The two ongoing large-scale NATO exercises ‘Defender Europe 2022’ and ‘Swift Response 2022’ (May 1-27) in Poland, with 18,000 troops participating including seven thousand already in situ, is the latest Western posturing against Russia. In addition are the thousands of Western mercenaries and regulars inside Ukraine; photographs of some of them captured or who surrendered to Russian forces have been in circulation.
After the visit of UN Secretary General Antonio Gutteres to Kiev, Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the US House of Representatives has gone and met Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Many Western officials can be expected to visit Kiev in coming months with US President Joe Biden set to give Ukraine another $33 billion, large portion of it for armament on very liberal terms like payment only for arms that don’t get destroyed. Whether Biden will also visit Kiev is doubtful since US media termed US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defence Lloyd Austin’s trip to Kiev on April 25 “Risky”.
Zelenskyy has accused Russia of looting gold from a museum of Ukraine and moving about a million Ukrainians to Russia. At the same time, answering a question in an interview by Italian TV company ‘Mediaset’, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said that more than $300 billon were actually stolen from Russia for gas and oil supplies. He said, the money was on Gazprom’s accounts in Western banks as payment for Russian gas; contracts that were signed before the Ukraine situation provided for payments in dollars and euros. By freezing payments for energy resources, Western countries have actually “used Russian gas for free all these years.”
There are reports of tied up bodies found in Odessa which appear of locals tied to poles and trees for making public examples who refused to take up arms against the Russians; their photographs when alive had appeared on social media earlier. Now Russian missiles have destroyed the runway of Odessa airport.
Some Americans are criticizing Biden for pumping in another $33 billion taxpayer’s money into Ukraine 5000 miles away. But the Biden administration’s stated aim now is to weaken Russia’s forces to such an extent that it can’t threaten another country. After Blinken and Austin met Zelenskyy in Kiev, Austin told reporters in Poland, “We want to see Ukraine remain a sovereign country, a democratic country able to protect its sovereign territory. We want to see Russia weakened to the degree that it can’t do the kinds of things that it has done in invading Ukraine.”
Austin’s call for Ukraine to remain a “sovereign” country appears utopian because Russian forces have already reached the Black Sea and there is no way they are going to vacate Mariupol, Donbas and of course Crimea. Any attempt to push out Russian forces out of Ukraine would need direct involvement of NATO troops; not just mercenaries, disguised regulars and arms transfer to Ukraine.
The US aim has since changed from regime change in Moscow to weaken the Russian war machine. This is based more on geo-economics, in light of which, the US wants to keep prolonging the war in Ukraine. A study released by the Centre of Strategic & International Studies (CSIS) dated April 27, 2022, comparing the 2020 GDP of major powers, has said that the EU and China are rising while Russia has sunk to sixth rate status. It further states that the US alone is 14 times of Russian GDP and 1.3 times China, while the US and EU combined are 23 times Russia and 2.3 times of China.
The above figures are of 2020 and changes have obviously occurred with the string of stringent sanctions against Russia. But Europe also has been hit with record inflation and the first quarter of this year has also seen dip in the US economy. Moreover, the rest of the world is also adversely affected because of Western sanctions on Russia, including the worst tanking of the Japanese yen.
Earlier, Jens Stoltenberg, NATO Secretary General had said that NATO’s strategy is being revised to include China. Now Liz Tuss, British Foreign Secretary says, “NATO must have a global outlook and needs to preempt threats in the Indo-Pacific”, while NATO members are discussing the bloc’s new ‘strategic concept’. Concurrently, Admiral John C Aquilino, Commander US Indo-Pacific Command has said that NATO is a “pretty good model” for the Indo-Pacific region. These are open signals to China that it is in the US-NATO crosshairs and the US plans to draw Europe’s military and financial resources to fight China – the same way the West is fighting America’s war with Russia in Ukraine.
The surprising part is American analysts and scholars writing that China will not side with Russia over Ukraine in its own national interests. This, despite the recent Russia-China Strategic Partnership agreement and the joint statement affirming their new relationship was superior to any political or military alliance of the Cold War era, and “Friendship between the two States has no limits, there are no ‘forbidden’ areas of cooperation.” It gives an impression that the West expects China to sit on the fence while Western attempts are increased to strangulate Russia, and await its own turn.
China firing two new anti-submarine ballistic missiles concurrent to the sinking of the Russian cruiser ‘Moskva’ is being passed off as routine; same way as the recent new generation Sarmat ICBM tested by Russia was termed a “routine test” by Washington. But some Western analysts have warned that the US with its maddening efforts to retain a US-led unipolar world, is unmindful of how its sanctions are affecting the world at large, and more importantly, when the Russian redlines will be crossed and how Moscow will then respond.
The US is adding fuel to the fire in the Ukraine conflict. Longer range and advanced weaponry in Ukraine could eventually lead to a Russian backlash on Europe, not by way of only more refugees. Depending on the situation, Russia with its back to the wall may resort to nuclear weapons. After all, the US was the first country to use nuclear weapons; having nuked Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.
There is an opinion that Russia could use tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine and this may lead to a similar response from the West. However, this amounts to direct confrontation even if Western mercenaries are proposed to be equipped with backpack nukes. But this also is likely to snowball into a larger nuclear confrontation. Besides, depending on how seriously Russia views the threat to its very existence, why would it limit the attack to only tactical nuclear weapons, knowing the advantages of first strike and perceiving that the Western response will be nuclear?
The US perhaps assumes that Russian backlash, if any, after its redlines are violated, will be absorbed by Europe. But according to Russian military experts, Russia’s RS-28 Sarmat ICBM is capable of carrying seven to ten nuclear warheads weighing more than 10 tons. Moreover, it is capable of flying to London from the Kaliningrad region in 202 seconds. Paris can be eliminated within 200 seconds, Berlin will take 106 seconds to destroy, and the Sarmat will fly to Washington in 995 seconds. Russia plans to put into service 46 x Sarmat ICBMs in addition to its existing nuclear arsenal. Forget NATO and the EU, the Biden administration needs to examine this seriously. As regards the expansion of China’s nuclear arsenal, no accurate figures are likely to be with the US intelligence and there could be many surprises.
The US-NATO-EU euphoria of witnessing the carnage and destruction in Ukraine from a distance needs to be compared with challenging China and Russia in the above context. This could turn Europe into a wasteland, not sparing London and Washington either. American analysts are also pointing out how well Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea have weaponized cyberspace, intelligence gathering, informational operations, and espionage and communication tactics against the US. These can hardly be ignored when throwing down the gauntlet to both China and Russia.