Ukraine and the End of NATO

I have been invited to speak at a conference in Istanbul on “World Security and the NATO Conference., hosted by the Global Civilizations Initiative Research Center. These are my prepared remarks.

As the conflict between Russia and Ukraine enters its fifth year, it is high time that the nations that comprise the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) take stock of the situation and what it means for the future of a trans-Atlantic alliance that has been in place for some eight decades. Western mainstream media and its social media echo chambers promote a narrative centered around the notion of Russian fatigue, Ukrainian resilience, and western resolve, and take delight in highlighting talking points premised on a Russian-generated quagmire that has dragged on longer than the Great Patriotic War of 1941-45. This narrative parallels that of the officially held positions of most of the nations that make up the membership of NATO, which is no surprise, given the hand-in-glove relationship between corporate-controlled media and governments possessing a revolving door relationship with these same corporations.

This narrative is deliberately misleading, since it is not designed to reflect fact-based truth, but rather promote a fiction that is being used to shape public perception so that the Russo-Ukraine conflict can be sustained through to its desired conclusion—the strategic defeat of Russia. This objective is the formal position of NATO and its key constituent members, having been given voice numerous times since first being articulated in May of 2022. The concept is built around three basic pillars, those being the economic collapse of Russia brought about by economic sanctions, the military exhaustion of Russia brought on by an endless war underwritten by the collective west, and the disintegration of Russian societal structures leading to the termination of the Russian government headed by President Vladimir Putin.

There is one major problem with this concept: it is failing. The Russian economy is growing, not shrinking, and has been able to find a balance between the economic needs of a consumer-driven society while also dramatically expanding its defense industry to the point that Russia is outproducing its western counterparts when it comes to the critical weaponry of war. The Russian military is growing stronger, not weaker, and is prevailing on a complex battlefield despite the efforts of the collective west to wear it down through a seemingly endless proxy war with Ukraine. Moreover, the government of Russian President Vladimir Putin continues to garner the support of not only most of the Russian people, frustrating those who have visions of provoking a Moscow Maidan moment, but also the world beyond the limited confines of the trans-Atlantic community.

The very pillars that the NATO plan of action are supposed to collapse inside Russia are in fact crumbling inside NATO—an energy crisis triggered by the self-imposed severing of Europe from Russian energy supplies, and exacerbated by war in the Middle East, has led to the near collapse of several critical European economies. NATO military strength has been greatly diminished in the years since the collapse of the Soviet Union, to the extent that there is not a single NATO nation capable of successfully waging large-scale ground combat in Europe of the kind being fought between Russia and Ukraine. And the costs associated with bringing NATO military forces up to the necessary levels capable of engaging with and prevailing over the Russian military are prohibitively high, and as such represent unattainable objectives for most, if not all, of Europe given the overall desultory condition of the greater European economy. Lastly, the political and economic elites who have seized and sustained their hold on power in Europe for the past three decades are themselves falling to the wayside. The United Kingdom has had four Prime Ministers in four years. German’s government is about to collapse, as it the government of France. In short, the very objectives NATO sought to impose on Russia are being implemented—inadvertently, but effectively—among the NATO membership itself.

What is most shocking about the current situation is that this is not the byproduct of some short-term misjudgment, but rather the result of policies decades in the making. Even before NATO was formally constituted, the United States and the United Kingdom were conspiring to turn the territory of central Europe that today comprises Ukraine into a poison pill for the notion of a greater Russia. Both Yalta and Potsdam were meant to carve out territory away from Russia that constituted part of Ukraine in 2021. The CIA was openly cavorting with former Nazi intelligence personnel and organizations to build an anti-Russian resistance movement on the territory of Ukraine that was recruited from the worst of the western Ukrainian nationalist organizations, including those headed by Stepan Bandera and Andrei Milnyk. And even after the Soviet Union crushed the last remnants of these pro-Nazi forces in 1954-55, the US and NATO continued to harbor fantasies of making common cause with the surviving elements of the Ukrainian nationalist movement, with US Special Forces planning the creation of indigenous resistance movements on Soviet soil, all the while the CIA sustained the odious ideology of Ukrainian nationalism through direct funding and training support that continued unabated until 1990.

When the Cold War ended, NATO worked with the United States to destabilized Russia by helping install ant-Russian, pro-Ukrainian governments in Kiev. NATO expansion took place in-the-shadows, the true motivations hidden from public scrutiny by those who viewed Russia as weak and susceptible to buying into misleading narratives. NATO was assisted by various non-governmental organizations which funneled money and resources into a master plan designed to create the inevitability of war with Europe and NATO. In 1993 George Soros, who is heavily invested in regime change opportunities in Russia, published an article in which he wrote of the inevitability and necessity of violence between NATO and Russia. But Soros openly acknowledged that NATO, as an institution, was incapable of sustaining any conflict which would send the bodies of hundreds of thousands of its soldiers home in body bags. Instead, Soros noted, NATO would need to provide the arsenal of war to a non-NATO eastern European source of manpower which would fight Russia as a NATO proxy.

This proxy has always been identifiable as Ukraine.

The Orange Revolution of 2004 was a NATO-supported, Soros-funded effort designed to supplant the pro-Russian Viktor Yanukovych with Ukrainian nationalists like Viktor Yushchenko who openly embraced the ideology of Stepan Bandera.

It succeeded.

And in the aftermath of Yanukovych’s political comeback, in 2010, NATO supported the US-EU efforts to orchestrate a violent coup in February 2014 that toppled Yanukovych and replaced him with Ukrainian nationalists and, in doing so, purposefully triggering the events that would lead to Russia’s initiation of the Special Military Operation in February 2022. The complicity of NATO in this action is manifest—NATO established training facilities in Ukraine whose mission was to build a Ukrainian army capable of holding its own against the Russian military. This action is the literal manifestation of Soros’ 1993 vision of a NATO-equipped eastern European army.

And is the very essence of the military situation that exists today between Ukraine and Russia, where millions of Ukrainian lives and billions of dollars of Ukrainian resources have been sacrificed to facilitate NATO’s not-so-secret war with Russia.

A war NATO is losing by a wide margin.

NATO’s first Secretary General, Lord Ismay, famously noted that the mission of NATO was “to keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.”

Today we see a NATO where the Americans are leaving, the Germans are resurgent, and the Russians are being compelled, against their will, to engage in direct confrontation with a NATO that is actively seeking war with Russia by the end of the decade.

It should be noted that NATO cannot afford to build the kind of military necessary to prevail against Russia in direct conflict, and that any NATO-Russia war would not only inevitably lead to the economic devastation of the NATO membership, but also the physical destruction of the very societies NATO was purportedly created to protect.

Next month the NATO collective will gather in Ankara to discuss the way forward for an origination which lost its legitimacy with the collapse of the Soviet Union and can only continue to justify its existence by resurrecting the threat of Russia by provoking Moscow through the proxy war with Ukraine.

As thing stands, NATO’s planned confrontation with Russia is a literal suicide pact. It will lead to the defeat of NATO and the probable extermination of Europe.

The Ankara Summit may prove to be the last Summit NATO ever convenes. Europe today is behaving like a rabid dog, and the only way a community protects itself from such a threat is to shoot the dog.

Russia is getting ready to shoot the European dog.

War prevention must be the priority of NATO going forward. This will require accepting the harsh truth that a Russian victory over Ukraine is inevitable, and that any effort by NATO to seek an alternative outcome by escalating the conflict between Russia and Ukraine will only lead to a direct conflict with Russia NATO cannot win, and as such will likely trigger a nuclear conflict that ends forever the experiment of European civilization.

NATO is playing a dangerous game of Russian roulette, where every chamber of the pistol is loaded, and the outcome certain.

Unless it stops playing the game.

The choice is clear—life or death for Europe and the trans-Atlantic alliance.

And the decision will be made next month in Ankara.

Choose wisely.

https://scottritter.substack.com/p/ukraine-and-the-end-of-nato