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Panic in the street of Chişinău

Sunday, July 20, 2008
It might be an idea, judging from this:

"NATO proposes joint Black Sea naval drills with Russia".

Here, as an aide memoire is a map of the Black Sea:

And to illustrate matters further, NATO membership in the area:


That the Black Sea is black in the graphic is serendipitous rather than a deliberate joke.

So, Turkey, Greece, Romania and Bulgaria are in NATO, Ukraine and Jawjuh want in while the Rodina herself and Armenia (who knows who its friends are) do not want to join the club. That covers the entire littoral of the Black Sea. While the reach of the US 6th Fleet is such it could flatten pretty well everything within a range of a few thousand miles of the dead centre of the Black Sea, even some of the less capable navies in NATO should not be too stretched if they sought to bombard landlocked Moldova, all of about 20 miles from the coast.

So, Moldova Beethoven and tell Tchaikovsky the news... (Sorry)

(The article actually refers to mine clearing, but having decided I fancied doing the post I pressed ahead disregarding that minor mouche in the unguent).

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posted by Croydonian

NATO - "an aggressive imperialist bloc"?

Friday, January 25, 2008
That, apparently is what 51.9% of Ukrainians think. Not that they were asked a question pre-supposing the answer 'yes', I am sure.

I discovered this from a report at Novosti on a demo by all of 1,000 people in the streets of Kiev, opposing NATO membership. They chanted the snappy 'NATO is slavery for Slavs', inter alia.

The organisers look to be Communists and members of the imaginatively named 'Party of Regions'. The latter is more a party of region, singular, given that its support looks to be entirely in the eastern, Russified, part of Ukraine. Said party has a website available in Russian and English, if not in the nation's official language.

I am not entirely sure that the English language site has been written by folk with any great fluency in my language, but it does have a certain surreal poetry:

"We will not allow the thousand year common history with Russia was destroyed by some beekeeper. That’s why NATO membership consequences will be worsening the relations with Russia".

Perhaps one of those leading the demo will do a Solana, and end up leading it.

Meanwhile, some 731 miles from Kiev as the Mig-29 flies, the Macedonians seem oblivious to the prospect of helotry under NATO, as Nikola Gruevski, Macedonian PM (and a chap, by the way) is all for taking his country into the organisation, joining fellow Slavs both next door and those nestled in the Carpathians and further north.

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posted by Croydonian

NATO - is it actually an 'Organisation' at all?

Wednesday, October 24, 2007
Way back lost in the mists of time, a dysfunctional state wedged between France and the Netherlands proved remarkably unhelpful when it came to selling us ammunition during Gulf War I.

And now this is being replayed, only with rather higher stakes in the Afghanistan War, with our Canadian friends getting the back of the hand treatment:

"NATO plans to rent helicopters to resupply front lines and remote bases in southern Afghanistan – an unprecedented move that could reduce ground casualties even as it exposes the unwillingness of major European allies to send their choppers into dangerous, Taliban-infested areas.... Canada [is] the only country with a major fighting role in southern Afghanistan that has no applicable helicopters of its own...Italy, Spain and France are among the Western European countries with large numbers of big, modern helicopters protected by sophisticated anti-missile defences and flown by highly trained crews. All three countries have turned a deaf ear to repeated pleas to deploy their aircraft to southern Afghanistan. In the past few weeks, NATO Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer made a final appeal for military-transport helicopters. He was turned down by Germany, France, Turkey, Spain and Greece, according to a NATO source".

What in the name of all that is holy, or come to that, profane, is the point of an alliance where members fail to pull their weight and will not risk materiel in combat? Are the helicopters more precious than the lives of the men putting their lives on the line?

Shameful, simply shameful.

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posted by Croydonian

Roll over Amazon.com

Friday, September 21, 2007
Let me present the Nato e-bookshop:

And what a lot of things they've got available for downloading or ordering, and in an awesome array of languages too, ranging from Albanian to Uzbek.

"Helping secure Afghanistan's future" is available in Pashto and Dari, and is doubtless popular fire side reading for the Taliban.

Perhaps more alarming is the range of publications available in Russian, including "Improving capabilities to meet new threats" and "The Nato Handbook". I appreciate that there will be English speakers at the FSB, (the Russian Secret Service) and the effort to translate NATO's opuses is unlikely to bring Mother Russia to her knees, but is this really that good an idea?

Nothing in Arabic or Chinese though, which is a comfort of sorts.



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posted by Croydonian

Well, that's one way of putting it....

Wednesday, April 25, 2007
The Secretary General of NATO, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, on the death of Yeltsin:

"I was saddened to learn of the death of Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin, First President of the Russian Federation. President Yeltsin will be remembered for his courage in charting a new, democratic course for his country. He was also at the forefront of the effort to overcome the legacy of the Cold War by forging a new relationship between Russia and the North Atlantic Alliance. This historic effort to set aside the fears and stereotypes of the past in favour of cooperation in facing the challenges of the future, enshrined in the NATO-Russia Founding Act that bears President Yeltsin’s signature, continues to this day". Source

Might not 'Cheers mate, you made our jobs a lot easier' have been rather punchier?

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posted by Croydonian