Putin Adviser Admits War Is With An 'Illegitimate' NATO

Sergey Karaganov, an adviser to Russian President Vladimir Putin and Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, has told the Corriere della Sera of Italy that “We are at war with the West. The European security order is illegitimate.”

Photo Insert: Sergey Karaganov is an adviser to Russian President Vladimir Putin and Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, and is enamored with the “Putin doctrine.”

In an interview with Federico Fubini, Karaganov also admitted to be enamored with the “Putin doctrine” that seeks to unify Russian-speaking minorities in countries bordering his motherland in a repeat of the Nazi claim that minority Germans were victimized in other European countries and should be liberated.

Karaganov, who is honorary chair of the Moscow think tank Council for Foreign and Defense Policy (CFDP), was first to come out publicly about an all-out invasion of Ukraine in 2019.

“For 25 years people like myself have said that NATO expansion would lead to war. Putin said several times that if it came to Ukraine becoming a member of NATO, there would be no Ukraine anymore. In Bucharest in 2008 there was a plan of quick accession of Ukraine and Georgia to NATO. It was blocked by the efforts of Germany and France, but since that time Ukraine has been integrated into NATO. It was pumped up by weaponry and its troops were trained by NATO, their army getting stronger and stronger day by day… It was clear that Ukraine had become something like Germany around 1936-1937. The war was inevitable, they were a spearhead of NATO. We made the very hard decision to strike first, before the threat becomes deadlier,” Karaganov bragged.

Yet, Russia signed the Founding Act on Russia-NATO relations in 1997 and accepted NATO expansion.

“It was the biggest mistake of Russia’s foreign policy in the last 30 years. I fought against it, because the Founding Act of 1997 legitimized further NATO expansion. But we signed it because we were desperately poor and we still were trusting in the wisdom of our partners. President Yeltsin probably thought that we would sneak between drops of rain, to no avail… But we know that article 5 of NATO, stating that an attack on a NATO member is an attack to all, doesn’t work. There is no automatic guarantee that NATO would come to the defense of a member under attack. Please read article 5 of the Treaty. But this enlargement is an enlargement of the aggressive alliance. It’s cancer and we wanted to stop this metastasis. We have to do it by a surgical operation,” Karaganov threatened.

WEEKLY FEATURE : MVP Group Keeps Lights On During Pandemic