Russia: NATO Statements about Threat from East Are “Detached from Reality”—i.e., Nuts

The Russian Foreign Ministry issued a statement Tuesday charging that comments made Monday by Czech Gen. Petr Pavel, chairman of the NATO Military Committee, “are fully detached from reality and are beyond ethics.” According to a paraphrase by TASS, Pavel said (speaking to a committee of the French Senate) that in its fight with the West Russia was using hybrid tactics, including torture and lies, and could deliver a strike on the territory of the Alliance in the Baltic states. According to the same report, Pavel speculated about the possibility of deploying seven divisions in Poland and Baltic states to avoid a defeat in that region.

Pavel, the Russian Foreign Ministry said, “seems to have fully lost the sense of reality and understanding of the cause-and-effect linkage of the processes underway in the sphere of European security.” The ministry pointed out that it is NATO that is engaged in an “unprecedented” build-up on Russia’s borders, and labelled any statements about the supposed threat from the East to be the “utmost cynicism” in light of that activity. “In conditions of NATO’s obvious inability to make substantial contributions to fight against such real challenges of the modern time as terrorism, only whipping up an anti-Russian campaign enables the Alliance to have bigger spending of its member countries and thus ‘stay afloat’,” the Foreign Ministry noted.

“This is very good,” Lyndon LaRouche said, upon being briefed on the Russian Foreign Ministry statement. “They’re basically saying, correctly, that the guy is nuts.”

Such nutty people can also be found in abundance in the right-wing government in Warsaw, particularly in the case of Polish Defense Minister Antoni Macierewicz, who told a lunch meeting with reporters last week, that the Polish government will insist on the necessity of “a permanent military presence on the eastern flank of NATO” during the Warsaw summit to be held in July, reports Defense News.

“Russia is an aggressive state, Russian troops are deploying more and more, and Russian ballistic missiles are near our borders. We want to be prepared to react. This is why we need a NATO military presence every day,” Macierewicz emphasized. Polish Prime Minister Beata Szydlo and Foreign Affairs Minister Witold Waszczykowski also underlined that the Warsaw summit July 8-9 must conclude with “concrete solutions” to face a threat that Russia could “destroy” Poland and the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. What motivation that Russia might have for wanting to destroy Poland and the three Baltic states is never explained.

Asked to describe the Russian threat to Poland, the defense minister said: “In the ’90s Russia held two wars in Chechnya; in 2008, Georgia; in 2014, Crimea, and its support to separatists in Donbass. … What more evidence do you need?”

“Do you think Western European countries’ troops would die for Estonia?” a Dutch journalist asked. “Nobody wants to die for [other countries], but I would do it for Amsterdam,” Macierewicz said melodramatically.