The Price of Admission
It’s madness
Meet Mr. Oleksiy Arestovych. He’s currently, among other things, a military advisor for President Zelenskyy.
Oleksiy Arestovych gave an eerily prophetic interview back in February 2019, exactly two years before Russia invaded Ukraine.
Please watch it carefully. Most people won’t.
They will marvel at the fact that he so accurately predicted the future that they will miss many crucial and very revealing points.
Mr. Arestovych is apparently a man of many talents: military advisor, actor, YouTuber, blogger, but as far as we know he’s not a psychic. In other words, when he predicted that there would be a war with Russia, up to three wars even, he did so by understanding and analyzing the situation and, obviously, by having inside information not available to most of us, thanks to serving as an intelligence officer in the Donetsk war. Clearly, he was much more well equipped than any western analyst to predict what the outcome of the situation would be in his country and the conflict with Russian-speaking separatists and Russians.
For me, one thing stood out in particular. He said:
“With a probability of 99.9%, our price for joining NATO is a full-scale war with Russia.”
The alternative, as he put it, was to be “absorbed” by Russia within 10–12 years. How this would be accomplished he didn’t say, but clearly, he didn’t mean through military means. Otherwise, he’d have said that war with Russia was inevitable, so they chose the path that would lead to NATO. That would have made sense. But that’s not at all what he said.
According to him a victory in a major war with Russia would result in Ukraine becoming a member of NATO. You need to fully understand the implications of this statement. Personally, I had to rewatch it several times to wrap my mind around it. He didn’t just say that Ukraine’s stated intention to join NATO (and NATO’s ambiguity about it) would lead to a war, like I, and many others, have cited as the root cause of the invasion. He took it one step further.
What he said was that a victorious war with Russia was a prerequisite for joining. In that context, NATO’s ambiguity on the issue has nothing to do with Ukraine’s corruption or troubled political climate but, rather, with the fact that it would “bypass” these obstacles if Ukraine was willing to shed blood for the privilege of membership. Again, let’s restate that this man is not a random pundit but a current military advisor to the President of Ukraine during a deadly war, with actual field experience.
He also said, and we’re in full agreement here, that Russia’s intent for attacking would be to devastate his country so that it would be undesirable to NATO. In other words, to stop it from joining. Not at all unlike the situation in Georgia. Arestovych would know. He was born there.
His main argument against what many respected analysts had proposed as the only viable alternative, i.e. the neutrality of Ukraine, is the cost. According to him, Ukraine could not afford to stay neutral, as the cost is “ten times that of a war with another”. I don’t know how he defines the cost of war, but money is just a fraction of it. This applies even when invading another country and the coffins start coming home. But when your country is the one being invaded, the human cost and sheer devastation are unthinkable. You’re not just sacrificing soldiers, but civilians of all ages, their homes, and the infrastructure on which people’s lives depend. The one the people who survive will depend on. And when the invading army is one of the most powerful in the world and is systematically bombarding you with every conventional weapon they have, destruction will be widespread. Even if it proved much less formidable than everyone imagined, the Russian army has devastated cities such as Mariupol. The human cost can’t (and shouldn’t) be priced. The actual monetary cost is staggering.
The very idea of comparing this to a budgeted, annual cost is not only delusional, but actually criminal.
To back his absurd and callous claim about neutrality, he cites Switzerland as an example. Switzerland, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, spent 5.7 billion dollars on defense in 2021 and has dedicated a mere 0.7% of its GDP to this purpose. Hold that thought for a moment.
What is of great interest to me is that Mr. Arestovych cited my country, Greece, as an example of a NATO member with a history of dispute with a neighbour, Turkey, which is also a NATO member. The reason he did that was to illustrate that despite a regional conflict NATO had no issue accepting both Greece and Turkey, despite even the fact that Turkey invaded our sister nation, Cyprus, and has established a globally unrecognized and illegal “state” within its borders for almost 50 years.
Funnily enough, when addressing the Cypriot parliament last month, the Ukrainian President feigned a technical problem and severed the connection when the Cypriot House President started making parallels between the two countries and their shared plight. It was no coincidence, as the lack of any mention whatsoever from President Zelenskyy of the very similar past of Cyprus during his address was noted with extreme disappointment. Then again, if you’ve decided to sacrifice your own people just to join a “defensive” alliance that has no interest in you unless you serve its purposes, then I guess that you wouldn’t want to ruffle any feathers by invoking history. Not even when a country that is notoriously trying to not displease your enemy is involved.
This brings us back to our supposedly ideal arrangement with NATO. Greece, being a non-neutral country and seemingly “blessed” with a “cooperative” NATO neighbour spent a staggering 8.1 billion dollars on defense in 2021, corresponding to 3.9% of our GDP, again according to SIPRI. Needless to say, the overwhelming majority of our military spending is dedicated to defense against our “ally” Turkey, which has never stopped violating our airspace or disputing the territorial waters of our islands in the Aegean sea. The corresponding defense spending estimate for Ukraine (while already engaged in war and preparing for an escalation) was 5.9 billion, 3.2% of its GDP. Neutral Switzerland, a much richer country than both Greece and Ukraine, spent much less than NATO “protected” Greece, about as much as war-mode Ukraine, amounting to just a tiny fraction of its GDP. If it needed to, it could spend much more.
How much more does Arestovych think Ukraine would be spending to uphold its neutrality? How much less would it spend under NATO?
By NATO’s own estimates, Greece is second in defense spending by GDP among all NATO members (source in Greek) and has been so for many years. We’ve steadily been trailing the US in this respect, and have been doing so even in the throes of the debt crisis which wracked my country during most of the last decade. Sadly, whenever our good EU partners called us out for fiscal irresponsibility they always neglected to consider the fact that all of them spent less on their defense than us. Economically robust countries, like Germany, much to the US’s frustration actually were “free-riding” in NATO up to now.
But Greece is in a state of constant tension with Turkey, a country with a much larger army and a bigger budget to spend on its “defense”. NATO membership never meant that Greece had to spend less for defense than if it was neutral. If anything we were caught in an arms race with our neighbour and being NATO members we were forced to buy weapons systems from allied countries only, so there was little room for bargaining. When Turkey broke that rule, it placed itself in hot water.
There’s clearly something wrong here.
Many things to be precise. All the above should have made clear that:
- Neutrality doesn’t cost nearly as much as Mr. Arestovych claims it does. Even if the monetary cost was comparable, which it isn’t, the human cost is simply unacceptable.
- NATO isn’t really a defensive alliance, but one focused on aggressive expansion and neutralizing the competitors of the US on the global stage.
- NATO cares little about international law when it conflicts with its interests (much like Russia or China or any powerful empire in history for that matter). It’s not special in that respect. The problem is that it pretends that it’s a force for good.
- Putin’s attack was in no way a surprise. For us, it might have seemed inconceivable, but for those on the inside, it was known since at least 2019. Arestovych was not only certain of this, but he went public with that knowledge.
- The U.S., as it has done several times in the past, has no qualms about sacrificing other countries to protect its “security” (read: its world dominance).
- The gains for the U.S. are not just geopolitical. The military-industrial complex will cash in for decades from the war and its long-term consequences from the resulting power shift. The profits from peace are laughable in comparison.
- Unbelievably, the leadership of Ukraine has somehow convinced itself that it’s in its best interest to be the sacrificial offering.
Once again, the necessary disclaimers must be given: this is not an attempt to justify Putin’s war. Russia acts more or less like any other major power in history. In this case, Putin believed that he could “neutralize” Ukraine by a swift “military operation”, which turned into a nightmare for Ukraine and Russia both. The only winner here is the US (and that only as long as the conflict doesn’t spread and threaten all life on the planet as we know it). The US didn’t just make contingency plans for this scenario, it seems to have been betting on it.
NATO is pretending to be upholding international law, although historically it has been violating it whenever it was in the interest of the US to do so, with zero consequences. But due to its status as “world police force”, it can dictate what is “right”, what is a “mistake” and what is a “war crime”. History ought to have taught us that there was never an empire in history that was actually “holy”, even if it claimed to be.
The problem is that we truly believed we had “outgrown” war, just because it didn’t happen in the “civilized” world anymore. The very thought of it understandably terrifies us “freedom-loving people” and yet we willingly ignore that the very strategies which use war as “policy with other means” in other parts of the world could very well apply also to our “neighbourhood”.
We really thought von Clausewitz was dead and buried, didn’t we?
No one could blame Ukraine if joining NATO actually guaranteed its safety instead of dragging it into a destructive war. But everything seems to point to the opposite direction.
And the Ukrainian leadership was clearly aware of this years ago.
