Berlin Alarmed by
Aggressive NATO Stance on Ukraine
By SPIEGEL Staff
March 07, 2015 "ICH"
- "Spiegel"
- It was quiet in eastern Ukraine last
Wednesday. Indeed, it was another quiet day
in an extended stretch of relative calm. The
battles between the Ukrainian army and the
pro-Russian separatists had largely stopped
and heavy weaponry was being withdrawn. The
Minsk cease-fire wasn't holding perfectly,
but it was holding.
On that same day, General Philip Breedlove,
the top NATO commander in Europe, stepped
before the press in Washington. Putin, the
59-year-old said, had once again "upped the
ante" in eastern Ukraine -- with "well over
a thousand combat vehicles, Russian combat
forces, some of their most sophisticated air
defense, battalions of artillery" having
been sent to the Donbass. "What is clear,"
Breedlove said, "is that right now, it is
not getting better. It is getting worse
every day."
German leaders in Berlin
were stunned. They didn't understand what
Breedlove was talking about. And it wasn't
the first time. Once again, the German
government, supported by intelligence
gathered by the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND),
Germany's foreign intelligence agency, did
not share the view of NATO's Supreme Allied
Commander Europe (SACEUR).
The pattern has become a
familiar one. For months, Breedlove has been
commenting on Russian activities in eastern
Ukraine, speaking of troop advances on the
border, the amassing of munitions and
alleged columns of Russian tanks. Over and
over again, Breedlove's numbers have been
significantly higher than those in the
possession of America's NATO allies in
Europe. As such, he is playing directly into
the hands of the hardliners in the US
Congress and in NATO.
The German government is
alarmed. Are the Americans trying to thwart
European
efforts at mediation led by Chancellor
Angela Merkel? Sources in the
Chancellery have referred to Breedlove's
comments as "dangerous propaganda." Foreign
Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier even found
it necessary recently to bring up
Breedlove's comments with NATO General
Secretary Jens Stoltenberg.
The 'Super Hawk'
But Breedlove hasn't been
the only source of friction. Europeans have
also begun to see others as hindrances in
their search for a diplomatic solution to
the Ukraine conflict. First and foremost
among them is Victoria Nuland, head of
European affairs at the US State Department.
She and others would like to see Washington
deliver arms to Ukraine and are supported by
Congressional Republicans as well as many
powerful Democrats.
Indeed, US President
Barack Obama seems almost isolated. He has
thrown his support behind Merkel's
diplomatic efforts for the time being, but
he has also done little to quiet those who
would seek to increase tensions with Russia
and deliver weapons to Ukraine. Sources in
Washington say that Breedlove's bellicose
comments are first cleared with the White
House and the Pentagon. The general, they
say, has the role of the "super hawk," whose
role is that of increasing the pressure on
America's more reserved trans-Atlantic
partners.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel and
US President Barack Obama after a
Feb. 9 meeting in Washington:
Increasing pressure on America's
more reserved trans-Atlantic
partners.
A mixture of political
argumentation and military propaganda is
necessary. But for months now, many in the
Chancellery simply shake their heads each
time NATO, under Breedlove's leadership,
goes public with striking announcements
about Russian troop or tank movements. To be
sure, neither Berlin's Russia experts nor
BND intelligence analysts doubt that Moscow
is supporting the pro-Russian separatists.
The BND even has proof of such support.
But it is the tone of
Breedlove's announcements that makes Berlin
uneasy. False claims and exaggerated
accounts, warned a top German official
during a recent meeting on Ukraine, have put
NATO -- and by extension, the entire West --
in danger of losing its credibility.
There are plenty of
examples. Just over three weeks ago, during
the cease-fire talks in Minsk, the Ukrainian
military warned that the Russians -- even as
the diplomatic marathon was ongoing -- had
moved 50 tanks and dozens of rockets across
the border into Luhansk. Just one day
earlier, US Lieutenant General Ben Hodges
had announced "direct Russian military
intervention."
Senior officials in Berlin
immediately asked the BND for an assessment,
but the intelligence agency's satellite
images showed just a few armored vehicles.
Even those American intelligence officials
who supply the BND with daily situation
reports were much more reserved about the
incident than Hodges was in his public
statements. One intelligence agent says it
"remains a riddle until today" how the
general reached his conclusions.
Much More Cautious
"The German intelligence
services generally appraise the threat level
much more cautiously than the Americans do,"
an international military expert in Kiev
confirmed.
At the beginning of the
crisis, General Breedlove announced that the
Russians had assembled 40,000 troops on the
Ukrainian border and warned that an invasion
could take place at any moment. The
situation, he said, was "incredibly
concerning." But intelligence officials from
NATO member states had already excluded the
possibility of a Russian invasion. They
believed that neither the composition nor
the equipment of the troops was consistent
with an imminent invasion.
The experts contradicted
Breedlove's view in almost every respect.
There weren't 40,000 soldiers on the border,
they believed, rather there were much less
than 30,000 and perhaps even fewer than
20,000. Furthermore, most of the military
equipment had not been brought to the border
for a possible invasion, but had already
been there prior to the beginning of the
conflict. Furthermore, there was no evidence
of logistical preparation for an invasion,
such as a field headquarters.
Breedlove, though,
repeatedly made inexact, contradictory or
even flat-out inaccurate statements. On Nov.
18, 2014, he told the German newspaper
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung that
there were "regular Russian army units in
eastern Ukraine." One day later, he told the
website of the German newsmagazine Stern
that they weren't fighting units, but
"mostly trainers and advisors."
He initially said there
were "between 250 and 300" of them, and then
"between 300 and 500." For a time, NATO was
even saying there were 1,000 of them.
The fact that NATO has no
intelligence agency of its own plays into
Breedlove's hands. The alliance relies on
intelligence gathered by agents from the US,
Britain, Germany and other member states. As
such, SACEUR has a wide range of information
to choose from.
Influencing Breedlove
On Nov. 12, during a visit
to Sofia, Bulgaria, Breedlove reported that
"we have seen columns of Russian equipment
-- primarily Russian tanks, Russian
artillery, Russian air defense systems and
Russian combat troops -- entering into
Ukraine." It was, he noted, "the same thing
that OSCE is reporting." But the OSCE had
only observed military convoys within
eastern Ukraine. OSCE observers had said
nothing about troops marching in from
Russia.
Breedlove sees no reason
to revise his approach. "I stand by all the
public statements I have made during the
Ukraine crisis," he wrote to SPIEGEL in
response to a request for a statement
accompanied by a list of his controversial
claims. He wrote that it was to be expected
that assessments of NATO's intelligence
center, which receives information from all
33 alliance members in addition to partner
states, doesn't always match assessments
made by individual nations. "It is normal
that not everyone agrees with the
assessments that I provide," he wrote.
He says that NATO's
strategy is to "release clear, accurate and
timely information regarding ongoing
events." He also wrote that: "As an alliance
based on the fundamental values of freedom
and democracy, our response to propaganda
cannot be more propaganda. It can only be
the truth."
The German government,
meanwhile, is doing what it can to influence
Breedlove. Sources in Berlin say that
conversations to this end have taken place
in recent weeks. But there are many at NATO
headquarters in Brussels who are likewise
concerned about Breedlove's statements. On
Tuesday of last week, Breedlove's public
appearances were an official item on the
agenda of the North Atlantic Council's
weekly lunch meeting. Several ambassadors
present criticized Breedlove and expressed
their incredulity at some of the commander's
statements.
The government in Berlin
is concerned that Breedlove's statements
could harm the West's credibility. The West
can't counter Russian propaganda with its
own propaganda, "rather it must use
arguments that are worthy of a
constitutional state." Berlin sources also
say that it has become conspicuous that
Breedlove's controversial statements are
often made just as a step forward has been
made in the difficult negotiations aimed at
a political resolution. Berlin sources say
that Germany should be able to depend on its
allies to support its efforts at peace.
Pressure on Obama
German foreign policy
experts are united in their view of
Breedlove as a hawk. "I would prefer that
Breedlove's comments on political questions
be intelligent and reserved," says Social
Democrat parliamentarian Niels Annen, for
example. "Instead, NATO in the past has
always announced a new Russian offensive
just as, from our point of view, the time
had come for cautious optimism." Annen, who
has long specialized in foreign policy, has
also been frequently dissatisfied with the
information provided by NATO headquarters.
"We parliamentarians were often confused by
information regarding alleged troop
movements that were inconsistent with the
information we had," he says.
The pressure on Obama from
the Republicans, but also from his own
political camp, is intense. Should the
ceasefire in eastern Ukraine not hold, it
will likely be difficult to continue
refusing Kiev's requests for shipments of
so-called "defensive weapons." And that
would represent a dramatic escalation of the
crisis. Moscow has already begun issuing
threats in anticipation of such deliveries.
"Any weapons deliveries to Kiev will
escalate the tensions and would unhinge
European security," Nikolai Patrushev,
secretary of Russia's national security
council, told the Russian newspaper
Komsomolskaya Pravda on Wednesday.
Although President Obama
has decided for the time being to give
European diplomacy a chance, hawks like
Breedlove or Victoria Nuland are doing what
they can to pave the way for weapons
deliveries. "We can fight against the
Europeans, fight against them rhetorically,"
Nuland said during a private meeting of
American officials on the sidelines of the
Munich Security Conference at the beginning
of February.
US diplomat
Victoria Nuland: Paving the way for
weapons deliveries.
In reporting on the meeting
later, the German tabloid Bild
reported that Nuland referred to the
chancellor's early February trip to Moscow
for talks with Putin as "Merkel's Moscow
stuff." No wonder, then, that people in
Berlin have the impression that important
power brokers in Washington are working
against the Europeans. Berlin officials have
noticed that, following the visit of
American politicians or military leaders in
Kiev, Ukrainian officials are much more
bellicose and optimistic about the Ukrainian
military's ability to win the conflict on
the battlefield. "We then have to
laboriously bring the Ukrainians back onto
the course of negotiations," said one Berlin
official.
Nuland Diplomacy
Nuland, who is seen as a
possible secretary of state should the
Republicans win back the White House in next
year's presidential election, is an
important voice in US policy concerning
Ukraine and Russia. She has never sought to
hide her emotional bond to Russia, even
saying "I love Russia." Her grandparents
immigrated to the US from Bessarabia, which
belonged to the Russian empire at the time.
Nuland speaks Russian fluently.
She is also very direct.
She can be very keen and entertaining, but
has been known to take on an undiplomatic
tone -- and has not always been wrong to do
so. Mykola Asarov, who was prime minister
under toppled Ukrainian President Viktor
Yanukovych, recalls that Nuland basically
blackmailed Yanukovych in order to prevent
greater bloodshed in Kiev during the Maidan
protests. "No violence against the
protesters or you'll fall," Nuland told him
according to Asarov. She also, he said,
threatened tough economic and political
sanctions against both Ukraine and the
country's leaders. According to Asarov,
Nuland said that, were violence used against
the protesters on Maidan Square, information
about the money he and his cronies had taken
out of the country would be made public.
Nuland has also been open
-- at least internally -- about her contempt
for European weakness and is famous for
having said "Fuck the EU" during the initial
days of the Ukraine crisis in February of
2014. Her husband, the neo-conservative
Robert Kagan, is, after all, the originator
of the idea that Americans are from Mars and
Europeans, unwilling as they are to realize
that true security depends on military
power, are from Venus.
When it comes to the goal
of delivering weapons to Ukraine, Nuland and
Breedlove work hand-in-hand. On the first
day of the Munich Security Conference, the
two gathered the US delegation behind closed
doors to discuss their strategy for breaking
Europe's resistance to arming Ukraine.
On the seventh floor of
the Bayerischer Hof hotel in the heart of
Munich, it was Nuland who began coaching.
"While talking to the Europeans this
weekend, you need to make the case that
Russia is putting in more and more offensive
stuff while we want to help the Ukrainians
defend against these systems," Nuland said.
"It is defensive in nature although some of
it has lethality."
Training Troops?
Breedlove complemented
that with the military details, saying that
moderate weapons aid was inevitable --
otherwise neither sanctions nor diplomatic
pressure would have any effect. "If we can
increase the cost for Russia on the
battlefield, the other tools will become
more effective," he said. "That's what we
should do here."
In Berlin, top politicians
have always considered a common position
vis-a-vis Russia as a necessary prerequisite
for success in peace efforts. For the time
being, that common front is still holding,
but the dispute is a fundamental one -- and
hinges on the question of whether diplomacy
can be successful without the threat of
military action. Additionally, the
trans-Atlantic partners also have differing
goals. Whereas the aim of the Franco-German
initiative is to stabilize the situation in
Ukraine, it is Russia that concerns hawks
within the US administration. They want to
drive back Moscow's influence in the region
and destabilize Putin's power. For them, the
dream outcome would be regime change in
Moscow.
A massive troop training
range is located in Yavoriv in western
Ukraine near the Polish border. During
Soviet times, it served as the westernmost
military district in the Soviet Union. Since
1998, though, it has been used for joint
exercises by Ukrainian forces together with
the United States and NATO. Yavoriv is also
the site where US soldiers want to train
members of the Ukrainian National Guard for
their future battle against the separatists.
According to the Pentagon's plans, American
officers would train the Ukrainians on how
to use American artillery-locating radar
devices. At least that's what US Army in
Europe commander Lt. Gen. Hodges announced
in January.
The training was actually
supposed to start at the beginning of March.
Before it began, however, President Obama
temporarily put it on hold in order to give
the ceasefire agreement reached in Minsk a
chance. Still, the hawks remain confident
that they will soon come a step closer to
their goal. On Tuesday, Hodges said during
an appearance in Berlin that he expects the
training will still begin at some point this
month.
By Matthias Gebauer,
Christiane Hoffmann, Marc Hujer, Gordon
Repinski, Matthias Schepp, Christoph Schult,
Holger Stark and Klaus Wiegrefe