The confidence is high in America and across Europe among all intelligence agencies, that President Vladimir Putin will direct Russian military forces to invade Ukraine, without something more than diplomacy and action of some large significance and backed with resolve by NATO occurring within the next three weeks. He’s sent Russian soldiers and armaments along the borders between Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine, and given the current weakness he finds in the Biden regime and NATO, with Germany blocking allies from arming Ukraine further, and Turkey signaling its own reluctance to fully commit, Putin has nothing to lose by taking Ukraine and finishing the initial phase of his agenda to rebuild the former Russian Empire.
Unfortunately, too many leaders in Europe seem more interested in benefitting and profiting from Gazprom’s Russian natural gas than they do in preventing a free and sovereign people in Ukraine from being harmed and killed by another tyrant’s invading army.
Joe Biden’s foreign policy “vision” has been revealed to be blind as a bat and far from the vision of a “remarkable statesman” the leftist media gushed over on the campaign trail. Once in office, Biden abandoned any resistance to allowing the completion of the Nords Stream 2 pipeline, thus strengthening Putin’s position and his leverage over Europe. And rather than exert a pro-active plan to answer Russia’s current aggression against Ukraine, Biden is satisfied to retreat and wait for Russia to act first and after all the damage is done, perhaps at the cost of thousands upon thousands of lives.
While Russia isn’t exactly a communist state any longer, it has implemented a sort of state “crony-capitalism” under Putin that sees some 55%-70% of Russia’s economy controlled by the state [depending on whose stats one accepts as accurate] and 20 million people employed by the state. However, more than any battle between the NATO allies and Russia over ideological differences, the battle for Ukraine really does have more to do with Putin’s ambition to rebuild Russia to her former might and “glory” [infamy?] than anything else.
However, many oligarchs and ordinary Russians are currently disgruntled over the poorly performing Russian economy, and the Russian people aren’t any more anxious for war with Ukraine than the American people are. Here again, there weren’t any calls within Russia to attack Georgia in 2008 or Ukraine in 2014, or to enter Syria, and yet Putin took those actions upon himself, his own authority.
America and Her NATO allies are justified in their attempt to stop this current invasion of Ukraine by Russia. Forty million people should never have their independence trampled so easily and with nary a word of hard, firm and resolved protest from the Free World, but there are ways and means to avert all of this if both sides will come together in an honest effort to arrive at a solution that works for all parties involved.
But is honesty even possible in the world we live in today?
America and NATO aren’t the aggressors in this entire mess. At the time of Russia’s first invasion of Ukraine, President Obama had already pulled our frontlines back in Europe and even abandoned placing new missile installations in Poland and the Czech Republic for the defense of Europe in 2009. Ukraine was absolutely no threat to Russia, but Putin was incensed at the notion of Ukraine being out from under Russia’s influence and control, which the election of that year had virtually ensured; a large part of the civil upheaval was due to the Ukrainian people’s anger over the previous president, Viktor Yanukovych, being a Russian puppet.
Much of what America and the world see today is simply a continuation of the conflict from seven years or so ago. In March of 2014, I noted:
“Ukrainians have long sought closer ties with the EU and the U.S. and their markedly freer cultures and political systems, not Putin and Russia. Five hundred thousand dollars annually have gone towards this goal since 2011 through the U.S. Agency for International Development, because many influential Ukrainians, such as Vitali Klitshko, a member of Ukraine Parliament, feared Yanukovych’s growing subservience to Putin; Putin’s $15 billion bribe was intended to coax Ukraine into his Eurasian Union, and, in appealing to Yanukovych’s corrupt nature, it effectively sabotaged the EU-Ukraine Association Agreement: So an East-West confrontation emerged, which is based on Putin’s desire to keep Russian hegemony in the region and enhance his own power.”
And nothing has changed from 2014 to the present, except Putin didn’t have a renewed opportunity to finish his work with Ukraine until Biden and NATO handed a new excuse to him.
In 2014, it’s worth noting that Putin sent Spetsnaz [Russian special forces] into eastern Ukraine and Donetsk to aide the ethnic Russians in the region in the civil war that broke out over the election results and the Maiden Revolt. We could compare this to Mexico sending troops to help dissatisfied Hispanics in Texas. But, the fact remains, Donetsk is a part of sovereign Ukraine and those Russians weren’t being held hostage; they could leave and return to Mother Russia, but neither them nor Putin should expect the administration of President Volodymyr Zelensky and the bulk of the Ukrainian people to just throw up their hands and allow a sizeable chunk of their land to be annexed, stolen, by Russia, without a fierce fight.
Incredulously, some political pundits and even so-called “journalists” have recently suggested that giving Putin the eastern sector of Ukraine would be an acceptable outcome if it kept the peace and prevented a war. With this logic, not a single country is safe from any tyrant wishing to expand his power through any evil machination of his making, no matter how noble these pundits’ notion of welcoming Putin into the Western fold might be.
And now, the current battle brewing is for the entire enchilada, Ukraine proper. If Putin is not dissuaded soon from invading, he takes all Ukraine, even if afterward a messy, hard-fought, bloody war continues on for months, perhaps a few years, through resistance groups that will most assuredly manifest themselves across the Ukraine countryside, towns, and cities.
If Putin is intent on taking the hardline regarding his demands of NATO, he’s leaving himself little room to do anything else but invade, and quite possibly, he’s known along that he would do so, in light of the weakness he now sees so readily evidenced throughout the Biden regime and NATO. Military action is Putin’s only option, if he is unwilling to come to the negotiating table and continues to seek a decisive triumph over the U.S. and NATO on the Ukraine issue, to embarrass and widen existing fractures; and with his most proficient military groups already staged strategically for action, if Putin really does plan to invade, he will have to act soon and while the ground is still frozen.
All the experts seem to agree, at the moment, that Russia would need to amass three times the number of troops and supplies on the border if they were planning a full-scale invasion, rather than a limited incursion, especially if they wanted to successfully combat the counter-insurgency forces that would arise. Many Ukrainian civilians have already spent many long years training and preparing for just such an event.
It won’t take long for Russia’s top military brass and the families of soldiers to realize Russia is paying an ever-increasing price in blood to build Putin’s legacy. And although the Ukrainians most likely cannot beat the Russians in a straight fight using conventional weapons, they do stand a great chance of convincing Putin to withdraw once the cost in blood and treasure becomes too high for Russia to bear.
This would be a fairly easy war to avoid if Putin was really only concerned about Russia’s security concerns.
However, regardless of Russia’s position, America and NATO cannot let Putin continue to control the narrative or tell them how to conduct security for Europe and NATO members or who can and cannot join NATO. That’s just not how freedom works.
Many have asked, “Well how would the U.S. feel if Russia were helping Communists in Mexico?” Well, that’s just what Russia aka the former USSR did throughout most of the 20th century. They were also active all across South and Central America, from Peru, Venezuela, and Cuba to Colombia, Nicaragua, and El Salvador. And we met the threat and answered it the best we could as a nation, but without invading any of those nations.
The Western allies are right in finding Putin’s arrogant attempt to veto Ukraine’s membership in NATO an intolerable demand. And even Finland observed, well before any other nation, that only NATO can decide its membership and not any other country. And bellicose and belligerent as ever, Putin’s demand that the U.S. must cease military training and maneuvers in or near Eastern Europe bespeaks of more arrogance from the leader of a country that was defeated during the Cold War.
In the meantime, this dangerous crisis has the hearts of many people pounding fiercely in trepidation of what may come, if Putin’s threats aren’t successfully met, countered and stopped or an actual invasion of Ukraine isn’t successfully repelled. Former Soviet satellite countries, such as Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia all see any weakness that yields to Russian aggression and expansion as a mortal and existential threat to their people.
Even some old Obama advisors, such as Celeste Wallander, are seeing the error in appeasement. Wallander served on the National Security Council from 2013 to 2017, and now she is a nominee for an assistant secretary of defense position dealing with international security affairs for the Biden regime. During her confirmation hearing, Wallander stated:
“I believe that our response in 2014 was too slow and too incremental. And it’s confirmed by the lessons I learned, and that I believe others in the national-security community learned, to better address Russia’s ongoing aggression ….. I believe one of the lessons I learned is that it would have been appropriate and necessary to provide Ukraine with what it needed to defend its territory.”
Yes. The Biden regime should already be pre-emptively enacting the heaviest economic sanctions available against Russia and Putin and all his crony oligarchs to put a significant hurt on their finances, especially in areas associated with foreign capital and Russia’s ability to export and import items to the Free World and its allies. Biden could start by getting our allies to close access to the financial services of the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications, which would prevent them from rapidly acquiring and transferring funds from financial institutions across the globe, but this would hinge on Belgium agreeing, since SWIFT is incorporated under Belgian law. And for good measure, he could make a public address calling on all Americans and America’s allies to dump the ruble and all Russian-tied investments.
On top of the economic sanctions, start flooding Ukraine with everything it could possibly need to withstand the Russian invasion, whether its radio equipment, trucks, or Javelin and Stinger missiles or Turkey’s Bayraktar TB2 drones, and lots and lots of medical supplies and ready-to-eat meals, military-style MREs.
Putin has threatened nuclear war against the West, several times since 2008, over the Ukraine. Could this be the time he actually tosses one or more at the West? I pray not, and though Putin is a power-mad tyrant, even he isn’t that insane — is he?
If a world war starts over this, it will be Putin’s doing, not that it’s any comfort once the killing starts and the dead bodies turn into small mountains of decaying flesh.
Biden has already failed miserably in his assessment and statements regarding Ukraine, and he has ensured that this will become another severe geopolitical blow to the U.S., embassy abandonment and all. He’s already failed the patriots of Ukraine, who understand that democratic Ukraine is on the frontline struggle against tyranny, and despite Biden’s failures, fine and decent Americans and our European counterparts must resolve to see a free Ukraine unrestrained from Her own destiny of choice, which will become a NATO member when it’s ready, under some righteous future administration, if it’s truly their desire.
Under any truly freedom-loving conservative administration, one might reasonably implore America and Her European allies to immediately erect a tactical nuclear shield across the European fault lines and aimed directly at Moscow, as was planned for by President Ronald Reagan, and during days gone by, it would have been made so. Only then would we worry about making Putin pay an economic price.
But this is Ol’ Commie Joe we speak of, and he’s more willing than Marx himself to allow for the rapid destruction of those human rights to which this nation has always been committed, and he’s more determined than ever to tempt our adversaries with weakness, while allowing the grasp of a new trending, growing and expanding iron tyranny to insert itself and take root in the four corners of the world.
Content syndicated from TheBlueStateConservative.com with permission.
