What will Russia do?

To Sweden

Mar 15, 2022

Well,

do we have much Russian culture here in Sweden?
Do we have 40% or more of the Swedish population speaking Russian?
Was the Swedish government overthrown by the US and NATO 8 years ago?
Did the US-controlled Swedish government bomb Russian speakers in Sweden for the last 8 years?
Is Sweden home to Russia’s only warm water Naval base (since Catherine the Great in the 1700s)?
Has Sweden been erecting statues in honor of Stepan Bandera since 2014? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stepan_Bandera

If any or all of those are affirmative, we’d already have a serious problem in Sweden.

But anyway, NATO is not something that any country “joins”. That’s a misnomer. If you want to surrender your sovereign authority to the USA, you can do that, but calling that “joining” is obfuscation.

It certainly won’t protect “democracy” to do that. Or autonomy. Far from it. Nor security.

If you host NATO weapons systems further east than NATO’s 1997 positions, you will invite countermeasures from weapons systems that have no match in the west, and likely won’t be matched for decades, if ever.

In case anyone says “that’s Russian propaganda”, here’s coverage from mainstream American sources:

https://consortiumnews.com/2018/07/05/corporate-medias-about-face-on-ukraines-neo-nazis/

That article is from 2018. In the first sentence it links to this article in the Washington Post (as mainstream as it gets anywhere, owned by Jeff Bezos): https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/democracy-post/wp/2017/06/15/ukraines-ultra-right-militias-are-challenging-the-government-to-a-showdown/

Corporate Media’s About-Face on Ukraine’s Neo-Nazis

July 5, 2018
U.S. corporate media spent years dismissing the role of neo-Nazis in Ukraine’s 2014 coup but it is suddenly going through a conversion, as Daniel Lazare reports.
By Daniel Lazare
Special to Consortium News

Last month a freelance journalist named Joshua Cohen published an article in The Washington Post about the Ukraine’s growing neo-Nazi threat.  Despite a gratuitous swipe at Russia for allegedly exaggerating the problem (which it hasn’t), the piece was fairly accurate.
Entitled “Ukraine’s ultra-right militias are challenging the government to a showdown,” it said that fascists have gone on a rampage while the ruling clique in Kiev closes its eyes for the most part and prays that the problem somehow goes away on its own.
Thus, a group calling itself C14 (for the fourteen-word ultra-right motto, “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children”) not only beat up a socialist politician and celebrated Hitler’s birthday by stabbing an antiwar activist, but bragged about it on its website.  Other ultra-nationalists, Cohen says, have stormed the Lvov and Kiev city councils and “assaulted or disrupted” art exhibits, anti-fascist demos, peace and gay-rights events, and a Victory Day parade commemorating the victory over Hitler in 1945.
Yet nothing has happened to stop this.  President Petro Poroshenko could order a crackdown, but hasn’t for reasons that should be obvious.  The U.S.-backed “Euromaidan” uprising not only drove out former president Viktor Yanukovych in February 2014, who had won an OSCE-certified election, but tore the country in two, precisely because ultra-rightists like C14 were in the lead.
When resistance to the U.S.-backed coup broke out in Crimea and parts of the country’s largely Russian-speaking east, the base of Yanukovych voters, civil war ensued.  But because the Ukrainian army had all but collapsed, the new, coup government had no one to rely on other than the neo-fascists who had helped propel it to power. “
https://consortiumnews.com/2018/07/05/corporate-medias-about-face-on-ukraines-neo-nazis/

Here’s another from The Nation (also very mainstream, and liberal, Democratic Party)

https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/neo-nazis-far-right-ukraine/

Five years ago, Ukraine’s Maidan uprising ousted President Viktor Yanukovych, to the cheers and support of the West. Politicians and analysts in the United States and Europe not only celebrated the uprising as a triumph of democracy, but denied reports of Maidan’s ultranationalism, smearing those who warned about the dark side of the uprising as Moscow puppets and useful idiots. Freedom was on the march in Ukraine.
Today, increasing reports of far-right violence, ultranationalism, and erosion of basic freedoms are giving the lie to the West’s initial euphoria. There are neo-Nazi pogroms against the Roma, rampant attacks on feminists and LGBT groups, book bans, and state-sponsored glorification of Nazi collaborators.
These stories of Ukraine’s dark nationalism aren’t coming out of Moscow; they’re being filed by Western media, including US-funded Radio Free Europe (RFE); Jewish organizations such as the World Jewish Congress and the Simon Wiesenthal Center; and watchdogs like Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and Freedom House, which issued a joint report warning that Kiev is losing the monopoly on the use of force in the country as far-right gangs operate with impunity.
https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/neo-nazis-far-right-ukraine/

Another important article, by Stephen Cohen, also in The Nation from 2018, with explanation and citation from mainstream/official sources:

https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/americas-collusion-with-neo-nazis/

Then there are issues that tend to get more coverage outside of the mainstream, like this: