO, the organization funds the Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission.
In Ukraine, the junta put into place with the assistance of the U.S. State Department has issued dire warnings about a Russian invasion of the eastern part of the country. “The aim of Putin is not Crimea but all of Ukraine,” Andriy Parubiy, Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council boss, told a rally in Kyiv. “His troops massed at the border are ready to attack at any moment,” Parubiy warned.
The establishment media in the United States is now reporting a Russian invasion is inevitable. Breedlove’s remarks about Russia are repeated without comment and are stripped of historical context by a corporate media disingenuously claiming to be fair and balanced.
Obama, Congress, and NATO all declare Russia will soon invade and annex its former Soviet satellite states. The establishment media, however, omits the fact that NATO and the West have successfully annexed 12 countries that were members of the Warsaw Pact and three former members of the Soviet Union. This occurred despite assurances by the United States it would not move on Eastern Europe after the fall of the Soviet Union. Gorbachev was told that if Soviet troops withdrew from East Germany, NATO would not move “one inch east,” a promise the U.S. soon violated.
From Spiegel Online, dated November 26, 2009:
What the US secretary of state said on Feb. 9, 1990 in the magnificent St. Catherine’s Hall at the Kremlin is beyond dispute. There would be, in [James] Baker’s words, “no extension of NATO’s jurisdiction for forces of NATO one inch to the east,” provided the Soviets agreed to the NATO membership of a unified Germany. Moscow would think about it, Gorbachev said, but added: “any extension of the zone of NATO is unacceptable.”
In addition to the United States, Germany assured Russia it would not move on its former territory. German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher told Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze in February, 1990, he was “aware that NATO membership for a unified Germany raises complicated questions. For us, however, one thing is certain: NATO will not expand to the east.”
Russian President Dmitry Medvedev complained that none “of the things that we were assured, namely that NATO would not expand endlessly eastwards and our interests would be continuously taken into consideration” were honored.
By the late 1990s, the U.S. had moved to include Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic in NATO as part of an effort, according to then Secretary of Defense William Cohen, to promote “more democracy, stability and prosperity in Europe.”
In addition to Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovakia – all formerly part of the Soviet Union – eventually became part of the NATO club.
In 1999, the United States and NATO hatched a plot to invade Yugoslavia under the pretense of humanitarian intervention, a scheme that would later figure large in U.S. interventions and invasions.
“NATO’s ‘humanitarian’ enterprise in Kosovo was built on a structure of lies, many of them flowing from NATO headquarters and officials of the NATO powers, and uncritically passed along by the mainstream media of the NATO countries,” write Edward S. Herman and David Peterson.
The word “genocide” was used to describe Serbian operations in Kosovo against the Kosovo Liberation Army, which targeted Serbs, including mail carriers. The KLA consisted of former Marxist-Leninists and members of a drug cartel. Prior to the US-NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, the Clinton administration cultivated a partnership with the KLA despite an earlier proclamation that the group was a terrorist organization.
In addition to outright invasions and less than opaque support for color revolutions in former communist countries, NATO and the US have staged a number of provocative military exercises on the outskirts of Russia, a fact ignored as the U.S. and its propaganda media criticize Russian military exercises within its own country and portray the drills as preparations for an invasion and annexation of Ukraine and,according to Breedlove and NATO, Moldova.
“We are seeing today a revival of this containment policy, which was designed to curb Soviet, might throughout the cold war. In addition to containment there is a conscious intent by Brussels (NATO HQ) and Washington to strangle Russia, by cutting it completely off from sea and land access beyond its borders or for its fleet and military supplies to remain mobile,” writes Michael Werbowski.
“The current crisis in Ukraine has made it plainly evident the West and by extension NATO wants to continue its eastward push or incursion into Russia’s front lawn and the same time try to scuttle all attempts by Moscow to create the formation of an alternative strategic, economic and yes military alliance to NATO,” Werbowski continues.
In addition, the Russians accused NATO of destabilizing states in the region, deploying troops in areas neighboring Russia, installing strategic missile systems on its borders, making territorial claims against Russia and its allies, interference in their internal affairs, and exacerbating “armed conflicts on territories neighboring Russia and allied nations.”
In 2010, Russia warned of the possibility of war due to NATO’s expansionism. “The goal of NATO to arrogate to itself the assumption of global functions in violation of international law, and to expand the military infrastructure of NATO nations to Russia’s borders including through expansion of the bloc,” the document states.
The possibility of war, either intentionally or by accident, has increased significantly over the last month as the U.S. and NATO engage in brinkmanship over the situation in Ukraine.
The corporate media in the United States has performed its usual task of rationalizing a move toward war by characterizing Russia as a brutal aggressor, a portrayal that has used lurid comparisons to Hitler and the annexation of Czechoslovakia and the Sudetenland while ignoring past moves by NATO to confront Russia, diminish its influence over political and economic conditions in its own backyard, and slowly chip away its territorial integrity.
Credit to Infowars