US Arms Sales to NATO Allies Almost Double in 2022

CCO//pixabay

Apart from sending arms to its NATO allies, the Biden administration also continues to supply Kiev with weapons, something that Moscow warns will only further aggravate the Ukraine conflict.

The number and price of arms sales approved by Washington to its NATO allies almost doubled in 2022 as compared to 2021, a US magazine has reported.

The outlet noted that last year, the US government approved 14 possible major arms sales to its allies in the alliance, worth about $15.5 billion. In 2022, the figure soared to 24 potential major arms sales with price tag of around $28 billion, including $1.24 billion worth of arms sales to possible new NATO member Finland.

The magazine pointed out that the data indicates that the US remains “a major arms supplier for allies in Europe in the short term,” in the midst of European defense industries’ push to “meet wartime demands for conventional arms and ammunition.”

According to the media outlet, the increase took place as NATO members scrambled “to stock up on high-end weapons” amid the ongoing Russian special military operation in Ukraine.

The outlet reported that although some of arms sales deals were negotiated years beforehand, the Russian special operation sent NATO’s European members scrambling to bump up their military spending, and to replenish vehicles, weapons, and ammunition delivered to the Ukrainian military.

Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia have all ordered HIMARS Multiple-Launch Rocket Systems (MLRS), while the US State Department authorized earlier this month the sale of 116 M1A1 Abrams tanks to Poland, after Warsaw sent its Soviet-era T-72 and domestically-made PT-91 tanks to Kiev’s forces.

The report comes after President Joe Biden signed a new $1.7 trillion federal spending bill into law, a document that includes $858 billion in defense spending.

According to a statement released on the website of the US Senate Committee on Budget Appropriations, the so-called National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) comprises “$44.9 billion in emergency assistance to Ukraine and our (America’s) NATO allies.” Since Russia launched its special operation in Ukraine on February 24, the US and its allies have supplied more than $40 billion worth of arms to Kiev. Moscow has repeatedly warned that providing Kiev with arms prolongs the Ukraine conflict.

The signing of the NDAA followed a separate US media outlet reporting about a surge in the share prices of the four largest US defense contractors, including Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon Technologies, and Pratt & Whitney.

The outlet reported that Lockheed Martin “had booked more than $950 million worth of its own missile military orders from the Pentagon in part to refill stockpiles being used in Ukraine, while Raytheon Technologies was awarded with “more than $2 billion in contracts to deliver missile systems to expand or replenish weapons used to help Ukraine.”

US Fast-Tracking Hundreds of Millions of Dollars in Private Arms Sales to Kiev, Reports Say

The United States has fast-tracked hundreds of millions of dollars worth of private weapons sales to Ukraine since the beginning of Russia’s special military operation in February, The New York Times reported on Thursday.

The US expedited over $300 million in private arms sales to Ukraine, reducing approval times from weeks to hours, in just the first four months of 2022, the report said.

The State Department authorized less than $15 million in such sales to Ukraine throughout the entirety of fiscal year 2021, the report noted.

The hundreds of millions of dollars in private arms sales to Ukraine comes alongside over $17.5 billion in security assistance provided by the Biden administration to Ukraine since taking office.

Russia has repeatedly slammed Washington and its allies over their continued arms deliveries to the Kiev regime, pointing to the danger they pose in escalating the crisis and facilitating weapons smuggling, as a large part of the weapons end up on the black market.

US to Expedite Arms Sales to Allies, Partners With Aim of Outcompeting China - Reports

©AP Photo / Eugene Hoshiko

The United States will speed up its arms sales to allies and partners by removing several bureaucratic road bumps that could cause delays in order to better compete with countries such as China, the Wall Street Journal reported citing US defense officials.

The report said on Friday that the Defense Department launched an initiative to streamline US arms sales to foreign countries, especially to allies and partners that have provided military equipment to Ukraine.

The United States promised European allies who have provided military equipment to Ukraine that it would be able to replenish their stocks, but the US defense industry is facing a backlog, the report said.

The United States could speed up arms sales by having US defense officials help countries draft initial requests for military equipment that would help avoid delays caused by requests that trigger security concerns, the report said.

The Defense Department only approves contracts once a year for certain military equipment, which means countries that fail to submit their orders by the Defense Department's deadline must wait until the following year, the report added.

However, the State Department is currently consulting with the Defense Department on this matter in light of the mission to speed up arms sales to allies, according to the report.

Jalur Puncak Bogor Padat dan Berkabut

Jarak pandang saat jalur Puncak Bogor berkabut. Foto/Pojoksatu

Kepala Satuan Lalu Lintas Polres Bogor, AKP Dicky Anggi Pranata mengatakan, volume kendaraan di Puncak Bogor, Jawa Barat mengalami peningkatan selama 25 persen dan cuacanya berkabut.

Peningkatan ini diakibatkan libur Natal dan Tahun Baru 2023 dibandingkan hari biasa.

"Per hari ini jam 13.00 WIB, itu sudah ada kurang lebih 28.000 kendaraan," katanya, mengutip dari Antara.

Untuk mengatasi kepadatan volume kendaraan di Jalur Puncak, pihaknya memberlakukan rekayasa lalu lintas berupa sistem satu arah dari arah Puncak menuju Jakarta sekitar satu jam.

Ia menyebutkan, saat arus lalu lintas sudah terbilang padat, maka rekayasa lalu lintas yang digunakan yaitu sistem satu arah secara situasional.

"Oleh karena itu kita sesegera mungkin memulai proses satu arah bawah untuk menguras arus ke bawah," kata dia. Cuaca di Puncak Bogor juga diselimuti kabut yang membuat jarak pandang di kawasan Kecamatan Cisarua, Kabupaten Bogor, itu terbatas. Polisi mengimbau pengendara berhati-hati dan tidak memaksakan diri saat berkendara.

“Kawasan Puncak berkabut, cuaca sedikit gerimis. Kami dari Satlantas Polres Bogor mengimbau masyarakat yang berkendara untuk tetap berhati-hati. Jangan memaksakan juga. Sebaiknya istirahat dulu di posisi yang aman,” kata KBO Satlantas Polres Bogor Iptu Ketut Laswarjana, pada hari Kamis, 29/12/2022.

Ketut menyebutkan kawasan berkabut di Jl Raya Puncak biasanya terjadi mulai kawasan Gunung Mas hingga perbatasan Cianjur.

“Titik kabut ini kan biasanya mulai dari Gunung Mas ke atas, kemudian Riung Gunung dan seterusnya. Kalau hujan lebat sih kabut hilang, kabut akan tebal kalau cuaca gerimis,” kata Ketut.

“Tentunya pandangan akan terbatas, makanya kita imbau untuk tetap hati-hati. Lebih baik istirahat sementara di tempat yang aman, sampai jalur kembali aman untuk berkendara,” tambahnya.

Ketut menambahkan Puncak Bogor berkabut lantaran memang kerap diguyur hujan dalam sepekan terakhir. Pengendara dan wisatawan juga diminta hati-hati ketika berteduh atau beristirahat.

“Kami dari Satlantas Polres Bogor mengimbau kepada masyarakat yang akan berwisata ke Puncak, terutama yang mau parkir, yang mau istirahat, mau berteduh, silakan pastikan betul melihat di atasnya, jangan parkir di bawah pohon untuk antisipasi dampak pohon tumbang,” katanya.

“Kemudian bagi pengendara roda dua, jangan memaksakan, kalau cuaca kurang bagus ataupun hujan lebat dan jalur Puncak Bogor berkabut, bisa istirahat dulu di tempat yang aman,” tambah Ketut.

Beberapa titik terjadinya kemacetan yaitu di Simpang Gadog hingga Cimory Megamendung di jalur Jakarta menuju Puncak. Di jalur Puncak menuju Jakarta kemacetan terjadi di KFC Cisarua, Pasar Cisarua hingga Taman Safari Indonesia (TSI), dan di Taman Wisata Matahari (TWM) hingga Cimory Megamendung.

Sementara, Kepala Polres Bogor, AKBP Iman Imanuddin, menyebutkan, kepadatan kendaraan yang terjadi pada Jumat siang ini karena masyarakat yang merayakan Tahun Baru di Puncak tiba lebih awal, sebelum jalurnya ditutup total alias tanpa kendaraan roda empat pada malam Tahun Baru.

"Karena kami sudah informasikan dari awal untuk tanggal 31 Desember kami akan berlakukan pembatasan, sebagaimana meningkatnya kegiatan masyarakat di jalur puncak, melalui malam tanpa kendaraan roda empat untuk malam tahun baru," kata dia.

Direncanakan besok, 31 Desember 2022 mulai pukul 06.00 sore sampai 1 Januari 2023 jam 6 pagi, jalan kendaraan yang menuju ke Puncak Bogor Jawa Barat akan ditutup.

How Saddam Hussein’s Execution Scarred Iraq and Changed US Foreign Policy Forever

©AP Photo / Chris Hondros

Friday marks the anniversary of the December 30, 2006 execution of Saddam Hussein, the former Iraqi leader reviled by Iranians for his 1980s war of aggression, but respected by many Iraqis for standing up to Western imperialism. How did Hussein’s hanging by the American occupation regime affect Iraq and alter US foreign policy? Sputnik media explains.

“Long live the people! Long live the Arab nation! Long Live the Ummah! Damn sellout dogs like you! Let the traitors be devastated! God is great!.....The end is near, you will see. This homeland is ours!...Don’t think this is over. This is just the beginning!”

Saddam Hussein Former President of Iraq

Those were the words shouted by Saddam Hussein on November 5, 2006 as a judge read out a verdict finding him guilty of crimes against humanity, war crimes and genocide for the Iraqi government’s execution of 148 Shiite rebels in Dujail, Iraq in July 1982 in response to an attempt on Hussein’s life.

Hussein remained obstinate, sarcastic and uncooperative throughout the October 2005-December 2006 trial, insisting that he was the constitutionally-elected president of Iraq, and saying he didn’t "recognize the body that designated and authorized" the trial, "nor the aggression" behind it.

Hussein repeatedly laughed in the judge’s face, and compared the Dujail incident to the US crackdown on Fallujah in 2004, which a defense witness said had been “wiped off the map” after four Americans were killed by insurgents.

Hussein’s execution was hailed by US and European media as an "end to an era" for Iraq, a “grim end for the 69-year-old leader who had vexed three US presidents” and “ruled Iraq in a reign of fear for three decades.”

Iraq Destabilized

But whatever personal gratification President George W. Bush and his staff may have felt during that moment – which marked the culmination of the US war on Iraq begun under Bush’s father, it didn’t provide any long-term sense of solace to ordinary Iraqis, nor to the US occupation forces who were facing the worst period insurgency since the invasion of Iraq began in March 2003. The Pentagon closed out 2006 as one of its bloodiest years in US history, with 823 troops killed, and 904 more the following year.

By the time the US withdrew from Iraq in 2011, some 4,492 troops were dead, 32,222 injured, and tens of thousands more left with debilitating psychological problems, like post-traumatic stress disorder and suicidal ideation. A devastating 2021 study found that some 30,177 US active-duty troops and Iraq and Afghanistan veterans had taken their own lives between 2001 and 2021.

As for Iraqi casualties, they were so severe that fierce debate over their scale continues to this day, with estimates ranging from 461,000 to over one million. For perspective, Iraq had a total pre-war population of 25.6 million people.

The ‘shock and awe’ invasion, combined with fierce fighting between US forces and pro-Saddam Baath Party loyalists, plus Sunni and Shia insurgents (who also fought and ethnically cleansed each other), forced up to six million people to flee their homes, with Iraq’s already weakened pre-war infrastructure turned into rubble and tens of thousands of homes destroyed or severely damaged. Hospitals and schools were left without running water, the electricity grid and sanitation networks were smashed, and the country suffered outbreaks of cholera, typhoid and other deadly diseases.

Middle East Destabilized

“Obviously, the war in Iraq was a big, fat mistake, alright?...We spent $2 trillion, thousands of lives, we don’t even have it. Iran is taking over Iraq with the second largest oil reserves in the world. Obviously it was a mistake. George Bush made a mistake. We can make mistakes, but that one was a beauty. We should have never been in Iraq. We have destabilized the Middle East,” then-presidential candidate Donald Trump said in a debate with Jeb Bush during the 2016 race.

Donald Trump Former President of the United States

Love him or hate him, on this issue, the real estate mogul was right. The collapse of the centralized government in Iraq, made worse by the US’s decision to dismantle all Baath-led institutions, including the military and police, sparked an insurgency that would mutate into Daesh (ISIS), a fanatical Sunni militia challenging al-Qaeda as the Middle East’s top terror group. Between 2013-2014, Daesh spread across much of western Iraq, made its way into northeastern Syria, and gained a foothold, or individual militants pledging allegiance to the group in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Turkey, Egypt, France, and much of North and West Africa, including Nigeria.

It took the combined military and intelligence capabilities of the Syrian and Iraqi governments, Russian and Iranian airpower/advisors, Hezbollah fighters, and US coalition forces to push the terrorists back.

The war against Daesh displaced over ten million Syrian and Iraqi civilians, with over 45,000 civilians in the two countries killed – up to 13,000 of them in US-led coalition airstrikes, and the humanitarian situation in both countries deteriorating further.

Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi declared final victory over Daesh in December 2017, with Trump proclaiming victory over the terrorists in Syria in December 2018 and announcing a withdrawal (which never took place).

How Iraq Forced US to Change Its Policy

Saddam Hussein’s “This is just the beginning!” cry during his verdict proved prophetic. Since the Iraq invasion, his ouster and public execution, the US never again launched a large-scale invasion of another country. Instead, Washington has shifted its operations to large-scale bombings (Libya in 2011), drone strikes (Yemen from 2002-2020), funding terrorist insurgencies and proxy armies (Syria, Ukraine), fomenting color revolutions and coups (2000 to present in countries including Ukraine, Moldova, Kyrgyzstan, Georgia, Myanmar, Tunisia, Egypt, and Bolivia), and limited, often secret, troop deployments.

Things could have been much worse. Had the Iraq War become the resounding success the Bush White House hoped it would be, it’s entirely possible that the invasion of the ancient Mesopotamian cradle of civilization may have turned out to be just a stepping stone in a strategy to endow the US with total control over the entire Middle East.

“About ten days after 9/11 I went to the Pentagon and saw Secretary [of Defense Donald] Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary [of Defense Paul] Wolfowitz. I went downstairs just to say hello to some of the people in the Joint Staff who used to work for me and one of the generals called me in and said ‘sir you gotta come in and talk to me a second…We’ve made the decision, we’re going to war with Iraq’. This was on or about the 20th of September,” former US Army general and NATO Supreme Allied Commander Europe Wesley Clark recalled in an interview in 2007.

“I said ‘well did they find some information connecting Saddam to al-Qaeda? ‘No, no,’ he says, ‘there’s nothing new that way. They just made the decision to go to war with Iraq.’ He said ‘I guess it’s like we don’t know what to do about terrorists but we got a good military and we can take down governments,’” the retired officer continued.

“I came back to see him a few weeks later and by that time we were bombing in Afghanistan and I said ‘are we still going to war with Iraq?’ and he said ‘oh it’s worse than that.’ He reached over on his desk and picked up a piece of paper and said ‘I just got this down from upstairs,’ (meaning secretary of defense’s office) today, and said ‘this is a memo that describes how we’re going to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and finishing off – Iran,” Clark said.

Wesley Clark Former NATO Supreme Allied Commander Europe

Echoing Merkel, Fmr French Prez Confirms West Lied to Russia on Minsk Deal to Buy Kiev Time to Rearm

©AP Photo / Alexander Zemlianichenko

The revelation comes a few weeks after Germany's former chancellor admitted that the peace agreement struck in the Belarusian capital in February 2015 was a contrivance used to buy time to build up Ukraine’s military after it had been shattered in fierce fighting with Donbass militias.

The Minsk Peace Accords were never about bringing peace to Donbass, former French President Francois Hollande has admitted.

“Since 2014, Ukraine has strengthened its military posture. Indeed, the Ukrainian army [of 2022] was completely different from that of 2014. It was better trained and equipped. It is the merit of the Minsk Agreements to have given the Ukrainian Army this opportunity,” Hollande said in an interview with Ukrainian media this week.

The former French president, who left office in 2017 with an approval rating hovering in the single-digits, had the courtesy to admit that while the Minsk agreement was functioning, Russia was meeting its obligations as a guarantor.

“Every month, (former Ukrainian President) Petro Poroshenko, Angela Merkel, Vladimir Putin and I had long telephone conversations in which we exchanged information on the progress of the Minsk protocols. Even if we saw that there was an obvious unwillingness, there was still a dialogue” via the Normandy Format, Hollande said.

Another of the Minsk peace deal’s “merits” was that it “didn’t allow the area controlled by separatists to expand,” Hollande added.

Confession is Good for the Soul

Hollande’s comments are the third confirmation in two months by a senior official involved in the Minsk negotiations that the West and its Ukrainian client state were never serious about implementing the peace agreement.

On December 7, Angela Merkel said that Minsk “was an attempt to buy time for Ukraine,” and that “Ukraine used this time to become stronger, as you can see today. The Ukraine of 2014-2015 is not the Ukraine of today,” she said.

A month earlier, Petro Poroshenko told Russian pranksters Vovan and Lexus that he “needed the Minsk Accords to get at least four years to form the Ukrainian Armed Forces, build up the Ukrainian economy and train the Ukrainian military together with NATO to create the best armed forces in Eastern Europe, created according to NATO standards.”

Signed on February 12, 2015 by Ukraine and guarantors Russia, Germany and France, the Minsk Peace Agreements were a thirteen-part ceasefire and peace deal which would have allowed Kiev to restore control over the Donetsk and Lugansk regions in exchange for broad, constitutionally-mandated autonomy.

Over the seven years after the treaty was signed, Kiev stalled on implementing the agreement, and continued low-intensity shelling and sabotage attacks against the Donbass. An attempt by President Volodymyr Zelensky to implement the treaty in late 2019 sparked widespread protests in Kiev led by Poroshenko, hardline pro-EU parties, and ultranationalist fighters and Donbass war veterans, prompting Zelensky to back down.

In February 2022, observing a severe escalation of tensions along the line of contact in the Donbass, and suspected Ukrainian sabotage attacks targeting senior military officials in Donetsk and Lugansk, Russia recognized the pair of self-proclaimed republics as sovereign nations, and, on February 24, kicked off a special military operation to ‘demilitarize’ and ‘de-Nazify’ Ukraine amid fears that Kiev was preparing an imminent all-out assault on the Donbass. In September, the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics, and the Russian-administered areas of Kherson and Zaporozhye became part of Russia after status referendums.

Commenting on Merkel’s admission about Minsk this month, President Putin expressed shock and disappointment.

“Frankly speaking, I did not expect to hear such a thing from the former federal chancellor. Because I always proceeded from the idea that the German leadership behaves sincerely with us. Yes, they were on Ukraine’s side, supported Kiev, but it always seemed to me that Germany always sincerely sought a peaceful settlement based on the principles that we had agreed on, which were achieved, including within the framework of the Minsk process,” Putin said.

Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, who hosted the Minsk negotiations in the Belarusian capital back in 2015, did not mince words about Merkel’s comments, saying the situation was “not just disgusting” but “abominable,” and that Merkel “acted in a petty, obnoxious way” trying to bring attention to herself.

Putin, Lukashenko Agree on Deployment of Joint Regional Grouping of Forces

Earlier in the day, at October, 2022, the Belarusian president held a meeting with the country's military and security forces, and told reporters that Minsk had been warned through unofficial channels about plans to carry out an attack on Belarusian territory from Ukraine.

Russian President Vladimir Putin and Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko have agreed on the deployment of a joint regional group of forces.

"In connection with the aggravation of the situation on the western borders of the Union State, we agreed to deploy a regional grouping of forces from the Russian Federation and the Republic of Belarus. This complies with our documents. They say that if the threat reaches the level it has now, we begin to use the Union State grouping of forces," Lukashenko said on Monday, his remarks cited by the Belta News Agency.

The Belarusian president clarified that the Belarusian Army constitutes the basis or core of this group of forces.

"I must inform you that the formation of this grouping has begun. It has been going on for, I think two days. I gave an order to start forming this group," Lukashenko said.

Earlier in the day, in a meeting with the country's military and security forces, Lukashenko warned Kiev not to move forward with any plans to carry out a first strike on Belarus.

"I have already said today that Ukraine is not just contemplating, but planning strikes on the territory of Belarus. Of course, the Ukrainians absolutely do not need this. Why would they need to open a second front on our southern border, which is their northern border? This is madness from the military point of view. They are being pushed by their patrons to unleash a war against Belarus in order to draw us into it," Lukashenko said.

The Belarusian president said the message received from unofficial channels was that Ukraine was planning to create a 'Crimean Bridge Part II'-style scenario in Belarus.

"My answer was simple: tell the president of Ukraine and other insane individuals that the Crimean Bridge will seem like flowers to them if they touch even one meter of our territory with their dirty hands," Lukashenko said.

The president ordered the military and security forces, including the KGB, to determine what else needs to be done to strengthen Belarusian security, "taking into account the rapidly changing situation."

Commenting on Lukashenko's comments later in the day Monday, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov confirmed that "interaction in various fields, including defense, is constantly being discussed during bilateral contacts between Presidents Putin and Lukashenko," and that this interaction is spelled out in the Union State's military doctrine.

Despite its territory being used by Russian forces in the early stages of Moscow's military operation operation in Ukraine, Belarus has so far managed to stay out of the conflict, with its forces deployed westward to face down NATO forces concentrated in Poland and the Baltics.

The Ukrainian military launched several attacks against Belarus, with Lukashenko reporting in March that a Ukrainian Tochka-U missile had been shot down by Belarusian air defense troops. A second attack - targeting Belarusian military targets, was foiled in June.

The Belarusian Army has 45,000 active-duty personnel, and 290,000 reservists, among whom 120,000 are members of the country's territorial defense forces.

Russia and Belarus are members of the Union State - a supranational organization created in the late 1990s aimed at the integration of the countries' political, economic and defense policies. The Union State's military doctrine states that any aggression against either of its members constitutes aggression against both, requiring "appropriate measures" to be taken "using all the forces and means" at the countries' disposal to neutralize the threat.

The Ukrainian crisis entered a new phase on Saturday after Ukrainian security forces carried out a terrorist attack against the Crimean Bridge - a key piece of infrastructure linking the peninsula to the Russian mainland to the east. Russia responded by carrying out strikes against infrastructure across Ukraine on Monday.

Reagan's Aide Warns Against Overestimating Soviet Union, Underestimating Russia

‘Major Political Error’: Moscow Warned About NATO Expansion in 2001, Declassified Docs Reveal

©Sputnik / Alexei Danichev

The world should not overestimate the significance of the Soviet Union, but should also avoid underrating the importance of Russia, American scholar of Russian history Suzanne Massie, who served as an adviser to President Ronald Reagan, told Sputnik in an interview on the USSR's centennial.

"Now the USSR is already a memory. I was at Gorbachev's funeral in Moscow, and with him the era of the USSR was gone, which, relative to the entire more than a thousand-year history of Russia, lasted only 70 years," Massie said in Russian. "I do not think it is necessary to overestimate the importance of the USSR, but the importance of Russia for the world today cannot and should not be underestimated."

Speaking of lessons Russia could draw from the Soviet period, Massie expressed her belief that Russia needs to combat its age-old bureaucracy.

"America does not know the new Russia at all, its new young faces, its spirit," she added. "I believe that Russia needs to be studied and studied from within, as I once did myself. And I just fell in love with it."

On December 30, 1922, five years after the October Revolution, the First All-Union Congress of Soviets in Moscow declared the creation of the Soviet Union, an entity intended to be built on Marxist principles and dedicated to ushering in a new era of Communism onto the world.

On December 26, 1991, the Soviet Union ceased to exist, soon after the leaders of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus signed the Belovezh Accords, declaring the country dissolved.

'Major Political Error’: Moscow Warned About NATO Expansion in 2001, Declassified Docs Reveal

In the mid-1990s, the Clinton administration broke with its predecessor’s pledge to Moscow not to expand the Western military alliance “one inch east” of a reunified Germany. Three decades on, relations between Russia and the West are perhaps worse than they ever were even in the darkest days of the Cold War.

In 2001, riding off the post-Cold War high of lofty promises to Russia about integration into the ‘civilized world’ and seeking to maintain good relations with its newfound Western partners, Moscow carefully sought to warn NATO about the implications of the alliance’s continued eastward expansion. That’s according to British government documents released by the National Archives on Friday.

The files, which include Cabinet Office papers of the Tony Blair government from the period between 2000 and 2002, featured a remark by then-Russian Defense Minister Igor Sergeyev that continued NATO enlargement to the east would be a “major political error,” and that Moscow would be forced to “take appropriate steps.”

By that point, NATO had already swallowed up former Warsaw Pact members Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic, and was negotiating expanding into Slovakia, Bulgaria, Romania, Slovenia and the Baltic states, which would put the bloc’s strategic reach to within just 100 km of St. Petersburg, Russia’s second city.

A 2001 security paper drawn up for Blair defense advisor John Sawers chided Russian officials for their “obstructionist stance.” UK officials appeared to dismiss then fresh-faced Russian President Vladimir Putin’s assurances to Blair that he did not want to be seen as “anti-NATO,” and that he “would not try to slow down the process of NATO enlargement,” as disingenuous.

The security paper suggested that Putin’s “constructive” statements were “belied” by Russian espionage efforts against the UK, as well as Moscow’s links to Iran and Iraq.

“Despite the warmth of Putin’s rhetoric about the close links between Russia and the UK, the Russian intelligence effort against British targets remains at a high level. The Russian intelligence presence in the UK is at Cold War levels, and they continue to post active and hostile officers to work against British interests worldwide,” the document said.

Defense Minister Sergeyev did not shy away from expressing concerns about NATO expansion, both in private and in public. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the marshal repeatedly criticized the Western bloc over the “lack of trust” with Russia in the framework of the alliance’s ‘peacekeeping’ operations in Kosovo after its 78-day bombardment of Yugoslavia. At a meeting of the NATO-Russia Council in 2000, Sergeyev warned of the dangers of Washington’s plans to withdraw from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which he characterized as a cornerstone of global strategic stability. Sergeyev called on Europeans to scrap NATO and create a “pan-European system of collective security” without the United States. The marshal also criticized the use of NATO forces in Kosovo without United Nations and Organization for Security Co-operation approval, saying this undermined the global post-Cold War security architecture.

The National Archives document dump also revealed UK efforts to keep up diplomatic decorum, befriend Putin and pull the wool over his eyes on the West’s friendship with Russia. In a memo dated February 2001, Blair proposed to US Vice President Dick Cheney that Putin be granted a “position (at) the top table” and encouraged “to reach for Western attitudes as well as the Western economic model.” Blair recommended “treating [Putin] with some respect while preventing him from pulling European members of the (NATO) alliance away from the US.”

Blair compared Putin’s “mindset” to that of the late French President Charles de Gaulle, describing him “as a Russian patriot, acutely aware that Russia had lost its place in the world.”

The docs revealed that Blair had symbolically gifted Putin a pair of special No 10 cufflinks in October 2001 for the Russian president’s birthday, with Putin ‘honored’ as the first non-British leader recipient of the trinket. The same year, Putin was said to have informed Blair that Russia was ready to help ensure Britain’s energy security “for decades to come” through the construction of a new gas pipeline via Belarus.

Western distrust over Russia’s intentions and the NATO push to incorporate more and more Eastern European members in the bloc underscored its underlying hostility to Moscow, notwithstanding the supposed end of the Cold War. Putin sought to test the authenticity of Western intentions in the year 2000, recalling to that he once proposed to outgoing President Bill Clinton that Russia itself join NATO.

“I remember one of our last meetings with President Clinton in Moscow. During the meeting I said, ‘we should consider an option that Russia might join NATO’. Clinton replied, ‘Why not?’ But the US delegation got very nervous,” Putin recalled, speaking to US filmmaker Oliver Stone in 2017.

Putin’s strategy echoed the approach taken by Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov, who asked to join NATO in 1954 in a test of the West’s strategic intentions vis-à-vis Moscow. The alliance turned the Soviet offer down, prompting Moscow to form the Warsaw Pact alliance a year later. That alliance helped to guarantee European security for the next three-and-a-half decades.

NATO expansion is one of the central causes of the current crisis in relations between Russia and the West, including the ongoing conflict in Ukraine -amid the bloc's attempts to drag Kiev into the alliance. Russia has expressed concerns that the alliance’s conventional military forces, plus the missile defense systems placed in Poland and Romania, are designed to target Russia, threatening the country and undermining global strategic stability.

In December 2021, Russia proposed a twin set of draft security treaties to the United States and NATO. The proposals were designed to reduce tensions between Moscow and the Western bloc, and included a pitch not to deploy troops, military equipment, warships, missile systems and aircraft in areas where they might be seen as a threat to the other party, and a formal commitment by both sides that they do not see one another as adversaries. Moscow also asked Washington not to continue NATO’s eastward expansion, including into Ukraine and Georgia.

The Western bloc rejected Russia’s proposals in January, citing its unwavering “open door” policy. Several weeks later, the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics reported an unprecedented increase in Ukrainian shelling and sabotage attacks of their territories, and, fearing that Kiev may be preparing a full-scale invasion, began an evacuation of civilians to Russia. Moscow responded by kicking off its special military operation to ‘demilitarize’ and ‘de-Nazify’ its neighbor.

George Kennan, venerated US diplomat, geostrategist and author of the famous 1946 ‘long telegram’ of advice on how to ‘contain’ the USSR in the first years of the Cold War, famously characterized NATO’s decision in the 1990s to expand as “the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold War era.” The decision, he said, would severely undermine the fledgling trust between Moscow and Washington, and “impel Russian foreign policy in directions not to our liking.” Twenty-five years on, Kennan’s warning has proven prophetic.