Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Gen. Mark A. Milley, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, have tried to set up phone calls with Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and Gen. Valery Gerasimov but the Russians “have so far declined to engage,” said Pentagon spokesman John Kirby in a statement Wednesday, March 23.
“A nightmare scenario would be a Russian missile or attack
aircraft that destroys a U.S. command post across the Polish-Ukrainian border,”
James Stavridis, a retired admiral who served as the Supreme Allied Commander
at NATO from 2009 to 2013, told
the Washington Post [1]. “A local commander might respond immediately,
thinking the event was a precursor to a wider attack. This could lead to rapid
and irreversible escalation, to include potential use of nuclear weapons.”
According to a CNN
report [2] detailing a rare face-to-face meeting between Russian and US
military officials last week, the US believes that the refusal for high-level
meetings is due to Kremlin worries that the encounters would show them to be
vulnerable if they allowed such meetings, because it risks a tacit admission
that an abnormal situation exists, according to the readout of the meeting.
Though the assumption of vulnerability appears misconceived
considering while the Pentagon has allegedly attempted to maintain high-level
contacts with Russian counterparts, Secretary of State Antony Blinken has not
attempted any conversations with his counterpart, Russian Foreign Minister
Sergei Lavrov, since the start of the conflict last month.
The real reason the Russian military leadership has allegedly
shunned maintaining high-level contacts with the Pentagon’s top brass appears to
be the duplicitous and treacherous role played by the transatlantic NATO alliance
of significantly escalating the conflict by substantially increasing the NATO
military footprint in Eastern Europe along Russia’s western flank, publicly providing
billions of dollars’ worth lethal weapons to Ukraine’s security forces and
allied neo-Nazi militias while asininely claiming to be “peacemakers” extending
chivalrous courtesies to the arch-rival.
Ahead of the NATO summit attended by President Biden Thursday,
NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg announced the transatlantic military
alliance would double the number of battlegroups it had deployed in Eastern
Europe. “The first step is the deployment of four new NATO battlegroups in
Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania, and Slovakia, along with our existing forces in the
Baltic countries and Poland,” Stoltenberg said. “This means that we will have
eight multinational NATO battlegroups all along the eastern flank, from the
Baltic to the Black Sea.”
NATO issued
a statement [3] after Thursday's emergency summit attended by Joe Biden and
European leaders: “In response to Russia’s actions, we have activated NATO’s
defense plans, deployed elements of the NATO Response Force, and placed 40,000
troops on our eastern flank, along with significant air and naval assets, under
direct NATO command supported by Allies’ national deployments. We are also
establishing four additional multinational battlegroups in Bulgaria, Hungary,
Romania, and Slovakia.”
Last week, President Biden announced an unprecedented
package of $1 billion in military assistance to Ukraine in addition to $350
million previously pledged which was disbursed within days of Russia’s invasion
of Ukraine on Feb. 24. The new package includes 800 Stinger anti-aircraft
systems, 2,000 anti-armor Javelins, 1,000 light anti-armor weapons, 6,000 AT-4
anti-armor systems and 100 Switchblade kamikaze drones.
Besides providing abundance of anti-aircraft and anti-armor munitions
to Ukraine’s largely conscript military and allied irregular militias, a senior
US administration official told
Reuters [4] Washington and its allies were also working on providing
anti-ship weapons to protect Ukraine's coast. Ukrainian forces claimed on
Thursday to have blown up a Russian landing ship in a Russian-occupied port.
Nonetheless, what must have exasperated Russia’s military
leadership is a secret
plan [5] for a “peacekeeping mission” involving 10,000 NATO troops from the
member states surreptitiously occupying western Ukraine and imposing a limited
no-fly zone over Lviv and rest of towns which is allegedly being prepared by
the Polish government.
The plan is seemingly on hiatus due to a disagreement
between Polish President Andrzej Duda and Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the deputy prime
minister of Poland and the head of Law and Justice (PiS) Party. Duda wants
Washington’s approval before going ahead, whereas Kaczynski appears desperate
to obtain political mileage from the Ukraine crisis.
The prime ministers of Poland, the Czech Republic and
Slovenia traveled via train to the embattled Ukrainian capital of Kyiv and met
with President Volodymyr Zelensky on March 15 in a show of support for Ukraine.
De facto leader of Poland, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, accompanied them. Speaking on
the occasion, Kaczynski said: “I think that it is necessary to have a peace
mission—NATO, possibly some wider international structure—but a mission that
will be able to defend itself, which will operate on Ukrainian territory.”
In response, Russian officials condemned Poland's proposal
to send NATO “peacekeeping forces” into Ukraine as a “very reckless and
extremely dangerous” idea that would risk a full-scale war between the alliance
and Moscow. “This will be the direct clash between the Russian and NATO armed
forces that everyone has not only tried to avoid but said should not take place
in principle,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said.
Regarding how operational-level miscalculations could lead
to all-out war between belligerents, it’s pertinent to recall that on February
7, 2018, US B-52 bombers and Apache helicopters struck a contingent of Syrian
government troops and allied forces in Deir al-Zor province of eastern Syria
that reportedly
[6] killed and wounded scores of Russian military contractors working for the
Russian private security firm, the Wagner Group.
The survivors described the bombing as an absolute massacre,
and Moscow lost more Russian nationals in one day than it had lost during its
entire military campaign in support of the Syrian government since September
2015.
Washington’s objective in striking Russian contractors was
that the US-backed and Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) – which is
mainly comprised of Kurdish YPG militias – had reportedly handed over the
control of some areas east of the Euphrates River to Deir al-Zor Military
Council (DMC), which was the Arab-led component of SDF, and had relocated
several battalions of Kurdish YPG militias to Afrin and along Syria’s northern
border with Turkey in order to defend the Kurdish-held areas against the
onslaught of the Turkish armed forces and allied Syrian militant proxies during
Ankara’s “Operation Olive Branch” in Syria’s northwest that lasted from January
to March 2018.
Syrian forces with the backing of Russian contractors took
advantage of the opportunity and crossed the Euphrates River to capture an oil
refinery located to the east of the Euphrates River in the Kurdish-held area of
Deir al-Zor.
The US Air Force responded with full force, knowing well the
ragtag Arab component of SDF – mainly comprised of local Arab tribesmen and
mercenaries to make the Kurdish-led SDF appear more representative and
inclusive in outlook – was simply not a match for the superior training and
arms of the Syrian troops and Russian military contractors, consequently
causing a carnage in which scores of Russian nationals lost their lives.
A month after the massacre of Russian military contractors
in Syria, on March 4, 2018, Sergei Skripal, a Russian double agent working for
the British foreign intelligence service, and his daughter Yulia were found
unconscious on a public bench outside a shopping center in Salisbury. A few
months later, in July 2018, a British woman, Dawn Sturgess, died after touching
the container of the nerve agent that allegedly poisoned the Skripals.
In the case of the Skripals, Theresa May, then the prime
minister of the United Kingdom, promptly accused Russia of attempted
assassinations and the British government concluded that Skripal and his
daughter were poisoned with a Moscow-made, military-grade nerve agent,
novichok.
Sergei Skripal was recruited by the British MI6 in 1995, and
before his arrest in Russia in December 2004, he was alleged to have blown the
cover of scores of Russian secret agents. He was released in a spy swap deal in
2010 and was allowed to settle in Salisbury. Both Sergei Skripal and his
daughter have since recovered and were discharged from hospital in May 2018.
In the aftermath of the Salisbury poisonings in March 2018,
the US, UK and several European nations expelled scores of Russian diplomats
and Washington ordered the closure of the Russian consulate in Seattle.
In a retaliatory move, Russia also expelled a similar number
of American, British and European diplomats, and ordered the closure of American
consulate in Saint Petersburg. The number of American diplomatic personnel
stationed in Russia drastically dropped from 1,200 before the escalation to 120,
and the relations between Moscow and Western powers reached their lowest ebb
since the break-up of the former Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War in
December 1991.
Notwithstanding, five years following a potentially
catastrophic incident that could’ve inundated Islamic State’s former capital
Raqqa and many towns downstream Euphrates River in eastern Syria and caused
more deaths than the deployment of any weapon of mass destruction, the New York
Times reported
in January [7] that at the height of US-led international coalition’s war
against the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, US B-52 bombers struck Tabqa Dam
with 2,000-pound bombs, including at least one bunker-busting bomb that
fortunately didn’t explode.
In March 2017, alternative media was abuzz with reports that
the dam was about to collapse and entire civilian population downstream
Euphrates River needed to be urgently evacuated to prevent the inevitable
catastrophe. But Washington issued a gag order to the corporate media “not to
sensationalize the issue.”
The explosive report noted that the dam was contested
between the US-backed and Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, the Syrian
government and the Islamic State. A firefight broke out in which SDF incurred
heavy casualties. It was then that a top secret US special operations unit Task
Force 9 called for airstrikes on the dam after repeated requests from the
Kurdish leadership of the SDF.
“The explosions on March 26, 2017, knocked dam workers to
the ground. A fire spread and crucial equipment failed. The flow of the
Euphrates River suddenly had no way through, the reservoir began to rise and
authorities used loudspeakers to warn people downstream to flee.
“The Islamic State group, the Syrian government and Russia
blamed the United States, but the dam was on the US military’s ‘no-strike list’
of protected civilian sites, and the commander of the US offensive at the time,
then-Lt. Gen. Stephen J. Townsend, said allegations of US involvement were
based on ‘crazy reporting.’”
It’s worth noting that it was the same rogue Pentagon
General Stephen J. Townsend, currently the commander of US AFRICOM and then the
commander of Combined Joint Task Force (CJTF) – Operation Inherent Resolve
(OIR) responsible for leading the war against the Islamic State in Syria and
Iraq, whose “operational miscalculation” was responsible for the reckless
confrontation an year later in February 2018 when US B-52 bombers struck Russian
military contractors, killing and wounding scores, a tragic incident that
brought two nuclear powers engaged in the Syrian conflict almost to the brink
of a full-scale war.
Citations:
[1] Top
Russian military leaders repeatedly decline calls from US:
[2] Inside
a rare US meeting with a Russian general in Moscow:
[3] NATO
doubles battlegroups in 'Eastern Flank' States:
[4] Russia
signals scaled-back war aims, Ukrainians advance near Kyiv:
[5] Secret
Plan to Send 10,000 NATO “Peacekeeping Troops” Into Ukraine:
[6] Russian
toll in Syria battle was 300 killed and wounded:
[7] A dam
in Syria was on a ‘no-strike’ list. The US bombed it anyway:
About the author:
Nauman Sadiq is an Islamabad-based geopolitical and national
security analyst focused on geo-strategic affairs and hybrid warfare in the
Af-Pak and Middle East regions. His domains of expertise include
neocolonialism, military-industrial complex and petro-imperialism. He is a
regular contributor of diligently researched investigative reports to
alternative news media.
25 March 2022.
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