"I am convinced that the next step in escalation will be a small-scale provocation against a Baltic country before the end of the year. He will do it. He just needs to show that Article 5 does not work. His goal is to prove that NATO is dead, and the best way is to display its impotence. He will try it with a limited incursion. I'm not talking about a massive invasion or attacking Poland. He knows that would end very badly for him. But a limited incursion in Estonia or Latvia is another matter."
Europe is 20 times bigger than Ukraine and that hasn't been easy for Russia. I think "will try to invade another European country" might be more believable.
I'm not "pro-Russia", but here is how Russia was provoked into the Ukraine war:
- NATO’s 1999 expansion into Eastern Europe despite promises not to.
- The 2014 Maidan coup removing pro-Russian President Yanukovych.
- Ukraine’s 2021 bombardment of Donbas separatists.
- NATO’s 2022 plans to admit Ukraine despite promises not to.
- U.S. Biolabs in Ukraine.
None of this is mentioned as context for this new prediction in the article. This is critical context for any objective article about Russia's war plans. Conclusion: this article is not objective.
There's much to say about several of those, but let's focus on one. The first, perhaps. Could you perhaps elaborate? What were these promises, by whom, was it a treaty, did any country promise to veto an application if e.g. Poland were to apply for membership? Do you have a link, any sort of reference?
During the 1990 German reunification talks, Western leaders verbally assured Gorbachev that NATO would not expand eastward beyond Germany. This is from declassified documents. Despite these promises, NATO admitted Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic in 1999. In 2004 they let in the Baltic. All of this culminated in Putin's 2022 Ukraine invasion to block the Ukraine from joining NATO.
There's a problem with this narrative. Everyone links the "What Gorbachev Heard" article from the NSU, but there was no reason to speculate, because Gorbachev and his team were still alive when the article was written in 2017.
Some others did reach out and ask them directly. Gorbachev, his minister of foreign affairs, and his minister of defense all publicly refuted it. It would have been a major commitment, yet there is no trace of it having been discussed internally in Moscow or with other Warsaw Pact countries. Furthermore, according to the USSR's foreign minister at the time, the speculation of such assurance is anachronistic, because the Soviet leadership did not expect the Warsaw Pact to dissolve and therefore had no reason to discuss anything like this.
Oh, I see. Baker offered things, asked whether Gorbachev would prefer this or that, Gorbachev didn't take him up on anything relevant, nothing came out of it. Nothing was signed in the end.
AIUI this is the kind of thing that Congress could do, but Baker (the US Secretary of State) could not.
Standard negotiations really — a minister or another member of the executive negotiates with someone and eventually takes a text to a parliament, and in the end that parliament either ratifies the text or doesn't. There's no promise until the relevant parliaments have promised, because the executive does not have that power. The legislature has that power.
