It needs to be said. It’s unfortunate our lily-livered politicians don’t have the balls to have said it, and acted on it, long ago. It’s always been my contention that back in late 2021/early 2022 had NATO thrown everything it had, (none nuclear,) at the Black Sea : warships, planes, tanks and infantry, missiles, then told Putin to piss off or suffer the consequences, Putin would have stuck to his lie about it being just Russian military maneuvers, and high-tailed it back to Moscow.
Why did Putin insist the Russian military were only on maneuvers? To achieve exactly what it did. It threw NATO into a spin, not knowing if it were true or not. They hesitated, waited to see what would happen, Once Putin recognised there was to be no come back, in he went and left NATO looking like the useless organisation it proved to be.
In the Guardian newspaper yesterday, James Nixey states in his article that it’s not the West escalating the war, but Putin himself.
“Even for a country that has been at war for more than 1,000 days, the past month has been rough for Ukraine: its nemesis, Russia, has acquired 11,000 troops from North Korea and mercenaries from Yemen to assist in its project to delete Ukraine. Russia has also pulverised Ukraine’s energy grid with renewed ferocity as temperatures fall below freezing and fired off experimental intermediate-range weaponry, and it continues to make gains in the east. As if that weren’t enough, Russia’s preferred candidate has been elected as the American president, promising to end the war in “24 hours” – and not in Ukraine’s favour.
And yet after all this, the question I have been asked continuously over the past week is: “Is the west escalating the war?” The question refers to the rescinding of some of the limitations imposed on Ukraine which forbade it from using western missiles to strike inside Russian territory. Far from being escalatory, western policy on the war is in fact best described as incrementalism – a drip-feed release of weaponry, which keeps Ukraine on a lifeline but certainly doesn’t allow it the possibility of pushing Russia out. The reason it has not been given this opportunity is twofold….”
Read the rest of his article HERE:
It needs to be said.
James Nixey leads the Russia-Eurasia programme at Chatham House.