“Back to the facts, back to dialogue”

A proven expert on military strategic issues, Jacques Baud worked for the Swiss Strategic Intelligence Service, where he was responsible for the Warsaw Treaty states. His excellent reputation led him to the UN. Here he headed the area for peacekeeping operations. In 2014, he was involved in missions in Ukraine on behalf of NATO.
  The concept of his book, published last year first in French and now in German translation, is as follows: As an observer of French media, he took the programme “Putin, master of events?” on the French TV channel France 5 as an opportunity to subject the claims made in this programme about Putin and Russia to a systematic analysis. He refutes the claims made piece by piece, exploring the following questions:

• “Was there a promise that NATO would not expand eastwards after 1990?”
• “Was Russian intervention in Syria opportunistic?”
• “Did Putin approve the forced rerouting of Ryanair flight 4978?”
• “Did Russia interfere in the 2016 American presidential election for the benefit of Donald Trump (Russiagate)?”
• “Did Russia try to influence the Brexit vote?”
• “What is the significance of the Munich speech in 2007?”
• “Did Vladimir Putin try to prevent a Ukraine association agreement with Europe?”
• “Is Russia not fulfilling its obligations under the Minsk agreements?”
• “Is Navalny the main opponent of Vladimir Putin?”
• “Can the Russian economy be compared to the Italian economy?”
• “Is the Western strategy in relation to Russia purposeful?”

Jacques Baud formulates his concern in concise compressed words: “Back to the facts, back to dialogue.” How else should a long-term solution be achieved, that can be supported by all sides? In this way he makes it clear what he, as an expert with a Swiss biography, is concerned with in this book. He is not concerned with apportioning blame or polarisation, but wants to open up paths to dialogue. With this concern, he stands in the long tradition of Swiss politics with its neutrality and good offices.
  In his introduction, Jacques Baud points out that he has only used Western sources in his book, often American and French traditional media. In this way, he wants to counter the accusation that he relies on Russian “propaganda” in advance.
  In order to keep his bearings in the mishmash of a fierce information war, Baud begins by clarifying the terms “lie”, “fake news”, “propaganda” and “conspiracy theory”. Since he repeatedly refers to the term “conspiracy theory” in the course of the individual chapters, his definition of it is given here with an example: “Conspiracy theory is the creation of a narrative, based on partial information, conjecture or suspicion, which is treated as fact and linked with the help of a tendentious logic. […] it can combine propaganda elements with misinformation and disinformation.” (p. 16) The example given refers to the accusation that Russia is standing like a shadow behind the protest movement of the yellow waistcoats, this would be allegedly proven by tweets from Russia. Since there are also tweets from Switzerland or Germany and the Russians are not Russia and certainly not the Russian government, this report is a mixture of propaganda and disinformation processed into a conspiracy theory. Amazing how easy it seems to be to deduce the alleged policy of the Kremlin from Russian tweets.

Allegations about
Vladimir Putin’s foreign policy

Baud succinctly contradicts the claim made by France 5 and others that Putin wants to restore the USSR. According to Baud, Putin sees quite clearly that the USSR was a Marxist state whose ideology differed fundamentally from the basic economic liberal view of today’s Russia. In this respect, there is no nostalgic mourning for the USSR, which the Western media repeatedly accuse him of. They refer to an alleged statement by Putin in which he is said to have claimed that the destruction of the USSR was the greatest catastrophe of the 20^th century. They infer that this is Putin’s Soviet nostalgia, which would make it clear that he wants to return to the greatness of the USSR. In fact, however, what Putin has described as drama and as chaotic was the way in which the transition to democracy took place in Russia. Putin, according to Baud, is firmly in favour of a liberal economy on the Western model. Baud describes the claim that Putin wants to restore the “Russian Empire” as a Western fantasy.

Was there a promise that NATO
would not expand eastwards after 1990?

There is a bitter dispute over this question. The dispute illustrates how the “West” deals with promises and treaties. With NATO’s eastward expansion by including Hungary, the Czech Republic and Poland, the Baltic countries, Slovakia, Romania and Bulgaria, NATO has moved inexorably towards the Russian border. Baud is not the only one to see it this way. But NATO’s eastward expansion in and of itself was not the real problem for Russia. Russia’s reactions only became more decisive after the US pulled out of nuclear disarmament treaties in the early 2000s and decided to install nuclear-capable missile “defence” systems with the potential for nuclear offensive weapons in the new NATO member states. Missile systems that have reduced the warning time for Russia to only a few minutes. This, Baud says, was the reason for Putin’s decisive speech in Munich in 2007, in which he recalled that Mikhail Gorbachev had received assurances in 1990-1991 that there would be no NATO eastward enlargement. This assurance was and is supported by numerous declassified documents made available in December 2017 by the George Washington University National Security Archive.
  Many Western politicians and institutes, Western NGOs, Western broadcasters and NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg argue that there never was an assurance because any form of written contract or written agreement would be missing. Baud confirms that such written contracts and assurances do not in fact exist, but at the same time points out that it is not the case that such promises have not been made. It is true that these promises were owed to a “deal”, Baud emphasises, because without this promise German reunification would have been a distant prospect. But Baud emphasises that a promise, a unilateral pledge to a counterpart “is a unilateral contract under international law” that has validity. Anyone today who disputes the validity of such a legal act thinks nothing of the value of the word given.
  Another actor interested in a fundamental NATO enlargement was the arms lobby in the United States, as the “New York Times” revealed in 1998. To this end, it had spent 51 million US dollars just on bribing American politicians who should work for its goal.

Did Putin want to prevent
an association agreement
between Ukraine and the EU?

There was a further escalation towards today’s conflict because of the way the EU misused the planned association agreement with Ukraine in order to cut Russia’s historically established ties with Ukraine. “European diplomacy has seen Ukraine as a border between East and West, while Russia has seen it as a bridge.” (p. 111) This is how Baud sums up the difference in interests between East and West. Ukraine was oriented towards the Russian market in its entire industrial mode of production. In a competition with the European market, Ukraine was bound to lose hopelessly, both in its industrial products and in its agricultural products. Many Ukrainian leaders also saw it that way. That is why Russia proposed a tripartite agreement. On the one hand, this would have preserved ties with Russia, and on the other, it would have made it possible to open up to the European market. But this is exactly what the then EU Commission President Barroso did not want. Instead, he asked the Ukrainians to make up their minds. This was the starting point of another “well-placed” explosive device.

The West and its support
for the Euro-Maidan

The explosive device was detonated with the help of the EU and the United States in 2014 in the form of the so-called Maidan revolution. The news magazine L’Obs described this action as a coup d’état. The well-known telephone conversation between Victoria Nuland (US Assistant Secretary of State for Europe and Eurasia) and Geoffrey Pratt (US Ambassador in Kiev) makes this obvious. For it was not the Ukrainian people who were to determine the future members of the Ukrainian government, but the two American officials. But this did not bother official Europe.
  Likewise, the West was not offended by the fact that the first legislative act of this parliament abolished Russian as an official language with equal rights in 2014, as provided for by a law of 2012. Another explosive device. And so it goes on: the leader of the largest parliamentary opposition party is arrested. Three Russian-language television channels are closed down. Moscow-friendly media are banned.
  That such action turned the Russian-speaking population against those they had not elected is understandable. This rebellion led the NATO military and the Ukrainian government to consider the population in the Donbass and Crimea as foreign enemy forces. This started the war against the Russian-speaking part in eastern Ukraine, which cost an estimated 14,000 lives. More than 80% of them were civilians.
  In Crimea, too, the Russian-speaking people were incensed. Baud again guides the reader through the recent history of Crimea using sources. Beginning with the cession of Crimea to Ukraine in 1954, he proves that even this cession was not legal, because it was not approved by the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, nor by the Soviet of the Russian Socialist Republic, nor by the Ukrainian Socialist Republic. Never before had the population of Crimea been under the rule of Kiev. It is therefore not surprising that the first autonomy referendum – still in the times of the USSR – in Crimea on 12 February 1991 was approved by 93.6 %. Such a vote was repeated in Crimea in 2014, after the government they had elected in Kiev was overthrown and after the incumbent government had decided to abolish Russian as an official language, thus undermining the protection of minorities. Unsurprisingly, this time too, the vote in favour of affiliation to Russia was 96.77 %. In the West, people spoke of annexation and justified this with the presence of Russian soldiers and “little green men”. Baud explains that Russia had a stationing agreement with Ukraine until 2042. According to the treaty, the limited number of soldiers was allowed to move across the entire Crimea. The fact is, as Baud says, that the population of Crimea joined forces with the territorial militias, the armed volunteers and, above all, the 35,000 Ukrainian defectors to defend themselves against the attacks from Kiev and to vote together. The West’s suggestion that there were soldiers in Crimea without recognisable insignia, soldiers who were immediately labelled as Putin’s agents, turned out to be false. For it was the Ukrainian defectors who tore off their army insignia. Baud sums up that there had been no Russian invasion either in the Donbass or in Crimea in 2014.

Why did Putin decide
to attack Ukraine?

Since the attempt to peacefully settle the 2014 conflict through the Minsk I and Minsk II agreements, Putin has never stopped demanding the implementation of these agreements. As a reminder, these were never about territorial delimitation, but always about administrative autonomy while retaining Ukrainian citizenship. The way the West has dealt with these agreements makes it clear that it not only does not keep promises made, but not even treaties under international law. Merkel, Hollande and Poroshenko even boast that they never took these agreements seriously.
  What does one do with such negotiating partners who stoop to amplifying the bluster of American representation in the media and prophesying an imminent Russian invasion of Ukraine on 16 February 2022? Alleged evidence for this were American satellite photos that were supposed to show military equipment and military units. However, these were quickly withdrawn after it became known that Russian troops, more than 200 km from the Ukrainian border, were close to the Belarusian border.
  In order to provoke Putin’s intervention, Ukrainian forces began to increase the shelling of the Donbass republics. The OSCE documented the increase in shelling since 16 February. Until now, Putin had hesitated to recognise the Donbass republics even after a decision to that effect by the Russian parliament, the Duma. This changed under the conditions of the continuous shelling. On 21 February 2022, the Donbass republics were recognised. Consequently, “treaties on friendship, cooperation and mutual assistance” were concluded at the same time. As the Donbass republics expected a large-scale offensive by Ukraine on their territory, they asked Russia for military support on 23 February 2022. Russia decided in favour of the “special military operation” on the basis of Article 51 of the United Nations Charter, as well as on the basis of Responsibility to Protect.
  For those who still have doubts about the intentions of Western actors after Baud’s explanations up to this point, Baud submits the statements of Oleksej Arestowitch, advisor and spokesman for President Selensky, who already admitted on 18 March 2019 to plans for one or even several major wars with Russia. He gave the interview to the Ukrainian channel Apostrof TV:
  “With a probability of 99.9 %, our price for joining NATO is a big war with Russia. […] A conflict bigger than today. Or a series of conflicts of this kind. But in this conflict, we will be very actively supported by the West.” (p. 196 f.)
  For those who want to find their way through the thicket of daily propaganda, not only from the state media, to see more clearly what the path to a peaceful solution might be, this book is highly recommended. Taking the author’s concern further can bring us all a step further towards dialogue, towards settling the conflict.  •