Cold War II_(US-West vs Russia/China tensions)

Those labs will be high tech and very expensive, but considering lack of a plan for COVID... you really have to wonder what they are doing in all of these labs... seems to me they are more likely creating weapons than working on defences and strategies to defend... otherwise they would have done better...

Well Russia could seize American assets in Kazakhstan and other locales.

And EU assets on Russian territory.... there are plenty of western factories making cars and vehicles and other things in Russia that westerners have invested in.

Just shows how desperate they are.

Russian doesn't want the Ukraine and wont invade to seize it.

If Kiev does something stupid then they will put a stop to that though.

They think that Russia today is much weaker than the USSR.   A lot of this comes from the ludicrous nominal GDP comparisons wrote:

The USSR had the advantage that its MIC had much greater production capacity. They built incomparably more tanks, ships, planes, etc. Here there is a gap in relation to Russia. Only that the MIC in the USSR was over 20% of GDP.

The USSR had the advantage that its MIC had much greater production capacity.

They didn't use imported parts and the older systems were cheap and simple so of course they could be made in large numbers.

They originally intended to make something like 350 Whiskey class submarines... in the end they made over 200 and China made some too... the point is that there would be no value in them making enormous numbers of cold war era stuff... it is just not good enough now... but that is normal... they made more MiG-21s than they made MiG-23s...

I would think the push to expand into the Far East and Far North would require an increase in train capacity in terms of rail stock and rail infrastructure and that if the push to develop those regions comes from the top that an increase in production to facilitate that would also come from the same place....

Document confirms US told Russia NATO won’t expand

A newly discovered document from March 1991 shows US, UK, French, and German officials discussing a pledge made to Russia that NATO will not expand to Poland and beyond. Its publication by the German magazine Der Spiegel on Friday proves Moscow right and NATO wrong on the matter.

The minutes of a March 6, 1991 meeting in Bonn between political directors of the foreign ministries of the US, UK, France, and Germany contain multiple references to “2+4” talks on German unification in which the West made it “clear” to the Soviet Union that NATO will not expand past the eastern borders of Germany.

“We made it clear to the Soviet Union – in the 2+4 talks, as well as in other negotiations – that we do not intend to benefit from the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Eastern Europe,” the document quotes US Assistant Secretary of State for Europe and Canada Raymond Seitz.

“NATO should not expand to the east, either officially or unofficially,” Seitz added.

A British representative also mentions the existence of a “general agreement” that membership of NATO for eastern European countries is “unacceptable.”

“We had made it clear during the 2+4 negotiations that we would not extend NATO beyond the Elbe,” said West German diplomat Juergen Hrobog. “We could not therefore offer Poland and others membership in NATO.”



The minutes later clarified he was referring to the Oder River, the boundary between East Germany and Poland. Hrobog further noted that West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl and Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher had agreed with this position as well.

The document was found in the UK National Archives by Joshua Shifrinson, a political science professor at Boston University in the US. It had been marked “Secret” but was declassified at some point.

Shifrinson tweeted on Friday he was “honored” to work with Der Spiegel on the document showing that “Western diplomats believed they had indeed made a NATO non-enlargement pledge.”

“Senior policymakers deny a non-expansion pledge was offered. This new document shows otherwise,” Shifrinson said in a follow-up tweet, noting that “beyond” the Elbe or Oder by any standard includes Eastern European countries to which NATO started expanding just eight years later.

During a major press conference in December 2021, Russian President Vladimir Putin said the West had promised the Soviet Union NATO would not expand “a single inch” to the east, but “brazenly deceived” and “cheated” Moscow to do just that.

Responding to these comments, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said the alliance “has never promised not to expand.” In an interview with Der Spiegel later, Stoltenberg repeated that “there has never been such a promise, there has never been such a behind-the-scenes deal, it is simply not true.”

NATO admitted Poland, Hungary, and Czechia in March 1999, just before launching an air war against Yugoslavia without the permission of the UN Security Council. This put NATO directly on the Russian border – the enclave of Kaliningrad – for the first time ever. The next round of expansion in 2004 included the former Soviet republics of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, placing NATO’s eastern frontier just 135 kilometers (84 miles) from St. Petersburg.

In a series of security proposals made public in December, Russia demanded NATO publicly renounce expansion to the former Soviet republics of Ukraine and Georgia and withdraw US forces to the 1997 boundaries of the alliance, among other things. The US and NATO have rejected this, arguing the alliance’s “open door” membership policy is a fundamental principle for them.

https://www.rt.com/news/549921-nato-expansion-russia-document/