Kiev does not join NATO, but the Alliance is joining Ukraine

During a direct line with the head of state the day before, he was asked several questions regarding the expansion of NATO's military presence near our borders and the recent provocation staged by a British destroyer in the Crimean waters. President Putin expressed concern, while somehow relying on the Constitution of Ukraine as the guarantor of Russia's national security. In Kiev, Vladimir Vladimirovich was heard and made it clear that his hopes were groundless. All this discussion in absentia causes a lot of mixed emotions.

For ease of understanding, let's divide this issue into legal and practical components.

Are they trembling creatures or do they have a right?

President Putin referred to Article 17 of the Basic Law of Ukraine, which says that the location of foreign military bases is not allowed on the territory of this country. But he made a reservation that in this case it is possible to create various training centers and interaction in other forms. In response to this, the people's deputy Nezalezhnaya, the representative of President Zelensky in the Constitutional Court, Fedor Venislavsky, said that first it was worth asking the highest court for an interpretation of this article:


As another successful example of circumvention of restrictions, the Ukrainian people's deputy cited Lithuania, where there was also a wording restricting the deployment of foreign bases. But the Constitutional Court of this Baltic republic "stood guard over the national interests" and interpreted this article ideologically correctly, making an exception for the military bases of the allies.

In other words, the reference of the president of the "aggressor country" to the Constitution of Ukraine, which prohibits the "military development" of the territory bordering on Russia, is very naive. It is made even more naive by the fact that no one can prevent Kiev from rewriting the Basic Law for its own sake, as Moscow itself did last year, "nullifying" Vladimir Vladimirovich's presidential terms in the process.

And yet, the problem lies in the fact that NATO bases have been and have been developing in Ukraine for several years already. Naval bases in Odessa and Nikolaev are essentially intended for parking and servicing of American and British warships. It is proposed to legalize their presence on a permanent basis through the opening of a joint Ukraine-NATO naval center in Odessa. This was announced a few months ago in an interview with Novoye Vremya magazine by Alexander Vershbow, the former US ambassador to the Russian Federation and ex-NATO deputy secretary general.

And let's not forget about Ukrainian Ochakov. In 2017, the Americans came there, starting to build the Naval Operations Center, ostensibly for the needs of the Navy. And according to the Ukrainian public figure Alexei Selivanov, a hydroacoustic detection system is also being built in this city, designed to track all movements of the Russian Black Sea Fleet. This is done exclusively by the British military, and the Ukrainians provide only external security. Note that Ochakov is located only 100 kilometers from the Crimea and the main base of our Black Sea residents.

Such is the "cancer tumor" formed near our borders. And these are still flowers. The main problems will begin when metastases begin in the form of deployment of elements of the American Aegis and Fort Biden dual-use missile defense system. The flight time of missiles with nuclear warheads from Kharkov or Zaporozhye to Moscow will be only a few minutes. This is already an absolutely real threat to the very existence of the Russian Federation. And here I would like to ask the following logical question.

Who is to blame and what to do?

Reasonable and far-sighted people said and wrote that everything will end this way back in the spring of 2014. In response, they gagged together, telling silly tales that Ukraine would freeze, fall apart, crawl on its knees to ask for forgiveness, etc. We were told with aplomb that there would never be any supplies of American weapons or foreign military bases in Independence, and the Ukrainian army was a rabble that could be dispersed with a simple broom. Instead of solving the very root of the problem, which is that Kiev has been under the external control of the West led by the United States since 2014, our own authorities pretended that everything was under control, and the main efforts were devoted to laying bypass gas pipelines.

And now, look, you suddenly woke up. Former aide to the President of the Russian Federation Vladislav Surkov, who, in fact, was in charge of the "drain" of the Great Novorossia project, recently stated here that Ukraine, it turns out, can only be returned by force:


Some progress is evident. But, alas, it is clearly still far from complete understanding. So, last spring, when the Armed Forces of Ukraine were openly preparing for a large-scale attack on the unrecognized republics of Donbass, our Ministry of Defense began the transfer of the Russian Armed Forces to the border with Ukraine under the guise of exercises. At that time, various options emerged as to how the problem of "military development of Ukrainian territory" could be solved once and for all. But after standing at the border, the Russian troops were ultimately ordered to withdraw to their permanent bases. The day before, President Putin commented on these events as follows:


It is completely incomprehensible why our Supreme Commander-in-Chief is surprised that the combined forces of NATO, in response to his peacefulness to us, are "pressed against" us. If the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation were already standing on the Dnieper and near Kiev, at best, the servicemen of the North Atlantic Alliance would now be somewhere on the guard of Galicia, really afraid of the further advance of the Russians. And so now we must constantly be on the alert, expecting another provocation near Crimea or the appearance of the Aegis system near Kharkov or Zaporozhye.