There will be no negotiated settlement (at least not one any time soon, or one that favors the Western side).įor his part, Biden made clear that he was not only going to continue his support for President Volodymyr Zelensky’sgovernment of Kiev. That was the point of Putin’s long-winded speech. The West is living in a pure fantasy if its so-called leadership thinks that Putin will simply sit back and watch this unfold. If it does, it ceases being a major power, as it is isolated away from the vital Black Sea region. Russia cannot lose its naval base in Sevastopol. That too is a red line that if crossed will likely trigger Moscow into risking nuclear war. The Ukrainians have made their intentions clear since before the conflict erupted a year ago: Kiev wants the complete restoration of Crimea and, eventually, eastern Ukraine. If necessary, Putin will deploy tactical nuclear weapons to ensure that his forces can accomplish this herculean task. This, at least, appears to be the general Russian plan. While the Russians have certainly taken heavy losses, Ukraine has also taken significant losses lately. Unlike the Ukrainians, the Russians can afford to keep sending hundreds of thousands of their people into the meat grinder until they simply attrit the Ukrainians until Russia’s larger forces bleed Ukraine’s forces dry in the field – and then surge over their corpses. Peace activists wearing masks of Russian President Vladimir Putin and US President Joe Biden pose with mock nuclear missiles in front of the US Embassy in Berlin on January 29, 2021, in an action to call for more progress in nuclear disarmament. The only thing that would make a peace deal tenable for Russia would be if its military were decisively defeated. Thus compromise is not possible at this rate. Putin’s decision to withdraw from the treaty speaks to the depths that he is willing to go to ensure that he wins this war. Plus, there are likely American forces operating covertly in and around these long-range weapons systems, so we can expect that the Russian targeting of these systems and their surrounding environs will result in multiple American casualties. After all, just as with Russian S-400 emplacements in Syria, the American long-range systems are undoubtedly staffed or maintained at least partly by Americans. What’s more, should these weapons systems be targeted by the Russians, one can anticipate that Americans will die. He said as much in his speech when he said the Americans will bear the responsibility for these actions should Russia be attacked by such systems. And while Ukraine certainly has a right to defend itself, the fact that it is doing so with capabilities that it only has thanks to the Americans means that the United States and NATO are now – in the eyes of Putin – direct combatants. You see, these systems will be used by Ukraine to strike deep inside Russia. Here is a red line that NATO and the Americans should think twice about crossing. A combination of networked data and high-precision missiles has forced Russia to half its offensive in order to pivot to counter-battery missions. In fact, Putin issued his first significant threat toward the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO): He told his American rivals that they were to remove their offensive long-range weapons systems in Ukraine, otherwise Russian forces would begin directly targeting those systems.Ī HIMARS missile launch. He not only signaled that his commitment to the conflict was as strong as ever, but that he was escalating it, in response to what he viewed as an American escalation. The speech certainly was Castro-esque in its loquaciousness and was tinged with quasi-religious accusations against the West that would make most Iranian mullahs blush, but there was substance in Putin’s words. Unsurprisingly, most Western media outlets simply refused to cover the speech. The other speech came from Putin, who spoke for a whopping two hours on Tuesday evening, in which he reiterated his commitment to total victory over Ukraine and how the United States was ruled by “satanists” and “pedophiles.” Shortly after his speech, the Pentagon hinted that it might stop slow-walking its promised (but as yet to be delivered) M1A2 Abrams main battle tank to the waiting arms of the desperate Ukrainian defenders and simply hand over the MBTs that are already in America’s warehouses (something that the Pentagon had resisted doing when the Biden administration made its initial announcement that it would, in fact, be sending the vaunted MBTs).
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