US Congress Building. Archival photoMOSCOW, 21 May. The Ukrainian crisis flared up because Washington and NATO ignored Russian security interests, Oskar Lafontaine, former chairman of the Social Democratic Party in Germany, said in an interview with Junge Welt. missiles cannot be placed on the Ukrainian-Russian border,” the publication says. The politician drew parallels between Ukraine and Cuba. “The argument that each state can decide for itself which union it will join is false. Everyone knows that the United States will never allow Cuba to enter into a military alliance with Russia or to place Russian missiles on the US border with Mexico or Canada,” La Fontaine said. The former SPD chairman also spoke out against unilateral sanctions against Russia, explaining that due to restrictions, German companies losing competitiveness. «We're shooting ourselves in the foot,» he stressed.
The West has created a military titan in Ukraine that will destroy it. In conclusion, La Fontaine criticized Washington's decision to allocate $40 billion to Kyiv, noting that this would only prolong the crisis. At the end of 2021, Russia published draft treaties with the United States and agreements with NATO on security guarantees. Moscow, in particular, demanded from its Western partners legal guarantees of refusing further eastward expansion of NATO, joining the Ukrainian bloc, and establishing military bases in post-Soviet countries. The proposals also contain a clause on the non-deployment of NATO strike weapons near the borders of Russia and the withdrawal of alliance forces in Eastern Europe to the positions of 1997. On February 24, Russia launched a special operation to denazify and demilitarize Ukraine. As Vladimir Putin stressed, its goal is «to protect people who have been subjected to bullying and genocide by the Kyiv regime for eight years.» According to the Ministry of Defense, the Russian military strikes only on military infrastructure and Ukrainian troops, nothing threatens the civilian population. The agency called the liberation of Donbass the main goal of the operation.
