International Crisis Looms as NATO To Hold Emergency Meeting With Ukraine

The government of Ukraine announced today that Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba will visit NATO Headquarters tomorrow for an emergency session of the Ukraine-NATO Commission. Kuleba will meet with NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg and possibly with the North Atlantic Council (consisting of the ambassadors of all thirty NATO member states) as well.

This comes as U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken yesterday lambasted Russia for a litany of offenses on a nationwide television program, in threatening tones stating, “If Russia acts recklessly, or aggressively, there will be costs, there will be consequences.”

The upcoming NATO-Ukraine meeting will occur a week after the head of NATO’s Military Committee completed a two-day visit to Ukraine where he met with the president, Volodymyr Zelensky, and the commander-in-chief of the Armed Forces, Colonel-General Ruslan Khomchak, as well as inspecting the National Land Forces Academy.

The impending meeting will also occur immediately before Secretary of State Anthony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin visit NATO headquarters this week in overlapping visits.

Ukrainian Foreign Minister Kuleba revealed that he’s held sixteen phone conversations in eleven days with the foreign ministers of NATO and NATO partner countries the U.S., Britain, Canada, Denmark, Estonia, France, Germany, Georgia, Greece, Latvia, Moldova, the Netherlands, Slovakia and Sweden, as well as with the European High Representative and the secretary general of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe. In addition to the above contacts, he also said, “The heads of the Foreign Ministries of Bulgaria, Lithuania, Poland and the Czech Foreign Ministry have firmly declared their solidarity with Ukraine.”

On April 10 Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan assured Ukrainian President Zelensky of his nation’s support for the expulsion of Russia from Crimea, the subjugation of the Donetsk and Lugansk republics in the Donbass and Ukraine’s admission into NATO. That even led the ever-timid Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov to warn today: “We strongly recommend that all responsible nations which we are in contact with – among them Turkey, that they analyse the situation, the never-ending militaristic statements by the regime in Kiev. We warn them against feeding these militaristic sentiments.”

Lavrov added this uncharacteristically blunt statement: “We are asked what Russia is doing on the border with Ukraine. The answer is very simple – we live here, this is our country. But what the United States is doing via its warships and troops, which are constantly organising some kind of events in Ukraine under the auspices of NATO, thousands of kilometres from America’s own territory – this question still remains unanswered.”

Today’s news also reveals that Ukraine’s foreign minister has been invited to attend a meeting of the European Union’s Foreign Affairs Council on April 19.

It is undeniably evident at this time that the West, which is to say NATO and its members and partners – the U.S., Canada and every European country except for Russia and Cyrus – have arrayed themselves against the small Donbass republics and Russia. There’s been much talk of a Sarajevo moment of the sort that triggered World War I. What the current situation resembles is what followed the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in 1914: the ultimatum issued by Austria-Hungary to Serbia. The ultimatum was announced on July 23; five days later the first world war began.

Rick Rozoff has been involved in anti-war and anti-interventionist work in various capacities for forty years. He lives in Chicago, Illinois. He is the manager of Stop NATO. This originally appeared at Anti-Bellum.