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driven by aggressive pro-war rhetoric....

Germany’s new chancellor Friedrich Merz has plunged the country into a deep political and geopolitical crisis, driven by aggressive pro-war rhetoric and a failing foreign policy agenda centered on Ukraine.

 

Merz in a dead end    Ricardo Nuno Costa The fragile German government that took office in bizarre fashion on its second attempt in early May in the Bundestag is already at a dead end. The obsession with wanting to play a military role in Ukraine and all the political consequences that followed were the main reason for the fall of the ‘traffic light coalition’ and will unsurprisingly be the trigger for the next political crisis in Germany.

Merz came to power after a disastrous resignation government, largely due to Berlin’s foreign policy, especially towards an overly important partner, Russia. Merz only disagreed with the traffic light coalition because it was ‘too passive’. Merz is an ultra. As opposition leader, he even accused Scholz of being ‘personally responsible’ for the fact that ‘Ukraine has to fight Putin with one hand tied behind its back’ and called for an ultimatum to Russia.

Total sanctions on Russian energy imports will affect Europe more than Russia 

In November, exploiting public emotions following the horrific Israeli bombing of civilians and the carnage in Gaza, he seized the opportunity to say that ‘This cannot go on, and if Putin does not accept it, then the next step must be taken, and he must be told: if he does not stop bombing the civilian population in Ukraine within 24 hours, then the Federal Republic of Germany will also have to supply Taurus cruise missiles to destroy the supply routes that this regime uses to harm and bomb the civilian population in Ukraine.’ This was warmongering rhetoric and a declaration of intent.

After winning the elections in February, he made it clear that he would not give up supporting the Kiev proxy regime and betting everything against Putin, insisting on the delivery of the Taurus missiles. Merz believes that the German missile is the decisive ‘Wunderwaffe’ that the Western coalition, which has been clashing with Russian lines for three years, has been lacking. The Taurus is neither a game changer, nor is there any consensus among European allies on such an escalation. Not to mention that Trump, the only decisive Western player, has shown no interest in Merz’s plans and has disdainfully rejected his attempts to build closer ties with Washington.

Now the German threats are rebounding off reality, putting the fragile government in a dead end. Merz is dragging Germany into a spiral of disorganised, inconsequential and irresponsible military and financial threats. In this context, he has no choice but to double down. Until when?

During an unforgettable train ride to Kiev in May, the footage of which will go down in history as a circus spectacle, Merz, together with Macron and Starmer, issued yet another ‘ultimatum to Putin’ to declare a 30-day ceasefire, and otherwise the allies would respond with ‘tougher sanctions’.

Obviously, without Putin falling into yet another trap. Not least because Moscow knows that at this stage of the game, the EU no longer has any trump cards to continue the poker game it insists on playing. The freezing of assets in euros was the most significant move from a financial point of view, and it was played by Brussels right at the start of the Ukrainian conflict. There, in the megalomania of emotionalism, Europe’s slight economic advantage was exhausted. As those in the know warned at the time, Russia is definitely not Venezuela, Syria, Iraq or North Korea.

There, in the megalomania of emotions, Europe’s slight economic advantage was exhausted. As those in the know warned at the time, Russia is definitely not Venezuela, Syria, Iraq or North Korea. But the European ‘elites’, drunk with their own arrogance, did not get it.

Putin also knows that total sanctions on Russian energy imports will affect Europe more than Russia. Moreover, this step would require the approval of Hungary and Slovakia, which would veto such a proposal.

All this is beginning to have an effect on German politics. In the CDU/CSU, there are increasing calls for a gradual resumption of relations with Moscow. The conservative wing now finds itself more in line with the AfD’s, which is already leading in the polls, than with Merz’s warmongering stance. The chancellor threatens to become a revamped, right-wing version of the Atlanticist caricature Annalena Baerbock.

In any case, Merz will certainly be the chancellor who will have to resolve the major problem of transatlantic relations, which has been pending since the explosion of the Nord Stream pipelines in 2022. The necessary reconstruction of the pipelines at some point will bring with it the logical accountability for that act of war against a major German, Russian and European civil infrastructure.

Does Merz have any plan to untie this Gordian knot, or did he realise at the end of his first week in office that he has to turn back because he is at a dead end?

 

Ricardo Nuno Costa ‒ geopolitical expert, writer, columnist, and editor-in-chief of geopol.pt

https://journal-neo.su/2025/06/30/merz-in-a-dead-end/

 

YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

 

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

 

NATO blow-out....

Did NATO expansion drive Russia to war?
Jan D. Walter
June 25, 2025
NATO has allegedly deceived and disrespected Russia by expanding into Eastern Europe, threatening Moscow's interests. That, at least, is how the Kremlin has justified its war in Ukraine. But is there any truth to it?

 

GUSNOTE: THE FOLLOWING ARTICLE IS OF COURSE RUNNY BULLSHIT. BUT ONE HAS TO READ IF ONE WANTS TO UNDERSTAND HOW THE WEST — ESPECIALLY GERMANY — SPINS A TALE THAT HAS FORGOTTEN, OR DARE I SAY REWRITTEN — THE CUBAN CRISIS OF 1963... 

 

NATO leaders have gathered in The Hague in the Netherlands on June 24 and 25 to discuss the topic of increased defense spending, and support for Ukraine will be high on the the agenda.

Russia's invasion of Ukraine is now well into its fourth year. As the fighting drags on, the United States has increasingly demanded that its NATO allies shoulder a greater share of the costs of funding the alliance, whose members have been providing significant military and financial support to Kyiv.

In the past four years, NATO has been a target of false narratives time and again. DW Fact Check looked at some of the most common claims. 

However, for the Russian President Vladimir Putin, NATO itself represents a threat to Russian national security — especially since its post-Cold War expansion into Eastern Europe, which includes countries that had formerly been part of the Soviet Union or at least in the Soviet sphere of influence.

The prospect of Ukraine, a country with even stronger historical and cultural ties to Russia, drawing closer to or even joining NATO — or indeed the European Union — has been cited by Putin as justification for Russian interference in Ukraine since 2014 and the so-called "special military operation" launched in February 2022.

As early as March 2000, speaking to the BBC in one of his first interviews as Russian president, Putin insisted that he was not opposed to NATO but stressed concerns about the alliance's eastward expansion, which by that point had already seen Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic join as members.

Despite NATO's insistence that the alliance was purely defensive, Putin was not convinced. He considers the expansion a breach of trust in the wake of the so-called "Two Plus Four Agreement," the September 1990 settlement regulating the reunification of West and East Germany (the "two") and signed by the four allied powers which had occupied Germany at the end of World War II: the United States, the United Kingdom, France and the Soviet Union.

According to Putin, the Western powers had promised that NATO would not expand eastwards into territory formerly controlled by the Soviet Union. NATO has always denied this claim.

GUSNOTE: THERE ARE NOTES AND DOCUMENTS THAT PROVE THAT NATO MADE THE CLAIM OF NOT EXPANDING EASTWARD. AS WELL, THIS SUBJECT WAS AGREED ON A HANDSHAKE... What did NATO allegedly promise the Soviet Union?

The Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany, or the Two Plus Four Agreement, made it clear that no foreign (meaning non-German) troops or nuclear weapons were to be permanently stationed on the territory of the former East Germany. But the German Interior Ministry states that the deal made "no binding assertions regarding the eastward expansion of NATO or the admission of other members."

But what informal promises and statements were made, what exactly they entailed and how they are to be interpreted has been the subject of heated debate among both politicians and historians ever since.

Speaking at the Munich Security Conference in 2007, Putin quoted former NATO Secretary-General Manfred Wörner who said in a speech in Brussels in May 1990: "The fact alone that we are prepared not to station NATO forces beyond the borders of the Federal Republic [of Germany] gives the Soviet Union firm security guarantees."

As a 2016 German government position paper on the topic points out, however: "Neither in this speech nor at any other point did [Wörner] declare that there would be no eastward expansion of NATO."

For Putin and his allies, two other well-documented comments made by senior German and US politicians in February 1990 are of particular importance: former US Secretary of State James Baker's proposal to Communist Party General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev of "assurances that NATO's jurisdiction would not shift one inch eastward from its present position," and former West German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher's commitment to a "non-expansion of NATO."

NATO promises taken out of context?

According to Tim Geiger of the Leibniz Institute for Contemporary History, however, these words should not be taken out of context.

Writing on behalf of the German Armed Forces, the Bundeswehr, Geiger argues that Baker's and Genscher's suggestions merely serve to demonstrate the lengths to which the West German foreign ministry was willing to go at the time to accommodate Soviet concerns regarding German reunification, but had never constituted German or American foreign policy.

Indeed, he points out that, within two months, both US President George H. W. Bush and West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl had dismissed the ideas as unworkable since they contravened a country's right of freedom to select alliances.

This argument is also made by Jim Townsend, senior fellow at the CNAS Transatlantic Security Program, who worked both for and with NATO in various roles throughout the 1990s. "It was all about Germany and German unification," he told DW.

Gorbachev himself confirmed as much in an October 2014 interview in which he stated: "The topic of 'NATO expansion' was not discussed at all … Not a single Eastern European country raised the issue, not even after the Warsaw Pact ceased to exist in 1991. Western leaders didn't bring it up, either."

Gorbachev: 'Against the spirit of 1990'

But that's not enough for Joshua Shifrinson, associate professor of international politics at the University of Maryland, who told DW that Gorbachev's apparent rejection of Putin's theory has also been taken out of context.

Indeed, the former Soviet president also said in the same 2014 interview that the first eastward expansion of NATO in the 1990s was "a big mistake from the very beginning," and "definitely a violation of the spirit of the statements and assurances made to us in 1990."

Among the sources analyzed by Shifrinson are the previously classified minutes of a meeting of the chief US, British, French and German ambassadors to NATO in March 1991, also reported by Der Spiegel, in which the German representative Jürgen Chrobog said: "We had made it clear during the Two Plus Four negotiations that we would not extend NATO beyond the [River] Elbe. We could not therefore offer membership of NATO to Poland and the others."

According to the minutes of the meeting, photos of which DW has also seen, none of Chrobog's colleagues objected. Indeed, US representative Raymond Seitz even added: "We had made it clear to the Soviet Union — in Two Plus Four and in other exchanges — that we would not take advantage of the Soviet withdrawal from Eastern Europe."

For Shifrinson, this is proof that NATO had not just committed to keeping foreign troops out of eastern Germany, but that "people were thinking about the future of Eastern Europe in general."

Benjamin Friedman, who also analyzes relations between Russia and NATO for the US think tank Defense Priorities, added: "The United States didn't make some solemn promise that we would never expand NATO, but we certainly gave the Russians that impression and I think that upset them."

 Did NATO force Russia into war?

Regardless of the ongoing debate, said Shifrinson, "it's incontrovertibly true that Russia invaded Ukraine. You can acknowledge that assurances were given and later abrogated and still not justify Russian behavior."

"The expansion or prospect of expansion [of NATO] to Ukraine was a huge cause, not the only one, but a huge cause of the war," said Friedman. "There's a difference between making a statement about causality and a statement about guilt or moral responsibility."

Townsend, who after stints at the Pentagon and NATO, moved to the Atlantic Council think tank, also sees Russia as the clear aggressor.

"We didn't do anything to upset the Russians, we were very careful about that, and they gave us the green light during those days," he said. "It wasn't until Putin's speech that he gave at the Munich Security Conference that they suddenly had a problem."

THE RUSSIAN NEVER GAVE "GREEN LIGHT". AT BEST IT WAS A BLINKING ORANGE WARNING LIGHT....

If NATO has made any mistake, in Townsend's mind, it's a very different one. "If there was any kind of actions that NATO took, [that might have destabilized the European security architecture], it was by not getting strong enough."

This article was originally written in German.
Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly said that Seitz was French. We have corrected the error on June 27, 2025.

https://www.dw.com/en/nato-expansion-east-russia-putin-ukraine/a-73030670

 

AND SO ENDETH A HISTORICAL PILE OF GERMAN PIG MANURE.... CONSIDERING THAT THE USA HAS VOWED TO DESTROY RUSSIA (AND CHINA) BY WHATEVER MEANS, SINCE 1917, NATO HAS ALWAYS BEEN ONE OF THE CATTLE PROD OF THE EMPIRE... AS MR MACRON SAID "NATO C'EST DE LA MERDE" (NATO IS SHIT) AND AS THE GENERAL de GAULLE DID: QUIT NATO BECAUSE "NATO IS DESIGNED BY THE AMERICAINS — FOR THE AMERICAINS." THE AMERICANS HATED DE GAULLE AND HE HATER THE AMERICANS....

PRESENTLY PRESIDENT TRUMP HAS FOOLED THE LEADERS OF THE EU AND OF NATO, BY PUSHING TARIFFS TO 10% AND PUSHING THE EU COUNTRIES TO SPEND 5 % OF THEIR BUDGET ON MOSTLY BUYING US WEAPONS... THE PREVIOUS US ADMINISTRATION BLEW UP THE CHEAO ENERGY SUPPLY THAT HAD MADE GERMANY GREAT... AS WELL AS DOING OTHER DIRTY TRICKS THAT WILL SEE THE LIGHT IN 30 YEARS TIME....

 

MAKE A DEAL PRONTO BEFORE THE SHIT HITS THE FAN:

NO NATO IN "UKRAINE" (WHAT'S LEFT OF IT)

THE DONBASS REPUBLICS ARE NOW BACK IN THE RUSSIAN FOLD — AS THEY USED TO BE PRIOR 1922. THE RUSSIANS WON'T ABANDON THESE AGAIN.

THESE WILL ALSO INCLUDE ODESSA, KHERSON AND KHARKIV.....

CRIMEA IS RUSSIAN — AS IT USED TO BE PRIOR 1954

TRANSNISTRIA WILL BE PART OF THE RUSSIAN FEDERATION.

A MEMORANDUM OF NON-AGGRESSION BETWEEN RUSSIA AND THE USA.

 

EASY.

 

THE WEST KNOWS IT.

 

READ FROM TOP.

 

YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

 

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.