Tag Archives: #Russia

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World War III Watch: the British and French are discussing sending their own troops to fight in Ukraine

Sometimes there are little things hidden inside of more sensationalized stories.

Though we haven’t seen as much about this recently — our American credentialed media were fixated on the election, and Israel’s war against the Palestinians — meaning that the Russo-Ukrainian War has somewhat faded into the background. Stories about foreign soldiers who traveled to Ukraine to fight the Russians? We heard a lot about them early on, though little recently. Yet this headline from the Associated Press might be seen as either misleading, or at least somewhat disingenuous clickbait.

Russia reportedly captures a Briton fighting for Ukraine as Russian troops advance

Monday, November 25, 2024 | 10:09 AM EST

Russia’s military captured a British national fighting with Ukrainian troops who have occupied part of Russia’s Kursk region, according to reports Monday, as Moscow began daylight drone attacks on civilian areas of Ukraine and its ground forces accelerated gains along parts of the front line.

Continue reading →

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World War III Watch: John Bolton is a blithering idiot!

When I was in college, back in the days of quill pens and inkwells, my best friend, Ken Vermillion and I used to have fanciful and oh-so-educated discussions about nuclear war. We had deterrence down flat, and Mr Vermillion, who sadly left this mortal vale in 2018, could quote his favorite movie, Dr Strangelove, extensively.

We met in 1973, drinking coffee with several other students in the old Student Center cafeteria, speculating whether an underwater nuclear explosion off the coast of California could trigger a tidal wave to hit Los Angeles.

But we were sophomores, and sophomores can discuss stuff like that with both impunity and the knowledge that we’d almost certainly ever be in a position to wage nuclear war.

John Bolton, now 76 years old, is not a sophomore. Having previously held the positions of assistant to the president for national security affairs (APNSA), commonly referred to as the national security advisor, from April 9, 2018 until September 10, 2019, when he was fired resigned, and as Under Secretary of State and Ambassador to the United Nations under the younger President Bush, he has a reputation which gets him all of the good news channel appearances. But, sadly, he’s just an idiot. He tweeted:

This ongoing threat of a “wider war” in Ukraine could be conventional, or it could be nuclear. If it’s a conventional threat, then where is the Russian army that’s going to provoke this war? And if it’s nuclear, it is important to remember that the U.S. has never renounced the first use of nuclear weapons. While these threats should not be entirely disregarded, it’s critical that the U.S. does not fall for Putin’s bluff.

What kind of absolute stupidity is that? Continue reading →

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World War III Watch: I’m amazed at how many people actually want war!

August of 1914 saw tens of thousands or men marching off to war, amid cheering throngs, knowing that their brave soldiers would be returning home soon, victorious in what would be called the Great World War. The French managed to stall the invading Germans short of Paris, and the armies dug in for what became four bloody years of stalemated trench warfare. On the eastern front, the German army under General Paul von Hindenburg and Erich Ludendorff used brilliant tactics and railroading to first engage and destroy the Imperial Russian Second Army and a few days later, the First Army.

Machine guns made a real appearance on the battlefields, and tanks came later. There were air battles, but the airplanes of the time were few and flimsy, and not able to make the deep bombing runs into enemy territory that were seen twenty years later in World War II. Continue reading →

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World War III Watch: Will American/NATO weapons be used against North Korean troops inside Russia? With President Biden sinking into dementia, who will take that decision?

This site noted, four days ago, that there were roughly 3,000 North Korean troops ‘undergoing training at military bases in eastern Russia’, and that John Kirby, a spokesman for the National Security Council, said those troops would become “legitimate military targets” if they should be used in the Russo-Ukrainian War.

Now those troops aren’t quite so far away. From The New York Times:

Ukraine Braces for Russians to Assault With North Korean Troops

Several thousand North Korean soldiers have arrived in Russia’s western Kursk region, where they are expected to support Moscow’s efforts to dislodge invading Ukrainian forces.

By Constant Méheut | Monday, October 28, 2024 | 10:53 AM EDT

Kyiv — Ukraine is bracing for assaults involving North Korean soldiers who arrived last week in Russia’s western Kursk region, where they are expected to support Moscow’s efforts to dislodge Ukrainian forces who invaded in August. Continue reading →

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World War III watch: We have a President sinking into dementia taking these decisions!

I saw the hints of this story on Twitter, but it seemed so insane that I was determined to find a credentialed media, a liberal credentialed media source before I would comment on or believe it. Well, the Grey Lady certainly fits the definition of a liberal credentialed media source, and the idea is simply appalling. From The New York Times:

Meeting With Biden, British Leader Hints at Ukraine Weapon Decision Soon

As the president deliberated with Prime Minister Keir Starmer, the question of whether to let Ukraine use long-range weapons in Russia was a rare point of contention between allied nations.

By Michael D. Shear and David E. Sanger

President Biden’s deliberations with Prime Minister Keir Starmer of Britain about whether to allow Ukraine to attack Russia with long-range Western weapons were fresh evidence that the president remains deeply fearful of setting off a dangerous, wider conflict.

But the decision now facing Mr. Biden after Friday’s closed-door meeting at the White House — whether to sign off on the use of long-range missiles made by Britain and France — could be far more consequential than previous concessions by the president that delivered largely defensive weapons to Ukraine during the past two and a half years.

In remarks at the start of his meeting with Mr. Starmer, the president underscored his support for helping Ukraine defend itself but did not say whether he was willing to do more to allow for long-range strikes deep into Russia.

“We’re going to discuss that now,” the president told reporters.

For his part, the prime minister noted that “the next few weeks and months could be crucial — very, very important that we support Ukraine in this vital war of freedom.”

Let’s be clear here: the Prime Minister is very concerned that Joe Biden will not be President after January 20th, and that, if former President Donald Trump is elected, that’ll be it: no more aid to Ukraine. And while Vice President Kamala Harris Emhoff has supported Mr Biden’s policies on Ukraine, she pretty much had to do so, because he is boss, and she isn’t. If she wins the election, she becomes boss, and perhaps, just perhaps, she won’t be as eager to set off World War III keep sending money and equipment to Ukraine.

Russia isn’t advancing, at least not in Ukraine. In 2½ years of war, the Russian advance has been mostly stymied. But it’s also true that, in 2½ years of war, the Ukrainians have been unable to reconquer anything, haven’t been able to defeat and expel the Russians. The United States and European NATO nations have sent billions of dollars in money, economic aid and military equipment to Ukraine, and it hasn’t been enough to defeat Russia. Prime Minister Starmer’s purported advocacy of deeper strikes into Russia is simply more evidence that what the West have provided Ukraine is not enough to defeat Russia. I have said it before: it doesn’t matter how much money and military aid we send to Ukraine, they cannot defeat Russia absent the US and NATO sending actual ground troops to fight Russia, and fighter aircraft and pilots to gain air superiority. That would mean the US and NATO in direct combat with Russia, a nation with a strategic nuclear arsenal. We have had our ‘proxy wars’ with the Soviet Union, in Korea, in Vietnam, and in Afghanistan, but those things were very different from direct combat against the USSR in the USSR.

The article noted that Mr Starmer is talking about “the use of long-range missiles made by Britain and France,” which would mean that the President of the United States does not have direct authority to authorize their use, but the US is the largest, most powerful, and wealthiest member of NATO, and it isn’t even close. If His Majesty’s Government approved the use of those long-range British missiles without American consent, it would create a major split in NATO, something Mr Starmer definitely does not want with Mr Trump possibly taking office again in four months, because the former President is not all that thrilled with an alliance which would require the United States to declare war on Russia if Vladimir Putin ordered an invasion on one of the small Baltic states, which are NATO members.

Ukraine is not a member of NATO.

European officials said earlier in the week that Mr. Biden appeared ready to approve the use of British and French long-range missiles, a move that Mr. Starmer and officials in France have said they want to provide a united front in the conflict with Russia. But Mr. Biden has hesitated to allow Ukraine to use arms provided by the United States in the same way over fears that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia would see it as a major escalation.

On Thursday, Mr. Putin responded to reports that America and its allies were considering such a move by declaring that it would “mean that NATO countries — the United States and European countries — are at war with Russia,” according to a report by the Kremlin.

There was a fine gentleman named Jake Broe, whose Twitter profile tells us that he is a “Fmr. Nuclear & Missile Operations Officer US Air Force”. Mr Broe tweeted:

If Russia uses a nuclear weapon against a NATO country, then this is what will happen to Russia in response.

About 45 million Russians will be vaporized in the first hour. Not much of a life remaining for the other 100 million.

Maybe the people of Russia should stop supporting Putin and deescalate the conflict?

He included a nasty World War III scenario video showing hundreds of nuclear warheads devastating Russia, but think about exactly what he said: “If Russia uses a nuclear weapon against a NATO country, then this is what will happen to Russia in response.” Ukraine is not a NATO nation!

Vladimir Putin might be a bit crazy, but he’s not stupid. He could respond to any NATO escalation of allowing longer-range weapons to be used to attack Russian military sites in Russia — and I’m old enough to remember President Richard Nixon’s expansion of the Vietnam war into Cambodia to attack Viet Cong bases there, and just how well that worked — with the use of ‘tactical’ or ‘battlefield’ nuclear weapons against Ukrainian military sites of troop concentrations inside Ukraine, and it would not be a nuclear attack against a NATO country. That would leave President Biden and Prime Minister Starmer and President Emmanuel Macron of France absolutely defecating in their drawers — and yes, I contemplated writing that in more vulgar terms — over how to respond. Ukraine has no nuclear weapons, and no one has been stupid enough to give them any, so any nuclear response, even if it is ‘just’ a small, tactical weapon, would have to be a direct attack by the US, UK, or France, the only NATO members which have nuclear weapons, and that would be a declaration of war against Russia.

That we have a President who’s clearly sinking into dementia taking this decision is appalling.

Let me be clear about this: I do not want President Putin and Russia to win this war, and so far, they haven’t. But I also do not want the United States involved in this war; the potential consequences are too dire. How many Americans am I willing to sacrifice to preserve Ukraine’s independence? The answer to that is: zero!

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World War III watch: Warmongers gotta warmonger!

It seems that the neoconservatives — who haven’t seemed very conservative when it comes to domestic policy — simply have never met a war in which they didn’t want the United States to fight. Of course, by that, they meant other Americans to fight, not themselves. We have previously reported on Bill Kristol, the neoconservative founder and later destroyer of The Weekly Standard, because as a dedicated #NeverTrumper he couldn’t stand to allow any support of Donald Trump in a magazine marketed to conservatives and Republicans. Mr Kristol and the other neocons, such as Max Boot and Jennifer Rubin, all love wars and want the United States to participate in them. Today’s left have managed to become so seduced by President Biden’s support for Ukraine in its war against Russia than even the very much not-a-neocon Amanda Marcotte was supporting Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, albeit for different reasons.

The Philadelphia Inquirer’s Trudy Rubin also fits into that category:

Are there four brave GOP House members with the courage to save Ukraine?

That’s all it would take to get the majority needed to bypass speaker Mike Johnson and get a vote on Ukraine aid to the House floor.

by Trudy Rubin | Friday, February 23, 2024 | 6:30 AM EST

Wanted: Four GOP House members with a tiny fraction of the courage of Russian dissident Alexei Navalny.

Saturday marks the second anniversary of Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine. It comes one week after Navalny died in an icy Siberian prison for his fight for democracy and opposition to the Ukraine war.

Yet the United States is on the verge of surrendering Ukraine into Putin’s hands because House Republican leaders refuse to allow members to vote for urgent military aid for Kyiv, a vote that would most likely pass (as it did with in a bipartisan vote in the Senate).

Pressed by Donald Trump and extremist MAGA members, Congress may doom brave Ukrainians to destruction by a Russian dictator who despises the West — and is armed by Iran and North Korea. Nothing like this has been seen since British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain conceded part of Czechoslovakia to Adolf Hitler in 1938 in hopes of dissuading him from occupying more European lands.

Mrs Rubin is most certainly dedicated to fighting the evil Vladimir Vladimirovich — addressing someone by his given and patronymic names is considered polite and respectful in Russian — but her comparison is accurate only in the most inaccurate of ways. Adolf Hitler was only 49½ years old when the Munich Pact was signed on September 30, 1938, and France and the United Kingdom were neither willing to fight Germany, nor able to send much aid to Czechoslovakia at the time. The Wehrmacht was an unknown quantity at the time, but Josef Goebbels’ propaganda made the world believe it was a tremendous fighting force.

Vladimir Putin, on the other hand, is 71½ years old, and the Russian military, if not mostly exhausted by the two-year-long war in Ukraine, would still be in no shape to invade any other countries for perhaps ten years or more after their war with Ukraine is over.

These are undisputed facts which must be taken into account, but the neocons don’t really do that, because those facts just don’t fit the narrative they wish to push.

Whether Trump and GOP extremists succeed in gifting Ukraine to Putin may depend on whether four GOP House members have the courage to stand up to MAGA appeasement and defend America’s long-term security.

Here’s how it could work.

The best chance to skirt House Speaker Mike Johnson’s refusal to permit a vote on Ukraine aid would be via a discharge petition. That is a parliamentary maneuver that effectively bypasses the speaker to bring a bill before the full House for a vote — if a majority of members agree to do so. If all Democrats signed on, it would only require four Republicans to get the Ukraine supplemental aid bill to the floor.

Heaven forfend! “Trump and GOP extremists”! “MAGA appeasement”! Mrs Rubin is telling Inquirer readers that there is no reasoned debate here, that only the extremists could possibly, possibly! be opposed to wasting sending yet another $60 billion in money and war materiel to Ukraine.

But let’s tell the truth here: it doesn’t matter how much money and military aid we send to Ukraine, they cannot defeat Russia absent the US and NATO sending actual ground troops to fight Russia, and fighter aircraft and pilots to gain air superiority. That would mean the US and NATO in direct combat with Russia, a nation with a strategic nuclear arsenal.

Given Russia’s relatively poor showing against the Ukrainians, it would seem probable that American and NATO troops could push the Russians out of Ukraine, at least once they got there, but it has to be asked: at what point of a seeming military defeat would President Putin decide to cross the nuclear threshold? A concentration of US and NATO troops would be the perfect target for Russian ‘tactical’ nuclear weapons, and once that threshold is crossed, who could say when the nukes would stop being used? Would Russia even risk that deployment, rather than strike the deployment bases, either in Poland, a NATO member, or Ukraine once the troops moved into the country but before they reached the front lines?

There is something truly sickening about the fact that Johnson — and so many GOP supporters of aid for Ukraine — are too scared to allow Congress to vote on such a key measure. Johnson fears being ousted from his speakership by the MAGA clique, as was the previous speaker, Kevin McCarthy. House members fear that, if they buck the Trump line, a MAGA candidate will run against them in the GOP primary. And above all hangs the threat of physical danger to them or their families by deranged MAGA supporters who take Trump’s ugly rhetoric to heart.

Yet, surely, among more than 200 GOP House members, there are four whose belief in democracy and U.S. security would embolden them to take the risk.

Mrs Rubin, naturally, asserts that there’s a serious physical danger to any Republicans who voted to support this, “by deranged MAGA supporters who take Trump’s ugly rhetoric to heart,” but, shockingly enough, no such thing has happened to the Republicans in the Senate who voted to support Ukraine.

But, more importantly, Mrs Rubin noted that Republican House members who voted for such might face primary opponents. Well, if they fear primary opponents, then they must believe that their constituents wouldn’t support wasting sending more aid to Ukraine. Aren’t congressmen supposed to represent their constituents?

“This is not just about Ukraine, it is about our security,” (Representative Brendan) Boyle (D-PA) told me. “Putin is evil on the same level as Hitler. It is a lot less expensive to stand up to him now; if we wait until later, it will be much more costly in money and lives.”

Mr Putin might be “evil on the same level as Hitler”, but his military forces have not proven to be on the same level as the Wehrmacht in 1939. We are not likely to see Russian troops landing on the beaches of Maine and Virginia even if Ukraine collapses completely. We’re not going to see them invading even tiny Estonia, a NATO member roughly the size of New Hampshire and Vermont, because Ukraine has shown the Russians that they simply don’t have the wherewithal to do invasions well. Perhaps in ten years Russia will have rebuilt its forces enough to contemplate that, but Vladimir Vladimirovich will be 81 years old in ten years. if he’s even still alive then.

I don’t want to see Ukraine lose either, but I am not willing to waste American dollars and American weapons, and possibly American lives — remember: my older daughter is a reservist with the Army Corps of Engineers — to prop up Ukraine.

$60 billion in US aid would do what? It would help Ukraine to keep fighting the stalemate they’ve managed to achieve, but that’s all. $60 billion would keep the war going, and keep the killing on both sides and the destruction in Ukraine marching ever-forward, but it wouldn’t enable Ukraine to throw the Russians out of their country.

Mrs Rubin noted that the European Union have committed twice as much aid to Ukraine as the US has, to which I say, “Great! It’s a European problem; let the Europeans handle it! But leave the United States out of it.”

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World War III Watch Warmongers gotta warminger!

We noted, just a couple of days ago, that American newspapers were starting to go all-out neoconservative in wanting to expand American and NATO involvement in the Russo-Ukrainian War. The Philadelphia Inquirer’s chief warmonger, Trudy Rubin, wants NATO to take in Ukraine, saying:

This is the moment when NATO members, led by Biden, should be laying out a clear path for Ukraine to join the alliance once the war ends. This is the moment, which, if seized, could plausibly lead to Ukrainian victory by year’s end.

The Washington Post’s Max Boot, who is, as we have previously noted, very much pro-war, said:

Yet there is deep and understandable reluctance among Western European states and the United States to admit Ukraine to NATO, because it is at war with Russia and will be for the foreseeable future. This isn’t a stable stalemate like the division of East and West Germany or North and South Korea. This is a dynamic, ongoing conflict that, if NATO were to take in Ukraine, could draw other members into a shooting war with a nuclear-armed Russia.

It’s true, as Scheunemann and Farkas argue, that Article 5 — which holds “that an attack against one Ally is considered as an attack against all Allies” — “does not mandate a specific response by member states.” NATO members could say they are complying with Article 5 by doing what they are already doing: supplying Ukraine with weapons, training and intelligence and imposing sanctions on Russia. But there has always been an implicit assumption that an armed attack on a NATO member would result in military action by other NATO members. If that’s not the case, it would risk watering down Article 5 and reducing the overall effectiveness of the NATO alliance. Do we really want to send a message to Putin that he could invade, say, Lithuania and the West won’t fight to defend that embattled democracy?

Marc A. Thiessen and Stephen E. Biegun, writing in The Washington Post, and very much wanting to increase US/NATO aid to Ukraine, wrote:

No serious person advocates NATO membership for Ukraine while the current fighting continues. That would be tantamount to a declaration of war with Russia. But it is equally true that after a cease-fire, a durable peace cannot be achieved unless that peace is guaranteed by NATO membership.

Bill Kristol, the neoconservative founder and later destroyer of The Weekly Standard, because as a dedicated #NeverTrumper he couldn’t stand to allow any support of Donald Trump in a magazine marketed to conservatives and Republicans, and who is so pro-liberty that he wants to force people to be vaccinated, wants you to believe that he is a serious person, but by Messrs Thiessen’s and Biegun’s definition, simply is not. Mr Kristol tweeted[1]Mr Kristol’s tweet, shown above, is a screen capture of the original, in case he decides to delete the stupidity he wrote.:

Perhaps the simplest and strongest argument for a clear commitment to Ukraine joining NATO as soon as possible is that it would show Putin he cannot win. It thus would make a quick end to the war more likely. If you’re for peace, you should be for Ukraine in NATO.

There is no reasonable way to read that as anything but Mr Kristol wanting NATO to take in Ukraine while the war is still raging. If “Ukraine joining NATO as soon as possible” is the best way to “show Putin he cannot win,” then showing Vladimir Vladimirovich that he cannot win follows Ukraine joining NATO. If Mr Kristol was somehow thinking that he really meant after the war was over — and I would never put it beyond conception that Mr Kristol could foul up his verbiage — then a path for Ukraine to join NATO after the war only provides more incentive for President Putin to continue the war until Ukraine is conquered, so it can’t join NATO.

Mr Kristol, born into a well-to-do family, now with an estimated net worth of $10 million, was born on December 23, 1952, which had him turning 18 in late 1970. If he really believed that war was a great idea, he was of age to have enlisted in the United States Army to help fight in Vietnam .  .  . but he didn’t. His draft lotter number was 171, so he was kind of on the cusp of being called up to serve, but in any event, never served a single day in uniform. Being Jewish, Mr Kristol could also have volunteered to serve in the Israeli Defence Force, which could have used his service in the Yom Kippur War of 1973, but he didn’t do that, either.

Bill Kristol just loves him some American involvement in wars, but let’s tell the truth here: he supports having other people fight in those wars, not himself and not his children. And now he’s advocating a position in which even his fellow traveler, Max Boot, has said would probably involve the United States directly in a war with Russia, with nuclear-armed Russia.

So many of the neocons, with their World War II thinking, seem to just blithely wave off any threat of such a war going nuclear, but the closer such a war would get to defeating Russia, which the warmongers all seem to think would be the case, then the greater the temptation for Russia to reverse a defeat through the use of ‘tactical’ nuclear weapons. If the nuclear threshold is crossed, no one can know when things would stop.

References

References
↑1 Mr Kristol’s tweet, shown above, is a screen capture of the original, in case he decides to delete the stupidity he wrote.
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World War III Watch: The liberal newspapers are going all out neocon!

I have said it before: There has been a whole lot of World War II thinking applied to the Russo-Ukraine War — or perhaps I should call it Russo-Ukraine War 2.0, considering Russia’s seizure and annexation of part of Ukraine in 2014 — with the logic that pushed the United Kingdom and France to declare war on Nazi Germany two days after the Wehrmacht rolled into Poland, but that is such superficial thinking that I am amazed no one has realized it. In that event, the UK and France could not and did not actually do anything to liberate Poland; the liberation of Poland came in 1944, when the Red Army pushed out the Germans, and ‘liberation’ by the Soviet Union hardly freed the Poles.

And there’s that biggest of differences: no one in Europe, or anywhere in the world, had in 1939 what Russia has now: a strategic and tactical nuclear arsenal. As he was losing the war, Adolf Hitler tried everything he could, used every weapon he had, but, other than the V-1 and V-2 terror rockets, and a short-range bomber force that could reach only parts of England, had no power to strike at his enemies. We do not and cannot know what Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin will do if, in the end, he sees Russia really losing RUW 2.0, but we do know that he could cross that nuclear threshold, and use tactical nukes against Ukrainian troop concentrations and other targets. And once that nuclear threshold is crossed, who can know when things will stop? And if the United States and NATO nations are supplying Ukraine from bases in Poland, how are those bases not legitimate targets if Russia has the weapons to reach them . . . and Russia does.

But that doesn’t really seem to concern a lot of “strategic thinkers” these days:

At the NATO summit in Vilnius: Will Biden seize or squander the chance to end Putin’s war on Ukraine?

Biden must offer Kyiv a clear path to NATO membership after the end of the fighting and ensure it has the weapons to win.

by Trudy Rubin | Sunday, July 9, 2023 | 7:00 AM EDT

Does Joe Biden want to be remembered as the president who lost Ukraine?

“(T)he president who lost Ukraine”? What, are we back in 1949, and the “who lost China” political idiocy? There was a lot of that around, as though the United States could have sent the Army into China to stop Mao Zedong and the Communists from routing Chiang Kai-shek and the Nationalists, chasing them off the mainland and into Formosa?

That question must be asked as NATO allies prepare to meet at a historic summit in the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius on Tuesday and Wednesday, which will focus on Russian President Vladimir Putin’s continued aggression in Ukraine.

This is the moment when NATO members, led by Biden, should be laying out a clear path for Ukraine to join the alliance once the war ends. This is the moment, which, if seized, could plausibly lead to Ukrainian victory by year’s end.

“(P)lausibly,” huh? Nothing in this war has proceeded in anything like what the military “experts” predicted. Russia was not able to brush the Ukrainians aside, but the rosy projections that the Ukrainians could push the Russians back out have not materialized, either. The only things which have really advanced in this war are the mud, the blood, the devastation, and the death.

This is also the moment when Biden should be announcing that the United States will finally expedite the arrival of critical weapons systems — long-range missiles and F-16 fighter jets — that are vital to the success of Ukraine’s counteroffensive.

As of this writing, though, all signs are that Biden will squander the moment, and none of the above will happen. As John Herbst, former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, said during a webinar last week, ”Very thin gruel is likely in Vilnius.” If so, Biden and NATO will be gifting Putin big time, even as he reels from a failed mutiny attempt by one of his closest allies.

There’s still a bit of time for Biden to shift gears and surprise us. Here are the vital steps he should take at the summit to help end Putin’s war.

Make clear that the United States and NATO support a Ukrainian “victory” according to Kyiv’s definition, which means regaining all territory seized by Russia, including Crimea. The White House keeps saying we are with Kyiv “as long as it takes,” but never clarifies “takes for what?” Why not say we are with the Ukrainians until they win?

President Putin had sent his troops into the eastern half of Ukraine back in 2014, seizing a large chunk of the territory, including Crimea, which Russia directly annexed. Mrs Rubin now wants the current war to continue until Ukraine not only holds off and then pushes out Russia from the parts of Ukraine that it tried to seize when she invaded in 2022, but also to expel Russia from land it has held for the last nine years, the seizure of which our NATO allies and we condemned in 2014, but which Presidents Obama, Trump, and, initially, Biden actually did nothing about.

Also see: William Teach: Ukraine Totally Vows Not To Use The Cluster Bombs Biden’s Giving Them In Russia

There’s a lot more of Mrs Rubin’s column, in which she advocates sending 300 KM range ATACMS tactical ballistic missiles to Ukraine, which has “promised” not to use them on targets inside Russia, but who can know, in advance, whether that promise would be kept if a desperate Ukraine identified targets inside Russia — or Byelorus — against which the weapons would be useful?

In what almost seems as though the Head Neoconservative sent a memo around to his minions, The Washington Post had several articles on the subject. A straight news piece noted that U.S. leaders insist war with Russia must end before Ukraine joins NATO, and even neoconservative Max Boot, very much a Ukraine supporter, realized that, as much as his “heart” says Ukraine should be admitted into NATO, his “head” says no.

Yet there is deep and understandable reluctance among Western European states and the United States to admit Ukraine to NATO, because it is at war with Russia and will be for the foreseeable future. This isn’t a stable stalemate like the division of East and West Germany or North and South Korea. This is a dynamic, ongoing conflict that, if NATO were to take in Ukraine, could draw other members into a shooting war with a nuclear-armed Russia.

It’s true, as Scheunemann and Farkas argue, that Article 5 — which holds “that an attack against one Ally is considered as an attack against all Allies” — “does not mandate a specific response by member states.” NATO members could say they are complying with Article 5 by doing what they are already doing: supplying Ukraine with weapons, training and intelligence and imposing sanctions on Russia. But there has always been an implicit assumption that an armed attack on a NATO member would result in military action by other NATO members. If that’s not the case, it would risk watering down Article 5 and reducing the overall effectiveness of the NATO alliance. Do we really want to send a message to Putin that he could invade, say, Lithuania and the West won’t fight to defend that embattled democracy?

If Mr Boot was uncommonly cautious, Marc A. Thiessen and Stephen E. Biegun were less so, arguing that only NATO membership can guarantee peace for Ukraine.

No serious person advocates NATO membership for Ukraine while the current fighting continues. That would be tantamount to a declaration of war with Russia. But it is equally true that after a cease-fire, a durable peace cannot be achieved unless that peace is guaranteed by NATO membership.

Even Mrs Rubin said that NATO membership for Ukraine should only come after Ukraine wins its war, or a cease-fire is somehow declared.

But what would that mean? If declaring a cease-fire means that Ukraine would them be offered NATO membership, then any incentive President Putin has for agreeing to a cease-fire is greatly diminished. More, if a ‘path’ to membership is specified, President Putin would know what he needed to do, and when he needed to do it.

We do not know what a post-Putin Russia will look like, but there’s one point I do not see the neocons considering. With all of the comparisons to ‘we should have stopped Adolf Hitler in 1938’ that we see concerning Vladimir Putin, the Nazi leader was 49 years old in 1938, while Vladimir Vladimirovich will turn 71 in three months time. With a Russian military which will have to rebuild following the war with Ukraine, regardless of how that war ends, the argument that we have to deter future aggression from him seems short-sighted. Even if Russia finally wins in Ukraine, and Mr Putin manages to hang onto power for the rest of his miserable life, he could be approaching, or even over, 80 years old before Russia would be ready for another aggressive move, and Russian military leaders of tomorrow, who today are the field-grade officers mired in the Ukraine war, are going to have the experience to know that another such assault against another nation will not go according to plan.

When NATO was formed, there were ‘buffer states’ between NATO and the Soviet Union; today, NATO nations are directly on Russia’s borders, and that fact gets a lot more serious if Ukraine becomes one of them. Many Western analysts say that, since NATO is a wholly defensive alliance, that shouldn’t really be a concern of the Russians, but they are thinking in Western terms, and not with a Russian mindset. When an American ‘analyst’ tells us how the Russians should feel, should think, he’s talking out of his ass, because it’s not necessarily how the Russians will feel about things.

How did we react when the USSR prepared to install nuclear weapons in Cuba? President Kennedy risked a direct military conflict with Soviet naval forces, at a time when the Soviets’ nuclear forces existed, but were vastly inferior to our own.

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World War III Watch: Warmongers gotta warmonger!

We have previously reported on Bill Kristol, the neoconservative founder and later destroyer of The Weekly Standard, because as a dedicated #NeverTrumper he couldn’t stand to allow any support of Donald Trump in a magazine marketed to conservatives and Republicans. Mr Kristol and the other neocons, such as Max Boot and Jennifer Rubin, all love wars and want the United States to participate in them. Today’s left have managed to become so seduced by President Biden’s support for Ukraine in its war against Russia than even the very much not-a-neocon Amanda Marcotte was supporting Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, albeit for different reasons.

I’ll admit the shameful truth: I follow Mr Kristol in Twitter, not because I like or even respect his views, but because he does clue me into some of his silliness. I’m not a subscriber to The Atlantic, and wouldn’t have seen this article, had Mr Kristol not retweeted Adrienne LaFrance’s promotion of it.

The Case for the Total Liberation of Ukraine

Russia must be expelled from all of Ukraine’s territory—including Crimea.

By Anne Applebaum and Jeffrey Goldberg | Monday, May 1, 2023 | 5:00 AM EDT

In March 1774, Prince Grigory Potemkin, the favorite general and sometime lover of Catherine the Great, took control of the anarchic southern frontier of her empire, a region previously ruled by the Mongol Khans, the Cossack hosts, and the Ottoman Turks, among others. As viceroy, Potemkin waged war and founded cities, among them Kherson, the first home of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet. In 1783, he annexed Crimea and became an avatar of imperial glory. To Vladimir Putin in particular, Potemkin is the Russian nationalist who subdued territory now impudently and illegitimately claimed by Ukraine, a nation that Putin believes does not exist.

Oh, I’m pretty sure that Vladimir Vladimirovich believes that Ukraine exists now, and that he’s not particularly happy about it.

There follows several paragraphs — the magazine is given to longer articles — on the history of Prince Potemkin and the fight over Kherson, before we get to the meat of the authors’ advocacy.

When we visited again a few weeks ago, the lights were on, the restaurants were open, and the trains ran on predictable schedules. A coffee shop in the station was serving oat-milk lattes. Bucha is a construction site, with a brand-new hardware store for anyone repairing war damage themselves. A conversation with Zelensky is now a more formal affair, with simultaneous translation, a videographer, and an array of English-speaking aides in attendance. Zelensky himself spoke English much of the time—he has had, he said, a lot more practice. But behind the more polished presentation, the tension and uncertainty persist, fueled by the sense that we are once again at a turning point, once again at a moment when key decisions will be made, in Kyiv, of course, but especially in Washington.

“Especially in Washington.” Not in Warsaw, or Berlin, not in nations much closer to Ukraine, but across all of Europe and the broad Atlantic Ocean.

For although the war is not lost, it is also not won. Kherson is free, but it is under constant attack. Kyiv’s restaurants are open, but refugees have not yet returned home. Russia’s winter offensive has petered out, but as of this writing, in mid-April, it is unclear when Ukraine’s summer offensive will begin. Until it begins, or rather, until it ends, negotiations—about the future of Ukraine and its borders, Ukraine’s relationship to Russia and to Europe, the final status of the Crimean Peninsula—cannot begin either. Right now Putin still seems to believe that a long, drawn-out war of attrition will eventually bring him back his empire: Ukraine’s feckless Western allies will grow tired and give up; maybe Donald Trump will win reelection and align with the Kremlin; Ukraine will retreat; Ukrainians will be overwhelmed by the sheer number of Russian soldiers, however poorly armed and trained they may be.

Uniquely, the United States has the power to determine how, and how quickly, the war of attrition turns into something quite different. The Ukrainian defense minister, Oleksii Reznikov, spoke with us about the “Ramstein Club,” named after the American air base in Germany where the group, which consists of the defense officials of 54 countries, first convened. Still, his most important relationship is with U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin (“we communicate very, very often”), and everyone knows that this club is organized by Americans, led by Americans, galvanized by Americans. Andriy Yermak, Zelensky’s chief of staff, told us that Ukrainians now feel they are “strategic partners and friends” with America, something that might not have felt so true a few years ago, when Donald Trump was impeached on charges of seeking to extort Zelensky.

That’s two slams against former President Trump in two paragraphs; no wonder Mr Kristol liked the article. Unmentioned is the fact that Russia invaded and annexed part of Ukraine while Barack Hussein Obama was President, made no moves against Ukraine while Mr Trump was in office, and invaded the rest of that nation once Joe Biden was in the White House.

In our interview with Zelensky, which we conducted with the chair of The Atlantic’s board of directors, Laurene Powell Jobs, we asked him how he would justify this unusual relationship to a skeptical American: Why should Americans donate weapons to a distant war? He was clear in stating that the outcome of the war will determine the future of Europe. “If we will not have enough weapons,” he said, “that means we will be weak. If we will be weak, they will occupy us. If they occupy us, they will be on the borders of Moldova, and they will occupy Moldova. When they have occupied Moldova, they will [travel through] Belarus, and they will occupy Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia. That’s three Baltic countries which are members of NATO. They will occupy them. Of course, [the Balts] are brave people, and they will fight. But they are small. And they don’t have nuclear weapons. So they will be attacked by Russians because that is the policy of Russia, to take back all the countries which have been previously part of the Soviet Union.” The fate of NATO, of America’s position in Europe, indeed of America’s position in the world are all at stake.

And now we get to it: the old “domino theory.” But it ignores Russia’s experience in Ukraine, an experience that tells Russia that, even if it wins, conquers, and annexes all of Ukraine, that their army has to be rebuilt, their industries have to modernize, and their resources have to be better channeled. Even if Russia wins, the nation will not be in any shape to invade another of its neighbors for a long time. And President Putin is 70½ years old.

There follows many paragraphs about the necessity for a Ukrainian victory to validate freedom and democracy, to show that such can prevail against an authoritarian nation bent on conquest. That’s all very nice, but at some point it has to be asked: how can Ukraine win? President Zelensky keeps asking for more and more weapons, telling its allies that if we can just give them enough weapons, they can defeat a nation with thrice its manpower, in a war that is being fought not in Russia, but in Ukraine, a country in which its infrastructure is being slowly demolished. As we have previously noted, some have said that the only way Ukraine could win, in the way that President Zelensky and the authors of the Atlantic article want, “Russia must be expelled from all of Ukraine’s territory—including Crimea,” necessarily involves more than just NATO shipping weapons to Ukraine, but “direct NATO involvement in the war. Only the full, Desert Storm style of deployment of NATO and U.S. troops and weaponry could bring about a comprehensive Ukrainian victory in a short period of time.”

Really? Our “full, Desert Storm style of deployment of NATO and U.S. troops” involved 697,000 American soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines. That would require calling up thousands and thousands of reservists, and we need to remember: it took the elder President Bush six months of diplomacy and work after Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait to assemble and put in place the forces which drove Iraq out of Kuwait. We used staging areas Iraq could not touch to assemble the forces required, but staging areas which Russia could attack.

There is, of course, the small matter of engaging in a direct war with a nation which has a strategic nuclear arsenal, something just blithely waved aside as a serious consideration by the neoconservatives and warmongers. Yes, it would be absolutely great if Vladimir Putin was deposed and Russian forces driven completely out of Ukraine, but I have to ask: how many American cities are we willing to see burned in nuclear fire to see that accomplished? If the answer is greater than zero, I’d like to know what number Mr Kristol believes would be acceptable.

Because that is the risk here, and no one should doubt it. There are all sorts of rational reasons why Russia should not resort to nuclear weapons, even the ‘smallest’ ‘battlefield’ nuclear weapons it has, to stave off defeat, but if defeat becomes eminent, who can promise that President Putin or Russian military commanders would base their actions solely on those rational reasons?

The number of American cities I’d be willing to see burned in nuclear fire to save Ukraine? Zero!