After six weeks of barbarism against Ukraine, Philip Breedlove, retired general of the American army and supreme commander of NATO forces from 2013 to 2016, submitted a very relevant reflection on the airwaves of the CNN network. If NATO forces had deployed a no-fly zone before Russian troops advanced on Ukraine, he explains, Vladimir Putin could not have embarked on an invasion process, given the strength of NATO power.
This strategic vision is at odds with the views of Macron, Trudeau, Biden and Stoltenberg, who constantly dither in the face of Vladimir Putin. As in the time of Munich when the Western democracies naively sought an agreement with Hitler rather than fighting him, while the Führer was preparing to ravage Europe and the planet.
While the current carnage targets all of Russia’s neighboring democracies, and not just Ukraine, doesn’t it require an urgent realignment of the West’s position? How long should humanity suffer such barbarism never equaled in Europe since the Second World War?
A smell of Munich?
At the end of the Munich agreements (September 29-30, 1938), Neville Chamberlain (British Prime Minister) and Édouard Daladier (President of the French Council of Ministers) were convinced that the option of negotiation was able to counter the bellicose intentions of Hitler. However, at 10and Nazi congress held a few days earlier (in Nuremberg), Adolf Hitler was already chanting loudly the importance of defending the German-speaking minority of the Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia, presumably oppressed. “But here we are, he said, we, the defenders of civilization, and we won’t let them! ” 1er October, the Wehrmacht invaded the country.
In the year 2000, after Vladimir Putin took power, the West was also convinced that the bellicose head of the Kremlin would listen to reason and not open hostilities. Yet there was the 2014 invasion of Crimea and the brutal imposition of the separatist territories of Donetsk and Luhansk. On the side of the Western capitals, we are silent. We closed our eyes.
Today, it is Vladimir Putin’s turn to present himself as the savior of the Russian-speaking minority in the Donbass region, allegedly mistreated by Ukraine.
force against force
During the 1946 Nuremberg trial, the representative of Czechoslovakia put the following question to Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, head of the high command of the German armed forces during the war: “Would the Reich have attacked Czechoslovakia in 1938 if the Western powers had supported Prague? He replied unequivocally: “Certainly not. Militarily, we were not strong enough. »
In the same vein, Vladimir Putin would not have had the means to attack Ukraine if NATO had imposed a no-fly zone or stationed its troops on Ukraine’s border.
On the assumption of a military response from NATO, we always raise the specter of a violent counter-offensive by Putin: exactions, atrocities, the use of illicit, biological or chemical weapons, and even the use of nuclear weapons. The fact remains that the atrocity of the current Russian military intervention is already extreme, even without direct Western intervention: cluster bombs, hypersonic missiles, pulverization of maternities and schools, annihilated cities, massacres of women and children. , repeated rapes and mass graves.
As for the nuclear threat, Vladimir Putin uses it above all to freeze his adversaries and numb them. He has already used it against the Baltic countries, Georgia and Crimea. This game unfortunately also seems to work with the Secretary General of NATO, whose reluctance is more and more akin to flat-ventrism.
Of course, account freezes, financial blocks and seizures against the oligarchs are hurting Russia. Sending weapons to the Ukrainians has also proven to be a considerable weapon, but the air battle still remains under Russian control. The barrage of missiles is still sweeping across Ukraine and is wiping out the country.
Vladimir Putin has just appointed General Dvornikov, the “butcher” of Syria, so as to push the massacre to its climax. Even if he has become a pariah of the international community and no longer has an ounce of credibility, the Russian president will continue his destructive and imperialist madness. It is time for NATO and the United States to directly engage themselves militarily.