Albert NgeneTo ‘Whatabouters’ and all those who see racism at every turn … Look . The West just turned its back on Ukraine. Appalling wickedness!
Yes. Reagan and Bush assured Gorbachev that NATO won’t move east. The West reneged on that. But let’s be forthcoming with complete disclosure here. The motives of Ukraine from the beginning have been progressive and non-belligerent.
For, Ukraine gave up its nukes and hardware with a promise from Yeltsin that Russia would never attack Ukraine.
Putin’s talking point is Ukraine’s popular desire to join NATO. Highlight ‘popular’ here.
But it is not as simple as he puts it. Don’t leave out Market economy. EU.
The first country to leave USSR was Estonia. Estonia sought and achieved Economic Sovereignty first. Estonia and the Baltic states all broke away and operated market economies. Market economy means integration into the western marketplace.
The doors of the Bank of Estonia flung open on January 1, 1990, to usher in Estonia’s re-integration into the Western market economy. Then Solidarity. Velvet Revolution. The rest is history.
Yes. Tiny creative, courageous Estonia begun the unraveling of mighty USSR.
NATO is not an end in and of itself. It is a means to an end which is EU/ market economy. NATO is the enforcement arm of the EU as it were. It protects the marketplace.
Like Royal Navy frigates were the enforcement arm of colonial Britain’s market hegemony on the West African Slave Coast. That was how soap and margarine got to Victorian middle-class households at affordable prices.
Anyway, what was the goal of Europe when it signed priority trade partner agreements with Petro Poroshenko in 2014? Just to lead Ukraine into the bear’s hug and then abandon it? That is what they just did Ukraine never desired to join NATO from its primordial instincts but as a natural progression of its operation of a market economy and inching closer to join EU.
As for Putin, the truth is that he does not want a thriving democratic market economy on his borders. He is essentially a life president.
He and the Chelsea FC-owning, battleship-riding, fighter jets-protected, larger than life James Bond-villain types like Abramovich, have looted the Motherland to death and a prosperous democratic market economy on its border is a threat to his entire schtick and raison d’etre.
Ask Navalny.
This is a lesson for Nigerians quick to cry racism at the Polish border, in Sumy, in London, in the U.S. It is not about your skin colour. It’s about what you bring to the marketplace. Nigeria is an oil-producing petrol-importing dependency. No one respects you. Contrast China.
If the West did this to Ukraine, what won’t she do to you?
IK Albert Ngene , our public interest analyst, lives in Toronto
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