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the EU in a fine balancing act…...

Poland and Ukraine have a complex history of massacres on both sides. However, for eight years, they have been united against Russia. After having considered annexing a Russian territory if Moscow loses the war, Warsaw would like to annex a Ukrainian territory, if Kiev loses. President Andrzej Duda has reportedly received guarantees from his counterpart Volodymyr Zelensky that, in gratitude for his military aid against the Russians, his country could annex Galicia.

 

RISING TENSIONS (22)

Poland and Ukraine

by Thierry Meyssan

 

From the Carpathian Mountains to the Urals, there are no mountains. Consequently, Eastern Europe is a vast plain in which many peoples have passed and sometimes settled without the relief allowing to delimit the borders of their territory. Poland, Moldavia, Ukraine, Belarus, the Baltic States and the European part of Russia are corridors of passage whose history is dominated by flows. Most of these states back onto a sea or a mountain. Only Belarus and Ukraine have no natural borders.

When the Versailles Peace Conference attempted to establish borders in Eastern Europe at the end of the First World War, it did not succeed. Depending on whether historical, linguistic, ethnic or economic criteria were used, different maps should have been devised, but the interests of the victors (the United States, France, the United Kingdom) were contradictory, so that the decisions taken satisfied only half of the people concerned. Even today, the problem can be turned around in all directions: the borders of Belarus and Ukraine are and will remain artificial. This is a very special situation, difficult to understand for people with a long national history.

Once this is established, it must be admitted that neither Belarus nor Ukraine can be nations in the usual sense of the term, which does not mean that they cannot be states. Ukrainian nationalism" is an artificial ideology that can only be built by rejecting other peoples. This is what the Banderists did during the interwar period and still today against the "Muscovites" or "Great Russians". This form of nationalism can only be destructive. The example of Belarus shows that another way is possible.

Poland, which had completely disappeared during the 19th century, was reconstituted after the defeat of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Russian Revolution. However, the Versailles Conference, while it had no problem in establishing its western border, did not know where to establish its eastern border. So the Second Polish Republic tried to grow by waging a war against Ukraine. It succeeded in annexing the whole of Galicia. Today Krakow is still Polish, while Lviv is Ukrainian. There is actually no obvious reason for this division, other than the chance of armed conflicts.

When President Volodymyr Zelensky claims that Donbass and Crimea are Ukrainian, he describes the current state of the land register, but cannot justify it.

In 1792, the Crimea was conquered by the Russian Empire from the Ottoman Empire, as well as the freedom for its fleet to use the Dardanelles and Bosporus straits. Tsarina Catherine II intended to extend her influence towards the South Seas. But the British, worried that the Russians would enter the Mediterranean and compete with their naval hegemony, organized a coalition with France and the Ottoman Empire. They succeeded in defeating the Russian army, but not in retaking this territory.

This one was kept, in 1917, by the Soviet Union. It was in the Crimea, in Sevastopol, that the decisive battle of the "Second World War" (or the "Great Patriotic War" in Russian terminology) took place, marking the beginning of the end of the Third Reich.

 

In 1954, the First Secretary of the USSR, the Ukrainian Nikita Khrushchev, decided at the same time to give amnesty to the Banderists and to attach Crimea administratively to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. This was to turn the page on the crimes of the Banderists and the Nazis during the World War and the crimes of the Banderists and the CIA at the beginning of the "Cold" War.

When the Soviet Union collapsed, Crimea declared itself independent by referendum on February 12, 1991, under the name of Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic of Crimea. The rest of today’s Ukraine did not confirm its independence until nine months later, on 1 December 1991. However, Russian President Boris Yeltsin refused to return Crimea to his country, so it decided to return to Ukraine on February 26, 1992.

When the democratically elected president Viktor Yanukovych was overthrown by a colorful revolution organized by the United States, the government that was formed included a dozen banderist members [1]. Under these conditions, Crimea refused to have a racist political regime imposed on it. It decided in a referendum to regain its independence and to apply for membership in the Russian Federation.

After the installation of Russian military bases in Syria, London saw the Russian presence in Crimea as the return of a credible rival, capable of threatening its maritime hegemony.

After conquering the Crimea, Tsarina Catherine II sent her fleet to Beirut and Latakia. She also established a settlement in southern Ukraine, the "New Russia" (Novorossia). This territory included Donbass, Mykolayev, Kirovograd (today Kropyvnytskyi), Kherson, Odessa, Gagauzia and Transnistria (today’s Dniester Moldavian Republic). Pavel Gubarev, who was governor of Donetsk in 2014, also opposed the new regime in Kiev imposed by the "coup" or by the "revolution" (it depends on the point of view). So he proposed to secede from Ukraine with all the territories of the "New Russia" of Catherine II. It is necessary to know that Goubarev was neither pro-Russian, nor pro-US, but on the contrary pro-European. It was only when Kiev arrested and imprisoned him that he became pro-Russian. When President Zelensky refused the Russian peace offer, President Putin told him that his demands would increase with time. From now on, liberating the "New Russia" (Novorossia) is the strategic objective of the Russian armies. In almost all wars, the victor demands compensation, often territory. Here, it will be Novorossia.

By creating the United Nations, the victors of the Second World War hoped to put an end to wars of conquest. However, they recognized that war could be a legal response to certain conflicts. The great powers refrained until Nato tore Yugoslavia apart, creating seven new countries. Kosovo became a US military base in the Balkans. Its security is still provided by a NATO contingent. Bosnia-Herzegovina is still a colony of the European Union. It is still ruled by an international High Representative. These deplorable examples set a precedent that will not allow for criticism of Novorossia’s possible accession to the Russian Federation.

Poland, which still has not accepted the loss of Eastern Galicia, participated in 2014 in the Anglo-Saxon operation to overthrow the elected president. At the time, I published an article revealing that 86 rioters from the banderist militia Pravy Sektor had been trained by Poland at the Legionowo police center in September 2013 [2]. The operation had been supervised by Radosław Sikorski, Minister of Defense and later Minister of Foreign Affairs. This information was denied by the person concerned, but in the end the Prosecutor General of Poland opened a judicial investigation into this strange case.

Poland’s support of the Banderists against the Ukrainian president was a nice manipulation. Stepan Bandera had indeed supervised, in 1934, the assassination of the Polish Minister of the Interior Bronisław Pieracki on behalf of the Gestapo. Then he had ordered numerous massacres of Poles during the Second World War.

 

It soon became apparent that the 2014 Ukrainian colorful revolution/coup was overseen by Straussian diplomats Victoria Nuland (current No. 2 in the U.S. Secretary of State) and Derek Chollet (current advisor to the U.S. Secretary of State), but implemented by Canadians and Poles Radosław Sikorski and Jerzy Dziewulski. The latter is a prestigious police officer, trained in Israel, and later an advisor to the President of the Republic and a parliamentarian. A photo, taken in June 2014, showed him leading the Ukrainian intervention forces alongside Ukrainian interim president Oleksandr Turchynov.

Poland returned to the fray at the start of the 2022 Russian special military operation. When Nato announced an imminent Russian defeat, General Waldemar Skrzypczak demanded that Kaliningrad (which was never Polish) be returned by Russia to Poland as war reparations. As it soon became clear that Russia was advancing and that the defeat would be Ukrainian, President Andrzej Duda considered recovering Eastern Galicia, which had been lost in the Second World War. At first he proposed to the Ukrainians to deploy a Polish peace force to protect Galicia. Then he made a stirring speech to assure his neighbors of their support against Russia. Finally, he went to Kiev and made a speech to the Verkhovna Rada. Finally, Poland began to implement a one-way cooperation. It deployed high-ranking officials to administer the country that a large part of the population fled. But not the other way around: there are no Ukrainian officials in Poland. Similarly, after taking in two million Ukrainian political refugees, Poland has indicated that it will stop paying them allowances as of July 1.

The enthusiastic acceptance of Warsaw’s aid for territory by the Banderists attests to the artificial nature of their "nationalism.

 

Thierry Meyssan

 

Translation 

Roger Lagassé

 

REEAD MORE:

https://www.voltairenet.org/article217210.html

 

 

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too bad for us….

SWEDEN, FINLAND: EMMANUEL MACRON, DROPPER OF FRENCH DIPLOMACY?

 

By Eric Juillot

06/15/2022

Policy

In the Ukrainian crisis, presidential inertia and conformity make France a non-actor.

 

Bold diplomacy?

 

From intention to action, there is sometimes a chasm. Of this maxim, President Macron's foreign policy is a dismaying illustration, especially in the current context. Let us judge: in August 2019, in his speech at the Conference of Ambassadors, he encouraged them to implement a "strategy of audacity and risk-taking", refusing to give in "to the ease and to the surrounding order", denouncing "the patterns of thought" and the "automatisms" which led imperceptibly to the weakening of France's role in the concert of nations.

 

Our country, he reminded us, is and must remain "a balancing power" and not "an aligned power", which suggested that it should be able to regularly adopt singular positions, at the risk of temporary disagreements with its closer partners, to prevent tensions and reduce the risk of escalation. These assertions particularly concerned the link with Russia, to which the President devoted a few very sensible sentences that day: "To push [this country] away from Europe is a profound mistake", he asserted lucidly, adding that it was thus forced "either into isolation which increases tensions, or into allying with other powers like China, which would not be in our interest at all".

 

With this speech, Emmanuel Macron defended a Gaullist conception of French diplomacy, concerned with affirming the singularity of our country and putting this singularity at the service of peace in the world. However, on all too rare occasions, this diplomacy has been set aside or flouted by the General's successors, for lack of faith in France or by adherence-submission to the American messianism which swept over the world in the aftermath of September 11, 2001. Emmanuel Macron was he going to be the one to rekindle the torch, against the tendencies of the “deep state” that he evoked in this same speech?

 

As of 2019, there was little reason to truly believe it. The meetings and talks with the Russian president did not lead to anything concrete, and France's inertia in the discussions in the Normandy format on the crisis in Ukraine ended up convincing Moscow that there was nothing to be expected from it. taking Russian interests into account on this burning issue. The revival of the Franco-Russian relationship, officially desired by the French Head of State, ended in complete failure, like all his other diplomatic ambitions.

 

A non-actor like the others

 

Since February 24 and the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, France has confirmed that it has become, in terms of high diplomacy, in the context of an open conflict in Europe, a non-actor, at the equal to most other European states. The only difference that distinguishes us is the large number of telephone conversations between the French and Russian presidents, both before and after the outbreak of hostilities.

 

This must be seen as a characteristic mark of Emmanuel Macron's practice of power. Everyone agrees that these interviews are completely sterile, but the French president sees them, on the contrary, as a success: like a good post-modern individual, he makes communication an end in itself, the empty dialogue with Moscow having as its main objective to allow France to convince itself that it is playing its role and keeping its rank.

 

As on the domestic scene, in the absence of substance, the French president is therefore betting everything on form. However, what does not work in domestic politics works even less in diplomatic matters, especially when it comes to negotiating with a head of state convinced that the vital interests and strategic security of his country are involved in the crisis. In progress. In the months leading up to the outbreak of the conflict, as tensions escalated week after week, a bold diplomacy would have been for Paris to take a formal stand against Ukraine's entry into NATO.

 

For once, our membership in this military alliance would have served something other than to dull us; such an announcement would perhaps not have been enough to stop the fatal mechanism that led to the conflict, but it would undoubtedly have reassured the Russians by showing them that the West was not unanimous in the desire to harm them, that it was still possible to rely on powers rejecting the antagonism of blocks to embark on the "path of de-escalation" that the French president then evoked. Rather than using this card, the latter however preferred to choose Atlanticist conformity, confirming that the 2019 speech was not intended to be translated into action.

 

Since the beginning of the war, France has continued to do everything obediently expected of her in Washington, Brussels and European capitals. At most, she is careful not to be at the forefront in the delivery of military equipment or in the frantic implementation of economic sanctions against Russia, despite the initial irresponsible declarations of her Minister of the Economy. Resisting hysteria more solidly than the Americans and the British, the Brussels officials and the Poles: this is what French singularity is currently reduced to.

 

A reported contribution to the rise to extremes

 

Reduced to insignificance by its passivity and its conformism, France can no longer fight significantly against the rise to extremes that it nevertheless intends to prevent. The current sequence, centered on the integration of Sweden and Finland into NATO, demonstrates this once again.

 

Even before these two countries officially announced their intention to join the Atlantic Alliance, President Macron indicated that he would accept their membership without reservation. France "fully supports the sovereign choice of Finland" thus informed the Elysée on May 12, 6 days before the official application for membership of the two Nordic countries was sent to the NATO authorities. Such eager support suggests that the French head of state did not even think for a moment of showing any reluctance to the idea of ​​​​this membership.

 

It must therefore be understood that at a time when many are worried about the possible extension of a conflict hitherto limited to Ukrainian soil, France, following its partners, finds it judicious to extend by 1300 km the border which separates Russia from a military alliance that it considers hostile to its interests, if not to its existence; that France considers it legitimate to integrate into NATO states with which Moscow has no territorial, political or memorial disputes, when all classical geostrategy affirms that the existence of buffer zones between great powers or power blocs is a necessary condition for the stability of international relations and peace. Are we not entitled to ask those who lead us to have a superior spirit of responsibility and lucidity?

 

By endorsing these two memberships as if they were self-evident, France is lending its support to the aggravation of tensions, extending and hardening a bloc antagonism which was nonetheless fatal to the continent a little over a hundred years ago, during the summer of 1914, when a conflict limited to two States (Serbia and Austria-Hungary) spread rapidly, by the only play of alliances, to the whole of Europe.

 

Conversely, the maintenance, even in spite of themselves, of the neutrality of Sweden and Finland would have demonstrated to Moscow that some of its adversaries in the West were still capable of taking a distanced and rational view of the current crisis. , that they could overcome legitimate outrage and choose restraint in hopes of maintaining control of the situation.

 

To officially oppose the Swedish and Finnish candidacies, however, the French president would have needed the audacity, the strategic intelligence and the lofty historical view that characterize the true statesman. He would also have had to free himself from the prevailing discourse, which denies the Russian leader any rationality to better justify the withering of ours under the effect of fear and hatred. Finally, he would have had to face the torrents of insults, the cascades of contempt, the media and political trials from all over the West, even on French soil. At this price, and at this price alone, he could have made our country play the stabilizing role that should historically be his.

 

But it is not de Gaulle who wants to, and our president, supposedly Jupiterian, is in fact only the strict heir of the two sad lords who preceded him, whose submission to the order of things wanted by Brussels and Washington was second nature. So he missed what was perhaps the last opportunity for France to influence the course of events other than symbolically.

 

Too bad for France, too bad for Europe.

 

 

READ MORE:

https://elucid.media/politique/suede-finlande-emmanuel-macron-fossoyeur-diplomatie-francaise/?mc_ts=crises

 

Translation by Jules Letambour.....

 

 

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