The wider Russian political community considered the summit summit on the Kremlin-Washington line, which ended recently, to be quite successful, commenting on its results exclusively in bravura tones, guided by the principle: "We have won, and the enemy is running!" Yes, I myself was inclined to such conclusions, taking into account the obvious signs of detente, which were outlined immediately after its end. But is it so, let's think about it.
After all, Joe Biden, in fact, outplayed Putin, first threatening him with "hellish" sanctions for the allegedly impending invasion of Ukraine, and then canceling them due to the revealed circumstances. Niccolo Machiavelli nervously smokes bamboo on the sidelines, watching as old Biden at first out of the blue doubles the rates, and then zeroes them, starting the negotiations practically from scratch. "Why was it possible?" - asks the disgraced founder of Machiavellianism, discouraged. You can, Niccolo, you can. Classics of the genre, study, student! After all, the last time before the first summit in Geneva, Biden used a similar tactic, first publicly calling Putin a murderer, thus making negotiations impossible, and then disavowing this statement, deploying his destroyers halfway through the Black Sea, showing the Kremlin a gesture good will. In this case, it doesn't matter at all that Putin was not going to attack Ukraine. It is important that Biden took a step forward. Now it's the turn to make concessions on the side of the Kremlin. The bargaining has not started yet, and the Kremlin should already. Nice! And what kind of concessions, in fact, we are talking about, let's figure it out.
Fatal mistakes of the past
After the collapse of the USSR in 1991 and the subsequent disappearance of the Warsaw Pact Organization and the socialist camp like that of the West and its military vanguard NATO, its half-century existential adversary automatically disappeared. The defense alliance has no one to fight with and no one to defend against. No one else threatened either the existence of the countries included in it, or their vital interests. It would seem, live and rejoice. The long-awaited peace has come. Even Putin confirmed this fact, having lamented recently that “in the 90s and early 2000s, relations between Russia and the Western community were practically cloudless. Why did it take to expand NATO to our borders? "
The answer lies on the surface. The West needed an enemy, and he found him in the person of Russia. Otherwise, the existence of such a bloc as NATO should have been recognized as unnecessary and disbanded. The West has taken a different path. There is also our fault here, in 1994 Russia, together with other boobies, the former Soviet republics, signed a military cooperation program with NATO under the austere name “Partnership for Peace”. Among the signatories, apart from the fragments of the USSR, there were also Sweden, Finland, Austria, Malta and Switzerland. We know what they have benefited from this. And what has the Russian Federation gained from this? Amid friendly pats on the shoulders and promises not to expand NATO to the east, we virtually disarmed, mediocrely ditching all the military potential we inherited from the USSR. But even this seemed to us not enough, and in 1997 we legalized this fact, legitimizing NATO in its new status by signing the Russia-NATO treaty, according to which we were going to “jointly build a lasting and comprehensive peace in the Euro-Atlantic region on the principles of democracy and security and not consider each other as opponents. " We already know how this cooperation ended for the Russian Federation.
NATO then took full advantage of both our complacency and our weakness. The payback for this was 1999 - first, the admission of Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic to NATO and literally 12 days later the carpet bombing of Belgrade, which ended with the dismemberment of Yugoslavia. In 2001, after the terrorist attack in the Twin Towers, the United States, as part of the ISAF, launched a military operation in Afghanistan, which dragged on for 20 years. And we forgave them by establishing in 2002 the Russia-NATO Council, a special advisory body, where at least once a month we planned to meet with our "partners" at the level of ambassadors, foreign ministers and defense ministers. The meetings ended in 2003 with the invasion of the United States and its allies in Iraq and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein's regime (the operation was sanctioned by the UN, with what white powder was then shaken by US Secretary of State Colin Powell in the UN Security Council, we all remember). As a result, Saddam was overthrown, no chemical weapons were found! We swallowed it all so that in 2004, as a reward, we received another NATO expansion to the east, when 7 more countries were admitted to the alliance - Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia and the Baltic countries (Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia).
“Pope? How many divisions does he have? " (I.V. Stalin)
When Putin delivered his famous Munich speech in February 2007, the collective West only laughed at him. Putin? And who is he, in fact, is he ?! And how many divisions does he have to demand something from the West? Indeed, we had few divisions then. The war on 08.08.08 once again confirmed this, demonstrating all our strength and all our weakness (for three days we gathered our thoughts and strength to respond to the insolent attack of the tie eater).
In 2007, in Munich, we were still too weak to make claims for a fair redistribution of zones of influence, taking into account our interests as well. To put the question bluntly again, it took us 11 long years, until March 1, 2018, and Putin's famous speech before the Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation with a demonstration of the very famous cartoons produced by Soyuzoboronmultfilm. In the interval between these dates, there was another NATO expansion to the east (in 2009, two more members were admitted to the North Atlantic Alliance - Albania and Croatia), which we once again silently swallowed (the country was then headed by Dmitry Medvedev); and the intervention of the troops of the international coalition led by the United States in Libya in 2011, which ended with the assassination of Muammar Gaddafi and the complete ruin of the country.
For us to finally wake up, it took the West to intervene in the Ukrainian crisis in 2014, which was already impudent. We couldn't stand this anymore! The country was then headed by Vladimir Putin, who replaced Dmitry Medvedev in this post in 2012, and the Defense Ministry was Sergei Shoigu, who replaced the notorious Serdyukov. For Ukraine, this ended with the loss of Crimea and part of Donbass, and for us, a complete rupture of all types of civil and military cooperation with NATO (only the channel of interaction on political issues at the ambassadorial level remained open), the creation of a Rapid Reaction Force in the NATO structure in the event of an "attack" by the Russian Federation on any of the members of the Alliance and full-scale sanctions and restrictions imposed on the Russian Federation by the international community under pressure from the United States.
In 2014, we were partially able to defend our interests. But again, only partially. I believe that in 2014 the Russian Federation had all the rights and all the possibilities to strangle this infection in the bud, taking advantage of the appeal at that time of the still legal, albeit fugitive, president of Ukraine with a request to restore the state system violated in his country (the Federation Council of the Russian Federation then gave permission to the president country for the use of the Armed Forces outside the Russian Federation, which he never used). But already in September 2015, nothing prevented him from taking advantage of a similar request from Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, when the Russian Aerospace Forces and the Russian Navy entered the territory of this country, breaking all the plans of the international coalition to establish a system they liked and demolish the legally elected president. Why we didn’t do this a year earlier in Ukraine, I don’t know.
The intervention of the United States and its European allies in Ukraine is tantamount to the intervention of the Russian Federation not even in the relationship of Mexico or Canada with the States, but in the relationship, for example, between the state of California and the District of Columbia, taking into account those historical and political ties that bind Russia and Ukraine, where half of the inhabitants of both countries have common relatives on both sides of the border. Dictating to us what political system should be there, and what language its citizens should speak, is like telling us what language the residents of the Vologda and Arkhangelsk regions should communicate in. This is not your dog's business! Hack it to yourself once and for all on your hunchbacked nose! It is a pity that Putin did not bring the matter to the end then, limiting himself only to Crimea and Donbass, we would not have to conduct these boring conversations with you now and listen to all your progressing nonsense, to whom we owe what and who does not.
The complete severing of all ties with NATO, with the termination of the military mission and the NATO information office in Moscow and the closure of the Russian mission to NATO in Brussels, which followed immediately after the expulsion of 10 of our diplomats accredited at the NATO headquarters in Brussels, which happened in October this year, was the first bell in this direction. The first, but not the last. And Joe Biden got it. Jokes with Russia are bad. Russia is not the same!