The words were once again very harsh when Secretary General of NATO, Jens Stoltenberg, met the world press on Wednesday this week.
– Putin must stop this war now. Moscow should not be in doubt – NATO does not tolerate attacks on member countries and sovereign territories.
Stoltenberg came straight from a NATO meeting, where the consequences of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine were on the agenda.
A war that arouses condemnation throughout Europe, indeed, throughout the Western world. A war that brings Stoltenberg to the podium, almost on a daily basis – as head of NATO, Russia’s post-war historical arch-enemy.
ATTACKS: NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg launches harsh, verbal attacks against Russian President Vladimir Putin. Photo: AP / Olivier Matthys
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Verbal attack
There are many considerations that need to be balanced. NATO countries can pour in support, humanitarian aid and weapons to Ukraine, but answering President Volodomyr Zelensky’s request for a no-fly zone over the attacked country is currently too far-fetched.
– NATO has a responsibility to ensure that the war does not escalate beyond Ukraine. It can be much worse if NATO takes action that makes this a full-scale war between Russia and NATO, says Stoltenberg.
Thus, the West’s preliminary response to the invasion is fierce economic sanctions against Russia and shipments of military equipment and weapons to Ukraine.
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And razor-sharp verbal attacks.
This week, US President Joe Biden took the step of calling Vladimir Putin a war criminal, a statement the Kremlin describes as “unforgivable”.
Stoltenberg has also fired several salvos at the Russian president.
When the war in Ukraine was a fact just over three weeks ago, the NATO chief was quickly on the scene.
– Peace is broken.
– This is a brutal act of war. Russia’s leaders must take full responsibility.
Vladimir Putin is trying to use force to write about history.
WARNING: Russian President Vladimir Putin warns the West and NATO to interfere in Ukrainian soil. Photo: Presidential Press Service / AP
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Warning
Putin, too, has been crystal clear in his twists and turns. Nearly three months before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, he warned:
– The deployment of weapons or troops in Ukraine by NATO will trigger a strong response. Russia will act if NATO country crosses Ukraine’s ‘red lines’
Shortly after the outbreak of the war, Russia’s president expressed strong dissatisfaction with harsh statements from the West.
– Western countries have not only initiated unfriendly actions against our country in the economic sphere. High-ranking officials in leading NATO countries have made aggressive statements related to our country, Putin said.
Putin has also described the economic sanctions against Russia following the invasion of Ukraine as “like a declaration of war”.
There were probably many who were intimidated when Putin announced that he had put Russia’s nuclear weapons forces on combat readiness.
Russia’s response will come immediately and lead to consequences unlike anything else in history. We are ready for any development, it was said Kremlin websites.
Stoltenberg has described Putin’s nuclear weapons rhetoric as “indefensible and dangerous.”
Very cool
When Jens Stoltenberg became Secretary General of NATO on 1 October 2014, relations between Russia and NATO were already very cool.
Earlier, when Stoltenberg was prime minister of Norway, he had had a more constructive relationship with Vladimir Putin.
In the book “My story” from 2016, Stoltenberg says that as prime minister he had confidential talks with the Russian president.
In an interview with the Russian state channel Rossiya in April 2014, President Vladimir Putin stated that he has a good relationship, also personally, with Jens Stoltenberg, who was then the incoming Secretary General of NATO.
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Nevertheless, there should not be much dialogue between Putin and Stoltenberg, in his new role as NATO chief.
For relations between Russia and NATO had been severely strained, when Putin’s Russia annexed the Ukrainian Crimean peninsula in 2014 and supported rebels in the east of the country.
– I believe in dialogue with Russia. If the connection is the right one, I am therefore of course also ready to meet President Vladimir Putin, Stoltenberg stated in an interview with the German news agency DPA in December 2019 and added:
– It is especially when it is difficult, that it is important to sit at the same table.
However, it emerged from the interview that Stoltenberg had never met Putin in Moscow as NATO chief.
Worried
– When I first received an inquiry in January 2014 about becoming general secretary, no one had anticipated the crisis in Ukraine, said Jens Stoltenberg, according to Khronowhen he visited the University of Copenhagen in April 2015.
He was already very concerned about Putin’s conduct in Ukraine.
– It is not only serious, because the annexation of the Crimean peninsula destabilizes Ukraine, but also because it is part of a pattern. Russia has used military force in Georgia. Significant rearmament has taken place on the Russian side. There are several nuclear weapons in their rhetoric. They are holding several unannounced military exercises. When you add this up, NATO has to act, Stoltenberg said.
– Has provoked Russia
Putin legitimizes his entry into Ukraine with a need to de-Naziize and demilitarize the country. This has been dismissed as disinformation and propaganda.
However, the Russian president has for a long time been concerned – and expressed that he strongly dislikes – that NATO is moving east and getting closer and closer to Russia’s borders.
– President Putin wants less NATO on Russian borders. He gets more NATO. He wants to divide Europe and North America, but we are more united than ever, Jens Stoltenberg has recently stated after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
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Putin’s concerns, however, are met with understanding among some critical voices in the West.
US political scientist John Mearsheimer believes that NATO and the Western countries bear a responsibility for provoking Russia to attack Ukraine.
In an interview with The New Yorker recently, he elaborated on this.
– I think the problems started in April 2008, at the NATO summit in Bucharest, where NATO stated that Ukraine and Georgia would become part of NATO. The Russians made it very clear at the time that they saw this as an existential threat, says Mearsheimer.
The political scientist explains that in recent years the West has continued to work to make Ukraine a pro-American liberal democracy, which is by no means music to Putin’s ears.
Blame NATO
In his book «Not One Inch; America, Russia and the Making of the Post-Cold War Stalemate “discusses the American historian and author Mary Elise Sarotte what really happened when the peace that” everyone “hoped for with the fall of communism was lost.
Sarotte goes on to claim that top American and European politicians have “promised” that NATO would not accelerate rapidly eastward when the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union disintegrated.
As Sarotte sees it, NATO’s rapid expansions east of the geographical dividing lines of the Cold War are the very basis of the ongoing conflict between the West and today’s Russia, writes Store Agenda.
Sven G. Holtsmark, Russia expert and history professor at the Department of Defense Studies at the Norwegian Defense College, does not buy that NATO’s expansion to the east is the reason for Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
He points out that the last president of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, never received a promise that NATO would not expand eastward.
Gorbachev may have got the impression of it, but he himself has denied that he was given such a promise, says Holtsmark.
