At a Brussels summit of the foreign ministers of NATO members and of Ukraine on Wednesday, the alliance put forward a new statement vowing to support Kiev “for as long as it takes” and would undertake steps to further integrate the operational ability of the Ukrainian military with that of NATO.
However, the Western alliance once again stopped short of immediately offering Ukraine membership - something Kiev’s government has been constitutionally obligated to pursue since a US-backed coup seized power there in 2014. NATO has repeatedly refused demands by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to admit his country to the alliance and invoke its mutual protection clause, bringing 31 member states into a state of war - three of them nuclear-armed - with the Russian Federation, which also possesses nuclear weapons.
Filmmaker Igor Lopatonok, who directed the documentary films "Ukraine On Fire" in 2016 and “Revealing Ukraine” in 2019, told Radio Sputnik’s The Backstory on Thursday that adding Ukraine to NATO was “a real red line” that would mean war between NATO and the Russian Federation, which many members understand and fear.
“They need to understand, if they want to escalate without any remorse and without any regrets so they can accept Ukraine into NATO, but that will mean immediate war for NATO,” he said. “And this is not making NATO members happy, because they understand that a war with Russia they actually cannot withstand. Because from February of 2022 and from 2014, we all saw how NATO was re-encircling in their approach to the borders [of Russia] and positioning their forces to attack. This is not a position for defense, this is a position [from which] to attack. And this is why Russia is acting accordingly.”
Lopatonok noted that it wasn’t Russia that moved its borders up to the edge of NATO countries, but NATO who moved its borders until they were against Russia’s.
“You remember that they tried to lie and cheat as usual and say and nobody promised [Soviet President Mikhail] Gorbachev to not enlarge NATO, until all the documents were released and delivered and everybody saw, yeah, that was not in the discussion,” he said. “They agreed together with [US President] Ronald Reagan, and then Gorbachev moved forward and dismantled the Warsaw Pact. And then Reagan just just dropped his promises and NATO was never dismantled.”
“To understand what is going on with NATO in Ukraine, you need to understand what NATO is,” Lopatonok said, adding that there was no better example than NATO’s war in Serbia in 1999.
“In 1999, NATO was bombing Serbia, together with the United States, for more than 80 days, with no reason. There's only one reason: it was not [Serbian President Slobodan] Milosevic, it was not Serbia, which posed no threat to anyone, it was just that NATO was on the verge of collapse because members did not understand why they need a military alliance when there is no threat, there is no enemy. And Russia was even trying to be accepted into NATO, to be a member of the alliance, for security. No, they were not interested in this. They needed [Russian President Vladimir] Putin as a perfect villain.”
“But in reality, you know, you can do this in the media, you can do it everywhere. But in reality, they have no power to confront Russia,” he said, noting that Russia had “so precisely” undertaken its special operation in Ukraine as a slow operation rather than a very quick one, of which it was certainly capable.
He said doing so would have “lead to very bad consequences because, you know, the perception of this will be wrong. Perception can make a big blow to the Russian stance and its standing in the international geopolitics ‘big game’. Russia is taking it slow and delivering the result . We all understand in 2024 there will be no peace in Ukraine. [Russian chief negotiator Vladimir] Medinsky revealed how [in the Spring of 2022] Ukraine destroyed the peace deal in whatever they negotiated in Istanbul.”
Lopatonok said that everybody understands “that nobody [in Kiev] is interested in peace, nobody is interested in a position of national interest of Ukraine or national security of Ukraine. Everybody is interested in only one thing: how to bring a ring of fire to the Russian borders, how to make Russia weaker, how to divide Russia, split it into pieces, take away nuclear deterrence forces, and enslave the Slavic people who live in Russia. This is an existential conflict of Western and Eastern civilizations and Russia here it is not Western civilization,” he said, noting that the Scythians were the ancestors of both Russians and Ukrainians and were never considered part of the West.
Russia, he said, “will win in this conflict and Ukraine will rejoin their orbit of Russian influence. Russia doesn’t need the territory of Ukraine, Russia has enough territory in Siberia, they are the biggest country in the world. They don't need that, but they need a peaceful, friendly neighbor who actually are Russians themselves.”