Why cannot NATO and Russia talk.

The Western Julian calendar year 2023 is still young, and so is indeed the Chinese Lunar year, which is celebrated this week. A year can change the world. If somebody had told us a year ago that there would be a war in Europe, and now it has gone on for over eleven months since 24 February 2022, few would have believed it. We thought it would be impossible that Russia would actually invade Ukraine. True, there had already been a war-like conflict in the east of Ukraine for over a decade, with Russia claiming provinces and areas with sizeable Russian-speaking populations, and later they annexed them, ratified by the 'Duma', the Russian parliament, albeit illegal according to international law. There is still severe fighting in the areas as Ukraine claims the land back.

In 2014, Crimea on the Black Sea was annexed by Russia because of its strategic military location for the Russian navy. NATO, the world's largest military alliance led by America with a total of twenty-eight member countries plus other partners, had crept dangerously close to the Russian border, which Russia found unacceptable. (In North America, there is a parallel, namely the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, not allowing foreign countries to settle near the US borders. It was activated in 1962 when the Soviet Union's planned close cooperation with Cuba, leading to the Cuban Crisis.)

It is said that Russia had expected a short war in Ukraine, or Special Operations, as they call it, having annexed Crimea, going on to annex Luhansk, Donetsk and other areas in the eastern provinces into Russia, and in addition planning to take the Ukrainian capital Kyiv and other key cities and areas. Some also say it was Russia's plan to eradicate Ukraine from the map as an independent state, making it a part of Russia again. Yet, since Ukraine gained independence from Russia in 1991, soon after the collapse of the Soviet Union, almost all Ukrainians want to be an independent state. But it is a fact that Ukraine was an important part of the Soviet Union in the fields of agriculture, technology, science, and more.

President Boris Yeltsin, who ruled Russia from 1991-1999, seems to have been quite naive and optimistic, or even erratic, about the future of the former Soviet republics and other Eastern Bloc countries and their cooperation with both Russia and the West. The lack of solid grounds for independence can explain some of the current problems, indeed for Ukraine. We should remember that the...