Shortly before a NATO meeting, Ukraine warned of a possible Russian invasion of their country. “In the worst case, Russia tries to redraw the borders in Europe by force, as it did in Georgia in 2008 and in Ukraine in 2014,” Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said in Kiev on Monday. He named the number of allegedly 115,000 soldiers on Russian territory on the common border. What you see now is “very serious”.
The foreign ministers of the 30 NATO countries will meet this Tuesday for a two-day meeting in the Latvian capital Riga. Under the chairmanship of NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, they want to discuss, among other things, the situation on the EU’s borders with Belarus and on the border between Ukraine and Russia. The meeting is also explosive because it is the first time that a meeting of NATO foreign ministers has been organized in Latvia, an ally that borders Russia.
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Stoltenberg had recently shown alarm about the renewed deployment of Russian armed forces not far from the Ukraine and spoke of “large and unusual” troop concentrations. On the question of whether the military alliance expected Moscow to want to further destabilize Ukraine, he said that Russia had already shown that it had the will and in the annexation of the Ukrainian Black Sea peninsula of Crimea and in supporting the separatists in the eastern Ukrainian Donbass region have the skills to use military force. Nobody should speculate too much, but the expansion of the military presence is a fact and unusual.
The government in Moscow, on the other hand, emphasizes that Russia poses no threat to anyone. Allegations that Russian troops are preparing to invade Ukraine have been labeled misinformation.
NATO also regards the course taken by the Russian partner country Belarus as extremely worrying. The leadership in Kiev is accused of deliberately bringing migrants into the country in order to then bring them to the border with countries such as Poland and Lithuania for onward travel to the EU. The assumption is that the ruler Alexander Lukashenko wants to avenge himself with this procedure for sanctions that the EU has imposed because of the suppression of civil society and the democratic opposition.
Withdrawal from Afghanistan is also an issue
For weeks, thousands of migrants and refugees have been trying to get from the ex-Soviet republic to the neighboring EU countries. Because of the tense situation, Poland, Lithuania and Latvia had already considered requesting a special NATO meeting. Article 4 of the North Atlantic Treaty provides for consultations if a member thinks that the integrity of their own territory, political independence or their own security is threatened.
The acting Foreign Minister Heiko Maas (SPD) is expected to attend the deliberations from Germany. The meeting is also the first since the end of the NATO military operation in Afghanistan and the seizure of power by the militant Islamist Taliban. The deliberations should therefore also focus on the status of the processing of the alliance’s mission.
The aim of the almost two decades of engagement was actually to prevent the Taliban from coming to power. Before that, they had offered shelter to international terrorism. This is how the attacks that hit the United States on September 11, 2001, were prepared in Afghanistan. (dpa)
