by Oleg Krivoshapov
[REGNUM] Some NATO countries will probably try to deploy their troops in Ukraine, regardless of their partners in the alliance. This will happen if the member states of the North Atlantic Alliance do not provide Ukraine with real security guarantees at the summit in Vilnius, scheduled for July 11-12. This opinion was expressed by former NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen (the immediate predecessor of the current head of the alliance Jens Stoltenberg ) in a commentary to The Guardian in London
"We know that Poland is actively engaged in providing concrete assistance to Ukraine. And I would not rule out the possibility that Poland will act even stronger in this context on a national basis. The Baltic states will follow, possibly including the possibility of deploying troops “on the ground," Rasmussen said.
"I think the Poles will seriously consider going in and putting together a coalition of the willing if Ukraine doesn’t get anything in Vilnius," the former NATO secretary general added.
As the Guardian reminded its readers, Rasmussen is acting as an official adviser to the President of Ukraine "on the question of Ukraine's place in the future European security architecture. "Now the ex-secretary general is touring NATO countries, including the United States, to "assess the change in mood before the start of a critically important summit."
Rasmussen's interview with the British edition was the actual reaction to the statement of the current head of NATO. Stoltenberg, also on June 7, said that the issue of security guarantees for Ukraine would be on the agenda in Vilnius, but recalled that NATO, in accordance with Article 5 of the Washington Treaty (on the collective security of the countries of the alliance), provides full security guarantees only to full members. At the same time, he pointed out that at the moment for the collective West, the absolute priority is to prevent the victory of Russia in the current armed conflict.
Earlier, Stoltenberg stated that Ukraine's entry into NATO until the end of the military conflict with Russia is not considered.
The nature of the statements of the former and current heads of the North Atlantic Alliance naturally raised the question of the real prospect of an invasion of Ukraine by the Eastern European members of NATO.
Deputy Chairman of the Security Council of Russia Dmitry Medvedev , we recall, in April pointed out the grandiose risks in the event of Ukraine joining NATO. “I will express a seditious thought. A quiet division is better than Ukraine in NATO or a world war,” Medvedev said, noting that Hungary, Poland and Romania intend to annex the western regions of Ukraine to themselves.
UNSTOPPABLE EASTERN EUROPEANS
Rasmussen and Stoltenberg's statements on the eve of the Vilnius summit are a reflection of the discussion that is currently unfolding in NATO, Fyodor Lukyanov, editor-in-chief of Russia in Global Affairs magazine, told IA Regnum.
"There are a number of influential countries that understand that giving Ukraine an official status in NATO at a time of acute escalation of the conflict is a demonstrative step that will intensify the escalation," the source said. "This will bring NATO closer to confronting Russia directly. Therefore, there are statements in Western Europe that so far it is impossible to talk about membership or a formal procedure for admission to NATO."
But there is another point of view in the North Atlantic Alliance, the expert notes. It is represented by the Eastern European countries most radically opposed to Russia, calling for more decisive steps.
“And Rasmussen plays on this second side, in his statement there is an emphasis on the need to give Ukraine some official status,” Lukyanov believes. —
And if not, then "we will not keep the Eastern Europeans from interfering, who are experiencing everything very painfully." Well, it means that there will be a war.”
"PIECES OF THE TERRITORY"
If Poland, as Rasmussen warns, decides on a separate entry of troops into Ukrainian territory, then this will create a precedent, experts believe. And we are talking not only and not so much about joining the Polish expeditionary corps of the military from the Baltic states. In the event of the invasion of the Polish armed forces into Ukraine, other neighboring Eastern European NATO countries will not stand aside , military observer Mikhail Onufrienko does not exclude.
“Both Hungary, and Romania, and possibly even Slovakia will, of course, lay claim to pieces of territory, ” a military observer predicts in a commentary to IA Regnum. “ Whether these territories will allow them to take control is another matter. In the same Transcarpathia, a large number of Hungarians live in just a few areas. But there are really a very large number of them, there people really speak Hungarian, they know their history well, they have relatives on the other side of the border. These areas may well be part of Hungary. Slovakia may also occupy some small piece.”
As IA Regnum previously noted , Hungarian nationalists, who are usually referred to as Prime Minister Viktor Orban , consider the country's modern borders established by the Trianon Treaty of 1920 to be unfair. Orban publicly does not question the principle of the inviolability of territorial integrity, but even the appearance of the prime minister in a football scarf depicting the borders of “pre-Trianonian” Hungary (with Transylvania, Transcarpathia, Slovakia and Serbian Vojvodina) caused a scandal.
In any case, the nationalist authorities of Budapest have repeatedly made it clear that they will not leave the ethnic Magyars of Transcarpathia in trouble, with whom the Hungarian authorities were actively working in the 1990s and zero. Hungarians do not prevail in the region (they are 12%), but along the Ukrainian-Hungarian border they constitute the ethnic majority.
Romanian nationalists - which include the previous president of the country, Traian Basescu - do not forget about the borders of Greater Romania until 1940, which included, recall, not only the right-bank Moldova (Bessarabia), but also South Bessarabia (the current south-west of the Odessa region with the cities of Akkerman and Izmail), as well as Northern Bukovina (the current Chernivtsi region in western Ukraine). Nationalists consider Romanians and Moldovans to be one nation, and from this it follows that in Southern Bessarabia, in Northern Bukovina and in the same Transcarpathia there live a total of about 260 thousand "compatriots" who may need "protection".
There are relatively few Slovaks in Ukraine - mainly in the same border regions of Transcarpathia - about 6.3 thousand, but let's also not forget about historical borders. The first Czechoslovak Republic from the moment of its creation in 1918 until 1938-1939 (and de jure until 1946) included Subcarpathian Rus - the current Transcarpathian region of Ukraine. The indigenous inhabitants of the region and adjacent territories, the Carpathian Rusyns , by the way, have the status of a national minority in Slovakia and are in fact recognized as a separate - the fourth East Slavic - people, and in Ukraine they are not even considered a sub-ethnos of the Ukrainian people.
DREAMS ABOUT "CROSSES"
The ideology of territorial revenge is perhaps the most developed in Poland, where they periodically recall either the “Prussians of Krulewski” (part of the former East Prussia, which gives rise to fantasies about the “return” of Kaliningrad), or about the “sprout crosses” - the “eastern outskirts” of Poland, which until 1939 included Vilnius (Vilna) taken from the Lithuanians, as well as Western Belarus and most of Western Ukraine captured as a result of the Soviet-Polish war.
“For the Poles, the return of the crosses is an issue that cannot be resolved by instructions from Washington or by agreement with anyone, ” Onufrienko believes. - Any president of Poland who returns these “crosses”, including Lviv, to the Commonwealth, will have a golden monument erected in the center of Warsaw during his lifetime. Regardless of anything. The Poles will be deeply indifferent to what the Americans, NATO or anyone else think about this. This is a question that they will decide anyway.”
And it is in Poland that the question of the eastern territories is openly raised by politicians. The junior partner of the ruling Law and Justice party, the Sovereign Poland party, headed by the Minister of Justice, the country's Prosecutor General Zbigniew Ziobro , at its congress proclaimed the thesis about the need to "create a new space of personal, religious and economic freedom on the territory of the former First Rzeczpospolita."
In April, official Warsaw hastened to refute the statement of the director of the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, Sergei Naryshkin , that the United States and Poland were developing a plan to establish Polish control over "historical possessions" in Ukraine. There are no plans for annexation, Stanislav Zharyn, a spokesman for the Polish special services, assured .
But this does not exclude the possibility that the ruling Law and Justice party follows the idea of “ prometheism ” formulated by Józef Pilsudski – the “liberation” of the Eastern European peoples from the “domination” of Moscow and the creation of a Baltic-Black Sea union of states, of course, with the leading role of Poland.
In turn, Rasmussen's statement and all other similar statements by Western public figures look like attempts to institutionalize the ongoing process of informally drawing NATO's Eastern European flank into the conflict in Ukraine, Onufrienko notes.
In the autumn of 2015, on the territory of Poland, we recall, an armed formation was created, which received the name "Litpolukrbrig." The predominantly Polish personnel of the new "brigade", whose creation was presented as "part of a long process of consistent and long-term military cooperation", was, for the sake of formality, diluted with a certain number of citizens of Lithuania and Ukraine.
The interlocutor of IA Regnum admits that this formation will enter a certain contingent, formally peacekeeping. “He will be able, in fact, to release several brigades of the Kiev regime, which, in turn, will be able to transfer to the front,” Onufrienko argues. He believes that for some time the Litpolukbrig will be able to position itself as a peacekeeping contingent, but in the case of a team from Warsaw, simply occupy the occupied territories.
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