Richard Fields reporting from Helsinki, Finland, the newest member of North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Finland, a country that maintained neutrality since the end of WW II applied and was accepted for NATO membership within weeks of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
In the last three weeks I have traveled to Krakow, Poland and seen Oscar Schindler's factory and Auschwitz and Birkenau, the concentration camps where millions of Jews were killed by the Nazis. I saw the Jewish ghetto in Warsaw. And the KGB "Headquarters" in Vilnius, Lithuania where thousands of Lithuanian patriots were imprisoned, brutally interrogated and shipped off to near certain starvation in Siberian labor camps. Or shot in the convenient KGB on-site execution chamber. Same story different details in Latvia and Estonia. The Finns fought a brutal winter war against the Soviets. They lost territory but were able to avoid becoming a vassal state of the Soviet Union.
The Baltic State citizens who rode railroad cattle cars to Siberian labor camps were replaced by Russians. Many of their descendants are still there. Same story in Ukraine. One of Putin's talking points for his invasion of Ukraine is the protection of those Russian speaking Ukrainians.
The fear that they will be next on Russia's invasion list is palpable among Poles, Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians and Finns. Understandably. There is also an almost childlike faith that NATO will defend them. To their credit, these countries are all spending the 2% on GNP on defense that is a condition of NATO membership. Many of the NATO members of western and southern Europe are not.
But the elephant in the NATO room is the United States. To say that the U.S. is militarily overextended is an understatement. We have formal or implied commitments to defend Israel, Taiwan, and many other countries in addition to Ukraine. Our financial warfare against Russia, Iran and other countries is eroding our dollar as the world's reserve currency. Contrary to what the White House and the lapdog U.S. media are saying, Ukraine is not winning against Russia. It's a stalemate at best.
The CIA support during the Obama Administration given to the 2014 coup in Ukraine that overthrew a regime sympathetic to Russia is coming back to bite us.
Let's hope that that the bite does not lead to the escalation of war to the nuclear level.
Reporting from the Fields, I'm Richard Fields. See you next week.