I was called a warmonger in 2014 when I said Putin would not stop with Crimea & E Ukraine. Now everyone admits that I was right, but wants to repeat the same mistake now. Letting Putin destroy Ukraine *increases* the threat of a greater conflict, including nuclear.
Putin is bombing hospitals, refuges, and retirement homes in Ukraine. But we are told that the free world must not act to help unless those hospitals, refuges, and retirement homes are inside specific lines on the map. Those lives matter. Those children matter.
This isn't about NATO. There's no treaty saying the US & other great powers of the free world are forbidden from defending Ukraine, which is dying to protect them. There is only fear, the same fear that kept them from acting in 2014 and led us here.
The Biden WH & its media defenders are repeating the arguments of the Obama admin & its media defenders in 2014. Heroic restraint! Such leadership! You are too hot-headed, Grandmaster Kasparov, let's just wait and see! We waited. We see. npr.org/2022/03/18/108…
As soon as the first Russian tank crossed the border of Ukraine, the West declared Putin the ruler of the largest country in Europe. No longer sovereign, no longer allowed to invite allies to fight in its own territory in its defense. Only Putin can do that.
The US & EU want to go back to their comfortable corruption, buying Russian oil & gas, applying weak sanctions, lip service about democracy, inviting Putin to summits & Davos. Dictators always escalate & the West kept folding. But this time a problem: Ukraine refuses to fold.
The West loves to lose slowly, to pass the hard choices to the next admin, shift the consequences to buffer states. Now Ukraine has exposed them because Ukraine doesn't want to lose slowly, or lose at all. Ukraine wants to win. Help them win. fight4ukraine.org
Give jets, drones, & long-range weapons that allow Ukraine to strike at the source and protect their people, as @AVindman proposes. Announce the creation of humanitarian corridors in advance, areas under protection. Ukraine is not Putin's. Stop treating it like it is.
[Some tweets didn't thread correctly last night. Adding them now.]
I've been asked several times on shows "Should we put US/NATO pilots into possible combat with Russians?" My reply is, please finish the sentence. "... in order to stop the slaughter of innocents on the ground in Ukraine?" This isn't an academic exercise.
There are situations in which the answer is obviously yes. To defend the US from attack? Yes. To defend any NATO country? Supposedly yes. To prevent genocide? Apparently not.
Putin did not need any pretext to launch this invasion. He did not need any pretext to shell & bomb innocent civilians in Ukraine. He won't need an pretext to use nuclear weapons. What we do know is that Putin always escalates when he isn't stopped.
Instead of newsreels from liberated concentration camps in 1945, we have drone footage and HD photos & interviews of innocents being bombed relentlessly with modern weapons. It's happening right now. Everyone knows.
Imagine how the Ukrainians feel about it! They don’t understand why the West is doing so little despite appeasing and funding their invader for eight years. They have little confidence the world will stay engaged as Putin’s war continues.
Finally sending arms is better than nothing, but does the West want to save the free world from tyranny or just be Amazon Prime for Lockheed? They encouraged this war by refusing to take risks to stop Putin in 2014. Now they’re doing it again.
Most of the arguments for letting Putin own Ukraine preemptively begin from “we must never engage Russian forces” and work backwards. Work forward from Ukraine being a sovereign nation you said you’d protect, fighting for values you claim to represent.
Were the RAND "experts" who wrote this in Foreign Policy on Jan 21 advising the White House? Are they still doing it? "The Ukrainian military... poses little deterrent threat to Russia; provision of U.S. weapons can do nothing to change that."
Is this sort of analysis the reason the US declined to arm the hell out of Ukraine to deter Putin's invasion and prepare for it, despite their own intel saying it was definitely going to happen? Instead, they waited until tanks were rolling & still lagged behind Europe.
It jibes with how the WH seemed to be looking forward a rapid UKR defeat, moving directly to its comfort zone of negotiating with a new Putin puppet ruler in Ukraine as he consolidated control & liquidated opposition as in E Ukraine.
After the USSR fell, there was no accounting for the Soviet horrors committed, no lustration or truth commissions. Do not prepare only for The Hague war crime trials of Putin's officials after this war, but for every Russian to know these stories.
Despite being utterly defeated in the Cold War & the myth of Russian humiliation popularized by Putin & his propagandists, Russia was invited to join the civilized world, aided and with its pride as a once-great power indulged. It was a huge mistake, the original sin.
Instead of deprogramming generations of Russians and ripping out the security service structure root and branch, it was allowed to lurk in the shadows until Putin & his backers seized their chance. It cannot happen again.
More mixed signals from the Biden admin. Are they trying to confuse Putin or are they confused themselves? Blinken says sanctions not permanent. Russia still active in Iran deal. Then Biden calls Putin a war criminal. Action needed, not words.
My questions: What about Crimea & Donbas? What if Putin signs the papers but doesn't really leave, as in Georgia? What about reparations to Ukraine? Why make deals with a war criminal you know you cannot trust?
Is the US is declining to send its best weapons to Ukraine immediately in order to avoid the total destruction of Putin's forces in Ukraine, which would jeopardize the White House's higher priority of the Iran deal? If not, what is the reason?