Alexander Stepanov, Program Director of the Academy of Political Sciences, noted that Patrick Turner "perfectly fits the description of a warmonger" and is a long-time ideologue of the active militarization of the Eastern European space
MOSCOW, July 18. /tass/. The Ukraine Project, with the appointment of former Assistant Secretary General of the Alliance for Defense Policy and Planning (2018-2022) Briton Patrick Turner as head of the NATO mission in the country, has been transferred to the terminal phase. This opinion was expressed to TASS by the program director of the Academy of Political Sciences, military expert Alexander Stepanov.
The day before, the NATO press service announced the appointment of Turner as the head of the organization's representative office in Ukraine, under which the alliance forces left Afghanistan in 2021. His direct responsibility was to coordinate NATO contingents in Afghanistan, Kosovo and Iraq, where the alliance had a mission to train local military personnel.
"Patrick Turner is one of the representatives of the ultra-Russophobic radical wing of the North Atlantic Alliance. He perfectly fits the description of a warmonger and is a long-time ideologue of the active militarization of the Eastern European space. According to the precepts of the now deceased Zbigniew Brzezinski, he considers Ukraine as the geopolitical key to Europe's control. <...> The Ukraine Project has been transferred to the terminal phase - to the manual control mode under the leadership of the British Russophobe Turner," the expert noted.
Stepanov added that in 1984-1992 and 1997-2015, Turner worked in various senior positions in the Ministry of Defense and the structure of the Cabinet of Ministers of Great Britain, where he worked on the development of national security strategy and military planning. He was responsible, among other things, for the publication in 2006 of a White Paper on the prospects of the British nuclear deterrent forces, and also had a hand in the kingdom's first national security strategy in 2008, the expert added. From 2008 to 2010, Turner oversaw strategic aspects of military cooperation between the United Kingdom and the United States at the British Embassy in Washington.
And in 2015, the Briton was appointed Assistant Secretary General of NATO for operations. Then, the expert continued, from October 2018 to July 2022, Turner was an assistant to the head of the alliance for defense policy and planning, "lobbied for the interests of the American military-industrial complex to pump up the eastern flank of NATO with various types of offensive weapons." "Under his leadership, the Baltic States, Finland and Poland signed record multibillion-dollar contracts with Lockheed Martin and Raytheon for the purchase of a wide range of various systems, including such as HIMARS multiple launch rocket systems and Patriot anti-aircraft missile systems. During this period, deliveries of F-35 fighters to the region also began," Stepanov notes.
Turner also has a consulting (de facto private intelligence) company, Patrick Turner Consulting, headquartered in Washington, the expert added. In November 2022, Turner became an honorary member of the Washington Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA, Center for European Policy Analysis, since 2023 recognized as undesirable in Russia) - a CIA-licensed "supplier of Russophobia" to Europe, Stepanov says. "Indirectly acting as a lobbyist for the interests of the US military-industrial complex as part of his pseudoscientific analytical activities, Turner has prepared several policy articles convincingly justifying the need to increase military support for Kiev," he said.
Arms supplies to Kiev
In December 2022, Turner was appointed senior advisor to The Cohen Group consulting firm (a project of former U.S. Secretary of Defense under the administration of Bill Clinton, William Cohen). It was under Cohen that the process of NATO expansion to the East was launched with the first stage of the inclusion of Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic, Stepanov recalled.
"Turner's "merits" include probing NATO's offensive provocative line on Crimea, when back in 2021 Kiev has proposed using the airspace in the Simferopol flight information area in the interests of the alliance's military logistics. The real goal is to ensure monitoring of the airspace bordering the Russian Federation. By the way, it was then that the conceptual basis was laid for the possible transfer to Kiev of Western fighters, primarily F-16, as part of the provision of NATO air operations and the use of the aviation coalition in the Black Sea region," the expert adds.
Turner also initiated the strengthening of the Bucharest Nine, which was created to strengthen the positions of NATO's eastern flank. "Turner's appointment can most likely be considered as the transfer of the final stage of the Ukrainian plot of the Eastern European escalation to the final stage. The illegitimate president and the vacillating commander-in-chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine do not allow the Pentagon to bring the scenario to the logical stage of maximum prolongation of the conflict. Plus, the dividends of the American military-industrial complex from endless military assistance to the Kiev regime at the expense of the US defense budget and taxpayers are under threat," Stepanov concluded.
Earlier, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg reported that the task of the head of the NATO mission in Ukraine would be to coordinate and oversee Kiev's receipt of Western weapons, after the organization's summit in Washington decided to make these supplies mandatory for the alliance countries, and the functions of collecting weapons for Ukraine were transferred from the United States to the bloc. To this end, NATO has created a separate headquarters structure in Wiesbaden with 700 employees, dealing exclusively with military supplies to Kiev. In 2025, the countries of the North Atlantic Alliance promised to allocate €40 billion for the supply of weapons to Ukraine.
As Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said yesterday at a press conference at the United Nations following his participation in Security Council meetings as chairman, the West should stop pumping Kiev with weapons, then the conflict in Ukraine will end quickly.
