By David Swanson.<\/p>\n
The Russian Ambassador to the United States, Sergey Ivanovich Kislyak, spoke at the University of Virginia on Tuesday evening, in an event organized by the Center for Politics, which no doubt has video of the proceedings. Kislyak was once ambassador to Belgium and to NATO.<\/p>\n
Kislyak spoke to a packed auditorium and took, I think, well over an hour of questions. He spoke frankly, and the questions he was asked by students, professors, and other participants were polite and for the most part far more intelligent than he would have been asked on, for example, Meet the Press.<\/p>\n
He told the audience that Russia had known there were no WMDs in Iraq, and had known that attacking Iraq would bring \u201cgreat difficulties\u201d to that country. \u201cAnd look what is happening today,\u201d he said. He made the same comment about Libya. He spoke of the U.S. and Russia working together to successfully remove chemical weapons from the Syrian government. But he warned against attacking Syria now.<\/p>\n
There will be no new Cold War, Kislyak said, but there is now a greater divide in some ways than during the Cold War. Back then, he said, the U.S. Congress sent delegations over to meet with legislators, and the Supreme Court likewise. Now there is no contact. It\u2019s easy in the U.S. to be anti-Russian, he said, and hard to defend Russia. He complained about U.S. economic sanctions against Russia intended to \u201csuffocate\u201d Russian agriculture.<\/p>\n
Asked about \u201cannexing\u201d Crimea, Kislyak rejected that characterization, pointed to the armed overthrow of the Ukrainian government, and insisted that Kiev must stop bombing its own people and instead talk about federalism within Ukraine.<\/p>\n
There were remarkably few questions put to the ambassador that seemed informed by U.S. television \u201cnews.\u201d One was from a politics professor who insisted that Kislyak assign blame to Russia over Ukraine. Kislyak didn\u2019t.<\/p>\n
I always sit in the back, thinking I might leave, but Kislyak was only taking questions from the front. So I moved up and was finally called on for the last question of the evening. For an hour and a half, Kislyak had addressed war and peace and Russian-U.S. relations, but he\u2019d never blamed the U.S. for anything in Ukraine any more than Russia. No one had uttered the word \u201cNATO.\u201d<\/p>\n
So I pointed out the upcoming NATO protests. I recalled the history of Russia being told that NATO would not expand eastward. I asked Kislyak whether NATO ought to be disbanded.<\/p>\n
The ambassador said that he had been the first Russian to \u201cpresent his credentials\u201d to NATO, and that he had \u201coverestimated\u201d NATO\u2019s ability to work with Russia. He\u2019d been disappointed by NATO actions in Serbia, he said, and Libya, by the expansion eastward, by NATO pressure on Ukraine and Poland, and by the pretense that Russia might be about to attack Poland.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe were promised,\u201d Kislyak said, that NATO would not expand eastward at all upon the reunification of Germany. \u201cAnd now look.\u201d NATO has declared that Ukraine and Georgia will join NATO, Kislyak pointed out, and NATO says this even while a majority of the people in Ukraine say they\u2019re opposed.<\/p>\n
The ambassador used the word \u201cdisappointed\u201d a few times.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019ll have to take measures to assure our defense,\u201d he said, \u201cbut we would have preferred to build on a situation with decreased presence and decreased readiness.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
By David Swanson. The Russian Ambassador to the United States, Sergey Ivanovich Kislyak, spoke at the University of Virginia on Tuesday evening, in an event organized by the Center for Politics, which no doubt has video of the proceedings. Kislyak was once ambassador to Belgium and to NATO. Kislyak spoke to a packed auditorium and … Continue reading “What the Russian ambassador to the US thinks of NATO”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2961,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[492],"tags":[5237,2376,66,1638],"class_list":["post-15531","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-opinion","tag-cold-war","tag-nato","tag-russia","tag-us"],"cc_featured_image_caption":{"caption_text":false,"source_text":false,"source_url":false},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15531","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2961"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=15531"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15531\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15532,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15531\/revisions\/15532"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=15531"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=15531"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=15531"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}