Secretary of State Tony Blinken went on a Goebbels-style rampage against Russia, turning history since 2014 completely on its head, in remarks to reporters following NATO’s virtual foreign ministers meeting. “We’re prepared to respond forcefully to further Russian aggression, but a diplomatic solution is still possible and preferable, if Russia chooses it,” he said, according to the State Department transcript. “That’s what we, together with our allies and partners, will continue to pursue intently next week at the Strategic Stability Dialogue between the United States and Russia, and at the meetings of the NATO-Russia Council and the OSCE, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.” (https://www.state.gov/secretary-antony-j-blinken-at-a-press-availability-11/)
“Ahead of these urgent discussions, let’s be clear about how we got to this moment,” he said, before unleashing a completely false narrative about events since 2014. “In 2014, the Ukrainian people chose a democratic (!) and European future for themselves. Russia responded by manufacturing a crisis and invading,” he said completely reversing the reality that an elected government was overthrown by a neo-Nazi-dominated violent coup in which the U.S. played a direct role. Acknowledging the reality, however, would make it impossible to then paint Moscow as the aggressor trying to crush the “democratic aspirations” of the Ukrainian people. That of course includes the rhetoric that NATO is only a “defensive alliance” that “exists to protect, not to attack.” Additionally, “NATO never promised not to admit new members,” Blinken went on, “It could not and would not—the ‘open door policy’ was a core provision of the 1949 North Atlantic Treaty that founded NATO.”
Turning to the topic of the series of meetings beginning on Monday, Jan. 10 in Geneva, Blinken declared that “Russia is now demanding that both the United States and NATO sign treaties to withdraw NATO forces stationed in the territory of Allies in Central and Eastern Europe and to prohibit Ukraine from ever joining NATO. They want to draw us into a debate about NATO, rather than focus on the matter at hand, which is their aggression toward Ukraine. We won’t be diverted from that issue, because what’s happening in Ukraine is not only about Ukraine. It’s part of a broader pattern of destabilizing, dangerous, and often illegal behavior by Moscow as it tries to build a sphere of influence that covers the countries that were once under Soviet dominion, and to stop them from realizing their democratic aspirations as fully sovereign, independent nations.”
