Lithuania, Kaliningrad, and NATO Article Five

The EU, NATO, and the Baltic States are not clarity-of-thought capable.

The Baltic States because of their bad embedded ethno-cultural memories of ” Russia”.

The EU because EUrope has always cherished the fond wish that Russia and America would destroy eachother in a war so that the EU could emerge from its bunkers and rule what is left of the world.

NATO because NATO itself is a joint EU-British conspiracy against America to use America’s armed might to nourish British nostalgia dreams of Empire and to spare EU from having to spend on social welfare and military defense both. The fact that Secretary General Yan or Yens or whatever-it-is Stoltenberg recently made a desperate plea for NATO ( at America’s funding and expense) to keep the Ukraine war going for years to come . . . . poorly described as a “prediction” that it “would” . . . . proves to my own satisfaction what an anti-American conspiracy NATO really is.

I hope that if the NATO-EU conspirators can create the war which THEY want between America and Russia, that THEY and BRITAIN pay the maximum price for THEIR war of choice at aMERica’s expense. ( And Ukraine’s expense too, by the way).

If Trump is nominated again to run in 2024, and if he makes the credible promise to pull America out of NATO and to label every NATO-connected person inside America to be persona-non-grata and an illegal alien subject to arrest and ICE detention in a lovely ICE vacation facility, I will vote for Trump all over again. The stakes are that high.

And the anti-American EUrophile Anglophile Democrats know that I am not the only one who would think so. So I predict that if Trump is nominated in 2024, the Democrats will do everything in their power to create a thermonuclear war with Russia before Trump gets to actually run in an election.

I have a couple of questions about the mechanics of Russian transit from contiguous Russia to Kalingrad:

1.) how do the Lithuanians know what Russia is shipping? Are there customs checks on the way in to Lithuania, even for a train that does not stop or off-load in Lithuania?

2.) Lithuania insists that it is not interdicting all rail shipments, only the transport of particular goods named by EU sanctions. But, is that how sanctions work, legally? I thought sanctions prohibited economic transactions. But, there is no economic transaction with Lithuanian business beyond the Russian train using the rail corridor — not itself prohibited.

I realized recently that I do not understand what legal justification underlies “sanctions”. I thought it was transactional — a bank or other business could not transact an exchange entailing either sale to or purchase from either a particular Russian person or Russian persons and entities generally.

The seizure of property however stood out to me as peculiar and arbitrary. Chasing down the yachts of Russian oligarchs who are not even residents in Russia seems peculiar.

And now this: apparently, they wanted the rail equivalent of excluding Russian aircraft from national airspace, but they couldn’t come up with anything, given the committments to allow transit generally.

I know there is deep history here of animosity. It was kind of funny when it was Lithuania refusing to sell the Russians cheese or Russians refusing to buy Lithuanian cheese — never too clear on all that.

Given the context of the article, here’s something to consider:
On average, is an 80 yr old leader more likely to be willing to die on principle than someone, say, 10 years their junior? 20 years? 30?

Oh, sorry. Context.
By 2030 those over 65 yrs and older will outnumber those 18 and younger — a first for the U.S.
https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2018/cb18-41-population-projections.html

By and large, they don’t care about the future, only preserving the memory of their halcyon past.

“Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose.”

Somebody really does want nuclear annihilation. The Russian Bear will be poked and poked until they get it, too. The Russia-haters in the foreign service are intent on their objective, but they would rule if they didn’t have a great deal of backing outside the foreign policy establishment. Russia-hate goes back a long way in the US… Hillary didn’t invent it.

This interdiction because sanctions is just silliness on the part of Lithuania, whether or not they were commanded to do it by their USandNato masters. The point is provocation, nothing more. As usual, Russia is taking its time and being very measured in response, but I would suspect that relatively pleasant facade can shatter in a moment. And when it does… unpleasant results ensue.

Whatever faction is behind all of this nonsense apparently believes that Mother Russia can be — will be — strangled, defeated and dismembered, not unlike Hitler’s plans for the Soviet Union when time was.

And I doubt that even resuscitation of the Trump Regime can stop these Ultimate War wheels from turning.

I’ve said in the past that if Russia attacks Lithuania, I feel we should go to war.

I recognize it Ian, but not only in this case, but in others, I would say in public “no”. Just because it’s a reality check for the Baltic states and Eastern Europe. They never were worth risking WWIII over during the Cold War, “rollback” nonsense aside, Sometimes the best thing you can do for someone is to tell them the truth: “If this happens, I can’t and won’t help you” because that (hopefully) will encourage more prudent action.

The delusion we fed Eastern Europe is that they could poke the Russian bear as much as they wanted and be free. But as South and Central Americans would tell Eastern Europeans, when you live next door to a hegemonic state (truth is, they are farther from the US and are less critical to the US than Eastern Europe is to Russia), the reality is your options are limited. You have to get along with them.

Agree with Ian & most of the comments.

As Z pointed out, Kalingrad is not militarily defensible under the existing arrangement. Long term, either Russia will have to relinquish Kalingrad, or else Russia will have to seize Lithuania and/or install a puppet government. But Russia plays the long game, so the Kalingrad situation may take decades to play out.

Ian said if WWIII happens, whichever side starts losing, will use nuclear weapons. Well, I’m pretty sure it will be the U.S. that starts losing. Russia seems to have the ability to shoot down most U.S. missiles, while the U.S. lacks the ability to shoot down Russia’s newer missiles. Let’s think about how that might play out. Most U.S. missiles get intercepted — but not all. Maybe 1% of U.S. missiles reach their target. Well, if the U.S. first strike is 1000 missiles, 1% is 10 missiles, and that’s still a a lot of damage. Ouch! The other question is what happens to the intercepted U.S. missiles if the warhead survives intact? Let’s say 990 intercepted warheads fall to the ground somewhere in Eastern Europe — do the warheads still detonate? If so, Eastern Europe may cease to exist. Eastern Europeans might want to think about that.

At this particular moment, Russia is as ready as it will ever be to take on NATO. In fact, if I were Russia, I might even be thinking “if war with NATO is inevitable, then let’s strike now, before NATO missiles and air defense technology catches up with ours.” So … we live in interesting times, and we in the West are ruled by madmen. I don’t know how this will play out.

“Somebody really does want nuclear annihilation. ”

I can’t really believe this — I can believe that somebody wants *everything except* nuclear annihilation.
And I can believe that they’ll keep grabbing away at that everything until one day, out of the blue, totally by surprise,
we get nuclear annihilation.

I understand how other commenters get to projections of further developments unfolding at a glacial pace (“long-game”, “decades to play out”) and I, too, hope for rationality and peace to prevail, but I don’t see peace and rationality winning out, short of a seismic shift in the structure of political power in the U.S.

Putin chose hot war in large part because he sees the “long-game” going against Russia even in the twilight of American neoliberal hegemony. Ukraine was a case in point, teaching him this lesson, as the neocons persisted successfully in subverting Ukraine thru two color revolutions and the temptations of EU membership and NATO membership. Armenia losing out to Azerbaijan in a surprising flash of drone technology in one of Putin’s frozen conflicts was a wakeup call: Ukraine, too, had long been plotting and planning a sudden seizure of the rump Donbass Republics, while stalling on implementing the Minsk Accords. I think Putin sees himself leaving the Presidency of the Russian Federation soon and wants to leave domestic Russian politics, especially among his elite Siloviki, firmly committed to a united anti-U.S. posture and the development of Russian economic capability.

I do not endorse Putin’s thinking — I know he was morally wrong to inflict war on Ukraine — and very heavily on the Russian-speaking regions of Ukraine — and I think the Special Military Operation was a political mistake, a gamble Russia may well end up losing, because there is no obvious path to a settlement with the rump Ukraine or with the West. The alternative of prolonged saber-rattling would have accomplished more in terms of de-stabilizing the Ukraine economy. But, I can see why he might think Russia’s leverage over Europe and its fuel demands would be much less even two years from now and he may well foresee the real need to yield his own grip on Russian politics.

I continue to see Putin as a gambler who makes finely-tuned calculations aimed at setting up situations for the long-term that he cannot resolve satisfactorily and altogether in the short-term.

It is his antagonists in “the Collective West” that worry me greatly — their “mentality” for lack of a better term is not conducive to international agreements and settlements. The whole ideology of “a rules-based international order” is drawn around an unrealistic insistence that it isn’t necessary to negotiate conflicts of interest among independent powers, and instead actors should be constrained in the game of international relations to navigate a labyrinth of “principles”. That the complex game might be rigged and some players privileged to make up new rules as part of their game-playing strategy, or declare exceptions without review, is treated as disinformation.

Putin, in gambling on hot war, is declaring that he’s not willing to continue to play a game that Russia in the long-run was clearly losing.

My point is that his opponents in the U.S. and European political classes — most of whom are no longer notably dependent on democratic electoral support, and that’s a really important point as we enter a period of economic pain — are simply not interested in negotiation. Their whole ideology and mentality and goals for the world order they have been attempting to exploit and maintain is against it.

I don’t see the Victoria Nulands of this world becoming foreign policy realists any time soon, nor do I see much prospect of them being displaced by a political system that could let realism emerge easily. In the U.S., there is some possibility of a conservative, isolationist faction emerging on the back of a Republican turn to populist (aka “fascist”) appeals — a Tucker Carlson foreign policy if you like. But, I think it is a long-shot. Neo-cons are deeply embedded in the permanent state and nothing if not bi-partisan. In Europe, again, there is some possibility of right-wing “populism” in the manner of Victor Orban wresting power from the “grand coalition” essentially “a-democratic” politics of Ursula von der Leyen, Macron and so on.

We have gone too long without the bad consequences of unwise policy visiting the lives of elite policymakers, as Ian has frequently pointed out. They’ve been doing increasingly stupid things for more than 20 years and they and their patrons have grown richer even as the mass of their citizens have been eased into greater precarity and people in the third world sometime suffer greatly. The suffering of Ukraine, the poorest country in Europe, is a prime example of an unacknowledged victim of clueless people who put blue and yellow flags on their Twitter and Instagram accounts. The thing that is hard to fathom is just how far up the food chain the cluelessness extends. I think it extends very far indeed.

Russia, imho, may not be able to “win” this war, because his real opponents — not the Ukrainians as a People so much as the professional globalist elites of “the Collective West” — do not share his reality and they cannot be compelled to yield control the U.S. or the E.U. as international players to other factions capable of negotiating a settlement.

The frustration this entails for Putin’s Russia and the destabilizing economic blowback for the U.S. and especially Europe (watch Italy — if Italy implodes financially and it might . . . yikes; also the UK breakup is looming and Little England sure as heck isn’t going to be credible as a world power with their soldiers having OnlyFans as a hobby) could make Europe’s leadership even crazier without letting realists take power.

Anyway, those are some reasons I think escalation out of control (because their is no one in charge in the West who even knows what control means) is a likely path.

One of the fairly obvious things being left unsaid is that the rail shipments being blocked are not trade with Lithuania, but traveling over a transit corridor that is based on treaty obligations. These treaty obligations establish the borders and sovereignty of Lithuania. Because this freight is not trade with Lithuania it’s not covered under sanctioned trade; it’s a clear violation of agreements that Washington is not able to honor (did I say honor

@GregT,

It is fashionable on the left to claim that the “US” is “provoking” these wars in order to fight Russia to the ” last Baltic state”.

Here is how it looks to me. The Lithuania leadership is deliberately trying to torture Russia into attacking Lithuania in order to extort America’s entry into the war on Lithuania’s side and behalf. The Baltics ( and East Europe) in general conspired with Clinton to suck NATO eastward in order to extort America’s protection and support against their beloved enemy Russia.

Given that the LithuaniaGov is violating international law through blocking the transit of Russian access to Russia’s own Kaliningrad territory in defiance of standing arrangements to the contrary, I desperately hope that America will not assist Lithuania if/when Lithuania successfully gets the military response from Russia which Lithuania is actively conspiring to create.

In the longest run, I hope a pro-America movement within America can conquer the DC FedRegime government ( with no more mass-slaughter of pro-NATO stooges, plotters and conspirators within the American Establishment than is necessary to exterminate their political power presence in government, academe and Think Tankistan, and then take America out of NATO.

The CanadaGov can then keep staying in NATO if it wishes. If Canada leaves NATO as well, then the EUropeans can create their own NEATO if the really feel oh-so-threatened by Russia. ( NEATO stands for North East Atlantic Treaty Organization.
NEATO!)

Kalingrad? No such place.

It’s Kaliningrad, named after Mikhail Kalinin, who was USSR President for several years.

Bruce W; *short of a seismic shift in the structure of political power in the U.S.*

The US is a failing state, Bruce. Matters will proceed as in Hemingway’s dictum about bankruptcy: very slowly, then all at once.

I can go to any major American city and find zones like this —

https://sonar21.com/proud-to-be-an-american-in-philadelphia/

I could cite the highest COVID death rate per million in the world, the fact that Chinese citizens now have longer life expectancies than Americans, blah blah blah.

Instead, let us turn to US conduct of international affairs.

Current events have been planned since 2013-14 and V. Nuland’s visit to Ukraine, and were initially scheduled to kick off in 2016 after Hillary’s ascension. Thus, the latter’s otherwise implausible fixation on Putin and the Russians as the explanation for her failure to succeed Obama to the presidency.

In 2018, RAND put out an explicit game plan, centering on the Ukraine and including the framework and check list for sanctions.
‘Extending Russia: Competing from Advantageous Ground.’
https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR3063.html
https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_reports/RR3000/RR3063/RAND_RR3063.pdf

It’s still up, because it was too widely disseminated to be withdrawn — there’s even a paperback version priced at $49.50 you can buy on Amazon. If you glance through it, you’ll note it’s an intelligent — though not benevolent — , stipdocumentulating a number of accompanying conditions that must be fulfilled if the strategy is to succeed — low global energy prices, for one.

And nevertheless the Biden administration rushed into this effort to pummel Russia with Ukraine as their proxy — granted, Putin forced their hand early –without fulfilling the adjunct conditions for it to succeed. Why?

I think it’s not just ignorance and arrogance. I believe it’s because from the viewpoint of imperial DC, thanks to the non-crowning of Hillary Putin and Russia are perceived as having had four extra years to prepare, develop a new generation of weapons, and — as it’s turned out — preempt US aggression with Russia’s own ‘Special Military Operation.’

I’m not a betting man. But I’ll take a bet that shadowy figures from the backrooms of State and CIA have been going around doing presentations for DC policymakers that feature over-amped comparisons of the US position now with that of, say, the UK in the pre-WWII days when Hitler’s Germany was building up its military. These presentations will include lots of graphics showing how with each month and each year China and Russia are pulling ahead, gaining an insuperable advantage over the US that the latter will ‘soon not be able to overcome.’

In other words, TPTB in DC know — just as we do — that it’s fatuous to simultaneously take on Russia, perhaps the world’s biggest exporter of commodities and resources, and China, the world’s biggest manufacturer, to which the US offshored its manufacturing. But they also feel that it’s now or never, because with every day the US position grows weaker vis a vis Russia, China, and the rest of the world.

This is an empire that knows it’s on the slide, whether it’ll admit it to itself or not.

The overworked and harried production team of Weekend at Biden’s are already peeved by the “Let’s go, Brandon!” taunts their lead stiff is receiving from the cheap seats. They’re going to be really pissed when those taunts turn to “Let’s go, Putin!”.

Z

Found on internet:

“Good lord, certain eastern European nations are really starting to irk me. I mean the Laos, Cambodians and Vietnamese lost untold thousands during the Vietnam War and they’ve had to just walk it off. They’ll never get any restitution or revenge for the unjustified deaths that happened within still living memory. Nor do they make a national culture of fetishizing their grievances. Yet certain European countries demand the rest of the world risk WWIII, by and large justifiying themselves with centuries-old grievances and the sins of a political entity that doesn’t even exist any more, and making not the slightest effort to cool but rather exacerbate tensions at every opportunity.”

Exclusive! This week’s script for the Lead Stiff!

https://twitter.com/greg_price11/status/1540086506030768128?cxt=HHwWgICxtY-hvt8qAAAA

Z

A huge unspoken part of this war right now is the U.S. trying, through guiding their Ukrainian proxies, to exact a price from Russia by taking out some more of their Black Sea fleet. The Ukrainians aren’t likely to win on the battlefield so the best way for the U.S. to hurt Russia, since they are not going to let their proxies bomb Russia itself, is to take out their high value targets at sea.

So, the U..S. is throwing sucker punches at the Russian navy by training, directing, and supplying the Ukrainians with the weapons to take out Russia’s Black Sea fleet in the belief that Russia won’t retaliate militarily against the U.S.. These are essentially free shots then and the U.S. will keep the war fully financed, and sacrifice Ukrainians, to get as many shots as they can while they can.

It’s their face-saving Plan B. They can say that even if Ukraine has to give up land at least the war weakened the Russian navy and broke the blockade on the grain.

It’s probably cat and mouse out there on the shore and in the Black Sea right now and I’d imagine that a lot of the U.S.’s mental energy in this war at this point is focused towards sinking ships in the Black Sea fleet. They sunk one already, the biggest one, and they’re jonesing for another.

Z

@Ché Pasa,

You could be right. But it would not be wise. If the ChinaGov reacted the way such a sinking would be designed to get it to react, it would equally attack an American ship leaving an equal number of traceable fingerprints on the attack.

If the ChinaGov decided to act asymmetrically, it could do things like dump all its dollar denominated holdings on the money markets all at once, embargo all its goods-of-addiction from reaching the US, etc. Including all its meth and fentanyl. That would add millions of violent addicts howling in the streets on top of tens of millions of violent Walmart bargain addicts howling throughout suburbia and small town America. That sort of asymmetric response could have a very destabilizing effect on American society and the American politicapitalist order stuck to America’s face like a pack of sea lampreys.

@Bruce Wilder,

Is it becoming clearer that NATO is an EU-British conspiracy against America?