REVEALED: Diplomatic Cables Prove U.S. Officials Knew NATO Expansion Would Lead to Ukraine/Russia Conflict
Shane Trejo
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Years of diplomatic cables that have now been released show how government officials around the world knew that NATO expansion would cause conflict between Russia and Ukraine, a reality completely lost in the haze of nonstop war propaganda from the corporate press.
“[French presidential diplomatic advisor Maurice] Gourdault-Montagne warned that the question of Ukrainian accession to NATO remained extremely sensitive for Moscow, and concluded that if there remained one potential cause for war in Europe, it was Ukraine,” one cable from September 2005 states. “He added that some in the Russian administration felt we were doing too much in their core zone of interest, and one could wonder whether the Russians might launch a move similar to Prague in 1968, to see what the West would do.”
“While Georgia was ‘just a bug on the skin of the bear,’ Ukraine was inseparably identified with Russia, going back to Vladimir of Kiev in 988,” German deputy national security advisor Rolf Nikel stated as a NATO expansion plan that enraged Russia was announced.
It was clear that government officials from U.S. and throughout the world knew that NATO’s expansion was provoking Russia and putting them in a position where they would have no choice but to act.
“NATO enlargement and U.S. missile defense deployments in Europe play to the classic Russian fear of encirclement,” said then-U.S. ambassador to Russia William Burns, who presently serves as CIA Director under Joe Biden.
A cable from March 2008 featured former deputy director of the Russian branch of the US-based Carnegie Endowment for International Peace Dmitri Trenin explaining that “Ukraine was, in the long term, the most potentially destabilizing factor in US-Russian relations, given the level of emotion and neuralgia triggered by its quest for NATO membership.” He stated that NATO’s eastward expansion was “one of the few security areas where there is almost complete consensus among Russian policymakers, experts and the informed population,” and Ukraine was considered “line of last resort” that could not under any circumstances fall to NATO control otherwise risk encirclement.
Russian deputy foreign minister Grigory Karasin “underscored the depth of Russian opposition” to eastward NATO expansion and said that globalist powers had the choice of “a Russia that is stable and ready to calmly discuss issues with the US, Europe and China, or one that is deeply concerned and filled with nervousness” with how they proceeded. By the time of the 2014 Maidan revolution promulgated by the U.S. State Department to install a NATO-friendly puppet regime in Ukraine, it was clear what choice had been made by the elites in regard to Russia moving forward.
“Russia’s opposition to NATO membership for Ukraine and Georgia is both emotional and based on perceived strategic concerns about the impact on Russia’s interests in the region,” wrote Ambassador Burns, who is now Biden’s CIA chief.
“While Russian opposition to the first round of NATO enlargement in the mid-1990’s was strong, Russia now feels itself able to respond more forcefully to what it perceives as actions contrary to its national interests,” he concluded.
It was also warned by experts in the region, including on both the Russian and Ukrainian sides of the aisle, that Ukraine was “internally divided over NATO membership” and pushing Ukraine into NATO was a “risky” proposition that was “not fully ripe” and could “break up the country.”
The RAND Corporation issued a 2019 report stating that Russia had “very real” fears of a “direct military attack” that were exacerbated by the U.S. providing Ukraine with more “military equipment and advice,” which could result in Russia responding “mounting a new offensive and seizing more Ukrainian territory,” a damaging prospect to both U.S. and Ukrainian interests. This dark prophecy has come to fruition in nightmarish fashion over the past year.
An analysis from the American Committee for US-Russia Accord (ACURA) notes that these cables show how “claims that Russian unhappiness over NATO expansion is irrelevant, a mere “fig leaf” for pure expansionism, or simply Kremlin propaganda are belied by this lengthy historical record.”
“Rather, successive US administrations pushed ahead with the policy despite being warned copiously for years — including by the analysts who advised them, by allies, even by their own officials — that it would feed Russian nationalism, create a more hostile Moscow, foster instability and even civil war in Ukraine, and could eventually lead to Russian military intervention, all of which ended up happening,” ACURA concluded.
The Ukraine/Russia conflict is another completely preventable case of blowback caused by belligerent and irrational meddling in the affairs of foreign nations due to the soulless machinations of the military-industrial complex.
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