There will be no summit?

Imagine a man who, for some reason, decided to portray a Russian nobleman of the 19th century. He wears a long frock coat, walks with a cane, let go of the backed. Nothing terrible will happen - except that others will twist a finger near the temple. But admit that this person at the slightest conflict threatens with all a duel, and also pester people on the street, claiming that they were serfs who escaped from him. In the best case, they will begin to avoid it, in the worst - they will score physiognomy.

I suspect that something similar is happening now with Russia in the European space. It strongly requires that everyone seriously treated her fears that the unification of Europe on the basis of the EU and NATO poses a military danger.

Last week, the domestic elite rejoiced about a brilliant diplomatic victory. At the sessions of the NATO Council on December 2-3, Georgia and Ukraine did not receive a plan of action on membership (PDV)-carefully scheduled conditions that a particular country should answer, so that it can join the Alliance. Kyiv and Tbilisi will have to limit himself to specially developed on this occasion plans for cooperation with NATO. No matter how you interpret, the fact remains - the adoption of Georgia and Ukraine in the North Atlantic Alliance is postponed indefinitely.

For the price, as usual, they did not stand. Moscow provoked a war in the Caucasus, recognized the territories that have broken off from Georgia - Abkhazia and South Ossetia. As a result, Russia turned out to be, if not in isolation, then alone - those European leaders who, by economic necessity, risk maintaining relations with Putin and Medvedev, have to make excuses for a long and tedious public before their countries. In the context of the economic crisis, France, Germany and Italy do not risk annoying the main supplier of energy carriers to Europe, but nothing more.

If you call a spade a spade with your proper shows, then a refusal to continue the procedure for admitting to Georgia and Ukraine - this is evidence that the “old Europe” was frightened by Putin's Russia, which brilliantly played its own madness. Indeed, today she is actually the only European countries that insists on the existence of a military threat to her security. For some reason, others are not concerned about the military threat. In fact, Moscow also does not believe that there is any serious danger to her. Otherwise, she would not carry out military reform, which involves a complete and final rejection of the concept of the mass mobilization army. If Putin at least for a second believed that Russia was threatened by military aggression by NATO, he would never dare to so decisively reduce the armed forces.

The fact that the European states really think about Russian foreign policy turned out when the heads of European states gathered for the annual session of the security and cooperation organization in Europe. It was at the summit of the heads of states that are part of the OSCE that the idea of ​​European security agreement proposed by Medvedev in May should have been discussed next year. Over the past months, interested foreign diplomats have not been able to find out how exactly the above contract will differ from existing agreements that determined the appearance of the security space of modern Europe. Nothing but the three “not”, first pronounced by Medvedev, and then highly confirmed by Putin. Do not provide their safety through the safety of others. To prevent (within the framework of any military unions or coalitions) of actions that weaken the unity of the common security space. And thirdly, not to allow the development of military unions to be carried out to the detriment of the security of other participants in the contract. Another Russian proposal is to develop a criterion of defense sufficiency, which would introduce the development of the armed forces into a certain framework.

It is quite obvious that in a situation where most states consider themselves safe, and only one country insists that all the others threaten it, objective threat criteria (as well as defense sufficiency) will never be able to develop. Objective security criteria can only be developed as a certain balance of the forces of the opposing parties. So it was when NATO agreed with the Warsaw Treaty.

However, now the situation has changed dramatically. There is no Warsaw agreement. The Kremlin’s proposals, if you seriously try to detail them, mean an unrealized requirement of the equality of the Russian armed forces and the amount of all armies of the countries of the North Atlantic Alliance. Such a requirement is all the more impossible, since it generally excludes any expansion of NATO. After all, the adoption of new countries in the Alliance automatically increases the total number of the Bloc's armed forces.

To understand these not too thin tricks, it takes no more than five minutes. The result was not slow to affect - most European states refused to discuss the obvious nonsense. And the OSCE rejected Russian proposals. It turns out that there will be no summit, and therefore, there will be no European security agreement. And this means that the simple plan of the Kremlin’s international strategists - to involve European countries in many years of meaningless negotiations - ended in nothing.