NATO Threatens, But Not from a Position of Strength

NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, during his visit to Kyiv April 20, assured President Zelenskyy that Ukraine would be welcomed into NATO at some point. But he may be promising more than he can deliver, given the growing opposition in the alliance’s member states to the west’s proxy war against Russia.

On the same occasion, the Secretary General confirmed that NATO allies have already provided more than 150 billion euros (!) in support to Ukraine since Feb. 2022. But that is not enough, he told those allies the following day, at the meeting of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group at the U.S. Air Force base in Ramstein, Germany.

The Ukrainian leaders agree. Volodymyr Zelenskyy had told him they need more “long-range weapons, modern aviation, artillery and armored vehicles”, while Deputy Foreign Minister Andrij Melnyk (an open admirer of Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera) called for “ten times more to finish Russian aggression”, and the head of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council, Oleksiy Danilov, tweeted “Don’t try to put us at the negotiating table, give us enough weapons. Weapons are the best mediator…”

With more and more Western military experts warning that Kyiv’s much touted “spring offensive” against Russia is bound to fail, contrary to the blustering about regaining even Crimea, such statements indicate that the failure will be blamed on the lack of weapons.

Nonetheless, NATO is escalating the provocations, with the United States resorting to the denial of visas for Russian journalists who wanted to attend two important events at the UN Security Council on April 24 and 25, chaired by Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. The situation thus remains highly dangerous.

That is confirmed by the classified Pentagon documents that were recently leaked (cf. SAS 16/23). The Russian news agency TASS asked Schiller Institute chairwoman Helga Zepp-LaRouche on April 23 for her assessment of the information they contained. “These leaks reveal on the one side the total surveillance control concerning the actual military situation in Ukraine, which makes the Ukrainian troops look like a pawn in a proxy war, not exactly a comfortable place to be”, she replied.

“The really disturbing issue is the implication of disinformation about the actual assessment of Ukraine’s chances of ‘winning this war on the battlefield”, she is also quoted as saying. “If the U.S. services had a much more pessimistic and actually more realistic view about the inability of the Ukrainians to ‘win,’ but consciously portrayed this estimate differently, then not only were the Ukrainian people sacrificed, but also the allies were lured into a policy of sending more and heavier weapons, which eventually is making them a target of a potential escalation…”