The Bucharest Nine

The B9 is an organization founded on November 4, 2015 in Bucharest, Romania, at the initiative of Romanian President Klaus Iohannis and Polish president Andrzej Duda. The members are from south to north: Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, Slovakia, Czechia, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. They all were for centuries until 1991 either subjects of the tsars, or part of the Warsaw Pact and the defunct Soviet Union. They know what is dependence and servitude and abhor the notion to be under Russian rule again. That is why they formed an alliance when in 2014 Putin wrested the Crimea peninsula from Ukraine and instigated separatist movements in the Donbas.

In their 2018 meeting Duda called for NATO membership of Ukraine and Georgia.

In their 2021 video conference with American president Joe Biden participating, Iohannis called for “stronger allied military presence on NATO’s eastern flank.” It was the time when Putin had amassed his troops all around Ukraine.

February 25, 2022: One day after Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen rushed to join the B9 summit.

The June 10, 2022 summit was attended virtually by NATO Secretary Jens Stoltenberg. In it Duda declared: “We want the enhanced forward presence that we have today on NATO’s eastern flank to be extended...” Iohannis favored the admission of Finland and Sweden into NATO.

In the October 22, 2022 summit the B9 president demanded the end of the missile strikes on Ukrainian civilians and condemned them as war crimes.

On February 22, 2023 the B9 met in Warsaw. Host leaders Duda and Slovakia Prime Minister Zuzana Caputova welcomed Stoltenberg and Biden. They all signed a declaration condemning Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

Also the foreign affairs and defense ministers of the nine countries held a number of meetings.

Why are the East European nations so russophobic that they must form an extra alliance inside the NATO? It is because they have lived through the horrors of Russian occupation under the tsars, the Soviet leaders Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, and Yeltsin. The nine abhor the thought that Russian tyrants again would subject their now-free and prosperous nations to exploitation of the economy by toggle contracts, short supply of basic commodities, travel ban, election fraud, injustice, fear of KGB agents, brutal sadistic treatment in the army (dedovshchina), arbitrary imprisonment, abduction and torture, deportment to Siberia and forced labor, public show trials with self-accusation, and thousands of chicaneries.

While NATO is an alliance against aggression from outside, the Warsaw Pact was an organization to strengthen the Soviet hold over its satellites Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland, and Romania. The Brezhnev Doctrine clearly defined its purpose: To intervene in countries where socialist rule is under threat of capitalism.

The interventions began in 1953. Soviet tanks crushed the Berlin workers revolt.

The 1956 Hungarian Uprising was ended by Soviet tanks after a two-month citizens’ protest against occupation and repression by the ruling Communist Party.

The third and last bloody intervention was the crushing of the ‘Prague Spring’ in 1968. The Czechoslovakian government had lifted restraints on freedom of expression and had sought closer relations with the capitalist West.

In 1988, Michael Gorbachev abandoned the Brezhnev Doctrine. He refused to send Soviet tanks when a wave of democratization swept through Eastern Europe: The Solidarnosc (Solidarity) movement in Poland, the Monday Marches in the German Democratic Republic, and movements in Hungary and Czechoslovakia. Finally after the collapse of the Soviet Union the formation of sovereign nations including the countries that today are neither members of the European Union nor of NATO was possible: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine.

Armenia and Azerbaijan maintain mutual cooperative relations with the EU. The other three are membership candidates. If ever one day they will join the Bucharest organization is not to be foreseen. Much will depend on the choice of Russia developing into either a peaceful country or remaining an imperialist bully.

Erich Wannemacher