Whatever your thoughts about NATO or the war in Ukraine (I recoil at both), it’s hard not to feel some sympathy with Volodymyr Zelensky’s frustration at being left outside the clubhouse gates, chastised by Biden that Ukraine is not yet “democratic” enough for membership in the West’s elite missile club. This rebuff comes from a consortium that includes Poland, Hungary and Turkey, a nation NATO supremos courted assiduously in order to win the entry of the new recruit they really wanted: Sweden. Of course the price of Sweden’s admission into the Brussels-based syndicate seems to have been giving Erdogan the green light to crackdown even more repressively on Kurds, inside and outside Turkey. But when have the Kurds ever really mattered? Like the Ukrainians, the Kurds have long served as disposable pawns in larger regional power plays by NATO, Russia and the US. More

The post Roaming Charges: Clusterfuck in Vilnius appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.