NATO military games on Russian border: ‘Summer Shield’ or ‘Summer Sword’?
Neil Clark
RT.com
22 Apr, 2017
Just imagine if over 1,200 Russian troops were carrying out major military drills over a two week period in Mexico, a country that borders the United States. Would media headlines be warning about “US aggression?” Of course not.
Yet 1,200 NATO troops have been carrying out military exercises in Latvia, the Baltic country that shares a border with Russia. Guess who is being portrayed as the aggressor? You got it: the big, bad Russian bear.
This week, NATO’s Summer Shield military exercises got underway at the Adazi military base. Soldiers from Latvia, the US, Bulgaria, Estonia, Canada, Lithuania, the UK, Luxembourg, Romania, Slovakia, Germany and also non-NATO member Sweden are taking part in the drills, which have been held in the country since 2004.
“The US Air Force has sent several of its newest stealth fighters to the UK as part of an initiative to reassure Europe in the face of Russian aggression,” reported the Independent newspaper on Easter Monday.
In March, ITV announced“UK troops arrive in Estonia for NATO mission to deter Russian aggression.”
Over the past few months there’s been a massive military build-up in Eastern Europe by NATO, but all we hear is the same old phrase: “Russian aggression, Russian aggression, Russian aggression.” Yet proof is wanting.
Today’s mantra regarding “Russian aggression” is the 2003 equivalent of “Saddam’s Weapons of Mass Destruction,” to be repeated ad nauseum by anyone supporting NATO’s Drang nach Osten. And like the WMD claim, it’s based on zero evidence.
The two examples of so-called ‘Russian aggression’ that hawks routinely cite in order to portray Putin as ‘a threat’ were in fact nothing of the sort. No matter how many times you read the phrase in neocon propaganda pieces, there was no ‘Russian invasion of Ukraine.’ What did occur was that after a Western-supported regime change operation against a democratically-elected government in Kiev, the predominantly Russian population of Crimea (the province where the Russian Black Sea fleet was already based) quite understandably voted overwhelmingly in a referendum to rejoin Russia. If there had indeed been a ‘Russian invasion of Ukraine,’ then the people of Kiev would certainly know about it.
And in Georgia in 2008, it was the tie-chewing Western-backed President Mikhail Saakashvili who started the conflict in South Ossetia. This is not a ‘pro-Russian’ version of events, it’s simply the truth.
As the EU report of 2009 declared, “There was no ongoing armed attack by Russia before the start of the Georgian operation … Georgian claims of a large-scale presence of Russian armed forces in South Ossetia prior to the Georgian offensive could not be substantiated.”
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