Addressing a meeting on socioeconomic support for the constituent entities of the Russian Federation on March 16, Russian President Vladimir Putin succinctly elucidated the salient reasons for pre-emptively mounting a military intervention in Ukraine in order to forestall NATO’s encroachment upon Russia’s security interests. Here are a few trenchant excerpts from the lucid and eloquent speech [1]:
“We are meeting in a complicated period as our Armed Forces
are conducting a special military operation in Ukraine and Donbass. I would
like to remind you that at the beginning, on the morning of February 24, I publicly
announced the reasons for and the main goal of Russia’s actions.
“It is to help our people in Donbass, who have been
subjected to real genocide for nearly eight years in the most barbarous ways,
that is, through blockade, large-scale punitive operations, terrorist attacks
and constant artillery raids. Their only guilt was that they demanded basic
human rights: to live according to their forefathers’ laws and traditions, to
speak their native Russian language, and to bring up their children as they
want.
“Kiev was not just preparing for war, for aggression against
Russia – it was conducting it … Hostilities in Donbass and the shelling of
peaceful residential areas have continued all these years. Almost 14,000
civilians, including children have been killed over this time … Clearly, Kiev’s
Western patrons are just pushing them to continue the bloodshed. They
incessantly supply Kiev with weapons and intelligence, as well as other types
of assistance, including military advisers and mercenaries.
“Just like in the 1990s and the early 2000s, they want to
try again to finish us off, to reduce us to nothing by turning us into a weak
and dependent country, destroying our territorial integrity and dismembering
Russia as they see fit. The failed then and they will fail this time … Yes, of
course, they will back the so-called fifth column, national traitors – those
who make money here in our country but live over there, and live not in the
geographical sense of the word but in their minds, in their servile mentality.”
Confirming Western support for Ukraine “with weapons and
intelligence, as well as other types of assistance, including military advisers
and mercenaries” that Putin alluded to in the speech, the Intercept
reported [2] on March 17 the US military had deployed extensive ISR, or
intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, assets to countries neighboring
Ukraine to monitor developments within the embattled nation. The aircraft
include MQ-9 Reaper drones, Boeing RC-135 Rivet Joints, and Boeing E-3 Sentry
AWACS, which have been used to eavesdrop on communications and collect imagery
intelligence.
“‘The U.S. is using a variety of drone and fixed-wing
collection assets to obtain tactical information of the battlefield,’ the
official said, adding that the intelligence is then passed on to the Ukrainians
through a liaison officer. On Sunday, a Russian drone briefly crossed into
Poland, a NATO member, leading to a warning from the alliance that it could
respond with force — an alarming threat of direct confrontation with Russia.
“An MQ-9 drone pilot with the U.S. military also told The
Intercept that Reapers had been deployed to the region. He said the U.S. was
using MQ-9 services leased from private contractors before withdrawing them and
replacing with government assets, which he said have been slower to stand up.
“The U.S. has particular experience with this type of
indirect weapons and intelligence assistance against Russia, having previously
sent arms to Syrian rebels combating the Russian-backed regime of President
Bashar al-Assad.”
In many ways, the proxy war in Ukraine resembles the CIA’s
Operation Timber Sycamore and the Pentagon’s $500 million train-and-equip
program to provide guerrilla warfare training and lethal weaponry to rebels
battling the Syrian government in the training camps located at border regions
of Turkey and Jordan during Syria’s decade-long conflict.
In fact, Russia’s military intervention in Syria in Sept.
2015 in support of the Bashar al-Assad government battling Washington’s
jihadist proxies was actually in retaliation for the CIA’s covert program
initiated in 2014 for arming and training mercenaries and neo-Nazi militias in
Russia’s backyard in east Ukraine in order to destabilize and provoke Russia.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last month was only a logical
culmination of a long-simmering, eight-year war of attrition initiated by NATO
powers against Russia in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region after the 2014 Maidan
coup toppling Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych and consequent annexation
of the Crimean Peninsula by Russia.
In an explosive
scoop [3], Zach Dorfman reported for the Yahoo News on March 16: “As part
of the Ukraine-based training program, CIA paramilitaries taught their
Ukrainian counterparts sniper techniques; how to operate U.S.-supplied Javelin
anti-tank missiles and other equipment; how to evade digital tracking the
Russians used to pinpoint the location of Ukrainian troops, which had left them
vulnerable to attacks by artillery; how to use covert communications tools; and
how to remain undetected in the war zone while also drawing out Russian and
insurgent forces from their positions, among other skills, according to former
officials.
“When CIA paramilitaries first traveled to eastern Ukraine
in the aftermath of Russia’s initial 2014 incursion, their brief was twofold.
First, they were ordered to determine how the agency could best help train
Ukrainian special operations personnel fight the Russian military forces, and
their separatist allies, waging a grinding war against Ukrainian troops in the
Donbas region. But the second part of the mission was to test the mettle of the
Ukrainians themselves, according to former officials.”
Besides the CIA’s clandestine program for training neo-Nazi
militias in eastern Donbas and the US Special Forces program for training
Ukraine’s security forces at Yavoriv Combat Training Center in the western part
of the country bordering Poland that was hit
by a barrage [4] of 30 cruise missiles killing at least 35 militants on
March 13, Zach Dorfman claims in a separate January
report [5] that the CIA also ran a covert program for training Ukraine’s
special forces at an undisclosed facility in the southern United States.
“The CIA is overseeing a secret intensive training program
in the U.S. for elite Ukrainian special operations forces and other
intelligence personnel, according to five former intelligence and national
security officials familiar with the initiative. The program, which started in
2015, is based at an undisclosed facility in the Southern U.S., according to
some of those officials.
“While the covert program, run by paramilitaries working for
the CIA’s Ground Branch — now officially known as Ground Department — was
established by the Obama administration after Russia’s invasion and annexation
of Crimea in 2014, and expanded under the Trump administration, the Biden
administration has further augmented it.
“By 2015, as part of this expanded anti-Russia effort, CIA
Ground Branch paramilitaries also started traveling to the front in eastern
Ukraine to advise their counterparts there. The multiweek, U.S.-based CIA
program has included training in firearms, camouflage techniques, land
navigation, tactics like cover and move, intelligence and other areas.
“One person familiar with the program put it more bluntly.
‘The United States is training an insurgency,’ said a former CIA official,
adding that the program has taught the Ukrainians how ‘to kill Russians.’ Going
back decades, the CIA has provided limited training to Ukrainian intelligence units
to try and shore up an independent Kyiv and prevent Russian subversion, but
cooperation ramped up after the Crimea invasion, said a former CIA executive.”
Notwithstanding, at the height of the Cold War in the
sixties when Russia exploded the world’s largest 50-megaton thermonuclear Tsar
Bomba in October 1961 and 400,000 US forces were deployed in Europe that were
still outnumbered by Soviet troops, the Soviet leadership made repeated
requests for signing a “no first use” nuclear treaty precluding the likelihood
of pre-emptive nuclear strike, but the United States balked at the proposal due
to conventional warfare superiority of the USSR in Europe.
Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev even unilaterally pledged
against the first use of nuclear weapons in 1982, though Russia has since dropped
the pledge [1] in 1993 following the break-up of the Soviet Union and
consequent tilting of balance of power in favor of the United States. After
European powers developed their own military capacity following the devastation
of the Second World War, NATO now holds conventional warfare superiority over
Russia with a significantly larger number of ground troops and combat aircraft.
Despite Russia’s massive nuclear arsenal, several Pentagon
officials, full of hubris and evidently suffering from misplaced superiority
complex, have recently made their misconceived institutional logic public that
they no longer regard Russia as an equal military power, instead they
contemptuously dubbed it “a second-rate regional power,” and if given an
opportunity, they wouldn’t hesitate to take Russia head-on, even if the risk is
as perilous as the conflict spiraling into a catastrophic nuclear war.
Total number of nuclear warheads across the world currently
stands at roughly 13,000: Russia has 5977; NATO has 5943, including 5428 in the
US, 290 in France and 225 in the United Kingdom; China has 350, Pakistan 165,
India 160, Israel 90 and North Korea has 20 nuclear weapons, according to the
Federation of American Scientists.
At the height of the Cold War in the sixties, Russia
exploded the world’s largest 50-megaton thermonuclear Tsar Bomba in October
1961. A Tupolev Tu-95V aircraft took off with the bomb weighing 27 tons. The
bomb was attached to a large parachute, which gave the release and observer
planes time to fly about 45 km away from ground zero, giving them a 50 percent
chance of survival.
The bomb was released from a height of 10,500 meters on a
test target at Sukhoy Nos cape in the Barents Sea. The bomb detonated at the
height of 4,200 meters above ground. Still, the shock wave caught up with
the Tu-95V at a distance of 115 km and the Tu-16 at 205 km. The Tu-95V dropped
1 kilometer in the air because of the shock wave but was able to recover and
land safely.
The 8-km-wide fireball reached nearly as high as the
altitude of the release plane and was visible at almost 1,000 km away. The
mushroom cloud was about 67 km high. A seismic wave in the earth’s crust,
generated by the shock wave of the explosion, circled the globe three times.
Glass shattered in windows 780 km from the explosion in a village on Dikson
Island.
All buildings in the village of Severny, both wooden and
brick, located 55 km from ground zero within the Sukhoy Nos test range, were
destroyed. In districts hundreds of kilometers from ground zero, wooden houses
were destroyed, stone ones lost their roofs, windows, and doors. Atmospheric
focusing caused blast damage at even greater distances, breaking windows in
Norway and Finland.
In conclusion, the Ukraine conflict is clearly spiraling out
of control and has the potential not only of dragging NATO powers into the war
but might also spell end to the human civilization by raising the apocalyptic
specter of a catastrophic nuclear war between two formidable nuclear powers
that hold between themselves over 90% of the world’s devastating nuclear
arsenal.
Citations:
[1] Putin’s
speech to a meeting published by Russian Embassy in London:
[2] U.S.
quietly assists Ukraine with intelligence:
[3] CIA
training program in Ukraine helped Kyiv prepare for Russian invasion:
[4] Pentagon
push to send more trainers to Ukraine was scrapped:
[5] CIA-trained Ukrainian paramilitaries may take central role if Russia invades:
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