What's past is prologue - Nickell on NATO as Russia advances

Frank Nickell of Cape Girardeau's Kellerman Foundation for Historic Preservation and a retired Southeast faculty member with a more than 40-year tenure in SEMO's Department of History, believes Russian president Vladimir Putin's anger at Ukraine's desire to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) is a "pretense" to Russia's actual motivation to invade its sovereign nation to the west this week.

"NATO is not the reason, at least not the primary reason, for Russia's aggression against Ukraine," said Nickell Friday. "I think Putin has launched this invasion for his own goals, and we will all be finding out what they are at some point."

Brief history

NATO, headquartered in Brussels, was formally established April 4, 1949, as an alliance for collective security in the aftermath of World War II.

Originally, there were 12 NATO nations, including the United States.

Today there are 30 -- 28 on the continent of Europe, including the former Soviet republics of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, plus two in North America: Canada and the U.S.

"When West Germany was received into NATO in early May 1955, the Warsaw Pact was formed at the behest of the Soviets just eight days later," he said.

The Warsaw Pact, a group of seven nations in the former Soviet sphere of influence and formed for collective defense, did not long survive the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991.

"Many Americans today cannot believe how bad things were in Europe in 1945," opined Nickell, adding Russia's predecessor -- the Soviet Union -- experienced widespread starvation and in some cases, had to resort to cannibalism after its drawn-out conflict with Nazi Germany.

In the late 1940s, Nickell said, food was in short supply in eastern Europe, infant mortality was high, and orphans numbered in the millions with many "burned-out" cities.

"When the Russians went into Berlin, Germany, in April 1945, it was a brutal intervention with reported rape cases by Soviet soldiers in addition to acts of wanton murder," Nickell said.

The historian mentioned a past conversation with a now-deceased woman from Fruitland who recounted firsthand stories of the conditions when Soviet soldiers entered Berlin after Germany's capital was overrun.

"She was working in a grocery store in the former East Germany in 1945 and told me her family was not afraid of the Nazis at war's end nor of the Americans -- but they definitely feared the Russians," he said.

NATO, Nickell said, was formed as a "direct response" to what member nations concluded was Soviet expansion plans for eastern Europe.

NATO's fabled Article 5 calls on all member nations to come to each other's aid if attacked militarily.

Ukraine is currently a non-member of the alliance, meaning NATO is not compelled to respond to this week's military action by the Russians.

What's next

"There is a belief, at least in the Kremlin, that Russia has been taken advantage of, and there is also palpable anger at the West," Nickell said.

The Illinois native, who once headed SEMO's Center for Regional History, offered an opinion about the state of the current crisis.

"I think it is valid to say this is the most serious geopolitical moment since the end of the Cold War," he said.