Pat Buchanan: What to Do About That Russian Ultimatum

[mystery-ak]

What to Do About That Russian Ultimatum
Pat Buchanan

Posted: Dec 21, 2021 12:01 AM

"Get off our front porch. Get out of our front yard. And stay out of our backyard."

This might stand as a crude summary of two draft security pacts Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei A. Ryabkov delivered last week as Russia's price for resolving the crisis created by those 100,000 Russian troops on Ukraine's borders.

Ryabkov's demands appear to be a virtual ultimatum, designed to be rejected by the U.S. and NATO and provide Moscow with a pretext for an invasion and occupation of part or all of Ukraine.

Among the maximalist Russian demands:

Written guarantees from NATO that it will not admit into the 70-year-old Cold War alliance any more ex-Soviet republics, specifically, Ukraine, Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan.

Offensive weapons are to be kept out of nations that border Russia.

The U.S. and Russia should keep their warships and strategic bombers away from each other's territory. The U.S. should forgo planting military bases in any of the five "stans," the Central Asian nations that once were part of the USSR.

NATO should withdraw military infrastructure it has placed in Eastern European states after 1997.

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https://townhall.com/columnists/patbuchanan/2021/12/21/what-to-do-about-that-russian-ultimatum-n2600846

[Kamaji]

From a strictly U.S.-Russian strategic point of view, we should agree to those demands so long as Russia agrees that it will not station any troops or other offensive weapons in those countries either, and that if it does, NATO is entitled to view such actions as aggression directly against NATO.

It won't be such a great result for those border countries, but there really is something to be said for having a series of nonaligned border countries between Russia and current NATO members.