Here is an interview by the Estonian President who is calling a spade a spade and points to the failure of the Transatlantic community for the current Russian problems.
Failure of 1994 Budapest memorandum to guarantee #Ukraine' integrity may have far-reaching implications for generations - #Estonia president
"I don’t know what country in future would ever give up its nuclear weapons in exchange for secur guarantee" - #Estonia President
The Transatlantic community paved the way for #Russian aggression on #Ukraine - #Estonia’s President, Toomas Ilves.
http://www.the-american-interest.com...sion-to-stand/ …
He has a very interesting take on US/EU leadership issues since 1994 and he might in fact be totally correct in his assessment.
Toomas Ilves: Well, I don’t think in regional terms, although there are regional manifestations of the deterioration. Since the invasion and annexation of Crimea, we’ve seen the collapse of the Transatlantic security environment as we’ve known it. We could start with the UN charter, which forbids aggression, but in the Transatlantic space the basis for security has been the 1975 Helsinki Final Act, which specifically forbids a change in borders through force or threat of force. That no longer holds.
I would argue that it no longer held after the 2008 invasion of Georgia, but the rest of the Transatlantic community did not buy that. In fact, they let it slide, I would say, first by breaking off negotiations over the EU-Russia partnership as long as Russian troops remained. Then, a month later, with no change in status of foreign troops, Europe claimed, “Thank God common sense prevailed.” That was 2008, so we’ve hit the snooze button a few times; but now, finally, we have the wake-up call.
We have allowed aggression to stand in Georgia, having done nothing and instead gone off on this “peace, love, Woodstock” idea. We’re now in a situation where we have genuine aggression, the collapse of the post-Cold War order, and we see all that on the 25th anniversary of the annus mirabilis of 1989—when we should be celebrating the neo-Hegelian triumph of the Fukuyaman view of the inevitability of liberal democracy. I too have believed all along that we were heading there. Unfortunately, what we’re seeing right now is that it can be turned around. When you have a collapse of order, you can expect all kinds of things.
To the collapse of order we can add the 1990 Paris Charter for Europe, a major summit celebrating the freedom of Eastern Europe—minus the Baltic states, which were excluded—that concluded that all CSCE (OSCE) states have the right to choose their own security environment. What we see in 2014 is not only that you do not have that right—consider the statements by Medvedev and Putin in 2009, that they invaded Georgia to keep it from joining NATO—but now Russia’s rationale for doing what it did is something so minor as Ukraine’s wanting to sign an Association Agreement with the EU.
I’m often stunned by the statements made by people within the European Union as if the EU Association Agreement were the big thing. Estonia signed its Association Agreement ten years before it joined the European Union. Five years before, we began negotiating, having been accepted to begin negotiations. Basically, the Association Agreement provides for teacher/student exchange programs and a slightly reduced tariff rate. This is not European Transatlantic imperialism, advancing to the borders of Russia with its evil designs.
Then, of course, there’s the failure of the 1994 Budapest memorandum, which was supposed to guarantee the territorial integrity of Ukraine (in return for Ukraine giving up its nuclear arms). This may have far-reaching implications for generations. I don’t know what country in the future would ever give up its nuclear weapons in exchange for a security guarantee.
Look around, and you see all kinds of stuff happening. In Denmark on Bornholm island they have this annual summer festival that involves the entire political elite, and the Russians chose that particular weekend to do a mock bombing on the island with nuclear-armed missiles. Just recently, their bombers were circling Guam. They’ve been doing things in Norway, in Japan, Portugal. The worst part about it in terms of standard security is that they’re doing this unscheduled, and flying with their transponders switched off. In another incident, a Danish SAS passenger plane came within 100 meters of a Russian plane that the pilots didn’t see or know was there. This is a kind of behavior that should be far more alarming than some of the Putinversteher tend to think.
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