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Russian troops
A report published in Covert Action Magazine from the self-declared Donetsk People’s Republic in Eastern Ukraine describes grave fears of a new offensive by Ukrainian government forces. The report comes after increased shelling, a drone strike by a Turkish-built drone, and an attack on Staromaryevka, a village inside the buffer zone established by the 2014-2015 Minsk Accords.
Russia has again assembled an estimated 90,000 troops near its border with Ukraine.
The People’s Republics of Donetsk and Luhansk, which declared independence in response to the U.S.-backed coup in Ukraine in 2014, have once again become flashpoints in the intensifying Cold War between the United States and Russia. The United States and NATO appear to be fully supporting a new government offensive against these Russian-backed enclaves, which could quickly escalate into a full-blown international military conflict.
The last time this area became an international tinderbox was in April, when the anti-Russian government of Ukraine threatened an offensive against Donetsk and Luhansk, and Russia assembled thousands of troops along Ukraine’s eastern border.
On that occasion, Ukraine and NATO blinked and called off the offensive. This time around, Russia has again assembled an estimated 90,000 troops near its border with Ukraine.
Since April, the United States and its allies have been stepping up their military support for Ukraine. After a March announcement of $125 million in military aid, including armed coastal patrol boats and radar equipment, the United States gave Ukraine another $150 million package in June. This included radar, communications, and electronic warfare equipment for the Ukrainian Air Force. It also appears to include the deploying of U.S. training personnel to Ukrainian air bases, bringing the total military aid supplied to Ukraine since the U.S.-backed coup in 2014 to $2.5 billion.
Turkey is also offering aid, supplying Ukraine with the same drones it provided to Azerbaijan for its war with Armenia over the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh in 2020. That war killed at least 6,000 people and has recently flared up again, one year after a Russian-brokered ceasefire. Turkish drones wreaked havoc on Armenian troops and civilians alike in Nagorno-Karabakh, and their use in Ukraine would be a horrific escalation of violence against the people of Donetsk and Luhansk.
Support from the United States and NATO for Ukraine’s government forces has come with diplomatic consequences. At the beginning of October, NATO expelled eight Russian liaison officers from NATO Headquarters in Brussels, accusing them of espionage. U.S. Under Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, the lead point person on the 2014 coup in Ukraine, was dispatched to Moscow in October to calm tensions. But only a week later, Nuland’s failed attempt to keep the peace resulted in Russia ending thirty years of engagement with NATO and ordering NATO’s office in Moscow to be closed.
Nuland reportedly tried to reassure Moscow that the United States and NATO were still committed to the 2014 and 2015 Minsk Accords on Ukraine, which include a ban on offensive military operations and a promise of greater autonomy for Donetsk and Luhansk. But her assurances were belied by Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin when he met with Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky on October 18, and also reiterated U.S. support for Ukraine’s future membership in NATO.
More extraordinary, but hopefully more successful, was CIA Director William Burns’s visit to Moscow on November 2 and 3, during which he met with senior Russian military and intelligence officials and spoke by phone with Russian president Vladimir Putin.
But after Biden promised a new era of U.S. diplomacy, his foreign policy team is now widely acknowledged to have instead brought U.S. relations with Russia and China to an all-time low. In Nuland’s case, she also misled the Russians about the U.S. commitment, or lack thereof, to the Minsk Accords.
Any use of nuclear weapons would quickly trigger a massive use of them by one side or the other, and the war would soon be over for everyone on the planet.
Burns, on the other hand, is a former Ambassador and career diplomat who has shown better judgment. In 2002, he wrote a prescient but unheeded ten-page memo to then-Secretary of State Colin Powell, warning him of the many ways that a U.S. invasion of Iraq could “unravel” and create a “perfect storm” for U.S. interests.
The Russians most likely told Burns what they have said in public: that U.S. policy is in danger of crossing “red lines” that would trigger decisive and irrevocable Russian responses. Some of these red lines clearly lie in the creeping U.S. and NATO military presence in and around Ukraine, including in the Black Sea.
With Russian troops amassed at Ukraine’s border for a second time this year, a new Ukrainian offensive that threatens the existence of Donetsk and Luhansk would surely cross another red line. Increasing U.S. and NATO military support for Ukraine may be dangerously close to crossing yet another one.
If push comes to shove, Ukraine is simply more important to Russia than to the United States. Therefore, it makes no sense for the United States to risk triggering World War III over Ukraine, unless it actually wants to trigger World War III.
During the Cold War, both sides developed clear understandings of each other’s “red lines.” Together with a large helping of dumb luck, we can thank those understandings for our continued existence. What makes today’s world even more dangerous than the world of the 1950s or the 1980s is that recent U.S. leaders have cavalierly jettisoned the bilateral nuclear treaties and the vital diplomatic relationships that their grandparents forged in order to stop the Cold War from turning into a hot one.
Three decades after declaring victory in the Cold War, and after the self-inflicted chaos of the U.S. “Global War on Terror,” U.S. military planners have settled on a new Cold War as the most persuasive pretext to perpetuate their trillion dollar war machine and their unattainable ambition to dominate the entire planet. Instead of asking the U.S. military to adapt to new challenges, U.S. leaders decided to revert to their old conflict with Russia and China to justify the existence of their ineffective but profitable war machine.
But the very nature of a Cold War is that it involves the threat and use of force, overt and covert, to contest the political allegiances and economic structures of countries across the world. In spite of relief at the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, which both Trump and Biden have used to symbolize the “end of endless war,” no one should have any illusions that either of them is offering us a new age of peace.
Quite the contrary. What is developing in Ukraine, Syria, Taiwan, and the South China Sea are the opening salvos of an age of more ideological wars that may become just as futile, deadly, and self-defeating as the “war on terror,” and much more dangerous to the United States.
Any war with Russia or China would risk escalating into World War III. As Andrew Weiss,who worked under William Burns at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told The New York Times on the issue of Ukraine, Russia and China would have conventional “escalation dominance,” as well as simply more at stake in wars on their own borders than the United States does.
The current U.S. $1.7 trillion plan for a whole range of new nuclear weapons seems to be a response to the reality that the United States cannot expect to defeat Russia and China in conventional wars on their own borders.
But the paradox of nuclear weapons is that the most powerful weapons ever created have no practical value as actual weapons of war, since there can be no winner in a war that kills everybody. Any use of nuclear weapons would quickly trigger a massive use of them by one side or the other, and the war would soon be over for everyone on the planet.
Neither Obama, nor Trump, nor Biden has dared to present their reasons for risking World War III over Ukraine or Taiwan to the American public, because there is no good reason behind their brinkmanship in either case. Risking a nuclear holocaust to appease the military-industrial complex is as insane as destroying the climate and the natural world to appease the fossil fuel industry.
So the best hope is that Burns not only came back from Moscow with a clear picture of Russia’s “red lines,” but that President Biden and his colleagues understand what Burns tells them and what is at stake in Ukraine.
They must step back from the brink of a U.S.-Russia war, and then from the larger Cold War with China and Russia that they have so blindly and foolishly stumbled into.