PRESS RELEASE
The General Kujat versus The Secretary Stoltenberg: After the NATO-Russia Council Meeting
WIESBADEN, April 21, 2016 (EIRNS)—Germany’s tabloid Bild Zeitung is forced to acknowledge opposition, in the person of Gen. Harald Kujat (ret.), to NATO’s reckless behavior in their report today on the Wednesday NATO-Russia Council meeting in Brussels. After the three-and-a-half-hour meeting, the paper asked, "Why are they even bothering to talk with Putin after Crimea and Russia’s support for Assad?" Kujat told Bild that "political and military predictability" was the basis for the partnership between NATO and Russia, and with the Ukraine crisis, "not to use the important instrument, the NATO-Russia Council (NRC), at the moment it was urgently needed, was a mistake."
General Kujat became head of the NATO Military Committee in 2002, its highest military deliberative body, the same year the NRC was founded. That the NRC finally met, was a sign of rationality, Kujat said, but this has to be deepened quickly by a meeting at the Foreign Ministers level and then with the heads of state and government at the July NATO Summit in Warsaw.
"And promising best success would be a direct discussion of Presidents Obama and Putin. ... The conflicts in Ukraine and Syria can only be solved by the United States and Russia,"
said Kujat, who had also been Bundeswehr Chief of Staff in 2000-2002.
Bild cites NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg (whom General Kujat once noted, is merely a Secretary) saying there will be no return to normality and "today’s meeting will not change that." General Kujat thinks otherwise, telling today’s Neue Osnabrücker Zeitung, "Russia wants to be acknowledged as a great power along with the U.S.A., to be able to negotiate on a level playing field"; to which Bild added, "NATO should come into accord with this wish and establish the framework to solve the conflicts in the world."
