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Prologue

NATO’s Summit in Vilnius broke the promise made to Ukraine 15 years ago that it would join NATO. The media won’t tell you that it never will – and that non-NATO Ukraine shall now win over Russia and pay an incredibly cruel price (or make peace with Russia). 

In other words, US/NATO has recognised what scores of knowledgeable people have said the last 30+ years: Including Ukraine in NATO means WW III. 

Had NATO been dissolved when the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact dissolved, we’d never be where we are today. This is NATO’s biggest crisis and blunder. It has to be covered up by ‘We are more united than ever’ repeated ad nauseam.

TFF has published more than most on Vilnius and the US-Nordic Summit in Helsinki – and reached hundreds of millions but not in Western media. 

The freedom of the press includes the freedom to ignore every critical voice about the NATO narrative and never ask a critical question at NATO press conferences. 

Say #NOTONATO. There must be better ways!

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At the moment, the escalatory madness is the only game in all towns. Russia, US/NATO and Ukraine believe that “we” shall win this war. But they are all wrong for a couple of simple reasons.

One, no sustainable solution can/will emerge from the battlefield. The conflict NATO has created by its provocative and Russia-defying expansion over the last two decades and the war created by Russia can only find a negotiated solution, including creative proposals for a non-NATO Ukraine and a new way of dealing with peace and security – in that order – in Europe of today and tomorrow.

Two, if someone could win in some kind of meaningful meaning of the word – what about the loser(s)? Isn’t it likely that a loser – given all that all sides have invested till now, including their prestige – would seek revenge at some point, be traumatised, or both?

Since none of the actors is anything but conflict and peace illiterates and thereforebent on expanding militarism, is it possible to see some kind of hope?

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Well, wars display a kind of psychological curve – full blast in the beginning, ‘we shall and will win, and the other will lose. We are the strongest!’ Depending on how long the warring parties are able and willing to run on that motivation, there is no hope. But time increasingly plays its role.

The catchwords here are: war fatigue, exhaustion as well as human and other costs. And afterthoughts as well as hindsight, doubts and decreasing decision-maker unity: Perhaps we were too gung-ho – extremely or overly zealous or enthusiastic about our own power, odds and stamina? Perhaps we underestimated the other parties and their power, odds and stamina? Perhaps we even did something wrong and aggravated the general situation as well as our own?

I’ve been thinking about these things since the conflict development began to accumulate towards madness – way before February 24, 2022. I came to think intensely of it when today I saw a new opinion poll survey from the Department of Sociology at Kiev’s University.

I quote directly from its press release:

“The absolute majority of Ukrainians – 78% – have close relatives or friends who were injured or killed due to the Russian invasion. Among those who have such close relatives or friends, the average number (the median value was used) was 7. That is, on average, such respondents have 7 close relatives or friends who were injured or killed.

64% of Ukrainians have at least one close relative or friend who was injured (on average, have 5 injured close people), and

63% have at least one close relative or friend who died (on average they have 3 deceased loved ones).

That is after about 16 months of fighting!

What could the figures be in just another 16 months? And how will the Ukrainian people judge the balance between the costs and benefits of ongoing fighting – in a war that is not inherently in their interest and for a NATO membership they never displayed a majority for before the invasion (as I have documented in Chapter E here)?

Other factors pointing in the direction of exhaustion:

• Weapons arsenals will be depleted, the more weapons NATO countries pump in, the less they have for their own military.
• European economies will suffer more and more from the sanctions against and cancellation of Russia and the destruction of Nordstream.
• There will be increasing conflict in the West about ‘are the accumulating costs worth it for getting a strategically non-important country into NATO’?
• Instability may well increase in Kremlin.
• The more the West wastes on militarism and war, the more it will lose out to others, China, BRICS etc.
• The world will see more and more strongly that this war – and all confrontations and wars – take human, technical, economic and other resources from solving the real, very very urgent problems humanity is facing.
• Ordinary citizens will rise in protests over prices but also over finding out that their politicians on all sides lied to them, omitted facts and influenced the media to give them disinformation.

It’s almost a rule of thumb that warriors are over-optimistic about what it takes, also in time, to win. Irrationality develops together with dangerous groupthink and hubris.

But no wars last forever. The one in Ukraine – fought out as a result of an unnecessary conflict between NATO and Russia over the last 30 years – also will not.

The saddest of all is that, for every day it continues, all decision-makers think of anything but the costs, the are “winning-blind” and believe that if they get just this or that more and mobilise even more resources, then they shall win – the “victory-around-the-corner” syndrome.

It’s that blindness that leads to ever more human death and destruction – suffering by the people while the elites seldom pay a price themselves.

The only world-respected organisation with a Charter that is relevant for situations like this is and remains the United Nations.

Tragically, NATO countries have misused and marginalised it since Yugoslavia, but one day, I predict, the UN will come in. Why? Because there are tons of similarities between the conflict formations in Yugoslavia back then and Ukraine today.

The road to a solution is through less and less weapons and not by pumping in more and more. But that’s what militarist kakistocrats – conflict-resolution illiterates – always do.

May this terrible war stop – the sooner the better!

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Jan Oberg is director at the Transnational Foundation for Peace and Future Research in Lund, Sweden. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Featured image: Graffiti “Stop War” on Russia’s war in Ukraine in the Mauerpark in Berlin, Germany. Image taken on March 11, 2022. Source: Wikimedia Commons.