Following article is taken from the link above. Verbatim. It is the complete story about what is (and has been) happening and why. I have already detailed them in many posts over the last eight years on this blog. However, this article aptly summarises them covering the whole picture. What I find encouraging is, that the facts are not lost among the many individuals in the West, where reason, decency, honesty and humanity, and most important of all, the ability to tell the truth (who would have thought! Except Mr Orwell!) with impartiality still exists. It is indeed heartening to find this article, among the deluge of the hatred and evil minded schemes in these days, and coming out on the surface with its true colour.
The reality surrounding the war in Ukraine
Sky News anchor Cory Bernardi, Swiss Colonel Jacques Baud and American historian Eric Zuesse lied to our coverage of the war in Ukraine. The Russians received a binding commitment on NATO enlargement. The Ukrainian government is not legitimate. NATO is not a defensive alliance and the accession of Finland and Sweden is not a good idea. At the fall of the Wall, Washington informed its allies that the Cold War would continue until the Russia under the yoke.
The in the period 2001-2021 in Nazareth (Israel)1 resident renowned British author and journalist Jonathan Cook draws attention in a tweet to the article The Hidden Truth about the War in Ukraine by former NATO and UN adviser Jacques Baud2 3. Cook’s comment was: “On big issues like Ukraine, we take sides based on the background provided by the Western media. But what if that background is skewed or just not right? An ex-NATO and UN advisor corrects the narrative.”
In this long read we publish a lightly edited and footnoted Dutch version of the statement by the French-speaking Baud, sometimes written in somewhat complicated English, a text that fits well with the words of Sky News Australia.4 TV anchor Cory Bernardi in the video above. The information also runs parallel to the articles on this platform since the turn of the year.
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Jacques Baud: The hidden truth about the war in Ukraine
The cultural-historical elements that determine relations between Russia and Ukraine are important. The two countries share a long, rich, diverse and eventful history.
Understanding those elements would be essential if today’s crisis is rooted in history. But that is not the case. Today’s war is not the product of our great-grandparents, our grandparents or even our parents, but of ourselves. We have created this crisis. We have put forward every part and every mechanism. We have piggybacked on the existing dynamics and used Ukraine to fulfill an old dream: to bring down Russia. It was the dream of Chrystia Freeland, Antony Blinken, Victoria Nuland and Olaf Scholz, and we made that dream come true.
The way we understand crises determines the way we solve them. Cheating with the facts leads to disaster. This is what is happening in Ukraine. The problem is so extensive that we cannot discuss all of them here. I’ll pick a few of them.
Did James Baker make promises to Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990 to limit NATO’s eastward expansion?
In 2021, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg stated that “there has never been a promise that NATO would not expand eastwards after the fall of the Berlin Wall.” This claim remains widespread among self-proclaimed experts on Russia, who explain that there were no promises because there was no treaty or written agreement. This argument is incorrect.
It is true that there are no north Atlantic Council (NAC) treaties or decisions that embody such promises. But this does not mean that they are not formulated, nor that they are formulated casually!
Today we have the feeling that the USSR, after having “lost the Cold War”, had no say in European security developments. This is not true. As the winner of World War II, the USSR had de jure veto power over German reunification. In other words, Western countries had to get their agreement, in return for which Gorbachev demanded a commitment not to expand NATO. It should not be forgotten that the USSR still existed in 1990 and that there was no question of dismantling, as the referendum of March 1991 would show. The Soviet Union was therefore not in a weak position and could prevent reunification.
This was confirmed on 31 January 1990 in Tutzing (Bavaria) by Hans-Dietrich Genscher, the German Foreign Minister, as stated in a telegram from the American Embassy in Bonn:
“Genscher warned, however, that any attempt to extend [NATO’s] military scope to the territory of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) would block German reunification.”
German reunification had two important consequences for the USSR: the withdrawal of the Group of Soviet Forces in Germany (GSFG), the most powerful and modern contingent outside its territory, and the disappearance of a significant part of its protective glacis.5. In other words, any movement would be at the expense of soviet security. That is why Genscher stated:
“… The changes in Eastern Europe and the process of German unification must “not undermine the security interests of the Soviet Union.” Therefore, NATO must rule out an “expansion of its territory to the east, i.e. to get closer to soviet borders.”
At this stage, the Warsaw Pact still existed and NATO doctrine was unchanged. Hence, Mikhail Gorbachev was quick to express legitimate concern about the national security of the USSR. That prompted James Baker, the U.S. Secretary of State, to immediately talk to him. To allay Gorbachev’s concerns, Baker declared on February 9, 1990:
“Not only for the Soviet Union, but also for other European countries, it is important to have guarantees that if the U.S. continues to have a presence in Germany within the framework of NATO, NATO’s current military jurisdiction will not move an inch to the east.”
So promises were made simply because the West had no alternative to obtain the approval of the USSR. Without promises, Germany would not have been reunited. Gorbachev accepted German reunification only because he had received assurances from President George H.W. Bush and James Baker, Chancellor Helmut Kohl and Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, her successor John Major and their Foreign Minister Douglas Hurd, French President François Mitterrand, as well as CIA Director Robert Gates and Manfred Wörner, at the time Secretary General of NATO. Against this background, Wörner stated in a speech in Brussels on 17 May 1990:
“The fact that we are prepared not to deploy a NATO army outside German territory gives the Soviet Union a solid security guarantee.”
In February 2022, Joshua Shifrinson, an American political analyst in the German magazine Der Spiegel, unveiled a declassified SECRET document dated March 6, 1991, written after a meeting of the political directors of the Foreign Ministries of the US, UK, France and Germany. The piece quotes the German representative, Jürgen Chrobog, as follows:
“We made it clear during the 2+4 negotiations that we would not expand NATO beyond the Elbe. That is why we cannot offer Poland and the others NATO membership.”
The representatives of the other countries also accepted the idea of not offering the other Eastern European countries NATO membership. So, written down or not, there was a ‘deal’, simply because a ‘deal’ was inevitable. Well, in international law, a “promise” is a valid unilateral act that must be respected (cf.) promissio est servanda’). Those who deny this today are simply those who do not know the value of a given word.6
Did Vladimir Putin ignore the Budapest Memorandum (1994)?
At the February 2022 Munich Security Conference (MSC), Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky referred to the Budapest Memorandum of 1994 and threatened to become a nuclear power again. However, it is not obvious that Ukraine will become a nuclear power again. Nuclear powers will not allow that. Zelensky and Putin know this. In fact, Zelensky is not using this memorandum to get nuclear weapons, but to get Crimea back, since Ukrainians consider Russia’s annexation of Crimea to be a violation of this treaty. In essence, Zelensky is trying to hold Western countries hostage. To understand that, we need to go back to events and facts that our historians have opportunistically “forgotten.”
On January 20, 1991, before Ukraine’s independence, the people of Crimea were asked by referendum to choose between two options: stay with Kiev or return to the pre-1954 situation and be governed by Moscow. The question was worded as follows:
“Are you in favour of the restoration of the Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic of Crimea as a national of the Soviet Union and as a member of the Union Treaty?”
In this first referendum on autonomy in the USSR, 93.6% voted in favour of annexation with Moscow. Thus, the Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic of Crimea (ASSR Crimea), abolished in 1945, was re-established by the Supreme Soviet of the Ukrainian SSR on February 12, 1991. On March 17, 1991, Moscow organized a referendum for the preservation of the Soviet Union, which would be accepted by Ukraine, indirectly confirming Crimea’s decision. At this stage, Crimea was under moscow’s control and not Kiev’s, while Ukraine was not yet independent. When Ukraine organized its own referendum for independence, turnout in Crimea was low, because people were no longer worried.
Ukraine became independent six months after Crimea, after the latter declared its sovereignty on September 4, 1991. On 26 February 1992, the Crimean Parliament proclaimed the ‘Republic of Crimea’. This was done with the consent of the Ukrainian government, which gave it the status of a self-governed republic. On May 5, 1992, Crimea declared its independence and adopted a constitution. The city of Sevastopol, which in the communist system was directly administered by Moscow, had a similar situation, after it was integrated with Ukraine in 1991, averse to any legality. The following years were marked by tug-of-war between Simferopol and Kiev, which wanted to control Crimea.
With the signing of the Budapest Memorandum in 1994, Ukraine renounced the nuclear weapons of the former USSR that had remained on its territory, in exchange for “its security, independence and territorial integrity”. At this stage, Crimea no longer considered itself de jure part of Ukraine and therefore not involved in this treaty. For its part, the government in Kiev felt strengthened by the memorandum. That is why Kiev abolished the Constitution of Crimea on its own authority on 17 March 1995. It sent troops to overthrow Yuri Mechkov, president of Crimea, and de facto annexed the Republic of Crimea. That led to street protests aimed at annexing Crimea with Russia. An event that the Western media hardly mentions.
Crimea was then ruled in an authoritarian manner by Kiev presidential decrees. This situation led the Crimean Parliament to draft a new constitution in October 1995 that restored the Autonomous Republic of Crimea. The new constitution was ratified by the Crimean Parliament on 21 October 1998 and confirmed by the Ukrainian Parliament on 23 December 1998. These events and the concerns of the Russian-speaking minority led to a friendship treaty between Ukraine and Russia on 31 May 1997. In the treaty, Ukraine included the principle of the inviolability of borders, in exchange – mind you – for a guarantee of “the protection of the ethnic, cultural, linguistic and religious originality of the national minorities”.
The kiev regime that came to power after the coup of February 23, 2014, had absolutely no constitutional basis. The unelected government repealed the Kivalov-Kolesnichenko Law of 2012 on official languages and thus no longer respected the guarantee of the friendship treaty with Russia of 1997. The people of Crimea then took to the streets to demand the “return” to Russia it had acquired 30 years earlier.
When, on March 4, 2014, a journalist asked Vladimir Putin if he was considering joining Crimea with Russia, he answered in the negative. “It is up to the residents to decide on their future. If that right has been granted to the Albanians in Kosovo, if it has been made possible in many parts of the world, then no one is ruling out the right of nations to self-determination, which, as far as I know, is enshrined in UN documents. We will in no way provoke such a decision or feed such feelings,” Putin said.
On March 6, 2014, the Crimean parliament decided to hold a popular referendum, with options remaining in Ukraine or annexed to Russia. The result allowed crimean authorities to ask Moscow for an annexation. With this referendum, Crimea regained the status it had legally acquired from Ukraine just before independence. Moreover, in 2010, the status of force agreement (SOFA) between Ukraine and Russia for the deployment of troops in Crimea and Sevastopol was extended until 2042. Russia therefore had no specific motive for claiming this area. The people of Crimea, rightly feeling betrayed by the Kiev government, seized the opportunity to assert their rights.
On February 19, 2022, Anka Feldhusen, the German ambassador in Kiev, threw a spanner in the works by declaring on the television channel Ukraine 24 that the Budapest Memorandum was not legally binding. Incidentally, this is also the American position, according to the statement on the website of the American embassy in Minsk. The entire Western narrative about the “annexation” of Crimea is based on rewriting history and covering up the legally valid referendum of 1991. The Budapest Memorandum of 1994 has been extensively quoted since February 2022, but the Western narrative coldly ignores the 1997 Friendship Treaty, which is the reason for the dissatisfaction of the Russian-speaking Ukrainian citizens.
Is the Ukrainian government legitimate?
The Russians still consider the regime change of 2014 to be illegal. After all, it did not come about through a constitutional process and without the support of a large part of the Ukrainian population. One can divide the Maidan revolution into different scenes, with different actors. Today, those driven by hatred of Russia try to merge these different scenes into a single “democratic élan.” It is a way to whitewash the crimes of Ukraine and its neo-Nazi fanatics.
Disappointed with the postponement of the treaty with the EU, the people of Kiev initially took to the streets, but regime change was not in the air. It was simply an expression of displeasure. Contrary to what the West claims, Ukraine was deeply divided on the issue of rapprochement with Europe. Researchby the Kiev International Institute of Sociology (KIIS) in November 2013 shows that Euro- and Russophiles kept each other in balance 50/50. In southern and eastern Ukraine, industry was strongly linked to Russia, and workers feared that an agreement excluding Russia would cost them jobs. That’s what would eventually happen. In fact, the goal at this stage was already to try to isolate Russia.
In the Washington Post, Henry Kissinger, national security adviser under Ronald Reagan, noted that the European Union helped turn the negotiation into a crisis.
The events that followed involved ultranationalist and neo-Nazi groups from the western part of the country. The violence broke out and the government backtracked. An agreement was made with the rioters that provided for new elections. But that agreement was quickly jettisoned.
It was nothing less than a coup d’état, led by the United States with the support of the European Union, and carried out without any legal basis. A government whose election had been qualified by the OSCE as “transparent and fair” and “an impressive demonstration of democracy” was overthrown. In December 2014, U.S. STRATFOR analyst George Friedman said in an interview:
“Russia calls what happened at the beginning of this year [in February 2014] a US-organized coup. It was, in fact, the most egregious [coup] in history.”
Unlike European observers, the Atlantic Council (AC), which is known as strongly pro-NATO, announced that the Maidan revolution had been hijacked by oligarchs and ultranationalists. The reforms promised by Ukraine had not been implemented at all, and the Western media stuck to an uncritical “black and white” narrative, according to AC. And a telephone conversation revealed by the BBC between Victoria Nuland, then US Secretary of State for Europe and Eurasia, and Geoffrey Pyatt, the US ambassador in Kiev, shows that it was the Americans themselves who elected the members of the future Ukrainian government, behind the backs of Ukrainians and Europeans. The conversation became illustrious thanks to Nuland’s unlikable remark “F*** the EU!”
The coup was not unanimously supported by the Ukrainian people, neither in terms of content nor form. The coup was the work of a minority of ultranationalists from western Ukraine (Galicia), who did not represent the entire Ukrainian people. Their first legislation, on February 23, 2014, was the repeal of the Kivalov-Kolesnichenko Law of 2012, which established both Russian and Ukrainian as official languages. This prompted the Russian-speaking population to mass protests in the southern part of the country, against authorities they had not elected.
In July 2019, the International Crisis Group (funded by several European countries and the Open Society Foundation) said:
“The conflict in eastern Ukraine began as a popular movement. […] The protests were organized by local citizens who claimed to represent the Russian-speaking majority in the region. They were concerned about both the political and economic consequences of the new government in Kiev and about the later abolished measures to prevent the official use of the Russian language throughout the country.” [“Rebels without a Cause: Russia’s Proxies in Eastern Ukraine,” International Crisis Group, Europe Report N° 254, July 16, 2019, p. 2].
In order to legitimize this far-right coup in Kiev, the West concealed the opposition in the southern part of the country in all languages. The revolution was presented as democratic by masking the “hand of the West” and putting forward the imaginary “hand of Russia.” This is how the myth of a Russian military intervention arose. The allegations of a Russian military presence were absolutely false. The head of the Ukrainian Security Service (SBU) admitted in 2015 that there were no Russian units in Donbas.
To make matters worse, Ukraine forfeited any legitimacy by the way it handled the uprising. Poorly advised by NATO officers, Ukraine waged a war in 2014-2015 that could only lead to defeat. Kiev considered the people of Donbas and Crimea to be hostile foreign troops and made no attempt to win the “hearts and minds” of the autonomy-fighters. Instead, Kiev’s strategy was to punish the people even more. Banking services were stopped, economic relations with the autonomous regions were severed and Crimea was no longer supplied with drinking water.
Hence the many civilian casualties in Donbas and the broad and lasting loyalty of the Russian-speaking population to its government. The 14,000 victims are attributed to “Russian invaders” and “separatists”, but according to the UN, more than 80% are the result of Ukrainian shelling. The Ukrainian government is thus killing its own people with the help, funding and advice of European NATO allies who pretend to defend their values.
In May 2014, the violent suppression of protests prompted the population in Donbas to hold referendums for self-determination in the Donetsk People’s Republics (89% agreement) and Lugansk (96% agreement). Although Western media continue to talk about referendums for independence, it was only about self-determination or autonomy (самостоятельность). Until February 2022, our media consistently talked about ‘separatists’ and ‘separatist republics’. In accordance with the Minsk accords, these self-proclaimed republics only sought autonomy within Ukraine, with the possibility of using their own language and their own customs.
Is NATO a defensive alliance?
In NATO logic, European allies must come under the U.S. nuclear umbrella. The alliance was set up for collective defense, but recently declassified U.S. documents teach that the Soviets had no intention of attacking the West. For the Russians, the question of whether NATO is offensive or defensive has no importance. To understand Putin’s position, we need to consider two things that are usually overlooked by Western commentators: NATO’s eastward expansion and the US’s gradual abandonment of the normative framework of international security.
As long as the U.S. did not place missiles near its borders, Russia did not care about NATO expansion. Russia considered applying for NATO membership itself. But in 2001, George W. Bush unilaterally withdrew from the ABM Treaty and placed antiballistic missiles (ABM) in Eastern Europe. The ABM Treaty was intended to limit the use of defensive missiles. A limited defense against each other’s weapons of mass destruction was intended to ensure that parties remained vulnerable to nuclear weapons. A ballistic total shield was taboo, the option to negotiate had to remain open. The treaty limited the deployment of antiballistic missiles to certain specific zones (notably Washington and Moscow) and banned it outside national territories.
Since then, the US has step-by-step withdrawn from all Cold War arms control agreements: the ABM Treaty (2002), the Open Skies Treaty (2018) and the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty (2019).
In 2019, Trump tried to justify the withdrawal from the INF Treaty by pointing to violations by the Russians. But according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), the US has never provided evidence of these violations. In fact, the U.S. was simply trying to get out of the agreement in order to be able to place its AEGIS missile systems in Poland and Romania.
According to the U.S. government, these systems were supposed to intercept Iranian ballistic missiles. But that’s not true. There is no evidence that the Iranians are developing long-range missiles. That was confirmed by Michael Ellemann of Lockheed-Martin before a Senate committee. AEGIS systems use MK41 launchers that can launch both antiballistic and nuclear missiles. The AEGIS plant in Radzikowo, Poland, is 800 km from the Russian border and 1,300 km from Moscow.
During the Bush and Trump administrations, it was said that the systems in Europe were purely defensive. But even if that is theoretically the case, it is technically and strategically a misrepresentation. The risks for which they were installed exist just as much for Russia. The deployment of AEGIS systems within shooting distance of Russian territory can effectively lead to a nuclear conflict. In a conflict situation, the Russians cannot determine what type of missile is on its way to them. Should they then suspend their response until the explosion has occurred on their territory? The answer is clear: without early warning, the Russians cannot determine the nature of the attack in time and are thus forced to respond preemptively with a nuclear attack.
For Putin, this is not only a risk to the security of Russia, he also notes that the US is increasingly flouting international law and acting unilaterally. That is why Putin says that Europe can be unintentionally dragged into a nuclear conflict.7 He already raised this in his speech in Munich in 2007, an argument he repeated in February 2022 during Emmanuel Macron’s visit to Moscow.
Finland and Sweden in NATO: a good idea?
The future will show whether the decision of Sweden and Finland to apply for NATO membership was wise. The value of nuclear protection offered by NATO is probably overestimated. It is highly unlikely that the U.S. will sacrifice its national soil by attacking Russia on behalf of Sweden or Finland. It is more likely that, if the US deploys nuclear weapons, it will first and foremost be on European soil. It will see a deployment on Russian territory as a last resort, in an effort to prevent counterattacks with nuclear weapons.
These two countries met the criteria of neutrality that Russia of his immediate neighbors likes to see. Now they are deliberately placing themselves in the nuclear crosshairs of Russia. For Russia, the greatest threat lies in the Central European battlefield. In a conflict in Europe, russian armed forces are mainly deployed in Central Europe. Their nuclear weapons would then serve to support their operations by attacking the Scandinavian countries in the periphery. The risk of a US nuclear reaction is then low.
Was it impossible to leave the Warsaw Pact?
The Warsaw Pact was established just after Germany joined NATO. We have described the reasons above. The pact’s largest military deployment was the invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968 (with the participation of all Pact countries except Albania and Romania). This event led albania to withdraw from the Pact less than a month later and Romania to cease to participate actively in the military command after 1969.
Hence, claiming that no one was free to leave the treaty does not correspond to the facts.
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On August 4, the American author and research historian Eric Zuesse published the article Ten Truths That Can’t Be Published Under The U.S. Regime on the international platform Oriental Review. Three of these truths relate to the war in Ukraine and are interesting to compare with the above text by Jacques Baud. We’ll let them follow below:
Eric Zuesse: Ten truths that cannot be published under the American regime
1. The overthrow of Yanukovych in Ukraine in February 2014 was a US coup, and certainly not a democratic revolution.
4. The war between Russia and Ukraine is actually America’s war against Russia on the battlefields of Ukraine, and began not on February 24, 2022 when Russia invaded Ukraine, but even well before America’s february 2014 criminal coup in Ukraine. By June 2011 at the latest, the Obama administration’s war was already secretly at the planning stage.
9. The US regime’s statements that it had not promised Russia in 1990 that the departure from communism and from the Warsaw Pact military alliance would mean that NATO itself would not expand “an inch to the east [towards the Russian border]” is a historical lie. The U.S. regime began secretly informing its “allies” (vassal nations) on February 24, 1990, that it was a lie and that on the U.S. side, the Cold War would continue until Russia itself was under U.S. control.
kiorana 