Post by Wayne Hall on Mar 4, 2022 2:30:16 GMT -5
The War in Ukraine: two approaches
1. Dimitris Kazakis
Free Pen
HUMANITY IS LIVING THROUGH CRITICAL TIMES
Presenter: Good evening ladies and gentlemen. Welcome again to our station and to Free Pen. The events in Ukraine will be the subject of our program today, with our guest the President of the United Popular Front (EPAM) Mr. Dimitris Kazakis. I think we will have the opportunity to have an interesting discussion. So I hand over immediately to him. Mr. Kazakis good evening.
Kazakis: Good evening, and good evening to the friends watching us.
Presenter: Thank you for being with us again. We spoke not long ago and we are speaking again today. I think it is a question that concerns all Greeks. And so it should, of course. I don't know what your view is, as a first statement on what we see happening there.
Kazakis: Look in any case I said from the first moment that the Americans started forcing the Russians to intervene, with all the escalation we saw from January this year we moved into a new strategic period, in which we will experience a world war. In the traditional sense of a world war. I think the 24th February 2022 will be recorded by historians of the future as the beginning of this process. The transformation is as significant as that.
Presenter: So will the hostilities spread?
Kazakis: Is is absolutely certain. It is already opening up on many fronts. First and foremost with Europe. The European Union is entirely subordinated to the Americans. There is not the slightest differentiation. Why? Because they are entirely dependent on the Americans. Not only militarily, as they were before. And the military presence of the United States is being strengthened. But they are dependent fiscally. And of course with energy. Tell me, how will Germany, for example, cover their enormous energy needs now that Nordstream 2 is not going to happen, is not going to function. How will they be covered? It will necessarily resort to the energy of the United States and whatever other source appears. Already today...
Presenter: Didn't Germany know that?
Kazakis: They knew, and that why, if you noticed, in the initial phase they were very careful and Scholz said: "No, it isn't so urgent. Let's see what we can do though diplomacy." They had sent Borrell, the representative of the European Union and he had made conciliatory declarations in January 2022, and indeed when Scholz made a strange statement to the Americans that we will reach an understanding with the Russians on the diplomatic plane he was immediately summoned to the White House and Biden gave him an earful, with a declaration of Biden in front of him that the United States and Germany are "interlocked", as he characteristically said. They are tightly linked. After this meeting Germany began to be aligned with the political decisions of the United States . And that is an unpleasant development. What were the Germans afraid of? Their own impoverishment. That's what they were afraid of. Mainly, but not only. Many fronts are being opened up: the front with China. The Chinese are now saying: "Precisely what Ukraine is for Russia, Taiwan is for us." And immediately we are having serious developments everywhere. Note Israel's position. Israel's distancing itself from condemning the alleged invasion of Ukraine by Russia. All of the fronts of global politics have opened up. You will see developments in Latin America, where the United States will open the fronts with Venezuela, Nicaragua. In Nicaragua, for example, at this moment Russian construction companies with Chinese funding are opening a competing canal in Panama. Bear in mind that that historically in 1914 when Nicaragua signed a similar agreement, with Japan at that time, it triggered United States military intervention in Nicaragua. So, that is the situation we are in. An escalation. In any case the economic countermeasures that are being taken, the celebrated sanctions, are nothing more than an element of economic warfare for which it is hard to find a historical equivalent.
Presenter: And which of course will have their effects on European citizens, and by extension European households. I think that is clear.
Kazakis: Of course. Europe already .... as a whole but above all the eurozone at this moment - because the eurozone has the main problem: it has no way of exerting a national monetary and fiscal policy. It sticks tightly together against inflationary situations. It's no joke what we're living through now.
Presenter: So in the face of what is coming, you are saying that the Corona virus was clearly a joke. We will see much worse situations.
Kazakis: I think that it is a fitting conclusion to the pandemic in the way that it was instrumentalized. The pandemic, a question that has to do with dealing with an epidemic virus that could have been handled in the way that epidemics are always handled, was instrumentalized, in effect was dealt with through the methods of a military operation. So that we have the fitting conclusion: we go into a real war. After a simulation of war with the Corona virus we go into a real war. Or into a real World War.
Presenter: So you say that Putin, according to what you said just now, will expand the war, will continue after Ukraine, will go further? Is that what you mean?
Kazakis: No. I don't think he will go further. I think his aim was to neutralize the threat from Ukraine. Of course he is facing other threats. What there is in the Caucasus, with Georgia, where there are already the problems with Ossetia and Abkhazia. There is the well-known problem of Nagorno-Karabakh and the Muslim regions of the former Soviet Union: Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, and so on. I think that Putin will try to unite, to bring together all of that living space so as not to have the problem of them starting wars, of launching an Afghanistan situation, in his soft underbelly. Remember, or rather you will have read, the article by Madeleine Allbright in the New York Times which says exactly that: to transform the Western border regions of Russia into Afghanistan. So, that is exactly what Putin was worried about and that is why he launched the military operation, and when did he do it? When the previous day the European Union placed on the agenda of the emergency summit on the Ukraine situation the entry of Ukraine into the European Union and the granting of status of a candidate country. That was the casus belli for Putin.
Presenter: NATO bases there.
Kazakis: If that happened...... Of course. It goes together with NATO, in the same packet. A package deal with NATO. So Putin made two moves. One move, which was to be expected, from the moment that on 15th February hostilities commenced in Donbass. I'm not the one saying that: it is being said by OSCE observers, whose reports for some strange reason received no publicity at all, at least in the Western press. An escalation of hostilities, with heavy weapons. Well, in this region, what did Putin do? The obvious: he recognized the autonomous regions and stationed military forces to put a brake on this activity. The fighting by the Ukrainian army. Well, when Zelensky came out and asked for admission into the European Union and the Commission says "Yes, we'll discuss it at the summit meeting", that was decisive for the military operation. I don't believe that from the outset Putin had it in mind to invade, or to launch a military operation for occupation of Ukraine. It happened because it was provoked and, look, very simply, imagine that he had permitted it, because the alternative was to allow to get under way some diplomatic moves and to allow the admission of Ukraine into the European Union and then into NATO. It would be done at the same time, of course, in this story. In other words the deployment of NATO forces on Ukrainian territory. What would he be able to do then? Nothing whatsoever. He would be permitting a wedge to be driven into the soft underbelly of Russia. He couldn't do it.
Presenter: It would be suicidal for Putin. Obviously.
Kazakis: Of course it would. It has become a one-way street for him. He has some of the responsibility. Of course he has. He is seriously responsible.
Presenter: What are his responsibilities?
Kazakis: He didn't do what he should have done in 2014.
Presenter: In the Donbass region. Yes.
Kazakis: Not only. If you remember, Yanukovych had requested political asylum and he was overthrown by the coup which occurred in Ukraine. And it is well-known that it was organized by Mrs. Nuland and the American leadership.
Presenter: As a parenthesis, and pardon me for interrupting, but it made a great impression on me that referring to that event some reports today mention democratic processes of election of today's Ukrainian president.
Kazakis: Yes, but they forget, very conveniently, that all the presidents that have been overturned since 2014 ended up in prison or accused of criminal activity. What we have are not elections but settlements of accounts between rival factions of the mafia, of organized crime. Mr. Zelensky too is accused, and indeed officially, in his country, for implication in organized crime. So, a country which, apart from the de-communistification that it carried out in 2014 - they demolished the statues of Lenin and others from the time of the Soviet Union - do you know what else they did? They demolished monuments relating to Hellenic civilization. And nobody talks about this. They closed the schools. They closed the academies. They forbade Russians, Greeks and Jews to practise freely their language, their culture, their traditions and customs, and also their religion. They reached the point, under Zelensky, of rejecting the monument, one of the great monuments to the Holocaust, Babi Yar, saying that it wasn't Jews who were murdered there by the Nazis, but Ukrainians murdered by Stalin. They demolished the monument. If it hadn't been for Israel saying "stop", for Israel's own reasons, you understand what I mean, because they have a franchise on the Holocaust. "Come on. Careful now. Don't take it as far as that." What democratic Ukraine can we talk about? Are we out of our minds?
Presenter: Go on about Putin's responsibilities. Is he responsible for 2014?
Kazakis: At that time, when Yanukovych requested political asylum and asked for help against the coup, Putin did not react. He should then have made a political contribution and have prevented the massacres which were carried out by the Nazi militias. Here in Greece we should remember Mariupol, where people were slaughtered by the Azov Detachment, with its Nazi symbols.
Presenter: Why didn't Putin do that in 2014?
Kazakis: Because I think that he imagined he could reach some kind of agreement with the West by diplomatic means. This is why he proceeded with the celebrated Minsk Agreement. The first agreement was in 2014, the second in 2015 and there was a protocol afterwards which had to do with peace in the region. But one basic question was not resolved and this turned out to be the key to the whole problem. The demand for national self-determination of the Russians of Donbass was not dealt with. You can't close your eyes to that and just say that there should be a cease-fire and the heavy weapons be moved away. Fine, so what's going to happen with that population? And all of those who are massacred and tear their hair out about the territorial integrity of Ukraine, I'm sorry, they forget that they broke up an entire country called Yugoslavia. They established statelets out of nothing in the name of national self-determination of minorities, or if you like of nationalities, most of which don't even exist. Have we forgotten about that? Here we have a Russian population that took up arms. How do you ignore that? Shouldn't it have been resolved? In what way? I don't say that it should be by force. Give that population the opportunity to vote, and say: who do I want to go with? With Ukraine or with Russia? Isn't that provided for under international law? Who didn't keep to it, given that the law exists? Those who didn't keep to it were first and foremost NATO, the European Union who were continually reinforcing the arrogance of the governments of Kiev, who regarded these people as terrorists and continued a war which Kiev itself admitted killed 14,000 people.
Presenter: Obviously wanting to entrap Putin, isn't that so? They used the....
Kazakis: Of course. That's the problem about Putin's responsibilities. The delay. The postponenment. And the secret diplomacy. "Come on. Let's find where we agree. You take this and I take that." And the situation got to the present point.
Presenter: To extremes. So from 2014 a situation was organized there. The European Union and NATO used Ukraine, seeking to trap Putin. So that he wouldn't know what else to do. To show Putin that it has power. Watch out. We are in charge. Obviously that.
Kazakis: Naturally. Along with the fact that NATO had it in its planning, and this is not me saying it, if you look in NATO texts, the 17th Congress of the Warsaw Pact and the following Congresses, and various studies, NATO's aim was to exclude Russia from all the regions of the former Soviet Union such as the Baltic, Belarus, Ukraine, and everything underneath. This automatically takes away Russia's ability to have a fleet in the Black Sea, that is, to have access to the Black Sea but also to the Baltic. Don't forget that between Belarus and the Baltic countries there is Murmansk which, for Russia, is the headquarters of the North Sea fleet. It is an enclave, if you look at it, an enclave between those countries. The objective, in any case, from the outset, if you read even from the time of the doctrine of Bush Senior, the father, what did it say, the aim was to break Russia up so that there could never again be a power with the capacity to challenge the hegemony of the United States. That was their doctrine. And it is not I who am saying it. Read it as published, if I remember correctly, in March 1992, all this statement of U.S. strategy in the New York Times. That is the strategy that the United States pursues and continues to pursue. It is just that from 2017 onwards that had to face really existing forces which, if you like, were all competing also with the United States. That doesn't mean that the United States has lost its global hegemony but this is why, in 2017, in the United States national strategy of President Trump, at that time, there is a reference, for the first time, to an upgrading of the threat from Russia and China, to number one threat for the United States, as against terrorism, which until then had been the number one threat. So this showdown has been under preparation for very many years.
And something else. I am really amazed at the off-handed analyses claiming that Putin wants to re-establish Czarist Russia, or the Russian Empire and draw into question the post-Cold-War architecture, to begin with. Let's get a few things straight: any leader of any country has every right to challenge a situation which has led the Balkans, Europe, Asia, Africa, Latin America, into never-ending wars. Do we forget what the post-Cold-War architecture did to the Balkans?
Presenter: You are right. That's very true and anyone who doesn't see it perhaps should see things from another point of view. Truly very important....
Kazakis: And what, if not that architecture, made it possible for Turkey today to demand things that would have been unthinkable, even for Turkey, until before this development, which is such an important development?
Presenter: Well. Mr Kazakis.What should Greece do in this particular case? I imagine you would not agree with the position taken by the Prime Minister a few days ago.
Kazakis: For a start, I find it insulting. They couldn't care less about the deeper crisis this country is going through, is on the one hand insulting and on the other I don't understand it. What is this anti-Russian mania? I don't understand it. Where was the government when Greeks were being continually hunted down in Ukraine? What did it do for those Greeks? A population of 200,000 who are not..... they are locally born. For anyone who knows history they are obviously....The people governing have no idea of history. A Hellenic population has been up there since Mycenaean times. And now what are the government's plans? To uproot them. That is the only way I can interpret the plan for "saving the Greeks" as they say. To uproot them, to finish the work of the Ukrainian SS.
What can I say? What should the government do? What it should do is first and foremost communicate to Putin and tell him that we are seriously interested in the Greek population of the area. And we demand that there should be observers, but also Greek task forces there to make available all possible assistance. To ensure both that there will not be victims nor unarmed people being massacred. Nothing of all that.
Do you seriously believe that Putin would turn his back on us if there were a contact of that kind, as the Americans and Europeans do?
Presenter: I don't imagine so. I don't want to believe it, and I don't believe it.
Kazakis: But anyway, even if he did, but I don't believe it either. For his own reasons, not because he is a Philhellene. For his own reasons. Because he is looking for allies at this time. Justifiably. But brother, do the obvious,
Presenter: I am afraid that....
Kazakis: It isn't possible to leave one's country at the mercy of neo-nazis in Kiev.
Presenter: That is what has been happening lately. More and more intensely, I think.
Kazakis: This fashion was started by Mr. Tsipras, to call things by their name. He was the first prime minister, senior representative of a European country, to visit Ukraine and extend his congratulations to the neo-Nazis of Kiev.
Presenter: And it is being continued now by the present government.
Kazakis: By Mr. Mitsotakis.
Presenter: Because finally on the big questions that this country has to face SYRIZA and New Democracy are absolutely on the same page.
Kazakis: You are quite right. This is why I call today's parliament a single-party parliament with six parties. Because look at them. Even Mr. Velopoulos, who in a way differentiated himself from all the others, who in a solid bloc condemned Russia. In a way, but he didn't raise the essential questions. And what is this country supposed to do? Really. I raise it as a problematic. To all Greeks. If there was no NATO, just as there is no Warsaw Pact, isn't that so, if there was no NATO, wouldn't we be much less likely to see these wars breaking out in the heart of Europe?
Presenter: Of course.
Kazakis: NATO is the root of the trouble, isn't it?
Presenter: And the point is...
Kazakis: And for Russia isn't it the root of the trouble?
Presenter: Of course. And the point is it has put Ukraine into that kind of a process. And it is leaving it to its fate at this time. The President of Ukraine said that in a proclamation he made today. He said: "We are on our own. Where are they, to help us?"
Kazakis: Look, in any case, Ukraine was destined to become the terrain for a showdown with the Russians. That's what it was from the outset. It was obvious. When you transform Ukraine - what can one say? It's not a poor country. They made it poor. With massive poverty, massive emigration, and so on. What did the West do, after fourteen years of decommunising Ukraine, as they say officially. That's what they say. Essentially it's not true but let's use those words. That's what they say. What did they do? It was very simple. They built up the military sector, a remnant from the old Soviet war industry that existed in Ukraine. They established a huge mercenary army which consumes around half the country's GNP. I'm sorry, half the country's budget. An army to be ready to deal with, to attack, the Russians. That's what they did. And they abandoned the overwhelming majority of the Ukrainian population to abject poverty. And for politics a dictatorship of neo-fascists and organized crime. That was the great contribution of the West, of the civilized democratic West, to Ukraine.
Presenter: Well. I think your position is clear. You spoke a little earlier of a world war. I think we should try to clarify that. You said that you don't see Putin continuing. What do you mean by world war? An economic war?
Kazakis: No. But I do see.....Look, I'll tell you, characteristically. If they succeed at this moment in maintaining patches of resistance in the big cities of Ukraine, this will automatically cause a serious economic hemorrhage for Russia. That is to say, they will transform Ukraine into Syria. Are they able to do that? In my opinion, the faster the Russian army finishes its operations the fewer chances there are of them doing something like that. But I'm rather afraid that it has the Baltic in its vicinity, and it has the capacity to transform the Baltic into an Afghanistan, let us say, for Russia. So as to have a permanent hemorrhage. That's the kind of war I have in mind. But on the other hand, I don't know what is going to happen in the Middle East.
Presenter: You're worried about that, are you?
Kazakis: I don't know what Turkey is going to do in that connection. That's a question. Turkey - always as a neutral - has exploited situations in the worst possible way, particularly when the big powers clash.
1. Dimitris Kazakis
Free Pen
HUMANITY IS LIVING THROUGH CRITICAL TIMES
Presenter: Good evening ladies and gentlemen. Welcome again to our station and to Free Pen. The events in Ukraine will be the subject of our program today, with our guest the President of the United Popular Front (EPAM) Mr. Dimitris Kazakis. I think we will have the opportunity to have an interesting discussion. So I hand over immediately to him. Mr. Kazakis good evening.
Kazakis: Good evening, and good evening to the friends watching us.
Presenter: Thank you for being with us again. We spoke not long ago and we are speaking again today. I think it is a question that concerns all Greeks. And so it should, of course. I don't know what your view is, as a first statement on what we see happening there.
Kazakis: Look in any case I said from the first moment that the Americans started forcing the Russians to intervene, with all the escalation we saw from January this year we moved into a new strategic period, in which we will experience a world war. In the traditional sense of a world war. I think the 24th February 2022 will be recorded by historians of the future as the beginning of this process. The transformation is as significant as that.
Presenter: So will the hostilities spread?
Kazakis: Is is absolutely certain. It is already opening up on many fronts. First and foremost with Europe. The European Union is entirely subordinated to the Americans. There is not the slightest differentiation. Why? Because they are entirely dependent on the Americans. Not only militarily, as they were before. And the military presence of the United States is being strengthened. But they are dependent fiscally. And of course with energy. Tell me, how will Germany, for example, cover their enormous energy needs now that Nordstream 2 is not going to happen, is not going to function. How will they be covered? It will necessarily resort to the energy of the United States and whatever other source appears. Already today...
Presenter: Didn't Germany know that?
Kazakis: They knew, and that why, if you noticed, in the initial phase they were very careful and Scholz said: "No, it isn't so urgent. Let's see what we can do though diplomacy." They had sent Borrell, the representative of the European Union and he had made conciliatory declarations in January 2022, and indeed when Scholz made a strange statement to the Americans that we will reach an understanding with the Russians on the diplomatic plane he was immediately summoned to the White House and Biden gave him an earful, with a declaration of Biden in front of him that the United States and Germany are "interlocked", as he characteristically said. They are tightly linked. After this meeting Germany began to be aligned with the political decisions of the United States . And that is an unpleasant development. What were the Germans afraid of? Their own impoverishment. That's what they were afraid of. Mainly, but not only. Many fronts are being opened up: the front with China. The Chinese are now saying: "Precisely what Ukraine is for Russia, Taiwan is for us." And immediately we are having serious developments everywhere. Note Israel's position. Israel's distancing itself from condemning the alleged invasion of Ukraine by Russia. All of the fronts of global politics have opened up. You will see developments in Latin America, where the United States will open the fronts with Venezuela, Nicaragua. In Nicaragua, for example, at this moment Russian construction companies with Chinese funding are opening a competing canal in Panama. Bear in mind that that historically in 1914 when Nicaragua signed a similar agreement, with Japan at that time, it triggered United States military intervention in Nicaragua. So, that is the situation we are in. An escalation. In any case the economic countermeasures that are being taken, the celebrated sanctions, are nothing more than an element of economic warfare for which it is hard to find a historical equivalent.
Presenter: And which of course will have their effects on European citizens, and by extension European households. I think that is clear.
Kazakis: Of course. Europe already .... as a whole but above all the eurozone at this moment - because the eurozone has the main problem: it has no way of exerting a national monetary and fiscal policy. It sticks tightly together against inflationary situations. It's no joke what we're living through now.
Presenter: So in the face of what is coming, you are saying that the Corona virus was clearly a joke. We will see much worse situations.
Kazakis: I think that it is a fitting conclusion to the pandemic in the way that it was instrumentalized. The pandemic, a question that has to do with dealing with an epidemic virus that could have been handled in the way that epidemics are always handled, was instrumentalized, in effect was dealt with through the methods of a military operation. So that we have the fitting conclusion: we go into a real war. After a simulation of war with the Corona virus we go into a real war. Or into a real World War.
Presenter: So you say that Putin, according to what you said just now, will expand the war, will continue after Ukraine, will go further? Is that what you mean?
Kazakis: No. I don't think he will go further. I think his aim was to neutralize the threat from Ukraine. Of course he is facing other threats. What there is in the Caucasus, with Georgia, where there are already the problems with Ossetia and Abkhazia. There is the well-known problem of Nagorno-Karabakh and the Muslim regions of the former Soviet Union: Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, and so on. I think that Putin will try to unite, to bring together all of that living space so as not to have the problem of them starting wars, of launching an Afghanistan situation, in his soft underbelly. Remember, or rather you will have read, the article by Madeleine Allbright in the New York Times which says exactly that: to transform the Western border regions of Russia into Afghanistan. So, that is exactly what Putin was worried about and that is why he launched the military operation, and when did he do it? When the previous day the European Union placed on the agenda of the emergency summit on the Ukraine situation the entry of Ukraine into the European Union and the granting of status of a candidate country. That was the casus belli for Putin.
Presenter: NATO bases there.
Kazakis: If that happened...... Of course. It goes together with NATO, in the same packet. A package deal with NATO. So Putin made two moves. One move, which was to be expected, from the moment that on 15th February hostilities commenced in Donbass. I'm not the one saying that: it is being said by OSCE observers, whose reports for some strange reason received no publicity at all, at least in the Western press. An escalation of hostilities, with heavy weapons. Well, in this region, what did Putin do? The obvious: he recognized the autonomous regions and stationed military forces to put a brake on this activity. The fighting by the Ukrainian army. Well, when Zelensky came out and asked for admission into the European Union and the Commission says "Yes, we'll discuss it at the summit meeting", that was decisive for the military operation. I don't believe that from the outset Putin had it in mind to invade, or to launch a military operation for occupation of Ukraine. It happened because it was provoked and, look, very simply, imagine that he had permitted it, because the alternative was to allow to get under way some diplomatic moves and to allow the admission of Ukraine into the European Union and then into NATO. It would be done at the same time, of course, in this story. In other words the deployment of NATO forces on Ukrainian territory. What would he be able to do then? Nothing whatsoever. He would be permitting a wedge to be driven into the soft underbelly of Russia. He couldn't do it.
Presenter: It would be suicidal for Putin. Obviously.
Kazakis: Of course it would. It has become a one-way street for him. He has some of the responsibility. Of course he has. He is seriously responsible.
Presenter: What are his responsibilities?
Kazakis: He didn't do what he should have done in 2014.
Presenter: In the Donbass region. Yes.
Kazakis: Not only. If you remember, Yanukovych had requested political asylum and he was overthrown by the coup which occurred in Ukraine. And it is well-known that it was organized by Mrs. Nuland and the American leadership.
Presenter: As a parenthesis, and pardon me for interrupting, but it made a great impression on me that referring to that event some reports today mention democratic processes of election of today's Ukrainian president.
Kazakis: Yes, but they forget, very conveniently, that all the presidents that have been overturned since 2014 ended up in prison or accused of criminal activity. What we have are not elections but settlements of accounts between rival factions of the mafia, of organized crime. Mr. Zelensky too is accused, and indeed officially, in his country, for implication in organized crime. So, a country which, apart from the de-communistification that it carried out in 2014 - they demolished the statues of Lenin and others from the time of the Soviet Union - do you know what else they did? They demolished monuments relating to Hellenic civilization. And nobody talks about this. They closed the schools. They closed the academies. They forbade Russians, Greeks and Jews to practise freely their language, their culture, their traditions and customs, and also their religion. They reached the point, under Zelensky, of rejecting the monument, one of the great monuments to the Holocaust, Babi Yar, saying that it wasn't Jews who were murdered there by the Nazis, but Ukrainians murdered by Stalin. They demolished the monument. If it hadn't been for Israel saying "stop", for Israel's own reasons, you understand what I mean, because they have a franchise on the Holocaust. "Come on. Careful now. Don't take it as far as that." What democratic Ukraine can we talk about? Are we out of our minds?
Presenter: Go on about Putin's responsibilities. Is he responsible for 2014?
Kazakis: At that time, when Yanukovych requested political asylum and asked for help against the coup, Putin did not react. He should then have made a political contribution and have prevented the massacres which were carried out by the Nazi militias. Here in Greece we should remember Mariupol, where people were slaughtered by the Azov Detachment, with its Nazi symbols.
Presenter: Why didn't Putin do that in 2014?
Kazakis: Because I think that he imagined he could reach some kind of agreement with the West by diplomatic means. This is why he proceeded with the celebrated Minsk Agreement. The first agreement was in 2014, the second in 2015 and there was a protocol afterwards which had to do with peace in the region. But one basic question was not resolved and this turned out to be the key to the whole problem. The demand for national self-determination of the Russians of Donbass was not dealt with. You can't close your eyes to that and just say that there should be a cease-fire and the heavy weapons be moved away. Fine, so what's going to happen with that population? And all of those who are massacred and tear their hair out about the territorial integrity of Ukraine, I'm sorry, they forget that they broke up an entire country called Yugoslavia. They established statelets out of nothing in the name of national self-determination of minorities, or if you like of nationalities, most of which don't even exist. Have we forgotten about that? Here we have a Russian population that took up arms. How do you ignore that? Shouldn't it have been resolved? In what way? I don't say that it should be by force. Give that population the opportunity to vote, and say: who do I want to go with? With Ukraine or with Russia? Isn't that provided for under international law? Who didn't keep to it, given that the law exists? Those who didn't keep to it were first and foremost NATO, the European Union who were continually reinforcing the arrogance of the governments of Kiev, who regarded these people as terrorists and continued a war which Kiev itself admitted killed 14,000 people.
Presenter: Obviously wanting to entrap Putin, isn't that so? They used the....
Kazakis: Of course. That's the problem about Putin's responsibilities. The delay. The postponenment. And the secret diplomacy. "Come on. Let's find where we agree. You take this and I take that." And the situation got to the present point.
Presenter: To extremes. So from 2014 a situation was organized there. The European Union and NATO used Ukraine, seeking to trap Putin. So that he wouldn't know what else to do. To show Putin that it has power. Watch out. We are in charge. Obviously that.
Kazakis: Naturally. Along with the fact that NATO had it in its planning, and this is not me saying it, if you look in NATO texts, the 17th Congress of the Warsaw Pact and the following Congresses, and various studies, NATO's aim was to exclude Russia from all the regions of the former Soviet Union such as the Baltic, Belarus, Ukraine, and everything underneath. This automatically takes away Russia's ability to have a fleet in the Black Sea, that is, to have access to the Black Sea but also to the Baltic. Don't forget that between Belarus and the Baltic countries there is Murmansk which, for Russia, is the headquarters of the North Sea fleet. It is an enclave, if you look at it, an enclave between those countries. The objective, in any case, from the outset, if you read even from the time of the doctrine of Bush Senior, the father, what did it say, the aim was to break Russia up so that there could never again be a power with the capacity to challenge the hegemony of the United States. That was their doctrine. And it is not I who am saying it. Read it as published, if I remember correctly, in March 1992, all this statement of U.S. strategy in the New York Times. That is the strategy that the United States pursues and continues to pursue. It is just that from 2017 onwards that had to face really existing forces which, if you like, were all competing also with the United States. That doesn't mean that the United States has lost its global hegemony but this is why, in 2017, in the United States national strategy of President Trump, at that time, there is a reference, for the first time, to an upgrading of the threat from Russia and China, to number one threat for the United States, as against terrorism, which until then had been the number one threat. So this showdown has been under preparation for very many years.
And something else. I am really amazed at the off-handed analyses claiming that Putin wants to re-establish Czarist Russia, or the Russian Empire and draw into question the post-Cold-War architecture, to begin with. Let's get a few things straight: any leader of any country has every right to challenge a situation which has led the Balkans, Europe, Asia, Africa, Latin America, into never-ending wars. Do we forget what the post-Cold-War architecture did to the Balkans?
Presenter: You are right. That's very true and anyone who doesn't see it perhaps should see things from another point of view. Truly very important....
Kazakis: And what, if not that architecture, made it possible for Turkey today to demand things that would have been unthinkable, even for Turkey, until before this development, which is such an important development?
Presenter: Well. Mr Kazakis.What should Greece do in this particular case? I imagine you would not agree with the position taken by the Prime Minister a few days ago.
Kazakis: For a start, I find it insulting. They couldn't care less about the deeper crisis this country is going through, is on the one hand insulting and on the other I don't understand it. What is this anti-Russian mania? I don't understand it. Where was the government when Greeks were being continually hunted down in Ukraine? What did it do for those Greeks? A population of 200,000 who are not..... they are locally born. For anyone who knows history they are obviously....The people governing have no idea of history. A Hellenic population has been up there since Mycenaean times. And now what are the government's plans? To uproot them. That is the only way I can interpret the plan for "saving the Greeks" as they say. To uproot them, to finish the work of the Ukrainian SS.
What can I say? What should the government do? What it should do is first and foremost communicate to Putin and tell him that we are seriously interested in the Greek population of the area. And we demand that there should be observers, but also Greek task forces there to make available all possible assistance. To ensure both that there will not be victims nor unarmed people being massacred. Nothing of all that.
Do you seriously believe that Putin would turn his back on us if there were a contact of that kind, as the Americans and Europeans do?
Presenter: I don't imagine so. I don't want to believe it, and I don't believe it.
Kazakis: But anyway, even if he did, but I don't believe it either. For his own reasons, not because he is a Philhellene. For his own reasons. Because he is looking for allies at this time. Justifiably. But brother, do the obvious,
Presenter: I am afraid that....
Kazakis: It isn't possible to leave one's country at the mercy of neo-nazis in Kiev.
Presenter: That is what has been happening lately. More and more intensely, I think.
Kazakis: This fashion was started by Mr. Tsipras, to call things by their name. He was the first prime minister, senior representative of a European country, to visit Ukraine and extend his congratulations to the neo-Nazis of Kiev.
Presenter: And it is being continued now by the present government.
Kazakis: By Mr. Mitsotakis.
Presenter: Because finally on the big questions that this country has to face SYRIZA and New Democracy are absolutely on the same page.
Kazakis: You are quite right. This is why I call today's parliament a single-party parliament with six parties. Because look at them. Even Mr. Velopoulos, who in a way differentiated himself from all the others, who in a solid bloc condemned Russia. In a way, but he didn't raise the essential questions. And what is this country supposed to do? Really. I raise it as a problematic. To all Greeks. If there was no NATO, just as there is no Warsaw Pact, isn't that so, if there was no NATO, wouldn't we be much less likely to see these wars breaking out in the heart of Europe?
Presenter: Of course.
Kazakis: NATO is the root of the trouble, isn't it?
Presenter: And the point is...
Kazakis: And for Russia isn't it the root of the trouble?
Presenter: Of course. And the point is it has put Ukraine into that kind of a process. And it is leaving it to its fate at this time. The President of Ukraine said that in a proclamation he made today. He said: "We are on our own. Where are they, to help us?"
Kazakis: Look, in any case, Ukraine was destined to become the terrain for a showdown with the Russians. That's what it was from the outset. It was obvious. When you transform Ukraine - what can one say? It's not a poor country. They made it poor. With massive poverty, massive emigration, and so on. What did the West do, after fourteen years of decommunising Ukraine, as they say officially. That's what they say. Essentially it's not true but let's use those words. That's what they say. What did they do? It was very simple. They built up the military sector, a remnant from the old Soviet war industry that existed in Ukraine. They established a huge mercenary army which consumes around half the country's GNP. I'm sorry, half the country's budget. An army to be ready to deal with, to attack, the Russians. That's what they did. And they abandoned the overwhelming majority of the Ukrainian population to abject poverty. And for politics a dictatorship of neo-fascists and organized crime. That was the great contribution of the West, of the civilized democratic West, to Ukraine.
Presenter: Well. I think your position is clear. You spoke a little earlier of a world war. I think we should try to clarify that. You said that you don't see Putin continuing. What do you mean by world war? An economic war?
Kazakis: No. But I do see.....Look, I'll tell you, characteristically. If they succeed at this moment in maintaining patches of resistance in the big cities of Ukraine, this will automatically cause a serious economic hemorrhage for Russia. That is to say, they will transform Ukraine into Syria. Are they able to do that? In my opinion, the faster the Russian army finishes its operations the fewer chances there are of them doing something like that. But I'm rather afraid that it has the Baltic in its vicinity, and it has the capacity to transform the Baltic into an Afghanistan, let us say, for Russia. So as to have a permanent hemorrhage. That's the kind of war I have in mind. But on the other hand, I don't know what is going to happen in the Middle East.
Presenter: You're worried about that, are you?
Kazakis: I don't know what Turkey is going to do in that connection. That's a question. Turkey - always as a neutral - has exploited situations in the worst possible way, particularly when the big powers clash.