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  • Eastern Partnership: The West's Final Assault On The Former Soviet U

    EASTERN PARTNERSHIP: THE WEST'S FINAL ASSAULT ON THE FORMER SOVIET UNION
    Rick Rozoff (USA)

    en.fondsk.ru
    05.03.2009

    At a meeting of the European Union's General Affairs and External
    Relations Council in Brussels on May 26 of last year, Poland, seconded
    by Sweden, first proposed what has come to be known as the Eastern
    Partnership, a programme to 'integrate' all the European and South
    Caucasus former Soviet nations - except for Russia - not already
    in the EU and NATO; that is, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia,
    Moldova and Ukraine.

    The above are half of the former Soviet republics in the Commonwealth
    of Independent States (CIS) established as a sop to Russia immediately
    after the breakup of the Soviet Union in that year and in theory
    to be a post-Soviet equivalent of the then European Community, now
    European Union.

    (Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania never joined and both were absorbed
    into the European Union and NATO in 2004.)

    The Eastern Partnership has since last May been presented as an
    innocuous enough sounding proposal containing a mission statement to
    promote "a substantial upgrading of the level of political engagement,
    including the prospect of a new generation of Association Agreements,
    far-reaching integration into the EU economy, easier travel to
    the EU for citizens providing that security requirements are met,
    enhanced energy security arrangements benefitting all conce rned,
    and increased financial assistance." (European Union press release,
    December 3, 2008) The key phrases, though, are "upgrading of the level
    of political engagement" and "enhanced energy security arrangements."

    What the Eastern Partnership is designed to accomplish is to
    complete the destruction of the Commonwealth of Independent States,
    the Eurasian Economic Community (EurAsEC) comprised of Belarus,
    Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, and the only
    post-Soviet multinational security structure, the Collective Security
    Treaty Organization (CSTO), as well as to abort the formalization of
    the Belarus-Russia Union State.

    Which is to say, to isolate Russia from six of the twelve CIS
    states, with the other five, in Central Asia (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan,
    Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan), simultaneously targeted by
    a complementary EU initiative.

    The ultimate intent of the Eastern Partnership is to wean away all
    the other ex-Soviet states from economic, trade, political, security
    and military ties with Russia and to integrate them into broader
    so-called Euro-Atlantic structures from the European Union itself
    initially to NATO ultimately.

    Coming out of last year's NATO summit in Romania the increased
    political, security and military integration - one is tempted to say
    merger - of the EU and NATO, trumpeted by France's President Nicholas
    Sarkozy and Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner, wa rmly embraced by the
    Bush administration and since affirmed most strongly by British Foreign
    Minister David Miliband at the recent Munich Security Conference,
    is the yet further consolidation of the longstanding EU-NATO "soft
    power, hard power" division of labour mutually agreed upon.

    "[T]he Partnership would demonstrate the "power of soft power" and
    acknowledge that the conflict in Georgia in August had influenced
    the decision to launch the Partnership" (PanArmenian.net, December
    11, 2008).

    The Eastern Partnership was first proposed in May of 2008 as mentioned
    earlier, but the impetus to endorse it at a meeting of leaders last
    December was the 'soft power' response by the EU to complement NATO's
    establishment of the NATO-Georgia Commission a month after Georgia's
    invasion of South Ossetia triggered last summer's Caucasus war.

    The EU will provide the 'diplomatic' persuasion and the economic
    subsidies as NATO and its individual member states (in almost every
    instance in Europe the same as the EU's) continue to supply Georgia
    with advanced offensive arms, surveillance systems, military training
    and permanent advisers.

    As a further indication of what the EU's true objective is, Belarus has
    been added to the other five only with the proviso it will be accepted
    "if it accepts a democracy improvement plan." (PanArmenian.net,
    December 12, 2008)0D

    The same has not been openly stated regarding Armenia, but for two
    critical reasons it is in the same category as Belarus, all pabulum
    concerning democracy notwithstanding. (If democracy in any acceptation
    of the term was a precondition then the US-installed despot and
    megalomaniac Mikheil Saakashvili and the hereditary president-for-life
    dynasty of the Aliev family would disqualify Georgia and Azerbaijan,
    respectively.)

    Armenia and Belarus are both in the second tier of Eastern Partnership
    candidates and will require a good deal of "improvement" before being
    absorbed into the West's new "soft power" drive to the east.

    Neither is part of the GUAM (Georgia, Ukraine, Azerbaijan, Moldova)
    anti-CIS bloc set up in 1997 through the joint efforts of the Clinton
    administration and its secretary of state Madeleine Albright and
    its European Union allies in Strasbourg. Both are members of the
    Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) with Russia and four
    Central Asian nations (all except for Turkmenistan), which has in
    recent years taken on a more overt military mutual defense nature.

    The deadly "Daffodil Revolution" in Armenia a year ago and the
    attempted "Denim Revolution" in Belarus two years before having failed
    to replicate their predecessors and prototypes in Georgia in 2003,
    Ukraine in 2004 and Kyrgyzstan in 2005, other means were required to
    "reorientate" the two nations from their close state-to-state and
    security relations with Russia.

    Hence the need for the Eastern Partnership.

    The role of GUAM, whose members are both identified by the EU as
    the preferred four in the Partnership and who collectively comprise
    two-thirds, indeed the foundation, of it, will be taken up in
    depth later on. As will the simultaneous and complementary Brussels
    programme aimed at Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan
    and Uzbekistan, itself mirroring US and NATO military and energy
    plans for Central Asia.

    The day after Poland and Sweden first proposed the initiative in May
    of last year, the British newspaper The Telegraph, under the headline
    "Poland takes on Russia with 'Eastern Partnership' proposal," wrote
    that "Poland will take on its mighty neighbour Russia today when it
    proposes that the European Union extends its influence deep into the
    former Soviet Union by establishing an 'Eastern Partnership' and more
    markedly that "The Eastern Partnership would be particularly galling
    for the Kremlin if its aspiration to include Belarus is achieved." (The
    Telegraph, May 26, 2008)

    Ahead of last December's EU summit where the plans were formalized for
    the implementation of the Eastern Partnership project at the summit
    of EU heads of state in March of 2009, this commentary appeared in
    a Georgian paper: "[T]his latest EU action could entail a nother
    consequence, one that few appear to be thinking about now. "In the
    early 1990s, the United States took the lead in pushing the idea
    that EU membership for East European countries could serve as either
    a surrogate or a stepping stone to NATO membership. "If that idea
    should resurface, and some of its authors will be returning to office
    with the incoming Obama Administration in Washington, it would change
    both the EU and NATO and equally would change how Moscow would deal
    with Brussels, thus introducing yet another complication in East-West
    relations." (Georgian Daily, December 8, 2008)

    With the Czech Republic poised to take over the presidency of the EU in
    two days, The Telegraph of Britain accurately characterized not only
    the subversive but the provocative nature of the Eastern Partnership
    by indicating that "The Czech Republic, which will become the first
    former Warsaw Pact country to hold the presidency, has made a priority
    of a scheme to establish closer ties with former Soviet states,
    irrespective of Russian concerns of encroachment close to its borders."

    It further stated that Czech Foreign Minister Karol Schwarzenberg,
    coincidentally or otherwise a staunch supporter of US missile radar
    plans for his country, "stressed that the EU's relations with the
    former Soviet states were its own affair and that Russia should
    not interfere."

    (The Telegraph, December 30, 2008)

    To insure that the point wasn't missed in Moscow, Schwarzenberg
    thundered that Russia should abandon any illusions it might entertain
    concerning "some privileged interests abroad" and, throwing down the
    gauntlet altogether, "in such cases a red line must be established
    beyond which the EU must not make concessions." (Black Sea Press
    [Georgia], December 30, 2008)

    The Czech foreign minister evinced a curious sense of geography in
    his use of the word abroad, as Russia borders Azerbaijan, Belarus,
    Georgia and Ukraine and is only one nation removed from Armenia and
    Moldova, whereas his own government is pressing for the deployment
    of missile radar facilities and troops from the other side of the
    world and has troops stationed in Afghanistan and Iraq.

    As though in anticipation of Schwarzenberg' s diktat, two weeks earlier
    Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov warned "[W]e cannot agree
    when attempts are being made to pass off the historically conditioned
    mutually privileged relations between the states in the former Soviet
    expanse as a 'sphere of influence,'" adding "If you accept that logic,
    then under this definition fall the European Neighbourhood Policy,
    Eastern Partnership and many other EU (let alone NATO) projects, on
    which the decisions are taken without the participation of Russia or
    countries to which they apply." (Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs,
    Decembe r 15, 2008)

    Two days ago the last US ambassador to the Soviet Union [1987-1991],
    Jack Matlock, "explained Russian motivations and highlighted what he
    considered to be American hypocrisy in geopolitical affairs. While
    America has claimed nearly monopolistic power in the Western Hemisphere
    for 200 years, Matlock said, it has increasingly denied Russia its own
    regional sphere of influence since the fall of the Soviet Union. "The
    West has been picking and choosing which principles to uphold." (Yale
    Daily News, February 12, 2009)

    To backtrack, a month after the initial proposal for the establishment
    of the Eastern Partnership in May of 2008 Polish Foreign Minister
    Radoslav Sikorski called the Partnership "the practical and ideological
    continuation of the European Neighbourhood Policy", which should
    become a supplement to the Mediterranean Union.... (InfoTag [Moldova],
    June 26, 2008)

    Sikorski was alluding to the Mediterranean Union project of French
    president Nicholas Sarkozy, which in July 13, 2008 was renamed the
    Union for the Mediterranean, the southern wing of the European Union's
    "push east and south" (US State Department phrase for its own emphasis
    in and from Europe), the eastern complement of which is, of course,
    the Eastern Partnership.

    A summit of EU leaders in Brussels in the same month, June of 2008,
    further pursued the initiative and the "Eastern Partnership... Poli
    sh-Swedish proposition of deepening cooperation with Eastern European
    countries" was discussed. (Polish Radio, June 20, 2008)

    The above advancement of the project evoked these comments from a
    Caucasus news source: "Moscow itself understood that the main aim
    of the initiative was to save the above-mentioned countries from
    the influence of Russia" and "According to the EU Commissioner for
    Foreign Relations and Neighbourhood Policy Benita Ferrero-Waldner at
    least one billion euro per year will be allocated for the Black Sea
    Synergy project." (Azeri Press Agency, June 30, 2008)

    Black Sea Synergy project is synergy not as in the word whose adjective
    form is synergistic but as in syn + energy. Of the six nations
    targeted for the Eastern Partnership two, Georgia and Ukraine, are
    on the Black Sea and one, Azerbaijan, is a Caspian Sea littoral state.

    The Eastern Partnership is designed among several other purposes to
    complement the Union of the Mediterranean and to augment the Black
    Sea Synergy programme as an integral and advanced component of the
    West's campaign to dominate world energy supplies and transit and to
    provide the civilian supplement to NATO's expansion throughout Eurasia,
    the Mediterranean, Africa and the Middle East.

    The website of the European Commission, the executive branch of the
    EU, on a page dedicated to Black Sea Synergy includes these comments:
    "The Black Sea region , which includes Bulgaria and Romania, occupies
    a strategic position between Europe, Central Asia and the Middle
    East. The European Union intends to support regional commitments
    tending to increase mutual confidence and remove obstacles to the
    stability, security and prosperity of the countries in this region."

    "Black Sea Synergy is a cooperation initiative that proposes a new
    dynamic for the region, its countries and their citizens. Regional
    cooperation could provide additional value to initiatives in areas of
    common interest and serve as a bridge to help strengthen relations
    with neighbouring countries and regions (Caspian Sea, Central Asia,
    South-eastern Europe)."

    And, which will bring the issue back to GUAM and the prospects for
    further armed confrontations after the model of last August's war in
    the Caucasus: "The EC advocates a more active role in addressing frozen
    conflicts (Transnistria, Abkhazia, South Ossetia, Nagorno-Karabakh)"
    (Europa, June 3, 2009)

    GUAM was set up by the West in 1997 to accomplish several strategic
    objectives: As a Trojan Horse within the Commonwealth of Independent
    States - until Georgia withdrew after the war last August all four
    GUAM member states were in the CIS - it was intended to undermine
    and ultimately dissolve the community, eventually luring other CIS
    states away from it. The inclusion of Armenia and Belarus in the
    Eastern Partnership is an example of thi s strategy.

    Incorporating the four ex-Soviet states into a trans-Eurasian strategic
    energy and military transit corridor from the Black Sea through the
    Caspian Sea Basin to Central and South Asia. The addition of Uzbekistan
    in 1999 extended the range of the bloc, although Uzbekistan would
    withdraw in 2005.

    The GUAM states are involved in all four of the so-called frozen
    conflicts in the former Soviet Union: Georgia with Abkhazia and South
    Ossetia; Azerbaijan with Nagorno-Karabakh; Moldova with Transdniester
    (Pridnestrovie).

    In fact there are several other unresolved territorial disputes in
    the GUAM states including Adjaria (suppressed and occupied by Georgia
    in 2004 after a show of force by Saakashvili's American-trained
    and -equipped army, the first example of the 'peaceful resolution
    of a frozen conflict') and the ethnic Armenian inhabited area of
    Samtskhe-Javakheti/ Javakhk in Georgia; Gaugazia in Moldova; and the
    Crimea and potentially even the Donetsk region in Ukraine.

    The four frozen conflicts proper - Abkhazia, Nagorno-Karabakh, South
    Ossetia and Transdniester - are illustrative of the cataclysmic
    consequences of the precipitate breakup of the Soviet Union in
    1991. All four former autonomous republics seceded from the respective
    Soviet Socialist Federal Republics they had belonged to, in all cases
    also entailing armed conflict and loss of life.

    The four, and the other potential conflict areas mentioned above,=2
    0for example Crimea in Ukraine, part of Russia for centuries until
    being ceded to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic in 1954,
    had belonged to the three federal republics they did until 1991 only
    within the context of the broader Soviet framework; once the latter
    ceased to exist, so too did the rationale for the autonomous republics
    remaining within new states that had never before existed as nations -
    Moldova and Ukraine - or, if so, not for centuries except for a three
    year period during the Russian civil war with Georgia from 1918-1921
    and a two year interlude with Azerbaijan from 1918-1920.

    The US and its NATO allies are past masters at fishing in troubled
    waters and in troubling the waters the better to fish in them, and
    the frozen conflicts in the former Soviet Union allow the West to
    impede integration processes within the Commonwealth of Independent
    States, develop close military ties to the nations involved with
    them and increasingly to intervene in post-Soviet territory under the
    auspices of peacekeeping operations whether through the Organization
    for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), the European Union or,
    the ultimate objective, NATO.

    Most dangerously, the US and all its NATO allies have refused to
    ratify the 1990 Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE) arms treaty -
    which has only been approved by Belarus, Kazakhstan, Russia and
    Ukraine (as successor states to the former Soviet Union) - and have
    justified their non-ratification by linking it to the withdrawal of
    small Russian peacekeeper contingents - mandated by the Commonwealth
    of Independent States and in at least one instance the United Nations -
    from Abkhazia, South Ossetia and Transdniester.

    In the eighteen year interim since the treaty was negotiated until now
    numerous new nations have been created in Europe - Bosnia, Croatia,
    Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Macedonia, Moldova, Montenegro, Serbia,
    Slovakia and Slovenia (and of course the pseudo-state of Kosovo) -
    and in the South Caucasus Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia which are
    not signatories to it and which then could have US and NATO forces
    and arms stationed on their territories without any provisions made
    for Russia and the three other nations that have ratified the treaty
    to monitor them.

    Such deployments are not limited to conventional weaponry.

    At the 2006 summit in Kiev, Ukraine, GUAM expanded its name to
    GUAM-Organization for Democracy and Economic Development, declared
    itself an international organization and announced the creation of
    a joint military ('peacekeeping') force.

    The summit also laid out in more detail and candor why the US and
    its allies created and fostered GUAM, whose expanded format is the
    Eastern Partnership, to begin with: "The creation of the bloc is a
    bold step in promoting energy supply routes linking the Caspian Sea
    basin and consumers in the EU, allowing to reduce heavy dependence on
    Russian energy. One of the main projects to be promoted is launching
    supplies of Caspian Sea crude oil from Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan
    via Georgian and Ukrainian pipelines to markets in Europe....-[T]he
    plan also calls for extending the Odessa-Brody pipeline to Plock of
    Poland, which is already hooked up with a major oil terminal and an
    oil refinery in Gdansk."(Ukrainian Journal, May 23, 2006)

    The same report contains this important detail: "[T]he situation
    changed last year when Yushchenko, a pro-Western leader, had been
    inaugurated to the presidency in Ukraine and had pledged to replace
    Russian shipments with Caspian supplies. The pipeline would bypass
    Russia on the way to Ukraine and to the E.U...." (Ibid)

    A Russian commentary of late last autumn reflected the last
    paragraph's allusion to the role of putative "colour revolutions" in
    strengthening GUAM's subservience to Western interests by remarking
    that the group "was created with a broad list of functions to combat
    Russian influence in the region, but remained largely unused, before
    the Orange Revolution in Ukraine and Mikhail Saakashvili's coming to
    power in Georgia." (Russia Today, November 7, 2009)

    The following year at its summit in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan,
    a GUAM-US, GUAM-Japan, GUAM-Visegrad Four (Czech Republic, Hungary,
    Poland, Slovakia), GUAM-Baltic and other new partnerships were
    launched.

    In November of 2007 the US hosted a meeting of GUAM states national
    coordinators in Washington where "A special topic of the discussions
    was the assessment of the potential of Caspian Sea networks in the
    consolidation of the GUAM states' energy security and the present-day
    shape of the Nabucco Project." (Infotag [Moldova], November 2, 2007)

    At the 2008 GUAM summit in Batumi, the capital of Georgian-subjugated
    Adjaria, "The sides [chartered a] course for the development
    of regional cooperation as a part of the European and Asian
    integration processes, and for strengthening partnership relations
    with the US, Poland, Japan and other states as well as international
    organizations. "The declaration expressed concern over the protracted
    conflicts, aggressive separatism...

    and underlined the importance of the international community's support
    for the settlement of the conflicts."(Azeri Press Agency, July 2, 2008)

    David Merkel, Assistant to the US Secretary of State "said GUAM
    unites the Caspian and Black Sea regions and can fulfill the function
    of connecting Central Asia with the Near East."(Georgian Public
    Broadcasting, July 1, 2008)

    The Georgian Energy Minister, Aleksandre Khetaguri, extended the reach
    of GUAM-centered energy projects to the Baltic Sea in adding "We have
    discussed the question of an Odessa-Brody-Gdansk pipeline, which will
    allow=2 0the oil from the Caspian countries to be transported first
    to Ukraine and then to other parts of Eastern Europe." (The Messenger
    [Georgia], July 1, 2008)

    The turning point in the West's resolve to back its GUAM, and now
    Eastern Partnership, clients to definitively 'solve' the issue of
    the frozen conflicts came at the NATO summit in Bucharest, Romania
    in April of last year. All twenty six Alliance members affirmed that
    Georgia and Ukraine, the most pro-American and pro-NATO of the four
    GUAM and six Eastern Partnership states, were on an irreversible road
    to full NATO accession but baulked at granting them the Membership
    Action Plan, the final stage to complete integration.

    Two central barriers to a nation joining NATO are unresolved conflicts
    in and foreign (that is, non-NATO nations') bases on their territories.

    Georgia still laid claim to Abkhazia and South Ossetia and Ukraine
    still hosted the Russian Sixth Fleet at Sevastopol in the Crimea.

    Far from being the rebuff to Georgia and Ukraine and to their American
    sponsor the non-granting of Membership Action Plans to the two
    candidates appeared to some, Georgia and Ukraine were both given not
    only a green light to resolve these issues but in fact were directed
    if not ordered to do so.

    At the beginning of last August Georgian shelling killed six people,
    including a Russian peacekeeper, and wounded twelve on the outskirts of
    the=2 0capital and on August 7 Georgia's American-armed and -trained
    armed forces crossed the border and laid waste to much of the South
    Ossetian capital.

    The assault, coming only days after the Pentagon had completed a two
    week military drill, Exercise Immediate Response 2008, under the
    sponsorship of NATO's Partnership for Peace programme with troops
    from Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan and Ukraine, weeks after Secretary
    of State Condoleezza Rice had visited the Georgian capital and hours
    after Georgia's Saakashvili had proclaimed a unilateral ceasefire,
    led to direct military hostility between Russia and the preeminent
    client of the US. During the same interim after the NATO summit
    Ukrainian authorities escalated their demands that the lease for the
    Russian Sixth Fleet not be renewed.

    Weeks after the Caucasus war ended, the EU convened an extraordinary
    summit "devoted to the situation in Georgia" at which it adopted a
    resolution stating that "it is more necessary than ever to support
    regional cooperation and step up its relations with its eastern
    neighbours, in particular through its neighbourhood policy, the
    development of the Black Sea Synergy initiative and an Eastern
    Partnership." (ForUm [Ukraine], September 2, 2008)

    Shortly thereafter Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk revealed the true
    dimensions of the Eastern Partnership when he said that, "Developments
    of the past months, especially the cr isis in the Caucuses, have shown
    the farsightedness of the Swedish and Polish initiative - a proposal
    for the entire European Union with a global dimension...."(UNIAN
    [Ukraine], September 18, 2008)

    The above occurred as the US sent a flotilla of warships to Georgian
    ports and NATO boosted its naval presence in the Black Sea.

    In the middle of last November an energy summit was held in the
    Azerbaijani capital of Baku and attended by the presidents of Ukraine,
    Turkey, Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Romania, Georgia and other heads
    of states.

    American expatriate and current Lithuanian president Valdas Adamkus
    said that "The number of letters in the word 'GUAM' should be
    increased: it would consolidate both the organization and the
    participating countries," explaining "[W]e are working towards
    strengthening the GUAM organization, expanding contacts between the
    countries of the Baltic, Black and Caspian Sea regions, and making
    cooperation in the energy field more intense." (Today.AZ [Azerbaijan],
    November 14, 2008)

    Adamkus' statements were supported in a Western press report of the
    same day: "The plan [elaborated at the summit] emphasised developing
    a 'southern gas corridor" to transport supplies from the Caspian
    Sea and Middle East regions, bypassing Russia, as well as an energy
    ring linking Europe and southern Mediterranean countries."(Agence
    France-Presse, November2014, 2008)

    The meeting was overseen by US Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman
    and special envoy of the US president for Eurasian energy issues
    Boyden Gray. The main focus was on the Caspian-Black- Sea-Baltic
    Odessa-Brody- Gdansk oil pipeline project, but also included as the
    Agence France-Presse dispatch alluded to the Nabucco natural gas
    mega-project, which is to take in North African and Persian Gulf as
    well as Caspian energy resources and transit lines.

    While at the summit US Energy Secretary Bodman effused that the "Baku
    Energy Summit is the continuation of 'The Contract of Century' signed
    in 1994," an allusion to the contract signed between between American
    and Western companies and Azerbaijan in that year which laid the
    foundation for the subsequent trans-Eurasian Baku-Tbilisi- Ceyhan oil
    and Baku-Tbilisi- Erzurum gas pipelines as well as the Nabucco project.

    Those three energy undertakings, unprecedented in scope and
    political capital expended, are to be expanded with the new Eastern
    Partnership. In late November of last year the EU issue a draft
    communiqué on the Eastern partnership which stated, inter alia, "On
    the energy front, Memorandums of Understanding are to help guarantee
    EU energy security, leading to 'joint management, and even ownership of
    pipelines by companies of supplier, transit and consumer countries," as
    well as noting "EU 'concern' over energy infrastru cture in conflict
    zones, such as a Russia-Balkans gas pipeline running through the
    disputed Moldovan region of Transdniestria." (Azeri Press Agency,
    November 25, 2008)

    A European Commission report of a few days later included the demand
    that "The EU must significantly boost relations with Ukraine and
    five other ex-Soviet republics and make easing Moscow's sway over
    them a priority.

    "The report says the EU must seek diversification of energy routes
    by enabling the ex-Soviet nations to build new and better connected
    pipelines and oil and gas storage facilities. The EU wants to see a
    gas pipeline from the Caucasus fully skirting Russia." (Associated
    Press, November 30, 2008)

    As mentioned above the EU signed the draft communiqué on the Eastern
    Partnership in December of last year with the intent of pulling "the
    EU's six post-Soviet neighbours closer to the West by recognizing their
    'European aspirations and creating a new European Economic Area..."

    (PanArmenian.net, December 3, 2008), "Accelerated partly because of the
    summer 2008 conflict in the Caucasus..." (Sofia Echo, December 3, 2008)

    On December 12 the heads of state of all 27 EU members approved the
    establishment of the Eastern Partnership. Twelve days later the EU
    special representative to the South Caucasus, Peter Semneby, added,
    "This programme was elaborated in the light of the recent developments
    0D in the region, the war in Georgia, as well as the concerns of the
    South Caucasus countries on security issues..." (Today.AZ, December
    24, 2008)

    On December 19 Washington signed a United States-Ukraine Charter
    on Strategic Partnership with its compliant client in Kiev, Viktor
    Yushchenko, and within a week the Ukraine-Russia gas dispute began,
    plunging much of Europe into a crisis and renewing Western calls for
    energy routes circumventing Russia.

    On February 10 of this year Deputy Prime Minister for EU Affairs for
    the Czech Republic, which assumed the EU presidency on the first of
    the year, Alexandr Vondra, announced that he expected the Eastern
    Partnership to be formally inaugurated on May 7 in Prague at the EU
    summit to be held there.

    Dispensing with the standard verbs like assisting and aiding, he added
    another one - stabilizing. "The recent gas crisis has not only its
    technical but also political implications. The crisis highlighted
    how important it is for the EU to assume responsibility for the
    stabilisation of its eastern neighbours and to pay them more political
    and financial attention." (Czech News Agency, February 10, 2009)

    The report from which the preceding quote is taken fleshed out the
    strategy in more detail: "The Eastern Partnership summit is to be
    followed by a meeting of the countries that are connected with the
    'southern energy corridor' that links the Caspian reg ion with world
    markets, bypassing Russia....[T] he meeting will probably take place
    on the same day as the Eastern Partnership summit."(Ibid) To further
    tie together the West's plans to penetrate and assimilate all of former
    Soviet territory, the following day it was reported that "Czech Prime
    Minister Mirek Topolanek will go to Central Asia on Thursday to have
    talks on the Eastern Partnership and possible gas supplies for the
    European Union that would reduce the EU's dependency on Russian gas"
    and that "During his two-day visit, Topolanek will have talks with top
    politicians of Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan," and, lastly,
    "Topolanek will negotiate in Central Asia on behalf of the EU as the
    Czech Republic has been EU president since January."(Czech News Agency,
    February 11, 2009)

    And to further confirm the predetermined and integrated approach
    toward all non-Russian Commonwealth of Independent States nations,
    last December a Central Asian news sources revealed: "The European
    Union launched, on 28 November, a rule of law initiative for Central
    Asia - one of the key elements of its strategy for a new partnership
    with five Central Asian countries adopted in May 2007. The initiative
    provides for support for Kazakhstan, the Kyrgyz Republic, Tajikistan,
    Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan..." (UzReport [Uzbekistan], December
    19, 2008)

    Exploiting the issue of alleged European e nergy security, a campaign
    first addressed in a major manner by NATO Secretary General Jaap
    de Hoop Scheffer at the Alliance's 2006 summit in Riga, Latvia,
    the real intent of the Eastern Partnership is to subordinate eleven
    of the twelve former Soviet states not already in the EU (and NATO)
    to Brussels...and Washington.

    By adding Belarus, either through cooptation or 'regime change,' to the
    Western column, Russia will lose its only buffer against NATO in Europe
    and the only substantive early warning missile surveillance and air
    defenses it has outside its own borders. By adding Armenia Russia will
    effectively be driven out of the South Caucasus. With the absorption
    of the five Central Asian nations, Russia would lose all influence
    throughout the entire former Soviet space except for its own territory.
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