PANDORA S BOX
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Posted by Jack Heslin on 22:03:32 12/28/22
We are now watching the Western Powers of NATO wage a proxy war on Russia that has been in the making for years.
It is clear now, with the former Chancellor of Germany from 2005 to 2021, Angela Merkel, publicly admitting that she, and other European leaders, lied to Russia when they signed the 2014 Minsk agreements which were designed to end the conflict in Ukraine. She admitted that those agreements were meant to give Ukraine time to build its military forces to a point that they could challenge Russia. They would build those forces with NATO s help in both equipment and training. It is obvious now, that the plan was for Ukraine to confront Russia in a conflict to control the Russian sympathizing Donbas Region, to weaken the Russian military and weaken the government of Russia with a stated hope to get regime change in Russia.
It is also clear that the Russian leadership knew the plan and began a concerted effort to counter the NATO buildup in Ukraine and to prepare their economy to withstand the Western sanctions that were sure to come. Russia preempted the Ukraine assault on the Donbas Region by executing their Special Military Operation on February 24, 2022.
While most of the American Presidential State of the Union speeches have taken place in January or early February, President Biden delayed his speech in 2022 until March 1st which was after the start of the Russian Special Military Operation. President Biden s speech began with the President addressing the Ukraine situation. Six days ago, Russia s Vladimir Putin sought to shake the very foundations of the free world, thinking he could make it bend to his menacing ways. But he badly miscalculated. He thought he could roll into Ukraine and the world would roll over. Instead, he met with a wall of strength he never anticipated or imagined. He met the Ukrainian people.
It seems now, in retrospect, that Russian President Putin did anticipate the West s reaction to the Russian Special Military Operation.
Later in the speech, President Biden explained the months of prior planning that went into retaliatory actions that would be taken against Russia and the Russian people through economic sanctions. The ramping up of economic sanctions against Russia has continued with wave after wave of new sanctions. However, it appears that the sanctions war against Russia has failed to achieve their stated goals and the Russian economy and the Russian government has survived. If anything, these ill-conceived sanctions have driven Russia to ever stronger relations with China, India and other countries who do not support the Western sanctions against Russia. The obvious results are that Western economies, especially in Europe, are suffering more than the Russian economy is today.
So now, we are watching as Russia responds to the Western threats not only against their economy but their very existence as a nation state.
In the mid -1980s, I was part of a US Army planning group that planned and conducted an annual logistics exercise known as LOGEX that simulated a war in Central Europe with NATO forces defending against a Warsaw Pact (WP) invasion of Europe. The exercise simulation was designed to exercise the logistics elements of NATO in support of the defense of Central Europe. We learned a lot from those exercises about NATO s ability to defend Europe and the potential of the Warsaw Pact forces to defeat NATO. At that time, many of us believed that it would ultimately take the use of tactical nuclear weapons to hold off the potentially very large conventional forces of the attackers. We knew then that tactical nuclear exchanges could have precipitated a thermonuclear exchange between the United States and the Soviet Union there were no winners from such an exchange, only losers.
Today, we are hearing that Russia is ramping up its conventional military forces to face a growing antagonistic NATO with many Western leaders openly talking about the destruction of the Russian State and the removal of President Putin. I do not hear that rhetoric coming from the Russian leadership about Western leaders.
Now, we are entering into a new arms race of conventional weapons and large military formations on the European continent. Russia has stated that they intend to greatly increase their armaments, more tanks, more artillery, more rockets, more, more, more with the trained manpower to create new divisions. It will be costly, but the Russian leadership obviously believes it is necessary for their continued survival in the face of an ever-increasing hostile Europe and United States. Can anyone blame them?
The question really is, who will go bankrupt first in an untethered arms race between the Western alliance and Russia? We are watching as huge amounts of money is being poured into the black hole of Ukraine with no end in sight. Will hyperinflation be the final arbiter of this disaster, or will it be a military confrontation on a scale not seen since the Second World War? Do the Europeans really want to see their cities destroyed once again with no hope of an American sponsored Marshall Plan to help them rebuild.
The West has opened Pandora s box and will regret that decision.
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