chimera wrote on Aug 4^th, 2024 at 12:45pm:


From the point of view of the West, this is a temporary state.

Here is what you can read on the NATO website in the section “De-bunking Russian disinformation on NATO”:

"Myth:
Ukraine will not join NATO

FACT
Ukraine will become a member of NATO. NATO supports the every country's right to choose its own security arrangements, including Ukraine. NATO's door remains open. NATO Allies decide on NATO membership. Russia does not have a veto.

At the Vilnius Summit, Allies reaffirmed the commitment they made at the 2008 Summit in Bucharest that Ukraine will become a member of the Alliance when conditions are met and Allies agree. They agreed to remove the requirement for a Membership Action Plan, changing Ukraine's membership path from a two-step to a one-step process.

NATO is stepping up its political and practical cooperation with Ukraine. President Zelenskyy attended the first meeting of the NATO-Ukraine Council at the Vilnius Summit, a platform for crisis consultation and decision-making between equals.

NATO has also agreed a new multi-year assistance programme to help the Ukrainian armed forces transition from Soviet-era to NATO standards and strengthen Ukraine's security and defence sector to resist further Russian aggression. Ukraine is already closer to NATO that it has ever been. In Vilnius, Allied leaders reiterated that Ukraine's future is in NATO."


There you can also read the following information.
"Myth:
NATO promised Russia it would not expand after the Cold War

FACT
Such an agreement was never made. NATO’s door has been open to new members since it was founded in 1949. This has never changed. No treaty signed by NATO Allies and Russia included provisions on NATO membership. Decisions on NATO membership are taken by consensus among all Allies. Russia does not have a veto.

The idea of NATO enlargement beyond a united Germany was not on the agenda in 1989, particularly as the Warsaw Pact still existed until 1991. Mikhail Gorbachev said in an interview in 2014: "The topic of 'NATO expansion' was not discussed at all, and it wasn't brought up in those years. I say this with full responsibility. Not a single Eastern European country raised the issue, not even after the Warsaw Pact ceased to exist in 1991. Western leaders didn't bring it up either."

Individual Allies cannot make agreements on NATO’s behalf. President Clinton consistently refused Boris Yeltsin's offer to commit that no former Soviet Republics would join NATO: "I can't make commitments on behalf of NATO, and I'm not going to be in the position myself of vetoing NATO expansion with respect to any country, much less letting you or anyone else do so… NATO operates by consensus," he said.

The wording “NATO expansion” is already part of the myth. NATO did not hunt for new members or want to “expand eastward.” NATO respects every nation’s right to choose its own path. NATO membership is a decision for NATO Allies and those countries who wish to join alone."



But on the website of The National Security Archive of George Washington University, you can read this:
"Memorandum to Boris Yeltsin from Russian Supreme Soviet delegation to NATO HQs
.......
Woerner [NATO Secretary General] stressed that the NATO Council and he are against the expansion of NATO (13 out of 16 NATO members support this point of view).  In the near future, at his meeting with L. Walesa and the Romanian leader A. Iliescu, he will oppose Poland and Romania joining NATO, and earlier this was stated to Hungary and Czechoslovakia. We should not allow, stated M. Woerner, the isolation of the USSR from the European community.
....."

Date
Jul 1, 1991

Description
This document is important for describing the clear message in 1991 from the highest levels of NATO – Secretary General Manfred Woerner – that NATO expansion was not happening. The audience was a Russian Supreme Soviet delegation, which in this memo was reporting back to Boris Yeltsin (who in June had been elected president of the Russian republic, largest in the Soviet Union), but no doubt Gorbachev and his aides were hearing the same assurance at that time. The emerging Russian security establishment was already worried about the possibility of NATO expansion, so in June 1991 this delegation visited Brussels to meet NATO’s leadership, hear their views about the future of NATO, and share Russian concerns.
.....
This memo on the Woerner conversation was written by three prominent reformers and close allies of Yeltsin—Sergey Stepashin (chairman of the Duma’s Security Committee and future deputy minister of Security and prime minister), Gen. Konstantin Kobets (future chief military inspector of Russia after he was the highest-ranking Soviet military officer to support Yeltsin during the August 1991 coup) and Gen. Dmitry Volkogonov (Yeltsin’s adviser on defense and security issues, future head of the U.S.-Russian Joint Commission on POW-MIA and prominent military historian). 

Ukraine belongs to
Ukraine  []
Russia    []
Please tick only 1 box.
On a scale of 1 to 10, are you weakly or strongly of that opinion?
(Answers above 10 are forbidden).

chimera wrote on Aug 4^th, 2024 at 4:02pm:


USA [10] 


On the Oakland Institute website you can read the article Who Really Benefits from the Creation of a Land Market in Ukraine?, dated August 6, 2021.

"Although Ukraine has large swaths of the most fertile farmland in the world, the wealth of its agriculture sector has long remained largely out of reach of the country’s farmers. In the country known as the “breadbasket of Europe,” agriculture has been dominated by oligarchs and multinational corporations since the privatization of state-owned land following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. For the past thirty years, no government has been able to meaningfully challenge that status quo.
.......
The law, “On Amendments to Certain Laws of Ukraine on the Conditions of Turnover of Agricultural Land” (Law 552-IX), is a crucial plank of the liberalizing agenda championed by President Volodymyr Zelensky and the Western international institutions that support his government. It was passed by the Verkhovna Rada, Ukraine’s unicameral legislature, in March 2020 as a condition for the financially imperiled government to receive a US$5 billion loan from the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
......
While reliable data on who is leasing Ukrainian farmland is hard to find (many leases are not registered), the Land Matrix database lists large-scale land deals totaling 3.4 million hectares by both Ukrainian and foreign companies; other estimates place the amount of land leased by the largest corporations operating in Ukraine at over six million hectares. The largest farmland holder is Kernel, owned by a Ukrainian citizen but registered in Luxembourg, with about 570,500 hectares; followed by UkrLandFarming (570,000 hectares), US private equity firm NCH Capital (430,000 hectares), MHP (370,000 hectares), and Astarta (250,000 hectares). Other major players include Saudi conglomerate Continental Farmers Group with 195,000 hectares (a majority shareholder is the Saudi Agricultural and Livestock Investment Company, owned by the sovereign wealth fund of Saudi Arabia), and French agricultural company AgroGeneration with 120,000 hectares.
.......
Thirty years after the disastrous privatization of land that took place with their support in the 1990s, international financial institutions such as the IMF and World Bank have succeeded in lifting the moratorium that had been established to prevent the takeover of Ukraine’s land by a minority of private interests.

The above analysis makes it clear that imposing the creation of a land market in Ukraine will further concentrate control of land in the hands of oligarchs and large agribusinesses, while favoring the interests of foreign investors and banks. It is unfortunately the vast majority of Ukrainian farmers and citizens who will have to pay the cost."

Chimera's poll ...

Not sure if the level out of 10 will work.

chimera wrote on Aug 5^th, 2024 at 3:10am:


The US annexed almost all countries.

If you still don’t know whose Ukraine is, then go to YouTube and watch Victoria Nuland handing out cookies on the Maidan.

If you still don’t know whose Ukraine is, then go to YouTube and watch Joe Biden talk about how he replaced the Prosecutor General of Ukraine under Obama and Poroshenko.

chimera wrote on Aug 6^th, 2024 at 7:33am:


The United States often operates from within other countries. Through a huge number of different NGOs, through various training programs for people from other countries. Therefore, such a strong noise is raised in the Western media when any country (for example, Russia and Georgia) tries to protect themselves from this by passing laws on foreign agents so that the latter bring into the public sphere the fact of their financing from foreign states.

Putin sends arms to Iran - the arse end of his New Axis in Europe.....

Putin says Diana was assassinated - does he hope the morale of the British Army will plummet as a result?

WTF is he playing with under that table ... hands out of your pockets, Vlad...

Iran alone has the chance of a snowflake in high summer... Russia is just screaming for some reserves ... maybe Steiner can rush in or something - after a Ukraine offensive drove a hole in their lines.....

chimera wrote on Aug 8^th, 2024 at 4:59pm:


I wonder what economic successes have these countries demonstrated over the years?

For example, how often do you buy Czech goods that are made in Czech-owned factories?