What is the role of Nato in the Russia-Ukraine crisis - BBC News - video Dailymotion

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00:00Russia is amassing troops close to the border of Ukraine.

00:04It's carrying out military exercises with Belarus.

00:07And President Biden has this message.

00:10If Russia makes a choice to further invade Ukraine,

00:14we are jointly ready and all of NATO is ready.

00:19NATO is a Western military alliance.

00:21The president says it's ready.

00:23And Russia is focused on it too.

00:24The NATO member countries continue to send a large amount of modern weapons to Ukraine

00:31to contribute to the modernisation of the Ukrainian military.

00:35NATO members are flying in what they call lethal aid to Ukraine.

00:39Across Eastern Europe, NATO is bolstering its defences.

00:42These are British forces on the Poland-Belarus border.

00:45And Russian concerns about NATO in Eastern Europe are not new.

00:48We will also have to look at those missile installations in Romania and Poland or anywhere.

00:57On NATO, Russia is looking to the future and the past.

01:00It wants NATO to promise that Ukraine will never join.

01:04And it wants NATO to withdraw its military deployments of recent years from Eastern Europe.

01:09There's no chance of either demand being met.

01:12And to understand why, we need to go back to the aftermath of the Second World War.

01:16NATO was set up in 1949 by 12 countries.

01:20Their mission was to secure peace in Europe, to promote cooperation among its members and to guard their freedom.

01:26In reality, this meant countering the growing power of the Soviet Union.

01:30And at the heart of NATO's strategy to do this was, and is, Article 5.

01:36It says an attack on one member is considered an attack on all of them.

01:40The idea is collective defence.

01:42And now, with 30 members, NATO continues to state its purpose.

01:47Together, we are 50% of the world's military might and economic might.

01:52So, as long as we stand together in NATO, North America and Europe, we are all safe.

01:56In recent years, though, NATO's purpose has been questioned.

02:00Donald Trump said the US might leave.

02:03Emmanuel Macron said NATO was brain dead.

02:06There are also questions of commitment.

02:08Some NATO members are behind on NATO's military spending targets.

02:12And then, there's Afghanistan.

02:14In response to the 9-11 attacks, NATO triggered its Article 5.

02:18NATO members supported America's attack on al-Qaeda and the Taliban.

02:2220 years later, the US chose to leave Afghanistan unilaterally, with NATO members left to follow suit.

02:28For this, and for other reasons too, as the BBC's Katja Adler notes,

02:33the longevity of the current show of unity between Western allies isn't guaranteed.

02:37Now, whether Russia sees that as a chance, we can't know.

02:41Some argue this crisis has galvanised the NATO alliance.

02:44But what is clear is that NATO's expansion has angered Vladimir Putin.

02:50We won't move one inch towards the east, they told us in the 1990s.

02:55And what happened?

02:56They deceived us.

02:57They brazenly tricked us.

03:00That claim is disputed.

03:02NATO's expansion, though, is not.

03:04The countries here in purple joined before 1997.

03:07Since then, the 14 in yellow had their request to join accepted.

03:12Many of them are former Soviet states.

03:14Five share a border with Russia.

03:17Moscow sees all of this as a major threat to its security.

03:20The continuation of NATO's open border policy and further movement towards our borders is exactly what threatens us.

03:29NATO is not a development institution.

03:32It is an instrument of confrontation.

03:34It's quite obvious that its expansion poses a threat to us.

03:38Russia doesn't see NATO as defensive.

03:40It sees it as an extension of American power.

03:42It sees its very existence as a reduction of Russian power.

03:47And Ukraine finds itself right in the middle of Russian efforts to resist that.

03:52It shares borders with Russia and the European Union.

03:55And while it's not a NATO member, it's what NATO calls a partner country.

04:00That means it could join in the future.

04:03And Russia is using its military to make it clear that that mustn't happen.

04:06Which brings the EU to this conclusion.

04:10We are living, to my understanding, the most dangerous moment for the security in Europe after the end of the Cold War.

04:20And in this dangerous moment, Russia sees NATO aggression.

04:23NATO sees only defence.

04:25What we all see is NATO and Russia playing their part in a global power struggle,

04:29where China is coming and America's superpower is being put to the test.

04:34In a recent essay, Tom McTague wrote in The Atlantic,

04:37that moment when we in the West all bathed contentedly under the American sun has gone.

04:42In that context, he argues, Putin then is a modern man,

04:45reacting to the modern world, using modern methods in an attempt to make something new.

04:50And NATO stands in the way of the new world that Putin would like.

04:54That's why, whatever the rights and wrongs,

04:56the causes of this crisis and the outcome of it both connect to NATO.

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What is the role of Nato in the Russia-Ukraine crisis - BBC News

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