The United States and its imperial surrogates think they are putting a gun to Russia's head. But non other than the NATO powers are the ones who are playing Russian Roulette.
NATO is at war against Russia. There can be no more pretense or illusions about NATO "not being a party to the conflict" in Ukraine, as Western leaders have been absurdly asserting for the past year. NATO missiles, drones and logistics have already been used to strike Russia. And by Russia, we don't just mean the disputed territories of Crimea and Donbass, but the pre-war territory of the Russian Federation.
This week saw the NATO mania for war against Russia reach a fever pitch. NATO military leaders met in a series of well-publicized meetings in Europe that can only be described as war summits to plan the further escalation of conflict with Russia. The culmination was the gathering at the US Air Force Base in Ramstein, Germany, on Friday, at which pressure is mounting on Berlin to give the go-ahead for the supply of Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine. The meeting was opened by Ukrainian leaders alongside American military commanders demanding tanks and more heavy weaponry.
Laughably, the Americans are prevaricating about sending their M1 Abrams tanks, preferring instead for Germany, Britain, France, Poland, Finland and others to send theirs. The farcical wrangling encapsulates the U.S. colonialist attitude towards European allies who are too supine or stupid to complain. "Go ahead punks, make my day," as Clint Eastwood's character Dirty Harry might say.
The U.S. is quite content for Europe to be turned into ashes and rebuild the continental wreck for the purpose of reviving redundant American capitalism, as in the aftermath of previous world wars.
Earlier in the week, the U.S. top military commander General Mark Milley met with Ukrainian counterpart Valery Zaluzhny to oversee the setting up of new training grounds for troops in Poland and Germany. Zaluzhny is an acolyte of the Ukrainian World War Two Nazi collaborator and mass murderer Stepan Bandera. The pairing between Milley and Zaluzhny can hardly be a better illustration of the nefarious nature of the U.S.-led axis pushing war against Russia. Western media don't report this because its function is to hoodwink the Western public into cheerleading for war.
The relentless mobilization of the NATO bloc under U.S. leadership has finally reached a historic war footing against Russia. We can trace this ideology all the way back to the beginning of the Cold War following the defeat of Nazi Germany, but it certainly has accelerated since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, followed by 9/11 and the U.S. imperial notion of full-spectrum dominance, and especially after the ignominious withdrawal of the NATO war machine from Afghanistan in August 2021.
All members of the 30-nation bloc are rushing weapons to the conflict in Ukraine. It is even reported that the United States is drawing down military stockpiles held in Israel and South Korea to augment firepower against Russia. Furthermore, Washington is now considering supporting strikes on Crimea which Moscow warned would be an extremely dangerous escalation towards all-out general war. Virtually all taboos have been shelved it seems, as the New York Times remarked this week.
The Western states appear to be driven by madmen who are willfully pushing the world to the brink of catastrophe. There are now open calls for the defeat of Russia and illogical demands for more weapons to Ukraine as a way of achieving peace. "Weapons are the way to peace," declared Jens Stoltenberg, NATO's titular leader during the World Economic Forum for assorted global elites in Davos this week. "We have to prevent a stalemate," intoned Washington's top diplomat Antony Blinken and his British counterpart James Cleverly (how misnamed is the latter!).
Meanwhile, American, European and NATO leaders are calling for war crimes prosecutions against Russia.
There seems to be no room for any diplomacy or rationality. The NATO powers are doubling down on reckless demands that Russia is expelled from Crimea and the Donbass. What the NATO powers are really seeking is the defeat and conquest of Russia.
Russia was forced to intervene in Ukraine last February after all diplomatic efforts by Moscow were rejected. The NATO-backed covert war on the Russian people within the artificially created areas of Ukraine - a war that had been raging for eight years following the NATO-orchestrated coup in Kiev in 2014 - had to be put to an end by force. Hence Russia's military intervention on February 24, 2022.
There is no way that Russia is going to cede the territories that have now become part of the Russian Federation following legally constituted referenda. But the war has been dragged out by NATO's demonic weaponization and callous exploitation of Ukraine as a bridgehead against Russia. NATO leaders talk about "preventing a stalemate" by sending more weapons to prop up the NeoNazi Kiev regime. It is the United States and European states along with other allies who have striven to create a bloody quagmire in Ukraine in which lives are callously being destroyed.
The stakes are being made incredibly high by the United States and its imperialist minions. Make no mistake. Washington and its NATO stooges have embarked on a war of choice. Russia has every right to take military action against NATO members. Train tracks in Poland delivering Leopard tanks to Ukraine to kill Russian soldiers are legitimate targets. As are British servicemen maintaining Challenger tanks or British ships transporting them. Up to now, NATO has aggressed Russia with impunity. It is time to end the impunity and give Western warmongers pause for thought about their criminal conduct as one of our commentators noted this week.
Russian President Vladimir Putin this week said that Russia will eventually win the war in Ukraine to vanquish the NATO-backed NeoNazi regime. He was speaking, appropriately, on the 80th anniversary of the breaking of the Nazi siege on Leningrad (St Petersburg).
Other independent international military analysts, including Colonel Douglas Macgregor and Scott Ritter, agree that Russia will prevail in its objectives to render Ukraine demilitarized and remove the NATO-NeoNazi surrogate posing as a national security threat to Russia. The Western media in lockstep with imperialist ideologues have created a propaganda illusion that the Kiev regime can win if only it is supplied with more tanks and missiles. This is fomenting a disaster for Ukraine and potentially for world peace. Russia will not be defeated but the madcap warmongers are raising the stakes to the level of an existential crisis by demanding that Ukraine be made into a "defense line for freedom".
Moscow again this week warned that if the Western powers insist on pursuing a general war with Russia, then the world is being pushed to the brink of nuclear destruction. This is not a threat. It is simply a statement of fact. Western leaders have become so deranged in their imperial arrogance, self-righteousness and Russophobia, they are beyond heeding sensible warnings. When they declare that war is being waged for the sake of peace and freedom and when diplomacy is vilified as a weakness then there is little hope for an imminent political solution.
The United States and its imperial surrogates have made war all but inevitable from their intransigence. They think they are putting a gun to Russia's head.
Moscow needs to end this war in Ukraine decisively by eliminating the NATO-Kiev regime. The NATO powers are the ones who are playing Russian Roulette.