Tässäpä vähän avattu tuota lausuntoa.
View: https://www.reddit.com/r/PoliticalDiscussion/comments/16u4jwl/nato_secretary_general_jens_stoltenberg_admits/
That's not what he said. From Stoltenberg's speech:
It is historic that now Finland is member of the Alliance. And we have to remember the background. The background was that President Putin declared in the autumn of 2021, and actually sent a draft treaty that they wanted NATO to sign, to promise no more NATO enlargement. That was what he sent us. And was a pre-condition for not invade Ukraine. Of course we didn't sign that.
The opposite happened. He wanted us to sign that promise, never to enlarge NATO. He wanted us to remove our military infrastructure in all Allies that have joined NATO since 1997, meaning half of NATO, all the Central and Eastern Europe, we should remove NATO from that part of our Alliance, introducing some kind of B, or second class membership. We rejected that.
So he went to war to prevent NATO, more NATO, close to his borders. He has got the exact opposite.
None of that is new information, and it's only "admitting NATO expansion was the key reason for the war" if you're accepting Russia's position that they have some sort of innate right to hegemony over Eastern Europe. Why should they get to veto the decisions of other sovereign states? None of the formerly Eastern Bloc NATO members were forced into the alliance. They joined
because they had just spent 50+ years under Russian domination and wanted to make sure it would never happen again.
I don't see how this changes the discussion on the reasons for the war. Russia made a patently absurd demand, and NATO rejected it and stood up for its eastern members. Sure, I guess you can say that means NATO provoked the war, in the same way I guess you could say Britain and France provoked WWII by guaranteeing Poland's independence, but that seems like a pretty silly position to take.
Finally, I think it's worth emphasizing that Russia was not being threatened. Whatever paranoid delusions Putin may have, NATO was not plotting to invade Russia, and Zelensky was actually elected on a platform of trying to make peace with Russia. As recently as 2014 Russia was seen as a pretty "normal" country: they were in the G8, the US was
actively working to improve their relationship with Russia, and the EU continued to deepen economic ties with Russia right up until February 2022. The West didn't force them to annex Crimea, or interfere in elections, or poison dissidents in the UK, or invade Ukraine.
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