TFF PressInfo # 298: Solve the Ukraine crisis now
The vote last week in the Ukrainian parliament was a seriously disturbing move- it has made reconciliation with Russia near impossible. The parliament voted to work for Ukraine’s membership of Nato, a red rag to a bear.
The truth is this whole Russian-Ukrainian-Western confrontation could be largely solved if the Ukrainian and Western sides wrote on paper that they don’t want to see Ukraine in Nato. This is the key issue for Russia. But it must be written down.
Moscow no longer trusts verbal understandings that can be broken, as when the Reagan Administration gave President Mikhail Gorbachev the distinct impression that the US would not take advantage of the Soviet Union now that the Cold War was over. But it did. President Bill Clinton provocatively began the expansion of Nato which has now reached right up to Russia’s borders. Gorbachev too innocently believed the Cold War was totally over and the US would never contemplate such a move.
By Jonathan Power
