Eastern Partnership: The West’s Trojan Horse and Battering Ram In Former Soviet Space

Stop NATO articles

Stop Nato
May 15, 2014

Eastern Partnership: The West’s Trojan Horse and Battering Ram In Former Soviet Space
Rick Rozoff

Рик Розофф рассказал о “троянском коне” Запада на землях бывшего СССР

When the European Union launched the Eastern Partnership initiative five years ago this month, it should have been transparently obvious what it was intended to effect: to wrest all other members of the Commonwealth of Independent States outside Central Asia aside from Russia from that post-Soviet trade and economic bloc and achieve the isolation of Russia not only from the rest of Europe but from the rest of former Soviet space itself.

The six nations that were and remain targeted by the Eastern Partnership – which is fully supported by the United States to complete their so-called Euro-Atlantic integration including, and by no means the least important factor, incorporation into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization – are three in Europe and three in the South Caucasus: Belarus, Moldova and Ukraine and Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia. At the time the Eastern Partnership was first proposed at the EU’s General Affairs and External Relations Council in Brussels in May of 2008, all six of the former Soviet federal republics listed above were members of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS).

Three months later the Georgian regime of Mikheil Saakashvili launched a full-scale attack against South Ossetia, timed to coincide with the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics, and thus provoked a five-day war with Russia. Shortly thereafter Georgia initiated the process of withdrawing from the CIS, which formally occurred ten days after the August 8th war began.

This March, shortly after the violent uprising in Ukraine that deposed President Viktor Yanukovych, the post-putsch parliament introduced a motion to withdraw from the CIS.

The self-evident intention of the Eastern Partnership is to bring about the demise of the CIS, the Customs Union consisting of Russian, Belarus and Kazakhstan, and the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), the last being the only multinational security and military arrangement in the former Soviet Union, whose current members are Russia, Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan.

The Association Agreement with the European Union that the government of Ukraine rejected on November 21 of last year, the alleged cause of protests and later bloody, even lethal, attacks by opposition forces, was to have been signed under the auspices of the Eastern Partnership.

The new junta in Kiev will now rectify the former administration’s “error” on the diktat of its Western sponsors and comparable agreements will soon be signed by the pro-Western governments of Moldova and Georgia.

Of the six nations included in the EU’s Eastern Partnership, four are the nations which account for the U.S.-initiated GUAM (Georgia, Ukraine, Azerbaijan and Moldova) bloc and the other two the only members of the CSTO outside Central Asia except for Russia: Armenia and Belarus. As the current writer observed five years ago, Washington and Brussels will first need, and unquestionably are actively planning, so-called color revolutions in the last two nations, something after the unsuccessful 2006 Denim Revolution and the 2008 Daffodil Revolution in Belarus and Armenia, respectively. (And the 2009 Twitter Revolution in Moldova.)

So that at the current moment the Western triad of the U.S., the EU and NATO is concentrating on the three Eastern Partnership candidates whose prospects appear most immediately promising: Ukraine, Moldova and Georgia. Integration with the EU will proceed, as it ever does, hand-in-glove with the latest, more advanced Individual Partnership Action Plan and afterward, the final gateway to full membership,  a Membership Action Program with NATO.

Western officials have been scurrying in and out of the capitals of all the Eastern Partnership candidates excerpt for Belarus, whose government appears to be watching which way the cat jumps, and their respective itineraries – trajectories – are worth tracing.

Georgian Defense Minister Irakli Alasania lingered in Washington, D.C. for what has to be an unprecedented second week, after addressing the Atlantic Council and meeting with Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel and Vice President Joseph Biden, and spent his final day in the capital meeting with Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland. To receive his marching orders. The public account – press release – of the meeting states the two and their delegations discussed “partnership in the defense area” and “Ukrainian developments.” The two are certainly not unrelated phenomena.

While the Georgian defense chief was in the American capital inviting NATO to deploy anti-aircraft, anti-armor and other equipment in his nation (on April 30 at this year’s annual  Atlantic Council conference), the NATO Secretary General’s Special Representative for the Caucasus and Central Asia, James Appathurai, was in the Georgian capital confirming that the military bloc was bringing Georgia “even closer” to full membership and seconding Alasania’s enthusiasm for dispatching military hardware to the country.

On May 8 the United Kingdom’s Foreign Secretary William Hague was in Georgia, after visiting Moldova and Ukraine, and confirmed his nation’s wholehearted support “for Georgia’s Euro-Atlantic trajectory [and] for its territorial integrity,” the latter an ominous reference to the Georgian government’s plans for subjugating independent Abkhazia and South Ossetia.

He also encouraged Georgia’s signing the Association Agreement with the European Union, as scheduled, next month. When asked about Georgian Defense Minister Alasania’s call for deploying NATO military assets in the South Caucasus state, Hague endorsed the proposition, answering, “We are in favor of course of building up further cooperation between Georgia and NATO.”

Subsequent to the foreign secretary’s departure, Estonia’s Secretary General of the Ministry of Defence Mikk Marran arrived in Georgia to discuss training programs designed to hasten the Georgia’s NATO accession.

In March Marran spoke at the Estonian Defense Ministry and stated: “The best possible solution for strengthening NATO’s presence and deterrence – in addition to expanding the Baltic Air Policing Mission to Ämari – would be the permanent presence of allied ground forces units in the Baltic states.”

He would then appear to be coordinating deployments on the Black Sea to complement those he envisioned, and in fact now are already well in progress, on the Baltic Sea.

On May 13 President Francois Hollande of France arrived in the Georgian capital after visiting those of Azerbaijan and Armenia. The French head of state was recruiting more Georgian troops for the military mission it heads up in the Central African Republic among other objectives, and while in Tbilisi echoed the earlier comments of Britain’s William Hague in pledging, as the local news media reported, “to support the signing of the EU-Georgia Association Agreement and…Georgia`s territorial integrity.” (Hague also thanked Georgia for supplying NATO troops for its war in Afghanistan and the EU troops for the Central African Republic.)

The next day President of the European Council Herman Van Rompuy was in Georgia to meet with the nation’s leadership and while there stated that the signing of the EU-Georgia Association Agreement on June 27 in Brussels “is not the final goal in our cooperation.”

Rompuy, like Hague before him, had come to Georgia via Ukraine and Moldova. If the EU comes, can NATO be far behind? Or is it the other way around?

The European Council president acknowledged to the local press corps that the “troubling regional situation” was deliberated over in meetings with his hosts and that the EU intends to “increase the cost for Russia” economically, politically and otherwise,

According to the Civil Georgia website, Georgian Prime Minister Irakli Garibashvili responded in the most accomplished NATOese/Euro-Atlantese thusly:

Regarding “current difficulties in the Eastern Partnership region,” he said, “we expect the EU’s more active efforts.”

“We believe that the EU will provide more assistance and help to the Eastern Partnership countries, which have made the European choice.

“Europe whole and free has not yet been accomplished; we hope that united, strong and successful European Union will play an active role in achieving this goal.”

A Europe whole and free is a catch phrase, perhaps better put code language, first introduced by President George W. Bush in a speech in Mainz, West Germany in 1989.

The title of this year’s recently concluded conference of the Atlantic Council, the world’s preeminent NATO-promoting think tank, was Toward a Europe Whole and Free.

One of the recipients of the Council’s international leadership awards was Herman Van Rompuy’s colleague José Manuel Barroso, president of the European Commission.

The world is large and populous. The Western clique bent on dominating both the world and its people is small and severely constricted in its composition, though it is diabolically  single-minded and ruthless in furtherance of its self-serving goals.