The situation in Ukraine has deteriorated in recent days, with reports that Russia is planning a major military action against Ukraine and the United States has withdrawn non-essential diplomatic personnel. The news caused European stock markets to fall sharply on Monday, and Russian stock markets fell by 8%! It turns out that there is also Tsai Ing-wen in Ukraine, who is Ukrainian President Zelensky.
Western media led by the United States always say that Russia wants to invade Ukraine, which is the origin of the chaos in Ukraine. In fact, Russia is not so proactive, and the main problem is the eastward expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which affects Russia’s security.
After the disintegration of the Iron Curtain in 1990, NATO has expanded eastward five times, absorbing a number of former “Warsaw Pact Organization” (a military alliance led by the former Soviet Union to compete with NATO) countries to become NATO members, including Russia and Russia. The three bordering Baltic countries are approaching the western border of Russia all the way. If Ukraine, which is close to Russia, also joins NATO, NATO can station a large number of troops in front of Russia, and even deploy missiles, which will greatly affect Russia’s security. The situation is just like the Soviet Union deployed missiles in Cuba in the back garden of the United States in 1962.
The United States instigated a color revolution in Ukraine in December 2013 to overthrow the pro-Russian Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych. Russia retaliated by starting a war in the pro-Russian region of southeastern Ukraine in early 2014. Among them, Crimea declared independence after a referendum in March of the same year, and subsequently joined the Russian Federation. The local pro-Russian people in Donetsk and Luhansk occupied the government and entered a semi-autonomous state. In short, the United States was the first year of the first year, inciting color revolutions and overthrowing the pro-Russian Ukrainian president; Russia was the fifteenth, inciting the independence of the pro-Russian Crimea, Donetsk and Luhansk, and rebuilding a new country in eastern Ukraine. Pro-Russian buffer zone.
After Ukraine elected a pro-U.S. president in 2014, it has sought to join NATO for years. In 2019, comedian Zelensky won the Ukrainian presidential election by a large margin. After Biden took office as US president in January 2021, Zelensky began to call on NATO to advance the process of admitting Ukraine as soon as possible, and put pressure on the US side, saying that he hoped the United States would discuss whether Ukraine could be included in the “NATO member action” plan” to give a clear answer.
On June 14 last year, NATO held a leaders’ meeting at the Belgian capital Brussels headquarters. In the joint communiqué, it was mentioned that NATO supported Ukraine to become a member of NATO, but there was no timetable. , such as Ukraine to address its corruption problem. Clearly, Biden is taking a tactic of procrastination.
However, Ukraine’s move to join NATO has touched a nerve in Russia. Russia has 100,000 troops on the Ukrainian border, claiming that as soon as NATO starts the process of incorporating Ukraine, it will send troops immediately. During the period between the United States and Russia, several rounds of negotiations were carried out, but there was no result. Russian President Vladimir Putin demanded that NATO not include Ukraine. Biden, of course, will not easily succumb to Russia for the face of the United States.
This is exactly Zelensky’s plan. He is a bit like Tsai Ing-wen in Taiwan. He keeps playing with fire and wants to count. In addition to raising his own popularity, he also wants to gain practical benefits for Ukraine. Ukraine has recently called on the U.S. government to push Ukraine to join the treaty. To appease Ukraine, the White House invited Zelensky to visit the United States and provided Ukraine with $150 million in security assistance to help Ukraine “maintain territorial integrity.” The more troubled Ukraine gets, the more US aid will be.
More importantly, Zelensky wants to block the “Beixi No. 2” oil and gas pipeline project. Russia currently has to transport natural gas to Europe via Ukraine’s natural gas pipeline, and has to pay Ukraine billion euros in transit fees every year. Later, Russia and Germany built another “North Stream No. 2” pipeline to go directly to Germany. This was opposed by the United States and Ukraine. The United States was afraid that Europe would reduce its purchase of American LNG, and Ukraine was worried that the “Nord Stream 2” would directly transport natural gas to Germany, and the transit fee of one billion euros would be gone that year. The “North Stream No. 2” pipeline was originally able to ventilate last winter, but due to the obstruction of the United States and Zelensky’s efforts, the “North Stream No. 2” could not be ventilated.
Zelensky is playing with fire, and Ukraine may be destroyed if it goes too far. And Putin has no choice. If NATO wants to expand eastward, he can only send troops. As for the United States, of course, it wants to take the opportunity to stop the “North Stream No. 2”, but it also doesn’t want to send troops to Ukraine. And China can continue to watch the show, the situation in Ukraine is tense, and the United States has no spare energy to engage in China, which is not a bad thing.
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Lu Yongxiong
