The principle cause of the Ukraine crisis was the West pressing Kiev to enter the EU Association Agreement and NATO’s extremely disastrous eastwards expansion, Samir Dathi, National Officer of the Stop the War Coalition, told RT.
NATO announced its expansion eastwards in Europe because of the Ukrainian crisis. Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said Russia was violating the Ukraine peace agreement signed in Minsk on September 5. He urged Moscow to remove “Russian forces from near the Ukrainian border.” The alliance also approved a quick reaction force and a permanent military presence near Russia.
RT: What do you think is the reason for the timing of this?
Samir Dathi: NATO and the West have been talking about creating a rapid reaction force for months. Back in September in Newport at NATO’s summit meeting, I think it was a first time when they discussed this. I think this is a fairly predictable development. The conflict that NATO is facing in Ukraine is different to what they have been used to for a number of years. Since the end of the Cold War, since 1990, America and NATO have enjoyed a kind of global imperial supremacy. They have been able to go around the world at their own leisure in their own time pulverizing third world countries without much retaliation: Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and so on, so forth. But now with Ukraine they face a much more significant adversary – Russia. And they don’t have the military means to really deal with this new type of challenge. So they need to reconfigure their military, and to do that they need a rapid reaction force. They need to be able to mobilize thousands of troops at a moment’s notice to meet challenges from Russia, as and when they arrive, perceived challenges.
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