Putin Nato Quotes

But, the source explained, this fit Putin’s larger strategic vision: “to destroy NATO, destroy the European Union, and seriously harm the United States.

You know what Trump is?’ ‘Tell me.’ ‘He’s Putin’s shithouse cleaner. He does everything for little Vladi that little Vladi can’t do for himself: pisses on European unity, pisses on human rights, pisses on NATO. Assures us that Crimea and Ukraine belong to the Holy Russian Empire, the Middle East belongs to the Jews and the Saudis, and to hell with the world order.

As the 2018 World Cup Championship in Russia draws to a close, President Trump scores a hat-trick of diplomatic faux pas - first at the NATO summit, then on a UK visit, and finally with a spectacular own goal in Helsinki, thereby handing Vladimir Putin a golden propaganda trophy. For as long as this moron continues to queer the pitch by refusing to be a team player, America's Achilles' heel will go from bad to worse. It's high time somebody on his own side tackled him in his tracks.

Lord Ismay, the first Secretary General of NATO, once remarked that the purpose of NATO was to “keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.

The crux of Putin’s foreign policy was to undercut the West’s grip on global affairs. With every hack and disinformation campaign, Putin’s digital army sought to tie Russia’s opponents up in their own politics and distract them from Putin’s real agenda: fracturing support for Western democracy and, ultimately, NATO—the North Atlantic Treaty Organization—the only thing holding Putin in check.

The United States and NATO took advantage of Russian weakness and, despite promises to the contrary, expanded NATO to Eastern Europe and even to some former Soviet republics. The West went on to ignore Russian interests in the Middle East, invaded Serbia and Iraq on doubtful pretexts, and generally made it very clear to Russia that it can count only on its own military power to protect its sphere of influence from Western incursions. From this perspective, recent Russian military moves can be blamed on Bill Clinton and George W. Bush as much as on Vladimir Putin.

The conflict in Serbia inflamed Russia’s wounded pride over its deflated status since the collapse of the Soviet Union. The new Russia lacked the ability to shape world events, which made the American-led actions even harder to swallow. Yeltsin berated President Clinton, insisting that an intervention was forbidden by international law, only to be ignored. Russia resented the fact that the United States and its expanding NATO alliance were acting as if they could impose their will on the new world order without regard to Russia’s interests. Even worse, the conflict in Kosovo had striking parallels to the one in Chechnya, and even Russians not prone to paranoia could imagine a NATO campaign on behalf of Chechnya’s independence movement.

The Russians had long historical ties to Serbia, which we largely ignored. Trying to bring Georgia and Ukraine into NATO was truly overreaching. The roots of the Russian Empire trace back to Kiev in the ninth century, so that was an especially monumental provocation. Were the Europeans, much less the Americans, willing to send their sons and daughters to defend Ukraine or Georgia? Hardly. So NATO expansion was a political act, not a carefully considered military commitment, thus undermining the purpose of the alliance and recklessly ignoring what the Russians considered their own vital national interests. Similarly, Putin’s hatred of the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (limiting the number and location of Russian and NATO nonnuclear military forces in Europe) was understandable.

On August 7, 2013, on the evening of the fifth anniversary of the war, Georgian President Mikheil Saakasvili, in a prerecorded interview on Georgia’s Rustavi-2 TV, told that he had met Putin in Moscow in February 2008 at an informal summit of the CIS. During the summit he told Putin that he was ready to say no to NATO in exchange for Russian help with the reintegration of the two breakaway territories. Saakashvili claimed “that ‘Putin did not even think for a minute” about his proposal. “[Putin] smiled and said, ‘We do not exchange your territories for your geopolitical orientation... And it meant ‘we will chop off your territories anyway.’” Saakashvili asked him to talk about the growing tensions along the borders with South Ossetia, saying, “It could not be worse than now.” “That’s when he [Putin] looked at me and said: ‘And here you are very wrong. You will see that very soon it will be much, much, much worse.’” [234]

When [Ivan] Ilyin wrote that the art of politics was “identifying and neutralizing the enemy,” he did not mean that statesmen should ascertain which foreign power actually posed a threat. He meant that politics began with a leader’s decision about which foreign enmity will consolidate a dictatorship. Russia’s real geopolitical problem was China. But precisely because Chinese power was real and proximate, considering Russia’s actual geopolitics might lead to depressing conclusions. The West was chosen as an enemy precisely because it represented no threat to Russia. Unlike China, the EU had no army and no long border with Russia. The United States did have an army, but had withdrawn the vast majority of its troops from the European continent: from about 300,000 in 1991 to about 60,000 in 2012. NATO still existed and had admitted former communist countries of eastern Europe. But President Barack Obama had cancelled an American plan to build a missile defense system in eastern Europe in 2009, and in 2010 Russia was allowing American planes to fly through Russian airspace to supply American forces in Afghanistan. No Russian leader feared a NATO invasion in 2011 or 2012, or even pretended to.

[Magyar] had an intense dislike for terms like 'illiberal,' which focused on traits the regimes did not possess--like free media or fair elections. This he likened to trying to describe an elephant by saying that the elephant cannot fly or cannot swim--it says nothing about what the elephant actually is. Nor did he like the term 'hybrid regime,' which to him seemed like an imitation of a definition, since it failed to define what the regime was ostensibly a hybrid of. Magyar developed his own concept: the 'post-communist mafia state.' Both halves of the designation were significant: 'post-communist' because "the conditions preceding the democratic big bang have a decisive role in the formation of the system. Namely that it came about on the foundations of a communist dictatorship, as a product of the debris left by its decay." (quoting Balint Magyar) The ruling elites of post-communist states most often hail from the old nomenklatura, be it Party or secret service. But to Magyar this was not the countries' most important common feature: what mattered most was that some of these old groups evolved into structures centered around a single man who led them in wielding power. Consolidating power and resources was relatively simple because these countries had just recently had Party monopoly on power and a state monopoly on property. ... A mafia state, in Magyar's definition, was different from other states ruled by one person surrounded by a small elite. In a mafia state, the small powerful group was structured just like a family. The center of the family is the patriarch, who does not govern: "he disposes--of positions, wealth, statuses, persons." The system works like a caricature of the Communist distribution economy. The patriarch and his family have only two goals: accumulating wealth and concentrating power. The family-like structure is strictly hierarchical, and membership in it can be obtained only through birth or adoption. In Putin's case, his inner circle consisted of men with whom he grew up in the streets and judo clubs of Leningrad, the next circle included men with whom he had worked with in the KGB/FSB, and the next circle was made up of men who had worked in the St. Petersburg administration with him. Very rarely, he 'adopted' someone into the family as he did with Kholmanskikh, the head of the assembly shop, who was elevated from obscurity to a sort of third-cousin-hood. One cannot leave the family voluntarily: one can only be kicked out, disowned and disinherited. Violence and ideology, the pillars of the totalitarian state, became, in the hands of the mafia state, mere instruments. The post-communist mafia state, in Magyar's words, is an "ideology-applying regime" (while a totalitarian regime is 'ideology-driven'). A crackdown required both force and ideology. While the instruments of force---the riot police, the interior troops, and even the street-washing machines---were within arm's reach, ready to be used, ideology was less apparently available. Up until spring 2012, Putin's ideological repertoire had consisted of the word 'stability,' a lament for the loss of the Soviet empire, a steady but barely articulated restoration of the Soviet aesthetic and the myth of the Great Patriotic War, and general statements about the United States and NATO, which had cheated Russia and threatened it now. All these components had been employed during the 'preventative counter-revolution,' when the country, and especially its youth, was called upon to battle the American-inspired orange menace, which threatened stability. Putin employed the same set of images when he first responded to the protests in December. But Dugin was now arguing that this was not enough. At the end of December, Dugin published an article in which he predicted the fall of Putin if he continued to ignore the importance of ideas and history.

During the Russia-NATO Council session in Bucharest in April 2008, Putin called Ukraine “a complex state formation. If the NATO issue is added there,” he said, “along with other problems, this may bring Ukraine to the verge of existence as a sovereign state.” Later during the same summit, in a discussion with U.S. President George Bush, Putin said that Ukraine was “not a real country.” This is clearly light-years away from the “common principles” laid down in the Founding Act, signed by Russia and the members of NATO in 1997, in which Russia had recognized the inherent right of all countries “to choose the means to ensure their own security.” Putin’s declaration was a scarcely veiled threat that Russia would intervene if Ukraine decided to join NATO. Doubts on Ukraine’s viability as a sovereign state were expressed on many occasions by leading Russians. On March 16, 2009, the Kremlin ideologue Gleb Pavlovsky wrote in the Russkiy Zhurnal, a Russian online magazine of which he is the owner, an article titled: “Will Ukraine Lose Its Sovereignty?” This article was followed four days later by an interview with Sergey Karaganov, the éminence grise of the Russian foreign policy community and head of the Presidium of the Council on Foreign and Defense Policy. This article had the title: “No One Needs Monsters. Desovereignization of Ukraine.” Karaganov depicted Ukraine as a failed state that was in a process of “passive desovereignization.” The process was, however, not only “passive.” Karaganov warned that “Russia will not want to see absolutely ungovernable territories close by.” Yuriy Shcherbak, former Ukrainian ambassador to the United States, wrote in response: “In military language it is called the ideological-propagandistic support of the future operation on capturing the territory of a sovereign state.” In fact, Russian politicians continued to denounce Ukraine as an “artificial” country that had no right to exist. At the height of the financial crisis Valery Fadeyev, editor of the political journal Ekspert, wrote: “Ukraine is cheap, we can buy it.” It sounded less aggressive, almost as a joke, but it expressed the same contempt for Russia’s neighbor and its status as an independent, sovereign state [239―40].

Mrs Merkel’s predecessor, Gerhard Schröder, took this approach furthest, becoming pals with Mr Putin and, soon after leaving office, joining the board of a pipeline company carrying Russian gas to Germany. Even now, Mr Schröder preaches empathy for Mr Putin, arguing that his actions in the Crimea are no different to NATO’s intervention in Kosovo in 1999, in which Germany took part under Mr Schröder.

Jaws dropped this week when Anders Fogh Rasmussen, who until recently was NATO’s civilian head, stated that it is highly likely that Russia will soon stage a violent provocation against a Baltic state, which being NATO countries, will cause a crisis over the Alliance’s Article 5 provision for collective self-defense. Rasmussen merely said what all defense experts who understand Putin already know, but this was not the sort of reality-based assessment that Western politicians are used to hearing.

To be blunt, I see little evidence to date that major European leaders are willing to wake up to this new reality. In the event of Russian provocation against NATO, which is highly likely soon, it’s very possible that the Atlantic Alliance will unravel completely. Putin may achieve his strategic victory with hardly a shot fired.

What Russia urgently requires from Western leaders is to be treated with respect and dignity. Let me use an analogy to drive home this point. Prior to the Maidan revolution, Ukraine was part of Russia’s sphere of influence. The country was like a baby that Russia was cuddling and admiring. It was in my opinion; the only remaining baby after all the other children (read Baltic States who have joined NATO) either abandoned their parents or disappeared into thin air. Understandably, the only option for Russia in the circumstances was to jealously guard their baby with all the might that God can give them. Then suddenly a richly endowed neighbor (read the West) having many children that it could not even afford to feed comes along and demands the baby from Russia. What reaction would you expect in such a situation? Violence.

Donald Trump’s foreign policy was framed by his hostility to Western democratic leaders and a bizarre attraction to former KGB agent and current Russian president Vladimir Putin. Trump let pass no opportunity to undermine NATO, a bulwark against Russian aggression since its founding. Trump also, in effect, ceded Syria to Putin, giving Russia its first beachhead in the Middle East since 1973. And his constant attacks on America’s most faithful ally during the Cold War, Germany, led to the American president playing into Russia’s hands again by withdrawing troops from the country. While Trump’s “America First” theme initially struck a nerve with voters, his ignorance of history and lack of diplomatic skill prevented

Indeed, Putin would like nothing more than to see the complete collapse of NATO so he can reconstitute Russia’s lost empire without the meddlesome West standing in his way. Under his leadership, Russia is once again quietly funneling money to extreme political parties in Western Europe on both the left and the right. It seems Putin doesn’t care much about his friends’ politics, so long as they are opposed to the United States and see the world roughly as he does. Besides, Putin has no real politics of his own. He is a kleptocrat and has no philosophy other than the cynical exercise of power.

Our close alliances are strained as never before. A frazzled NATO feels the eager heat of Russia’s breath in the east, with the Baltic states, Poland, and Germany wondering if we’re about to see a new Cold War, only this time with the United States more friendly to Russia than to the West. America’s role as a NATO ally will continue to degrade as Trump’s bromance with Putin, his extortion of the allies, and his utter ignorance of the traditions and meaning of the Western Alliance is demonstrated time and again. But hey, Trump Tower Moscow will make it worthwhile, right?

demonstrations in Moscow prior to Putin's return to the presidency in 2012 unnerved Putin, in Obama's view, to the point where he believed “he was losing control.” Putin quickly infused his administration with an “anti-American and anti-Western,…proto-Russian nationalist, almost czarist” attitude, which improved his political position at home but complicated his foreign policy, especially his dealings with the United States. It also put Moscow on edge, Putin insiders looking anxiously over their shoulders, concocting Western conspiracies, imagining NATO threats.

the framework of the conflict between former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Russian President Vladimir Putin, angered by U.S. intrusion in his wars in Georgia, Syria, Ukraine, the military seizure of Crimea, and pressures on NATO allies Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania, Putin may be unleashing Trump’s challenge as a way to exact revenge on the United States. Putin

example, consider the opinions of Robert Gates, who served as director of the CIA before becoming secretary of defense for both Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama. During the cold war, he was a hard-liner; now he is in Gorbachev's corner on the 1991 controversy. “They [the Russians] believed they had a commitment that we wouldn't try and move NATO to the East,” Gates told the Council on Foreign Relations. And

clearly had a more limited objective. Putin wanted to protect Russia from “NATO expansion.” In fact, Kissinger believed, the West was as responsible as Russia for the Ukraine crisis, a position radically at odds with the conventional wisdom in Washington.

Russia is changing Russia’s face and not towards democracy. Karen Dawisha, a Professor at Miami University, told PBS Frontline that “Instead of seeing Russia as a democracy in the process of failing, see it as an authoritarian system that’s in the process of succeeding.”22 Putin is that authoritarian. For him to succeed at the mission of damaging the United States he will use all tools of the Russian statecraft such as forging alliances, but also including blackmail, propaganda, and cyberwarfare. To Putin, the best of all possible worlds would be an economically crippled America, withdrawn from military adventurism and NATO, and with leadership friendly to Russia. Could he make this happen by backing the right horse? As former director of the KGB, now in control of Russia’s economic, intelligence and nuclear arsenal, he could certainly try.

All of these were drops in the bucket that could easily have been overlooked, but on August 17, 2016 the London Times released a bombshell report from Ukrainian prosecutors that Manafort had been paid by pro-Russian parties in the Ukraine to organize anti-NATO protests in Crimea, leading to the withdrawal of forces for a planned NATO exercise. The prosecutors wrote,

Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham were staunch advocates of arming the government of Ukraine in their fight with Russian separatists and Putin. During the Republican National Convention, the party platform committee proposed language to the effect that Ukraine needed U.S. weapons and NATO support to defend itself, in support of a long-held Republican position. Carter Page, now on the Trump campaign team, used to work in the Merrill Lynch’s Moscow office, has personal investments in Gazprom, a Russian state oil conglomerate. He told Bloomberg that his investments have been hurt by the sanctions policy against Russia over Ukraine.39 He has characterized the U.S. policy toward Russia as chattel slavery.

With this election, Vladimir Putin, the former director of Russia’s intelligence agency, sees the election of Donald Trump as the fastest way to destabilize the United States, damage its economy, as well as fracture both the European Union and NATO. These events, which start with the election of Trump, would allow Russia to become the strongest of the world’s three Superpowers and reorder the globe with a dominant Russia at the helm.

Objective: Candidate Should Damage NATO Alliance and Push for its Realignment

In the United States, the dominant analytic framework for explaining international relations today is realism. ... Those deploying this model to explain Russia’s behavior today...offer several prescriptions for how to defuse the current Russia-Ukraine crisis: Freeze NATO expansion and Russia will be content. Offer face-saving concessions that give Russia tangible gains and the threat of war will subside. Don’t arm Ukraine because that will fuel escalation and trigger a Russian invasion. If Putin thought like us, maybe some of these proposals might work. But Putin does not think like us. He has his own analytic framework, his own ideas and his own ideology — only some of which comport with Western rational realism.

Applying the Finnish model is based on the assumption that in return for neutrality—meaning not joining NATO—Russia will let Kyiv maintain its sovereignty and Ukraine will be able to develop into a stable, democratic, and prosperous state. However, the likelihood of such a scenario seems to be unlikely, given that the existence of a free and democratic Ukraine is a threat to Putin’s corrupt and authoritarian Russia. In consequence, “the Kremlin will seek nothing less than the collapse of democracy in Ukraine.

Ego is killing Humanity, Destorying Peace and Normal life, Putting the world on fire. For someone it's Zelenskyy For someone it's Putin For someone it's Europe For someone it's USA Biden For someone it's NATO But for me it's Ego Do war against Ego and save The WORLD

The prospect of a NATO military intervention to protect Kosovo infuriated Russia in ways American and European leaders failed to appreciate. Serbia and Russia shared Slavic roots, religion, and culture, but Russia’s concerns went deeper. The conflict in Serbia inflamed Russia’s wounded pride over its deflated status since the collapse of the Soviet Union. The new Russia lacked the ability to shape world events, which made the American-led actions even harder to swallow.

That is not to say there were not negative consequences to the Trump era. In 2018, according to the Ronald Reagan Institute, 70 percent of Americans had “a great deal of trust and confidence” in the military. By the end of Trump’s term the number had fallen to 56 percent. At the same time, Trump’s decision to withhold military aid from Ukraine while providing political cover for Vladimir Putin’s aggression against it, and seeking to weaken NATO, looks very different and much more reckless in light of Russia’s February 2022 attack on its neighbor. But as each chapter of this book illustrates, the principled, constitutionally based resistance Trump encountered from within his administration to his most dangerous ideas limited the negative consequences of his recklessness.

Trump’s withholding of funds to Ukraine and his closeness to Putin have been seen in a different light in the wake of Russia’s unprovoked and unjustifiable invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022. Indeed, Russia’s actions and their consequent implications for Ukraine, NATO, and the United States have cast a great deal of Trump’s behavior in a very different light from how it was seen during his term of office—an even more damaging and disturbing light, hard as that is to believe. Trump actively wanted to pull the United States out of NATO. He actively attacked the alliance. He advocated for a plan to pull US troops out of Europe. He advanced plans to pull US troops out of Asia, the Pacific, and the Middle East. He effectively sought to hand Syria to the control of Russia and Russia’s allies. He pulled out of arms deals that constrained the Russians. He pulled out of a deal that constrained Iran, a key ally of Russia.

Putin’s lurch to war, disastrous for Russia as well as for Ukraine, is unjustifiable. But it was not unprovoked. NATO enlargement has been an aggressive operation and Moscow has always been in its sights. In calling for a stable settlement of military borders, the Kremlin has a good case. From its foundation in 1949, NATO was always an offensive, not a defensive, enterprise, whose ultimate objective in American eyes was the restoration of a normal capitalism in the Soviet bloc.

fixation on Ukraine no doubt includes economic jealousy of its position as a lucrative pipeline route to Europe and its access to warm-water ports. But foreign policy analysts argued that Putin wasn’t necessarily seeking to somehow reintegrate his Little Russia into the Kremlin’s empire. Instead, he hoped to create a “frozen conflict”: By taking enough Ukrainian territory to lock it into a permanent war, Russia sought to prevent the country from being welcomed into the European Union or NATO, instead pinning it in place as a strategic buffer between Moscow and the West.

THE BALKAN WARS AND RUSSIA’S CONFLICT WITH NATO The split between Russia and the West came in the Balkans, the same cauldron of competing ethnicities and religions that had given birth to World War One. Much of Russia’s suspicion of and opposition to NATO was rekindled during the Balkan wars of the 1990s. Yugoslavia was a patchwork

Trump gave the New York Times a wide-ranging interview in which he remarked that he saw a major change for the seventy-year old NATO alliance. He said that if Russia attacked any NATO nation, he would first consult and determine if they had “fulfilled their obligations to us” before coming to their aid.13 Trump set forth a policy of extortion never before heard or seen in American politics:

For the siloviki—Russian military and intelligence officials—the NATO campaign in Serbia confirmed their theory about American imperial intentions. In their view, little had changed since the Cold War era, except that Russia was much weaker in 1999 and therefore lacked the means to counter American military aggression. The proper response, therefore, was not to kiss and make up, as the naive, aging Yeltsin opted to do, but to rebuild Russian military forces. One of the intelligence officers who held this view was Vladimir Putin. The following year, he became president.

One idea Daniel proposed was unusual: The United States and NATO should publicly announce a giant “cyber exercise” against a mythical Eurasian country, demonstrating that Western nations had it within their power to shut down Russia’s entire civil infrastructure and cripple its economy.

One key area of U.S.-Russian tension was Ukraine. According to Steele’s sources, the Trump team agreed to sideline Russia’s intervention in Ukraine during the campaign. Instead, and in order to “deflect attention,” Trump would raise U.S.-NATO defense commitments in the Baltics and Eastern Europe. This would help Putin, “who needed to cauterize the subject.

During a trip to the United Kingdom in March 2000, Acting President Putin seemed eager to demonstrate his Western orientation, hinting in an interview at the possibility of closer cooperation between Europe and Russia and even NATO and Russia. “Russia is part of the European culture,” he explained. “And I cannot imagine my country in isolation from Europe and what we often call the civilized world. So it is hard for me to visualize NATO as the enemy.” When asked point-blank if Russia might join NATO, Putin replied, “I don’t see why not. I would not rule out such a possibility.