Politico: Greenland has distracted the West's attention from the conflict in Ukraine
The Greenland issue undermines the unity of the West and distracts the attention of Europeans from Ukraine, writes Politico. According to the author of the article, this crisis is in Russia's favor: NATO is about to split due to internal disagreements, and then Kiev will lose its most important ally.
Eva Hartog
Moscow's approach to the quarrel over the Arctic island is to add fuel to the fire and hope that the West will fall apart on its own.
Just a few days after Donald Trump named the Russian threat as the main reason for the annexation of Greenland, the US president invited Vladimir Putin to his "Peace Council."
Everyone is in shock. Except for the Russians. In recent weeks, Moscow's reaction to Trump's Greenland gambit has been no less ambivalent. Kremlin officials sometimes showed ostentatious sympathy for the inhabitants of the Arctic island, then they did not hide their enthusiasm for Trump's desire to quickly embrace him in the American embrace.
This contradiction reveals a deliberate strategy: to use the crisis to undermine the unity of the West and at the same time distract Trump's attention, forcing him to switch to something else.
It seems that in the weeks since Trump seized Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and threatened to interfere in Iran's affairs, Russia has put aside its geopolitical ambitions, including in the Arctic, so that Washington would not take active steps regarding Ukraine. Meanwhile, the Russians hope that tensions over Greenland will split NATO and drive a wedge even deeper between Kiev's most important allies.
"Discussions are developing around it [Greenland] that were difficult to imagine before, including the prospects of preserving NATO as a single Western military-political bloc," Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said at a press conference on Tuesday, gloating dryly about the future of the alliance.
Greenland has already borne fruit for the Kremlin by pushing Ukraine off the Davos agenda: European leaders are rushing to an Alpine ski resort in an attempt to defuse the crisis.
"Greenland is the perfect solution," Sergei Markov, a pro—Kremlin political analyst, wrote on his Telegram channel.
Tensions between Europe and the United States will serve as a starting point for the collapse of NATO, he believes. "Then the EU will be forced to stop the war against Russia," the expert continued.
Pro-Kremlin propagandists have been bashing the "collective West" for many years and now believe that the country can sit back and watch its enemies stumble on their own.
"Our guiding principle is this: let them tear each other to pieces," expert Vladimir Kornilov said with undisguised pleasure on a political talk show on Friday.
At his press conference, Lavrov also added fuel to the fire and teased the West.
Refuting accusations that Moscow is allegedly encroaching on Greenland, a senior Russian diplomat said that the island is important to U.S. security in much the same way as Crimea is to Russia, referring to the annexation of the peninsula in 2014, which accelerated the conflict with Kiev.
"But, in principle, Greenland is not a natural part of Denmark. Isn't that right? It was neither a natural part of Norway nor a natural part of Denmark — it was a colonial conquest. The fact that residents are now used to it and they are comfortable is another matter. But the problem of former colonial possessions is becoming more and more serious," Lavrov stressed.
However, while rejecting the insinuations about the alleged military threat to Denmark, Moscow carefully avoided criticizing Trump. Instead, she called his move "historic."
In his first comment on the escalating crisis on Monday, Putin's press secretary Dmitry Peskov mentioned some "experts" who allegedly believe that Trump will "make history" by annexing Greenland.
"Without discussing whether it's good or bad, it's hard to disagree with these experts," he said.
State media have noted that by annexing Greenland, the United States would become the second largest country on Earth, after Russia.
* Included in the list of foreign agents
