First, why after the Warsaw Pact was voluntarily dissolved and the former members had left the Soviet orbit did NATO not freeze its membership as a reciprocal gesture of good will? Why did it continue to recruit new members even after the dissolution of the Soviet Union itself?
Its purpose had disappeared. Yet it continued to expand and advance. This was happening when the Russian Federation under the Boris Yeltsin regime was nearly a basket case and was almost coming apart at the seems.

Why was there no Martial Plan for eastern Europe including Russia that could provided prosperity and long term stability for most of those people?

Why did Washington and some of its sock puppets (Germany & the UK) in NATO continue to treat Russia as an enemy?

None of this makes sense unless we go back to former US president Eisenhower’s last warning about the "military industrial complex". There seems to be a powerful element in Washington that always wants war. That thrives on war. What purpose do 12 90,000 ton nuclear powered aircraft carriers serve in this day and age?

The only rational answer seems to be that this military machine must find an excuse to exist and its suppliers (some of the most powerful corporations in the world) need it too.

The big question is, does anybody else need this nonsense?

The author also fails when recommending that "the EU should ready an aid or rescue package". That’s only a patch, not a serious, permanent solution. Those aid packages will serve to pay due debt and to partially compensate for increased gas prices for a while. A year from now, Moldovans, Ukranians and the such will beg for additional money and will have to implement deeper cuts if they pretend that the IMF open its purse.

If aid packages didn’t save Spain or Greece from the deep recession they are plunged into, why would it do so for less organized countries? If migrant Romanians and Polish were chased out of UK, France and Italy, why would it be different to Moldovans eager to migrate to Western Europe?

What Mr Boehm and other pro-West seem to ignore (voluntarily or not) is that the real problem behind all this Crimean conflict is rooted in the inability of the European Union to convince East European countries to join the union under the stipulated terms (ECB and IMF terms). The EU has less and less to offer to new members (stagnant growth, difficulties to protect local jobs from German competition, dismantling of social services, high youth unemployment, xenophobia, etc.) and the "threat" comes from Russia and China luring countries into a more convenient trade and investment zone.

The World is changing to a multipolar format, and the US and EU cannot accept this fact. That explains the need to aggressively push the EU and NATO membership eastwards at any cost, even if it means conspiring against democratic (albeit corrupt) governments sitting instead neonazis in office.

Cheers,

Andres

So far, Russia took control of Crimea only, a region populated by a Russian majority and in which Russia had clear interests for its own security concerns.

You go too far inferring that Russia will invade the 20 or so countries that you mention in your list. Even in the case of Georgia, Russian territory claims were limited to Abkhasia and Ossetia, where there’s a Russian majority. Putin had the might to have smashed Saakashvili armies and Tblisi at a whole in a few days, and he didn’t go that far.

Putin seems very cautious in the way he wants to assert Russian influence. I think that he won’t commit the same errors that the Soviet did and that American-NATO copied (overextending their military involvement thus overstretching their resources). In fact, I think that he prefers to keep the Russian influence without any formal annexation. After all, a truly successful Eurasian economic zone cannot be sustained by military

As a Canadian, you should be much more worried of how the Canadian elites will come with a sound "New Deal" for the ailing manufacturing and commercial sectors. Our infrastructure is collapsing (bridges and routes in Quebec) while the few really profitable economic sectors are mostly relied to non-renewable natural resources (mining, tar sands, etc.). However, instead of attacking this worrisome reality, people prefer to point to a flag at the bottom of the ocean. Go figure…

Cheers,

Andres

The narrative that Alexander Bohem and this blog is the same being barked to the four winds by the U and the Wall Street crowd.
The assumptions are wrong all around and the spin is ludicrous. This article is but more of the same crap pushing for re-igniting a cold war that never ended completely.
Russia today is NOT the Soviet Union, and its capitalist system is perhaps more so than any place in the EU and the US, with a flat tax of only 12% it is very attractive to any one who wants to invest and produce. Here in the US the tax anyone in Middle class pays is at least 30% while the richest pay only about 10%.

The times since the WWII have changed drastically and Russia doesn’t need to have such a large "buffer zone" to protect itself from hundreds of years of invasions. Russia didn’t have transcontinental missiles before Hitler attacked, neither atomic bombs, which makes a huge difference.

However they are very concerned with the missiles stationed in Poland and the radar system in Zcheck republic because that can jeopardize Russia’s deterrent. The laughable excuse the EU and the US is giving regarding Iran’s NON-EXISTENT rockets and atomic bombs is pathetic.

The cabal that controls the world using Fractional Reserve Banking through the central banks they control (most except Syria, Iran and Russia. The other Libya was taken over by NATO) use the creation of currency as the conduit to extract the wealth of countries.

The current global debt crisis is FAKE, it’s artificial, only the result of this debt-based money system. The BRICS countries are aware of this and are working to create a parallel monetary system, and this Ukraine crisis perhaps will accelerate the process.

The US dollar is being set up to crash big by the very forces that create it. The FED is the orchestra director for all the central banks and the plan is to inflate as they have been doing for the last 6 years until the bubble pops producing a much worse crash than 2008. It is then that they will come with their "solution" which is another debt-based currency but this time imposed on many other countries. The Euro now I realize was merely a trial run, and it has been successful in achieving the cabal’s objectives as we can see Greece, Spain, Ireland, Italy, Portugal caught in their worst nightmare and the Euro is at the center of it, it is the VENOM killing these countries.

Russia is much better off because they have no debts and a large international reserve, while all of Europe is in debt. The US is the only one that can print their dollar that every other one uses to buy oil. If China and Russia dump all their dollars at once, then you’ll see who is gonna sink like a stone once all countries try to divest from their useless dollars, the inflation in the us then will skyrocket.

YOU GOT IT BACKWARDS. Once this shit storm takes place China and Russia, and perhaps Brazil will be standing tall watching the mess around them.

It is NATO that has been misbehaving since the fall of the Berlin Wall. It is NATO that promised NOT to swallow up the countries that belonged to the Soviet Warsaw Pact and they reneged in their promise, In fact there is not reason for NATO to exist at all since there is no more a threat from the group of countries that was formed to confront against.
Before Europe was afraid Russia would invade them and turn them into a communist nightmare, but today neither China or Russia are communist and have no desire to impose anything on them while sharing the same socio-economic system.

It is Russia that has the largest territory full of natural resources, and it is the NATO countries who are the AGGRESSORS who want it for themselves by following their bosses orders at the Cabal of Zionists who have been relishing the full control of the planet for the last 300 years. The New World Order they have been talking so much about and YOU are merely becoming part of the ECHO CAMBER repeating the same lies and deceit, whether you know it or not.

If you are not getting paid to propagate this garbage, you are losing some bucks.