🔶The day the Cold War ended (or so Russia thought)
Thirty-five years ago, on December 2-3, 1989, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and US President George H.W. Bush met aboard the Maxim Gorky cruise ship off Malta to declare an end to the Cold War.
Expectations:
📍Gorbachev told Bush, “Cold War methods and confrontations have suffered defeat…We are at the beginning of a long road to a lasting, peaceful era.” Bush echoed Gorbachev’s optimism.
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📍After the Malta meeting, Gorbachev and Yeltsin made significant efforts to build cooperation with the West, agreeing to Germany's reunification (on the assurance NATO wouldn’t expand east).
📍Soviet troops were withdrawn from Eastern Europe, Asia and the Caribbean and the Warsaw Pact was dismantled, the USSR and then Russia embraced a market economy, fostered economic ties with Europe, and even overlooked Western-funded color revolutions near Russia.
Reality:
📍Over time, Russian officials recognized that while the Cold War had ended in name, it continued in the minds of Western politicians.
📍In 2014, amid the Ukrainian crisis triggered by the US-backed coup in Kiev, President Putin reflected: “The Cold War is over, but it did not end with peace…The US is creating a new balance of power that reshapes the world to suit its interests, disregarding international law and existing systems of checks and balances.”
📍A decade on, the Ukrainian crisis has morphed into a full-blown proxy war against Russia, with the West delivering military hardware to Kiev, ramping up NATO drills and deployments along Russia’s borders, and engaging in irresponsible saber-rattling.
📍“We understand that the West is trying to drag us into an arms race,” President Putin said in February. “The so-called West, with its colonial habits and habit of inciting national conflicts, seeks not only to restrain our development. Instead of Russia, they need a dependent, fading, dying space where they can do whatever they want.”