Långfredag den 15 april 2022, Faa'a, Huahine
En lugn dag där vi gick iland för att byta en burk 'fyra kryddor' till en burk kanel. Elisabeth hade tagit fel burk igår, innehållet har ju samma färg. Mängder med folk ute, supplyskeppet hade kommit in igår kväll och 'Aremiti 5', snabbfärjan till Tahiti, skulle anlända inom kort. Frukt, fisk och grönsaksförsäljning på gatan. Skratt och 'Ioarana' (hej) hördes överallt. Full aktivitet i de många små 'snacks' vid vägkanten. Mängder med turister. Ett underbart ställe.
Vi gick ifrån vimlet mot gendarmeriet och tandläkaren och fortsatte längre bort tills vi kom till nästa vik innan vi vände om. Jag hade gärna köpt en glass men köerna i 'Super-U' var långa så jag avstod. Vi tog jollen hem till 'Bengt' och badade istället.
På eftermiddagen tog vi jollen ut på revet för bad.
US, EU sacrificing Ukraine to 'weaken Russia': fmr. NATO adviser (greyzone.com)
"AARON MATÉ: Welcome to Pushback. I'm Aaron Maté. Joining me is Jacques Baud. He has served in a number of senior security and advisory positions at NATO, the UN, and with the Swiss military. He is also a former strategic intelligence officer with the Swiss Strategic Intelligence Service. Jacques, thank you for joining me.
JACQUES BAUD: I thank you for inviting me.
AARON MATÉ: Let me just start by asking you to talk more about your background and how it has informed your visibility into the crisis in Ukraine.
JACQUES BAUD: Well, as you just said, I'm a strategic intelligence officer. I used to be in charge of the Warsaw Pact forces in strategic...that was during the Cold War, but still, I have a good visibility on what's going on in Eastern Europe. I used to speak and read Russian as well, so that gives me some access to some documents. And recently I had been seconded to NATO as head of the struggle against proliferation of small arms. And in that capacity, I was involved in several projects from 2014 onwards with NATO in Ukraine.
And so, I know the context quite well. I was also monitoring the possible influx of small armaments in the Donbas in 2014. And I have also worked--because in my previous assignment in the UN, I used to work on the restoration of armoured forces, so when the Ukrainian armed forces got some problems with personnel issues, with suicide, with all these kinds of things that you had in 2014, also problems in recruiting military--I was asked to participate on the NATO side on several projects in restoring Ukrainian armed forces.
And so that's a little bit, in a nutshell, my background regarding this area.
AARON MATÉ: You've written a lengthy article which I will link to in the show notes for this segment, and you lay out the causes of the Ukraine conflict in three major areas.
There is the strategic level, the expansion of NATO; the political level, which is what you call the Western refusal to implement the Minsk agreements; and operationally, the continuous and repeated attacks on the civilian population of the Donbas over the past years and the dramatic increase in late February 2022. Let me ask you to start there.
Talk about what you call the dramatic increase on civilians inside the Donbas in February, the period that led to the Russian invasion, immediate period, and how this escalation of attacks, as you say, helped lead to this war, this Russian invasion.
JACQUES BAUD: Well, I think we have to understand, as you know, that the war in fact hasn't started on 24 February this year. It started already in 2014. But I think that the Russians always hoped that this conflict could be solved on a political level, in fact; I mean the Minsk agreements and all that. So, basically what led to the decision to launch an offensive in the Donbas was not what happened since 2014. There was a trigger for that, and the trigger is two things; I mean, it came in two phases, if you want.
The rest is the decision and the law adopted by [Volodymyr] Zelenskyy in March 2021--that means last year--to reconquer Crimea by force, and that started a build-up of the Russian armoured for...not the Russian, [rather] the Ukrainian armoured forces in the southern parts of the country. And so, I think the Russians were perfectly aware of this build-up. They were aware that an operation was to be launched against the Republics of the Donbas, but they did not know when, and, of course, they were just observing that, and then came the real trigger.
You may remember that--I think it was on the 16th of February--Joe Biden, during a press conference, told that he knew that the Russians would attack. And how would he know that? Because I still have some contacts, and nobody actually thought that the Russians--before end of January, beginning of February--I think nobody thought that the Russians would attack Ukraine. So, there must have been something that made Biden aware that the Russians would attack.
And this something, in fact, is the intensification of the artillery shelling of the Donbas starting on the 16th of February, and this increase in the shelling was observed, in fact, by the [Border] Observer Mission of the OSCE [Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe], and they recorded this increase of violation, and it's a massive violation. I mean, we are talking about something that is about 30 times more than what it used to be, because the last eight years you had a lot of violations from both sides, by the way.
But suddenly on the 16th of February you had a massive increase of violation on the Ukrainian side. So, for the Russians, Vladimir Putin in particular, that was the sign that the operation--the Ukrainian operation--was about to start. And then everything started; I mean, all the events came very quickly.
That means that if we look at the figures, you can see that there's, as I said, a massive increase from the 16th-17th, and then it reached kind of a maximum on the 18th of February, and that was continuing. And the Russian parliament, the Duma, also was aware of this possible offensive, and they passed a resolution asking Vladimir Putin to recognize the independence of the two self-proclaimed Republics in the Donbas. And that's what Putin decided to do on the 21st of February. And just after adopting the decrees, the law recognizing the independence of the two Republics, Vladimir Putin signed a friendship and assistance agreement with those two Republics.
Why did he do that? So that would allow the Republics to ask for military help in case of attack. And that's why, on the 24th of February when Vladimir Putin decided to launch the offensive, it could invoke Article 51 of the UN Charter that provides for assistance in case of attack."
Hela intervjun finns här: https://thegrayzone.com/2022/04/15/us-eu-sacrificing-ukraine-to-weaken-russia-fmr-nato-adviser/