But Putin himself didn't see that promise as binding and relevant. He publicly stated that Ukraines relationship with NATO was solely a thing between NATO and Ukraine and none of Russias business. Only later had this always been different.
What's next?
Let's revive the treaty of Westphalia?
Plus, any treaty takes bits of the sovereignty of a nation and limits the will of the voter. See how the US never ratified UNCLOS. But a pinky swear by Baker should limit the US forever?
The idea that those seasoned soviet diplomats got somehow hoodwinked is also a bit silly.
Are we only accepting the public declarations of Russian leadership as credible when we like and agree with them, or are we being selective and ignoring the things they say that don't match the boogeyman in our head?
Notice how they offer to put it in writing, to reduce the room for ambiguity and misunderstanding that the west disingenuously exploited when doing diplomacy with Gorbachev?
We're getting far off track from the important point here though, which is that the US should not invade Venezuela, just as Russia should not have invaded Ukraine (the latter being a point of comparison for the former, not the subject of the conversation).
When the west negotiated with Gorbachev the Warshaw Pact was still existing. Everybody had big problems on their hand and nobody thought about NATO membership of nations that still were part of the Pact.
It is not about agreeing/disagreeing. If you publicly cancel a claim you no longer have it.
But just listen to what local Russian politicians/media tell their people and what Russians think. They are very comfortable with their imperial/colonial agenda and all these discussions/arguments we are having are primarily for western consumption. Read the propagandist narratives that Russia put out for the winter war or Hitler with the Sudeten Germans. You could just change the names and many pamphlets would fit right in current Russian propaganda.
Russia will always say everything and let people in the west sift through it to find things that fit the various agendas. In the end Russia will have more than it did before like in Chechnya, Georgia, Crimea, Donbas and the invasion they are running right now.
There has been a release of archived official US diplomatic communications a few years ago that paint a rather mixed picture where the embassy was convinced the uprising had failed and the next days there were surprising marches in support of the shah that succeeded in the end.
Explain to me in what scenario it would make sense to put 7 people on a small speed boat and fill up the rest with drugs to transport them from one Caribbean location to another.
Explain to me in what scenario innocent people loaded the boats up like the ones shown in the video below just to do what? Dodge tarriffs? A boat like that full of cocaine is worth enough money to be worth the trip. A boat like that full of coffee beans is not worth enough. And that isn't a fishing boat, a tour boat, or any recreational yacht.
But there it makes sense. It is a short distance and there is lots of police which puts time pressure on the transport and offloading. If you are near Venezuela why wouldnt you just put your tons of drugs in fishing boats or transport ships. What do you need the additional half a ton of human weight in those small boats for?
“Nearly 75 players are active in the CAISO battery storage ecosystem. Top players include EIG Management Company, NextEra Energy, Arevon Energy, Hectate Energy, and Cultivate Power, all of which have eight or more projects underway” [1].
Tesla isn’t yet a player in utility storage. (They’re at the table, but only starting to bid, and they’re more or less politically fucked in America for the time being on that front.$
I would be more inclined to check and see if someone’s dream revelation was correct than be a human search engine for people that don’t want to use one.
On a related note, I am not sure the 20% EU deal is that bad for the EU. Any practical ramifications are a few years in the future (building local production) and whenever Trump threatens to rise tariffs by n% because of x they can always counter with n+20% and erase the board.
Plus, any treaty takes bits of the sovereignty of a nation and limits the will of the voter. See how the US never ratified UNCLOS. But a pinky swear by Baker should limit the US forever? The idea that those seasoned soviet diplomats got somehow hoodwinked is also a bit silly.
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