THE FOLLOWING ARTICLE, NOW COMPLETELY IRRELEVANT, WAS WRITTEN BEFORE MERKEL AND HOLLANDE ADMITTED THAT THE MINSK AGREEMENTS WERE BULLSHITTING RUSSIA. IT IS OUR HUMBLE VIEW THAT RUSSIA KNEW THIS, BUT PLAYED ALONG AND DESPITE PUTIN SAYING RUSSIA SHOULD HAVE DEFENDED THE DONBASS REGION EARLIER, HE WAITED TO THE LAST MINUTE TO DO THE DEED. IT IS OUR HUMBLE OPINION THAT CONTRARILY TO THE US PRESIDENTS, PUTIN HATES WAR.

 

 by Ted Snider

The animosity between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has been bitter. Agreement on anything — which would be a starting point for talks — is elusive. For the first time in several months, however, the two leaders have agreed on something. Unfortunately it takes them even farther away from talks than they are today.

They both seem to believe that the Minsk II agreement, a 2015 deal that many believed would be a way forward to peace in the region, is dead.  

At some point this horrifying war will end. And it will have to end with talks. Those talks will have to, at some point, settle the issue of the eastern lands caught in a decades-long tug of war. Zelensky has said that a precondition for talks is “restoration of [Ukraine’s] territorial integrity,” meaning the Donbas, Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, and even Crimea. Russia has said that negotiations can only be held on the basis of existing geopolitical realities and maintains that any negotiated settlement must respect Russia’s annexation of these same regions. That is the principal roadblock to a settlement. A big one.

That roadblock has been solidified and reinforced, not dissipated or lessened, by a recent agreement in statements made by the two leaders. 

On November 15, addressing the G20 summit in Bali by video link, Zelensky rejected any return to the Minsk agreement. “We will not allow Russia to wait, build up its forces, and then start a new series of terror and global destabilisation. There will be no Minsk 3, which Russia will violate immediately after the agreement,” he insisted.

The Minsk agreements of 2014 and 2015 provided the best diplomatic solution to the crisis. Brokered by France and Germany, agreed to by Ukraine and Russia, and accepted by the U.S. and UN, the agreement was meant to peacefully return the Donbas to Ukraine while granting it full autonomy. Minsk II promised autonomy to the Donbas within Ukraine. The prospect of neutrality and the issue of NATO membership were expected to come later.  

Former US Ambassador to the Soviet Union Jack Matlock recently said that “The war might have been prevented – probably would have been prevented – if Ukraine had been willing to abide by the Minsk agreement, recognize the Donbas as an autonomous entity within Ukraine, avoid NATO military advisors, and pledge not to enter NATO.”

But Zelensky’s words in Bali, though diplomatically well chosen for his audience, did not accurately reflect history. It was not Russia who used the time provided by the agreement to build up its forces before violating the agreement. It was Ukraine.

In 2019, Zelensky was elected in large part because his platform of making peace with Russia and signing the Minsk II Agreement won him the Russian-speaking vote in the south and east. But to fulfill his promise, Zelensky had to have the support of the U.S. He didn’t get it. Abandoned and under pressure, Zelensky refused to implement the agreement. The U.S. then failed to pressure him back onto the road of diplomacy. 

Richard Sakwa, Professor of Russian and European Politics at the University of Kent, told RS that “as for Minsk, neither the U.S. nor the EU put serious pressure on Kiev to fulfil its part of the agreement.” Anatol Lieven, Director of the Eurasia Program at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, agrees. Though the U.S. officially endorsed Minsk, Lieven told RS that “they did nothing to push Ukraine into actually implementing it.”

Zelensky was not the first Ukrainian president to fail in implementing Minsk. In fact, Ukrainian President Pyotr Poroshenko may have negotiated it with no intention of ever implementing it. In May 2022, Poroshenko told the Financial Times that Ukraine “didn’t have an armed forces at all” and that the “great diplomatic achievement” of the Minsk agreement was that “we kept Russia away from our borders — not from our borders, but away from a full-sized war.” In other words, the agreement bought Ukraine time to build its army.

Poroshenko told the Ukrainian media and other news outlets that “We had achieved everything we wanted. Our goal was to, first, stop the threat, or at least to delay the war — to secure eight years to restore economic growth and create powerful armed forces.”

Some have countered that Russia shares blame for the failure of the agreement because they have shirked responsibility by claiming to be a facilitator of the agreement rather than a party to a deal that is fundamentally between Ukraine and the separatist Luhansk and Donetsk Peoples’ Republics. Notably, Russia would also have had to withdraw all of its military from the Donbas if Ukraine had passed a law guaranteeing autonomy to the region. Given that Ukraine never passed such a law, we will never know if Russia would have made good on its promise.

Whoever killed the Minsk agreement, Putin agrees with Zelensky that it is dead. Ten days after Zelensky said it could not be revived, Putin said that agreeing to the Minsk agreement had been a mistake he would not repeat, suggesting there would be no Minsk III.

Dmitry Trenin, professor at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow, points out that when Russia annexed Crimea in 2014, Putin was acting “on a mandate from the Russian parliament to use military force ‘in Ukraine’ not just in Crimea.” But Putin stopped short of annexing the Donbas and agreed, instead, to autonomy for the Donbas within Ukraine under the Minsk agreement.

Putin has been harshly criticized by hardliners in Russia for not going further than the annexation of Crimea by annexing the Donbas as well. Lieven told RS that the hardliners criticize Putin for trusting Germany and France’s promise to ensure the implementation of the Minsk Agreement instead.

In his recent statement, Putin said he had been wrong. “Today it has become obvious that this reunification [of the Donbas with Russia] should have taken place earlier.” 

But in 2014, Putin said, he “believed that we would manage to come to terms, and Lugansk and Donetsk would be able to reunify with Ukraine somehow under the agreements – the Minsk agreements.” 

That Putin’s hopes that Minsk II would succeed proved false in no way justifies his subsequent decision to  carry out a brutal invasion of Ukraine. 

But Putin and Zelensky seem to have come to the same place for very different reasons. Zelensky does not trust that Putin won’t take advantage of the lull provided by a Minsk III agreement to build up his forces before violating it and terrorizing Ukraine with renewed force; Putin doesn’t trust that Zelensky will negotiate a settlement on the eastern territories that will calm the complicated strife. They both, nearly simultaneously, announced that the most promising hope for a diplomatic solution to the crisis is dead. 

So, in the end, the only thing the two leaders agree on is this: it is not at all clear what the road to a negotiated settlement would look like.

 

READ MORE:

https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2022/12/05/putin-and-zelensky-finally-agree-heres-why-thats-a-bad-thing/ 

(NOTE: RESPONSIBLE STATECRAFT IS A WEAK AS PISS ORG....)

 

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IT IS CLEAR WHAT THE NEGOTIATIONS WILL LOOK LIKE:

THE WEST IS AFRAID/IRKED OF HAVING TO GIVE ANYTHING TO RUSSIA.

YET ANY NEGOTIATIONS HAVE TO PLY TO RUSSIA’S FAIR DEMANDS (THESE WON’T CHANGE, EXCEPT IN RUSSIA’S FAVOUR AS THE CONFLICT GOES ON. THE WEST KNOWS THIS):

*NO NATO IN UKRAINE.

*CRIMEA IS RUSSIAN

*THE DONBASS REGIONS ARE NOW RUSSIAN BECAUSE KIEV REFUSED TO ACCEPT THE MINSK AGREEMENTS

*FORMALISED WESTERN NON-AGGRESSION AGAINST RUSSIA (AND CHINA).

 

BIDEN DOES NOT WANT TO GIVE ANYTHING TO RUSSIA, THUS THERE IS NOTHING TO DISCUSS (UNLESS OLD JOE IS IMPEACHED AND REPLACE BY THE VACUOUS VICE PREZ). 

 

PUTIN HAS MADE EVERYTHING CLEAR LAST YEAR

 

SEE ALSO: 

dealing with the western idiots is a hard slog....

 

 

 

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By Patrick Lawrence / Original to ScheerPost

 

The U.S., having no need of or gift for statecraft, has long practiced what I’ve taken to calling the diplomacy of no diplomacy. You can’t expect much from bimbos such as Antony Blinken or Wendy Sherman, Blinken’s No. 2 at the State Department. All they can do is roar, even if they are mice next to any serious diplomat. 

But have the European powers now followed along? I fear to ask because I fear the answer. But I must, given recent events.

Early last year, when Petro Poroshenko stated publicly that the post-coup regime in Kyiv had no intention of abiding by diplomatic commitments it made in 2014-15 to a peaceful settlement of the Ukraine crisis, a few eyebrows arched, but not over many. Who was the former Ukrainian president, anyway? I had him down from the first as a self-interested dummkopf who did what Washington told him to do and nothing more, no shred of statesmanship about him. 

It was another matter when, in early December, Angela Merkel admitted in back-to-back interviews that the European powers were up to the same thing. The objective of diplomatic talks in late 2014 and early 2015, the former German chancellor told Der Spiegel and Die Zeit, was not, as they had pretended, a framework for a federalized Ukraine in the cause of a lasting peace between its hostile halves: It was to deceive the Russians to give Kyiv time to prepare for a military assault on the Russian-speaking provinces in the east, whose people had refused to accept the U.S.–orchestrated coup that brought compulsively Russophobic Nazi-inflected nationalists to power in February 2014. 

Merkel’s revelations came as a shock, of course. But I contrived to mark down her comments as an inadvertent indiscretion in the autumn of a long-serving leader’s years. Merkel made her remarks more or less in passing. There was no boasting in them. She did not seem proud of her duplicity. 

Now François Hollande weighs in. A few days before the year ended, the former French president gave a lengthy interview to The Kyiv Independent. In it he made the Franco–German position perfectly clear: Yes, Merkel and I lied to the Russians when we negotiated the Minsk I and Minsk II Protocols in September 2014 and February 2015. No, we never had any intention of making Kyiv observe them or otherwise enforcing them. It was a charade from the first and—the part of this interview that truly galls—Hollande advanced this as wise, sound statesmanship.

Let us count the betrayals we must assign to the hapless Hollande and the inconstant Merkel. 

The betrayal of Russia and its president will go without saying. It is a matter of record that Vladimir Putin, who participated directly in the Minsk talks, worked long, long hours in the cause of a settlement that would leave Ukraine stable and unified, a freestanding post–Soviet republic on the Russian Federation’s southwestern order.  

Here I will remind readers of the animosity Putin expressed in his New Year’s address, three days after Hollande described the Franco–German sting operation in detail:

The West lied to us about peace while preparing for aggression, and today, they no longer hesitate to openly admit it and to cynically use Ukraine and its people as a means to weaken and divide Russia.

This, a clear reference to the Merkel and Hollande interviews, leaves us with clear and obvious questions. Did Berlin and Paris give Moscow any alternative but to intervene in Ukraine militarily when they sabotaged peace negotiations? While Moscow remains open to talks to end the war, how seriously is it supposed to take any such prospect? Volodymyr Zelensky is forever slamming the door to negotiations with the Russians, but the Ukrainian president is late to the gate: The Germans and French got this done years ago.

To betray the diplomatic process as Germany and France have done is also to betray trust as a necessary condition of orderly state-to-state relations. Nations may not fully trust one another but must be able to trust the diplomatic process—to trust the word given in the process of a negotiation. In this way the core European powers have condemned all of us to an unstable, dangerous world—and so are guilty of betraying all of us—our security, our futures, our desire for a stable, peaceable world order.

There are, of course, the Ukrainians. The majority of them wanted a peace deal from the start. Poroshenko was roundly defeated in Ukraine’s 2019 elections because he failed to deliver one. You would never know this from the Western press, but Zelensky succeeded him with a 70–odd percent majority of the vote precisely because he promised to negotiate a settlement in direct talks with Putin. 

Now the nation lies in ruins, its economy having cratered by 30 percent last year, 30 million of its people displaced, and its war dead to be counted in the tens of thousands. I see no argument against counting this a major consequence of the Franco–German design of deception. 

I urge readers to peruse Hollande’s interview with The Kyiv Independent. The second-rate Socialist—and so much for France’s long and storied Socialist tradition—competes with any duplicitous American diplomat as measured by his lies, omissions, and upside-down logic.

By Hollande’s account, the intent to mislead the Russians dates to the D–Day celebrations of 2014, a few months after the coup in Kyiv and the start of the coup regime’s artillery attacks on civilian areas in the eastern provinces. In June of that year France, Germany, Russia, and Ukraine gathered in Normandy to begin a negotiation process nominally intended to lead to a peace settlement and a stable national structure in Ukraine. This was named the Normandy Format. 

This format produced the Minsk I Protocol the following September. When that collapsed in early 2015, Kyiv refusing to cease its shelling, the four nations convened again. This time, talks were based on a settlement plan Paris and Berlin developed jointly. Minsk II followed. This protocol included more than a ceasefire; it also provided for a restructuring of Ukraine such that the eastern provinces would enjoy that degree of autonomy deemed necessary to hold the nation together despite the marked differences between its Europe-tilted western region and its Russia-tilted east. 

All terrific, on paper. All deception on the ground, Hollande now tells us: “Putin accepted the Normandy Format, which required him to report regularly on the progress that could be made in implementing the Minsk agreements.” As to what actually transpired, Hollande offers this, and it is here his accounting of events begins to turn on its head:

The Minsk agreements stopped the Russian offensive for a while. What was very important was to know how the West would use this respite to prevent any further Russian attempts.

To state the self-evident, NATO took this opportunity to begin training Ukrainian forces—this even as Putin took the terms of the Minsk accords seriously by Hollande’s own account. It is a matter of record that the offensive in the eastern provinces was Kyiv’s as it shelled its own citizens. The death toll reported by monitors of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, the OSCE, tells the story of the next eight years: 14,000 civilians dead, more than 80 percent of them in the eastern provinces known as the Donbas.

The lies come thick and fast from there. Early in the exchange The Kyiv Independent asks, “Did you have the impression that Vladimir Putin would respect the Minsk agreements?” to which Hollande replies, “We couldn’t know that.”

Liar. Putin’s desire for a negotiated settlement was perfectly obvious from the D–Day meeting onward.   

“He dreamt of a recreation of the Soviet Union,” Hollande says of the Russian leader. “Putin adopted an aggressive posture and waited to see what the West’s reaction would be.”

The former point is a common perversion of a remark of a sentimental sort that Putin made many years ago: Anyone who approves of the Soviet Union’s collapse has no heart, anyone who thinks it can be brought back to life has no brain. As to “Putin the aggressor,” whatever happened to Moscow’s decades-long efforts to negotiate a working post–Cold War order? Whatever happened to the decades of American subterfuge in Ukraine by means of various U.S.–sponsored “civil society groups”? Whatever happened to the February 2014 coup, an aggression if ever there was one?

Of these, Hollande has nothing to say. It goes on and on. “Moscow didn’t want peace.” “Mariupol was already in his [Putin’s] sights,” this a reference to the Ukrainian port that fell to Russian forces last spring. Nonsense and nonsense. None of this stands up to logical scrutiny or known facts.  

And never mind that the subversion of the Normandy Format talks and the two Minsk accords led directly to the war that began a year ago next month. Europe’s duplicity has been a great success, Hollande wants us to know. “Ukraine has strengthened its military posture,” he asserts. “Indeed, the Ukrainian army was completely different from that of 2014. It was better trained and equipped. It is the merit of the Minsk agreements to have given the Ukrainian army this opportunity.”

The merits of the Minsk agreements: We must assume he means the merits of their subversion. 

How, you ask, can Hollande count the underhanded strategy he pursued with Angela Merkel a success in view of how things have turned out? That is easy. The West went soft on Russia, so giving Putin the opening he was seeking. Consider this:

We have already seen the American withdrawal from the international scene in Syria with the “laissez faire” [the free pass] given to Putin regarding the support he gave Syrian dictator Bashar al–Assad.

Wow. I didn’t know the U.S. had free passes to give out in Syria—where its intervention was and remains illegal and where the Russians intervened against the Islamic State in September 2015 at the Assad government’s invitation.

How the French Socialists have fallen, I have to say.    

Why did Hollande choose to make these weird remarks? This is an interesting question. 

One clue may lie in his choice of The Kyiv Independent as the publication to grant this interview. The Kyiv Independent is not, to go straight to the point, independent. The Canadian government and the European Endowment for Democracy, the Continent’s version of the National Endowment for Democracy, have been among its supporters since its founding a year ago. It appears to be all mixed up with other NGOs of the anti–Russian sort. The Kyiv Independent, in other words, was dry ground for Hollande; it would ask all the right questions and none of the wrong ones. The interview was something of a staged vent, then.

It is inconceivable that Hollande spoke without Merkel’s knowledge. Maybe he was covering for what the two of them considered the former chancellor ’s mistake when she admitted her dishonesty and Hollande’s to Der Spiegel and Die Zeit. Hard to say. 

Whatever Hollande’s specific motivation, it seems more obvious that his intent was to legitimize deception as a feature of 21st century statecraft. Greater cynicism knoweth no man. 

He and Merkel have taken a grave step in the wrong direction these past nine years. It is many decades since we’ve seen any serious diplomacy from the Americans. It is another matter for the Europeans to abandon their long, admittedly pockmarked diplomatic traditions. Ever fewer nations take U.S. diplomats seriously anymore, knowing their word is simply no good. Will this now extend to the West altogether, the non–West seeing little point talking to it?

The duplicity with which France and Germany conducted the Minsk negotiations over some years now takes its place in the long story of the West’s dishonesty in its dealings with Russia since James Baker, George H.W. Bush’s secretary of state, promised Mikhail Gorbachev in February 1990—in conversation, not in writing—that NATO would not expand eastward from Germany. 

In effect, Hollande has just confirmed that lying to Moscow remains perfectly acceptable among the major Western powers. This has never led the world anywhere good and never will.

 

READ MORE:

https://scheerpost.com/2023/01/08/patrick-lawrence-europe-and-the-legitimization-of-deception/

 

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Switzerland’s role in geopolitical change

Lecture by Ralph Bosshard* at the 30th “Mut zur Ethik” conference in Sirnach TG on 2 September 2023

 

On the occasion of my inaugural visit to the General Staff Academy of the Russian Armed Forces in May 2013, I had a similar experience to Scott Ritter on his inspection trip to the former Soviet Union: I discovered that Russian colonels, generals and admirals are completely normal people and do not at all correspond to the image, which is currently being published in the German-speaking press. Over the next 14 months, we considered how to defend Russia against invasion and realised that with an army then numbering 900,000 men, this was a challenging task. In this respect, the training in Moscow differed from that which I had enjoyed in numerous NATO courses: there we always practiced putting down uprisings somewhere on fictitious islands in the world’s oceans under the slogan “foster peace and stability”.

 

Neutrality in the environment of hybrid warfare

You can only gain such insights if you get to know the language and local conditions. Based on this consideration, language training should actually become mandatory in the training of journalists, otherwise reporting becomes worthless. Gazettes without such knowledge can safely be used to stuff wet shoes.
  One line of strategy in today’s competition between powers is the promotion of organised crime, regardless of whether one calls it “hybrid warfare” or something else. But as long as, for example, the alleged paedophile Oleh Liashko, the allegedly corrupt and criminal former Interior Minister Arsen Awakow and Yuriy Lutsenko, who served as prosecutor general as a non-lawyer, have political influence in today’s Ukraine, even the most efficient criminal investigators will have no chance to investigate or prevent crimes, particularly against Ukrainian refugee women.
  Since the turn of the millennium, questions about the relationship between politics, the economy and society have been answered differently in Russia and Belarus than in the West. This has created an ideological contradiction – largely unnoticed by the West – which is now becoming apparent in the war in Ukraine. Francis Fukuyama’s theories have been refuted by reality.
  For 20 years NATO waged war in Afghanistan, not against terrorism, but against an entire society. All the political advisors and gender advisors who worked in the NATO mission and demanded that the country’s residents implement all of Europe’s achievements since the French Revolution such as human rights, democracy, equal rights and others within a few years are to blame for this. Now we have to stop these people from ruining other Central Asian states.
  Overall, it must be noted that the use of all conceivable areas of social life and state action for the purpose of waging war, which is being carried out today, forces a discussion about the semantic content of the concept of neutrality.

 

Favourable starting position for Switzerland

The Swiss always like to hide their light under a bushel. In terms of area, Switzerland is indeed a small state, ranking 132nd out of 194 countries in the world. However, in terms of population, where it is ranked 100th, it is more or less in the middle. In terms of economic performance, it is one of the largest in the world, ranking 21st out of 192. As a medium-sized country with great economic performance, without a colonial past and with a long tradition of non-interference in foreign conflicts, Switzerland should actually be in a position to secure the sympathy of a large number of countries around the world. This should actually help it to overcome its image problems due to its financial centre and the envy of the war-ravaged countries of two world wars. All of this forces us to pursue an active foreign policy. If Switzerland submits to the foreign policy dictates of the Diplomatic Service of the EU (EEAS), it will give up important advantages and only suffer disadvantages.

 

Abuse of neutrality

In the run-up to World War II, Joseph Stalin was interested in the neutrality of the Soviet Union because his ideological mindset told him that the Soviet Union should not care if the capitalist states of Germany, Italy, France and the British Empire were tearing each other apart. Furthermore, he may have hoped that he could then benefit from the moment of weakness that arises when these powers are exhausted by war. Conversely, leading circles in Great Britain may have asked themselves why the kingdom should be concerned if the National Socialist Third Reich and the Bolshevik Soviet Union fight each other. Great Britain was primarily interested in its colonial empire and had pursued a strategy of balance on the European continent since the War of the Spanish Succession. Here, neutrality was abused as a vehicle, in contrast to Switzerland, which always viewed permanent neutrality as a prerequisite for credibility.
  Similar considerations may have motivated the Americans at the Potsdam Conference from 17 July 1945 to 2 August 1945 to urge the Soviets to break their neutrality pact with Japan and attack the Empire of Japan three months after the end of the war in Europe. Imagine what the balance of power in East Asia would have looked like if the USA had lost a million soldiers in the invasion of Japan, as feared, while the Red Army had transferred the same number of soldiers to the Far East. The Soviet Union would have had a free hand in East Asia! Therefore, the Soviet Union had to be drawn into the war and Japan’s surrender had to be brought about quickly, without major losses for the Americans. The logical consequence of this was the dropping of two atomic bombs. These events also revealed an understanding of neutrality that is not credible.

 

The assault rifle in your own locker

It has been repeated for decades that neutrality must be armed in order to appear credible. Actually, an easy-to-understand statement, because almost every policy has to be backed up militarily. Anyone who fails to do so is virtually inviting military intervention. The most recent case in which this happened is the autumn war in Nagorno-Karabakh of 2020. In this sense, neutrality is not synonymous with pacifism, but arises from the insight that wars that lead to self-destruction are better not waged.
  Neutrality must not only be credible, but also useful, so that the neighbours of a neutral power in particular have an interest in its integrity. This also speaks for Switzerland’s active foreign policy based on its neutrality.
  Proponents of joining NATO repeatedly argue that autonomous defence is no longer possible today. This has been the case for centuries, because without imports of the necessary raw materials we would not even have been able to produce gunpowder ourselves. And even today, of the 194 countries in the world, only very few are able to produce everything an army needs. Furthermore, the chain of arguments between dependence on imports and NATO membership is far from closed. One can also ask oneself how such a statement from NATO supporters can come about as long as there are no scenarios for Swiss national defence in the context of a pan-European conflict scenario.
  If Switzerland is ever forced to defend itself against an aggressor, then it must persuade at least one of its neighbours to keep its access to world markets open. However, there is no requirement that someone else fight the war for Switzerland. Three of our neighbours are among the big players in world politics and have geopolitical ambitions from the Gulf of Aden to the Gulf of Guinea to the Arctic Ocean. Participating in acts of aggression that violate international law as a kind of preventive measure in order to endear oneself to these neighbours cannot be a strategy for ensuring security.

 

Switzerland is quintessentially European

It is well known that Erasmus von Rotterdam, Paracelsus and other important early modern scholars taught at the University of Basel; that Jean Calvin and Jean-Jacques Rousseau came from Geneva, as well. What is less known, however, is that the chief engineer of the Milan Cathedral, Giovanni Solari, came from Carona near Locarno and that his son Pietro Solari played a leading role in the expansion of the Moscow Kremlin. The original version of the Nibelungenlied, one of the oldest testimonies of the German language, was written in the monastery of St. Gallen as early as the 13th century. In the monastery of St. Gallen, pious monks, especially Notker the German, wrote the first commentary on Aristotle since ancient times in the 10th century, when the residents of Berlin still worshiped pagan idols! All in all: Switzerland is quintessentially European, but not part of the EU and NATO. This is what makes the Swiss position on current issues so interesting. It makes no sense for powers outside Europe to talk to representatives of the small EU member states, because Brussels speaks for them. As a non-member of these alliances, Switzerland can make its voice heard internationally.

Geopolitical change cannot be ignored

Quite apart from the fact that a large number of countries around the world are not taking part in the EU’s sanctions against Russia, the summits of African countries with Russia and the BRICS summit in recent weeks have shown how the world feels towards Europe. At the Africa-Russia Summit on July 27 and 28 this year, 49 African countries out of 54 were represented by heads of state or government or ministers. In most of these countries, Europeans are unpopular due to their colonial past. According to reports, the Chinese are currently trying to make themselves unpopular on the African continent. They also sometimes tend towards arrogance and a false sense of cultural superiority. Perhaps they are making the same mistakes as Europeans in the past. The Africans in particular will have no interest in swapping their hard-won dependence on the European colonial powers for one on Beijing or in opening the door to gender zealots, primarily from north-western Europe.
  The BRICS summit from 22 to 24 August demonstrated great interest in this group of states, which today accounts for a share of the world’s population and global economic output that can no longer be ignored. It cannot be assumed that the BRICS plus will form a tightly knit bloc, like the countries of the communist bloc during the Cold War, when belonging to a bloc was, in the eyes of many countries, a question of military survival. For many countries, however, there is now an opportunity to secure the most advantageous offer from the West and the BRICS plus. Anyone who does not take advantage of this opportunity is just stupid. And perhaps the loose cohesion of the BRICS is also an element that makes this cluster of states attractive.
  In the future, world politics will be conducted in the capitals of the BRICS plus countries, and not in the eunuch choir of the G7. Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putinmay settle the Korean peninsula’s problems while the German foreign minister is still stuck on a broken government plane.

 

Conclusion

The cards in world politics are currently being redistributed, to the detriment of all those who would like to divide the world into good and evil, black and white. This is world politics for colour blind people. NATO has been remembering the Olsen gang in the Danish crime comedies of the eighties and nineties since the embarrassment at Kabul Airport in August 2021. In these, the clumsy gang, led by their boss Egon Olsen, was always ready to do crooked things and failed every time because of their own shortcomings.
  As long as the war in Ukraine continues, the West will continue its process of denial of reality. And the war in Ukraine must continue because it has long since become the framework in which the third world war is being prepared. The attacks on the Kremlin in Moscow and the bases of the Russian transport and long-range aviation forces near Saratov and Pskov can also be interpreted as main tests for a (first) strike against the country’s leadership and the Russian arsenal of nuclear deterrence. If there are attacks against Russian submarine bases and missile silos in the near future, then we will know what is really at stake. For now, the West will force Ukraine to continue the war, even if it loses hundreds of lives every day. Perhaps the same dirty game is being played in the Baltics that has been playing for years in the Middle East, where the Israeli Air Force is used to flying attacks against Syria from Lebanese airspace.
  By participating in the economic sanctions, Switzerland has damaged its image as a reliable trading partner. What role can she still play? It is questionable whether it will once again succeed in assuming a bridging function, such as between the USA and Cuba and Iran or between Russia and Georgia. More than one role as a voice of reason is probably no longer possible.

Outlook

Neutrality is the attitude of sovereign states and self-confident peoples who decide their own fate and do not want to be reduced to an object of geopolitical concepts. It is the counter-concept to exceptionalism, with the help of which the USA in particular wants to turn all other countries in the world into banana republics and into territories with limited rights like Puerto Rico. The reluctance with which the Global South reacts to the advances from Brussels, Washington and Berlin is forcing the West to bring neutrals on board. In this sense, the pressure currently being exerted on Switzerland is nothing other than a sign of desperation.
  Switzerland was not insufficiently active in the conflict in and around Ukraine. Swiss diplomats played a key role in bringing about the Minsk Agreements and the OSCE special observation mission in Ukraine. When it became clear that the Minsk package of measures in particular could not be implemented, Swiss diplomats offered to draw up a road map. But Ukraine and the West wanted to keep all options for action open – including military ones – and pursued a “choose and pick” policy. Neutrality is not indecent. Pressuring Switzerland to participate in violent solutions after it has invested so much in peaceful options is indecent. Neutrality is also not an expression of cowardice. Switzerland remains a country that is not exposed to any military threat. Taking advantage of their secure position to spread war to other countries would be cowardly. Using the security of their situation to work on non-violent solutions is not a pacifist heroic act, but rather the contribution that the world can reasonably expect from Switzerland. We must continue to follow this path.  •

 

* Ralph Bosshard studied general history, Eastern European history and military history, completed the military leadership school at ETH Zurich and general staff training for the Swiss Army. This was followed by language training in Russian at Moscow State University and training at the Military Academy of the General Staff of the Russian Army. He is familiar with the situation in Eastern Europe and Central Asia from his six years at the OSCE, during which he also worked as special advisor to the Permanent Representative of Switzerland.

 

https://www.zeit-fragen.ch/en/archives/2023/nr-23-31-oktober-2023/die-rolle-der-schweiz-im-geopolitischen-wandel

 

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Angela Merkel and François Hollande’s crime against peace

by Thierry Meyssan

A controversy has arisen over my analyses of the personal responsibility of former Chancellor Angela Merkel and former President François Hollande in the current war in Ukraine. My colleagues claim that I made it all up and that these two personalities are innocent. I’d just be peddling Russian disinformation.
This controversy is not insignificant: my opponents are trying to whitewash our political leaders, and in so doing they are serving the Western narrative of the war in Ukraine and justifying it.
So here are the facts and documents on which I rely. You be the judge.

 

few mainstream media colleagues have launched a controversy over an extract from a lecture I gave in Colmar last month [1]. They dispute what I said about the personal responsibility of former Chancellor Angela Merkel and former President François Hollande for the current war in Ukraine.

Here, in detail, are the facts I have reported and the documents on which I relied, which they deny.

 CRIMES AGAINST PEACE

On December 28, 2022, President Hollande gave an interview in Paris to Théo Prouvost of the Kyiv Independent [2], which my opponents have confused with the sketch by Russian comedians Vovan and Lexus that he inspired [3]. In it, he claims to recognize himself in the remarks made a few days earlier by the former German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, to Zeit [4]. In it, she declared that she had signed the Minsk agreements, not to protect the people of the Donbass and put an end to the war being waged against them by the Kiev authorities, but to give them time to arm themselves. François Hollande explicitly confesses: "Yes, Angela Merkel is right on this point. The Minsk agreements stopped the Russian offensive for a while. What was very important was to know how the West would use this respite to prevent any new Russian attempt".

The "Russian attempt" he refers to is not Moscow sending Russian troops, but the private initiative of billionaire Konstantin Malofeyev to send Cossacks to support the people of the Donbass, as he had done for the Bosnian Serbs.

Angela Merkel’s and François Hollande’s comments were confirmed by the Secretary General of Ukraine’s National Defense and Security Council, Oleksiy Danilov, who resigned three weeks ago after insulting the Chinese special envoy [5]..

The Minsk agreements were negotiated in two stages:

• The first protocol was signed, on September 5, 2014, by Ukraine, Russia and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). It was also initialed by the governors of Donetsk and Lugansk oblasts. At the time, these oblasts, though called "republics" like the former Soviet regions, had no ambitions for independence. The protocol instituted a ceasefire, the release of hostages, the withdrawal of troops from both sides, including Konstantin Malofeyev’s Cossacks, and a general amnesty. It also provides for decentralization of powers, local elections and a national dialogue.

Not much happened, however, apart from the withdrawal of Konstantin Malofeyev’s Cossacks at the urging of Russian President Vladimir Putin, who took a dim view of a modern oligarch behaving like a Tsarist-era Grand Duke.

• The second protocol was signed six months later, on February 11, 2015. Negotiations took place under the responsibility of the OSCE, again between Kiev, Donetsk and Lugansk. This time, Germany, France and Russia acted as guarantors ("Normandy format").

It contains more or less the same provisions as the first protocol, but is more detailed. Above all, it states that decentralization, which has not taken place as agreed, will have to be achieved through constitutional reform.

Russia feared that this second protocol would not be applied any more than the first. Vladislav Sourkov, who had been in charge of this dossier at the Kremlin, later explained this and not that it did not want to apply it, as Le Figaro [6] wrongly interpreted it. Moreover, it was Moscow [7], not Berlin or Paris, that submitted the protocol to the Security Council for approval.

TOWARDS A NUREMBERG 2 TRIAL

Reacting to Chancellor Merkel’s and President Hollande’s remarks, Vyacheslav Volodin, Chairman of the State Duma (i.e. the lower house), immediately intervened to express his indignation at these confessions. Then, after the Christmas holidays, he published his comments on his Telegram channel [8]. This led to two dispatches, one from the Tass agency [9] and another from the Ria-Novosti agency [10], which my opponents also ignore.

In his capacity as Chairman of the State Duma, he first quotes President Vladimir Putin: "If a fight is unavoidable, you must strike first". Then he declares: "The confessions of a representative of the Kiev regime and former German and French leaders should be used as evidence before an international military tribunal. These leaders were plotting to start a World War with predictable consequences. They deserve to be punished for their crimes.

In describing the statements made by Angela Merkel, François Hollande and Oleksiy Danilov as evidence of "crimes", he is referring to the "crimes against peace" enunciated at the Liberation by the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal. According to this authority, recognized by all UN member states, these are the most serious crimes, even more so than "crimes against humanity". They are therefore not subject to any statute of limitations.

Angela Merkel, François Hollande and Oleksiy Danilov have not yet been the subject of an arrest warrant, but they have already been reported. For the time being, there is no jurisdiction capable of judging their crimes. This is why President Vyacheslav Volodin alluded to the idea of an "international military tribunal" (equivalent to the Nuremberg Tribunal). Such a tribunal has yet to be set up following the war in Ukraine. There is no doubt that, unless France, Germany and Ukraine agree, Angela Merkel, François Hollande and Oleksiy Danilov will have to answer for "crimes against Peace".

I can only deplore the fact that my opponents have not found the above-mentioned documents. In reality, this is quite normal: they are only interested in Anglo-Saxon or European press agencies that refuse to take into account the Russian point of view. They take the official narrative at face value and don’t do their due diligence.

 WHY THE MINSK AGREEMENTS WERE NEVER IMPLEMENTED

Russia, as I mentioned above, presented the second protocol to the Security Council on February 17, 2015. This was the subject of resolution 2202. In the annex, Moscow had the text of the protocol and the statement by the four heads of state adopted: Vladimir Putin (Russia), Petro Poroshenko (Ukraine), François Hollande (France) and Angela Merkel (Germany). During the debates, Ukraine’s permanent representative in New York expressed his satisfaction at the unwavering support of the United Nations.

In passing, it should be noted that China’s permanent representative made clear at the time the position he still holds today: peace can only be lasting if the concerns of all parties are addressed.

Yet the second Minsk agreement has not been implemented. In the Donbass, sporadic clashes have always taken place, with each side blaming the other. Moreover, Kiev wanted the amnesty to be proclaimed after the local elections, while the leaders of the Donbass Oblates wanted it to be proclaimed beforehand. This would have enabled them to stand in the elections, which they would probably have won. Constitutional amendments were indeed put to the vote on August 31, 2015, at the Verkhovna Rada, in the presence... of the US special envoy, the Straussian Victoria Nuland, who had organized the 2014 coup (known as "EuroMaidan"). Elected representatives of the "integral nationalist" Sloboda party tried to block the vote and invaded the gallery, shouting "Shame!" and "Treason!" [11]. Meanwhile, outside the Assembly, clashes broke out between police and "integral nationalist" militiamen, leaving 4 dead and 122 injured. A qualified majority was not reached in the Rada, and the constitutional reform was not adopted.

These riots were the biggest since the overthrow of the elected president, Viktor Yanukovych, by the Sloboda "integral nationalists", supported by Victoria Nuland. President Petro Poroshneko condemned them, but wasn’t told twice. It was clear that if he persisted in implementing the Minsk agreements, he too would be overthrown.

Courageous, but not foolhardy, he suddenly denounced the second Minsk protocol. According to him, former president Leonid Kuchma’s signature on the Ukrainian side was worthless because he had not been accredited by the Verkhovna Rada. Yes, but Petro Poroshenko was present at the negotiations, as acting Ukrainian President, he raised no objections when the agreements were signed, nor when they were ratified by the Security Council, and he signed a joint declaration in which he undertook to implement them. Henceforth, he shared the same bad faith as President François Hollande and Chancellor Angela Merkel.

President Petro Poroshenko immediately appointed the Sloboda militia to put pressure on the people of the Donbass. This is the sinister Azov division of the "White Führer", Andriy Biletsky. Over a period of seven years, 80,000 fighters would battle it out. Kiev’s men killed between 17,000 and 21,000 of their own Donbass population. Poroshenko set up an apartheid, a two-tier citizenship: Russian speakers in the Donbass were no longer entitled to any public services, schools or pensions.

The United Nations Security Council did not intervene, at most issuing a presidential statement on June 6, 2018 [12]. Once in power, President Volodymyr Zelensky tried to reconnect the threads by convening a Normandy-format meeting, but to no avail.

 THE RESPONSIBILITY TO PROTECT THE PEOPLE OF DONBASS

On November 2, 2021, the President appoints Dmytro Yarosh, the leading figure of the "integral nationalists" and a long-time CIA agent [13], as advisor to the Commander-in-Chief of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, General Valerii Zaluzhnyi. He quickly drew up a plan for an attack on the Donbass [14], to be launched on March 9, 2022.

However, at an impromptu ceremony in the Kremlin on February 21, Moscow suddenly recognized the Donestk and Loughansk People’s Republics as independent states. The following day, it launched a "special military operation". Russian troops converged from both their own border and that of Belarus to prevent any regrouping of Ukrainian forces in the Donbass. It destroyed Kiev’s military airport, but did not seek to take the capital. Within a few weeks, it had liberated most of the Donbass.

For months, Russia avoided uttering the word "war". It explained that it was intervening exclusively to put an end to the suffering of the civilian population of Donbass. On the contrary, the West accused Russia of having "invaded" Ukraine in order to conquer it. However, Russia has merely applied Resolution 2202 and the declaration of the heads of state that negotiated the Minsk agreements. In fact, in order to reserve this possibility, it reproduced it as an annex to the resolution. To say that Russia invaded Ukraine would imply that France "invaded" Rwanda when it put an end to the Tutsi genocide in 1994. No one thinks so. It simply implemented Resolution 929 and saved millions of lives.

Strangely enough, Russia did not raise the "responsibility to protect" argument. This is because it had opposed the formulation of this concept, which was only adopted by the United Nations in 2005. However, she would finally use it, on February 12, 2024, at a meeting of the Security Council that she would convene. She would set out her invariable position, but this time she would use the same diplomatic language as her interlocutors.

WAR PROPAGANDA

As I conclude this article, I’d like to come back to what my colleagues have written. According to them, I have invented the responsibility of François Hollande and Angela Merkel in the current war, and I am relaying Russian disinformation by claiming that Moscow did not invade Ukraine. They probably wrote these articles with the intention of undermining my credibility.

Perhaps they didn’t realize that by writing this nonsense in mainstream media, they were misleading the public and ultimately relaying the propaganda of war supporters.

Thierry Meyssan
Translation
Roger Lagassé

 

 

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