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Press TV has conducted an interview with Jim W. Dean, Managing Editor of Veteran’s Today from Atlanta, about NATO war games near Russia’s border involving 5,000 troops from ten countries including the US. 

Press TV: We have NATO and the United States accusing Russia of provocation whenever Moscow delivers troops along its border, but isn’t NATO’s troops buildup an act of provocation in itself?

Dean: It’s an act of provocation historically because when the former Soviet Union broke up and they wanted to de-militarize the situation and chill out the Cold War they made very strong agreements that Western Europe was never going to be put in a situation of having to choose East versus West particularly for a military situation.

And of course we can see now that the West had no intentions of actually following through on that and they’ve just nibbled away trying to push their way back to the Soviet order, which obviously can only be for some type of offensive purposes.

Number two, you’ve got these poor Baltic countries…. I don’t know why they want to be cannon fodder in some type of future dispute or fight between Russia and the US because with the NATO bases there if anything really started they would have to be taken out and destroyed right away, which is exactly why the US is doing these drills…because they would soak up Soviet missiles, Soviet troops to have to guard their flank there. And you would think that the Baltic countries would be smart enough to figure this out, but obviously they haven’t.

Press TV: Earlier we had the French foreign minister dashing the hopes of Ukraine in its hopes to join the European Union. What would this mean for Ukraine? How much trust and confidence can Ukraine have in the West’s support?

Dean: Ukraine got way ahead of the game because way back when the EU made their counter-offer it was nothing more than to start a process to integration. And I remember when I did a little initial reading on it they were talking about a ten year process for them to be ready to do it.

And Ukraine was desperate for cash and they wanted money, which the EU was not willing to do and that threw them back into the hands of the Russians because they knew they could continue to get the gas subsidies.

So the whole thing has just been crazy and it’s very, very dangerous. It’s brinkmanship leadership, which is very dangerous and there’s been no attempt to get any kind of a public approval over this strategy whatsoever.

Press TV: At the end of the day what is the likelihood of a military escalation in the Ukraine region and of course what would the consequences be?

Dean: It’s not likely in that everybody says they don’t want to do it – it’s just pressure typically to help out in negotiations and when they sit down and do some horse trading.

But history has shown us what happens is that some of it pops up. We know that false flags are very, very sophisticated today; intelligence agencies have tremendous capabilities for starting some type of an event, make it look like somebody else had done it and blame it on somebody else, which then gives the other side the ability to retaliate.

So it’s very, very dangerous for all of the rest of us and we should complain like heck to all of the governments that are involved in escalating tensions like this.