Pity Ukraine’s poor president Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

He’s sanctioned all this fighting, seen the terrible destruction of Ukrainian cities and towns, watched as a million Ukrainians have left his country for Canada, or Poland, or France and sacrificed tens of thousands of Ukrainians’ lives during the 500+ day war against Russia. 

All Zelenskyy really wanted in return was to join NATO. 

But the NATO bullies refused him and will always refuse him. 

They insisted that because of the war he and his Ukrainian stalwarts are bravely waging – NATO was not going to allow Ukraine into its club.  

That’s rich: the US, Canada, the UK and NATO allies are the ones sending every kind of war toy – drones, missiles, armoured tanks, ammunition, and now cluster bombs to arm Zelensky who is fighting Nato’s proxy war against Russia.  Since Feb. 2022, NATO members have sent tens of billions of dollars in economic, military and humanitarian aid to Ukraine .

Now those countries, that wanted Ukraine to pursue “maximalist war aims”   against Russia are telling Ukraine to bide its time and wait until the war is over.  Only  then will Ukraine be considered for membership in the elite club.

But I don’t believe it.  Neither does US author and political scientist Norman Finkelstein. He puts forward a cogent reason – it is because the US and its allies wanted to ensnare or entrap Russia into a war, to use up its resources and its men so Russia’s power would be a thing of the past. 

It must be galling for Zelenskyy:  Finland was admitted to NATO in April 2023.  And now here’s Sweden which has done little but sell the world ball-bearings and Volvos and offer open-faced sandwiches – but it’s going to get into NATO.  Though at first Turkey blocked Sweden from joining NATO because Sweden accepted Kurds as immigrants,  now Turkey has relented. 

US “myopia and arrogance”

After nearly 75 years, NATO, the post-second World War II bulwark against Communism has got a new lease on its sorry war-mongering life.  As Ted Carpenter of the Cato Institute (a pro-business, libertarian organization based in Washington DC) wrote in The Guardian in 2022,

“It was entirely predictable that Nato expansion would ultimately lead to a tragic, perhaps violent, breach of relations with Moscow. Perceptive analysts warned of the likely consequences, but those warnings went unheeded. We are now paying the price for the US foreign policy establishment’s myopia and arrogance.”

Ted Galen Carpenter, senior fellow for defence and foreign policy at the Cato Institute

The US pushes Ukraine to do its bidding– yet NATO’s respect for Ukraine seems to be skin deep. 

Featured image: War, Sorrow and Peace by artist Erhan Yalvaç (Turkey)