Agent Rutte should be in a modern-day dock. He and his masters want to push the world into catastrophe.
NATO chief Mark Rutte declared in a high-profile address to the Ukrainian parliament this week that alliance troops would be deployed in Ukraine immediately on signing any peace deal with Russia.
He asserted that the NATO forces would be British and French, deployed "on the land, in the air, and at sea." He added that the coalition would have the "crucial backstop" of a U.S. security guarantee if "Russia tried to subjugate Ukraine again."
It seems more than a coincidence that three days after Rutte spoke in the Ukrainian Verkhovna Rada (parliament), there was an assassination attempt in Moscow on a top Russian general. Lieutenant General Vladimir Alekseev, the deputy commander of Russian military intelligence (GRU), was shot several times in the back by a gunman.
This was while delicate negotiations were being conducted in Abu Dhabi to find a peace settlement to the nearly four-year war in Ukraine. Russian delegates met with American and Ukrainian counterparts for a second round of talks this week.
Rutte's speech in Kiev and the assassination attack in Moscow appear to be calculated moves to sabotage the negotiation efforts that the Trump administration has been pushing.
First, the NATO chief knows full well that Russia is adamant that any settlement in Ukraine will not involve the presence of NATO troops, whether they are called "peace monitors" or "coalition of the willing." Moscow has repeatedly expressed in the clearest terms that such a contingency is out of the question and non-negotiable.
So, Rutte's forcing the issue of deployment can only mean that the real aim is to make any agreement with Russia impossible. This is while the mealy-mouthed former Dutch prime minister was also saying that he backed efforts by Trump to end this "terrible conflict".
"Some European Allies have announced that they will deploy troops to Ukraine after a deal is reached. Troops on the ground, jets in the air, ships on the Black Sea. The United States will be the backstop; others have vowed to support in other ways... The security guarantees are solid, and this is crucial - because we know that getting to an agreement to end this terrible war will require difficult choices," said Rutte with double-think.
Moreover, in his latest pronouncements, Rutte dispensed with the deceptive terms of NATO forces supposedly acting as "peacekeepers". His gung-ho rhetoric of troops "on the land, jets in the air, and ships at sea" sounded more like a stealthy plan for NATO military intervention to escalate the confrontation from a proxy one to a full-on war.
Significantly, too, Rutte declared that NATO was gearing up to increase military supplies to Ukraine. He said that an additional $15 billion was earmarked by the European members to buy weapons sourced from the U.S. He concluded his speech with the World War Two fascist slogan "Slava Ukraini!" (Glory to Ukraine!). It was a rallying call for the Kiev regime and its NeoNazi adherents to keep fighting.
As with the assassination plot on the GRU deputy commander, the objective seems to be to frustrate any negotiations to end the war. The head of the Russian security delegation in Abu Dhabi is reportedly GRU Director, Admiral Igor Kostyukov. That his deputy was shot several times in his Moscow home as talks were taking place outside the country would appear to be a calculated provocation.
The irony is that the European NATO members constantly accuse Russia of not wanting to make peace. They make the preposterous claim that Russian President Vladimir Putin is intent on conquering the rest of Europe when Ukraine is defeated. The fact is, Moscow has consistently called for a diplomatic process to resolve the root causes of the conflict (NATO's historic expansion) and to formulate a new collective security treaty for Europe based on indivisible security for all. Russia also wants to keep the territories that are historically Russian.
It is the transatlantic axis of U.S. and European NATO hardliners who don't want a diplomatic settlement. They want the proxy war against Russia to persist indefinitely. It was they who instigated the hostilities with the CIA-backed coup in Kiev in 2014, and, before that, with numerous color revolutions after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.
It is not clear what Trump's agenda is. Is he an inconsequential maverick, or is the deep state pulling his chain ? He talks about making peace with Russia, yet his administration is sanctioning Russia's vital oil exports, seizing cargo ships in international waters, coercing India and other nations to halt trade with Russia, and threatening its allies like Iran, Venezuela, and Cuba. Is his Ukraine diplomacy a guise for continuing aggression in another form ? Or is it muddled thinking ? Moscow appears to be giving Trump the benefit of the doubt and is engaging in talks to explore a peaceful settlement in Ukraine.
That said, however, a red line for Moscow is the proposals to deploy NATO troops in Ukraine. That's not ending root causes. It is fertilizing them.
The transatlantic imperialist nexus (the U.S. and European ruling class, the CIA and its intelligence counterparts, and the military-industrial complex) is driven by hegemonic goals. Russia, China, and the non-Western multipolar world must be contained or rolled back, as during the Cold War.
The proxy war in Ukraine demonstrated that Russia could not be strategically defeated, as the Western hegemons desired. Their next best option is to keep Ukraine militarized and to keep Russia on guard to drain its resources. It still amounts to a war agenda.
Mark Rutte's performance this week is that of a minion for the war agenda. His every word and deed speak of deliberately inciting aggression while he duplicitously talks about supporting peace. Eight decades ago, the Nuremberg Trials defined such aggression as the "supreme crime".
Even some mainstream European politicians have taken note of Rutte's sinister psychology. Charles Michel, the former European Council President, said in a media interview last week: "I want to be clear, Mark Rutte is disappointing and I'm losing confidence... I'm not expecting [him] to be an American agent."
Agent Rutte should be in a modern-day dock. He and his masters want to push the world into catastrophe.