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Because General Tricarico snaps on Putin and beats NATO

3 years ago babelfish

Because General Tricarico snaps on Putin and beats NATO

According to the former Chief of Staff of the Air Force, Leonardo Tricarico, NATO was wrong to encourage Ukraine to join the alliance by causing Putin's "reaction foul" Russia. Italics by Francis Walsingham

In a couple of speeches on LA7 to discuss Russia's attack on Ukraine – one on the Tagadà broadcast, the other on Enrico Mentana's Tg La7 -, General Leonardo Tricarico lashed out at the NATO secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg , for encouraging Ukraine to join the alliance, thus causing a crisis with Moscow that resulted in the invasion on Thursday morning.

Tricarico was Chief of Staff of the Italian Air Force, a NATO member country, from 2004 to 2006.

WHAT TRICARICO SAID IN TAGADÀ

“There was an unwritten promise,” said Tricarico in Tagadà, “to the Soviet Union, then dissolving, that the satellite countries would not join NATO. Of course, a commitment that no one has been able to keep. However, from here to encourage the transit in NATO it passes us. And I refer of course to this constant chatter, this declaratory activity by Secretary General Stoltenberg that I do not know if he has been authorized by the individual countries to speak in those terms and with that peremptory nature ", said Tricarico, president of the Icsa Foundation and leading signature of the Formiche magazine by Paolo Messa (“the most popular publishing machine in Washington”, according to Dagospia ).

“Just look at the accession of the last two countries, which are Montenegro and North Macedonia, for example,” added the general. "And we will see how much they have been encouraged to transit instead of being discouraged, as it should be done today with Ukraine, trying to find a condition of balance acceptable to both sides".

WHAT TRICARICO SAID ON TG LA7

On the Mentana news, however, Tricarico said that “NATO, in this whole affair, had no title to speak. Because NATO is a defensive alliance, it is an alliance that can intervene in an out-of-defense manner only if one of its members is attacked, there is an Article 5 that is triggered. And that's what took place with the Twin Towers in 2001 ”, he said during a special on the news program directed by Mentana.

"If this is true", he continued, "Stoltenberg did a lot of wrong to speak every day with a certain air, a certain peremptoriness, a certain self-confidence, which certainly fueled Putin this uncertainty and this fear that there really was the determination and the international consensus for Ukraine to transition into NATO. So Putin's, if you like, was a terrible reaction foul ”.

"This is what it is about," he added.

And finally, to conclude: “We absolutely must not encourage the transit of Ukraine into NATO, which unfortunately NATO has done in a surreptitious and sometimes open manner. If anything, it is necessary to throw water, and not petrol, on the fire, and above all on the aspirations of Ukraine ”.

WHAT RUSSIA WANT

Tricarico obviously does not justify Vladimir Putin for ordering the invasion of Ukraine, but rather holds him responsible for the situation. In a certain sense, however, he understands, and legitimizes, the fears and requests. Not to mention hysteria, the syndrome of encirclement for an alliance which – as the general himself recalls – is defensive, not offensive.

Some will say that his is geopolitical realism: given that Russia wants NATO far from its borders, and since Russia is a military power that borders on Europe and maintains commercial and energy relations there, we might as well give her what she wants. But this is only part of the story: what drives Putin is not only national security (ie the removal of NATO), but the desire to rebuild a sphere of influence in the former Soviet territory and to "take back" Ukraine, that after the expulsion of the pro-Russian Yanukovich has come very close to the West. For the good of the West, however – Tricarico seems to say -, NATO's doors should remain closed to Kiev, thus allowing Moscow to determine the foreign policy and strategic orientation of an independent state.

THE PROMISE OF BORN TO UKRAINE

It is true that NATO has welcomed many countries that were once part of the Soviet orbit – such as Poland, anti-Russian -, and it is true that the Atlantic alliance made a promise of membership to Ukraine (it was 2008, with the agreements of Bucharest). It is true that that promise was first made by the United States, and received with skepticism by its European allies.

From 2008 to today, however, nothing has been done about that promise – already vague at the time. Even the American president Joe Biden, while defending the principle for Kiev to decide independently its own placement in the world, spoke very cautiously , making it clear that he was not interested in proceeding in this direction.

This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/tricarico-ucraina-nato/ on Fri, 25 Feb 2022 15:07:21 +0000.