By Felix Abt
[Source: Screenshot of Los Angeles Times headline]
In its 1,000-year history, Russia has never fought a war against Western Europe. Conversely, it has been attacked by Western Europe multiple times:
▪ 1245 German Crusaders
▪ 1612 Catholic Poles
▪ 1759 German Prussians
▪ 1812 French army of Napoleon
▪ 1914 Germany and Austria-Hungary
▪ 1941 Germany
After the persecution of the invaders in Western Europe, the Russians voluntarily withdrew: after Napoleon’s invasion, from Paris in 1815, after Hitler’s invasion, from Vienna in 1955 and from Berlin in 1990.
The most traumatic experience was the death of 27 million citizens after the German invasion in World War II, of whom 3 million Russians were killed in captivity, many in bestial ways in concentration camps.
Due to these experiences, Russia is very afraid of enemy troops massing on its borders. Russia knows very well that NATO is not a self-defense organization, as it claims, but an aggressive war alliance, at least since NATO’s wars of aggression in Yugoslavia, the Middle East, and Afghanistan, which have caused terrible death and destruction and, for example, turned prosperous Libya, with a good education system for all girls, into a ruined, failed state where girls now risk ending up in slave markets.
NATO’s regime change war in Libya turned one of Africa’s most developed countries into “an open slave market.” [Source: Informed Insight]
Today, NATO is once again at Russia’s gates. And the threat is tangible: Russia has a defense budget of $50 billion. NATO has a military budget of $1,000 billion, 20 times more than Russia, and even wants to increase it massively!
Shattered trust
Russia allowed Germany to reunite peacefully after the West had promised diplomatically not to move NATO an inch to the east. Moreover, in 1999, Western countries had agreed to the principle in the Charter for European Security that “the obligation of each State not to strengthen its security at the expense of the security of other States.” Not only did the West fail to keep its promises, the U.S. even provoked Russia by trampling on its security interests until Moscow fell into a Washington-set trap à la Afghanistan in Ukraine. In addition, it provoked Russia by massively arming Russophobic Kjiv nationalists after the 2014 U.S.-initiated coup against democratically elected Ukrainian President Yanukovych, enabling them to instigate a brutal civil war against the hated Russian-speaking residents of the Donbass.
Long-standing cooperation between NATO and the Ukrainian neo-Nazi battalion Azov, which has been at the forefront of the war against civilians in the Donbass, killing thousands. The picture shows Azov soldiers with NATO advisers in 2017. More here
While Russia is portrayed in the West as imperialist — it is enough to read all of Putin’s speeches in the original to see that there is not the slightest hint that he is a new tsar, let alone a Hitler, who supposedly wants to create a Greater Russia — the United States and its NATO faithful are trying to bring about regime change in Moscow and break Russia, a vast country spanning eleven time zones, into smaller, weaker and thus more controllable Western vassal states.
It could take generations to restore trust between Russia and its Western adversaries, or perhaps much less if the aggressive U.S. Empire and its European vassals weaken faster than expected. In this sense, there is certainly a glimmer of hope for the Russian people, who want to live in secure borders and in peace, without nuclear-tipped missiles pointed at them on the borders of their European neighbors.