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Randy Smith: Is it time for the U.S. and NATO to intervene in Ukraine?
Randy Smith – April 13, 2022
I don’t know how many isolationists or Putin fans live out here in the Valley, but I was looking at the recent satellite images of that eight-mile long Russian military convoy traveling in eastern Ukraine and thought, what’s wrong with this picture?
What’s wrong is all we’re doing is watching it. That’s it. Same for the Ukrainian military. All they can do is watch it, too. But if we can detect it, why isn’t immediate action being taken to destroy it?
It’s almost a foregone tragic conclusion that the Russian soldiers and equipment in that convoy will be used in yet more brutal atrocities against innocent Ukrainian civilians, women and children included. Russia is repositioning and beginning a major offensive in eastern Ukraine that will probably finish off the city of Kharkiv as it did the city of Mariupol.
So why hasn’t that Russian military convoy already been obliterated instead of just photographed? Oh, wait, we — the West — opted to not send those MIG fighter jets, and to not arm Ukraine with the right weapons it needed soon enough. Military aid is rolling now, but so too are the Russian convoys.
As the next Russian offensive gets underway, NATO countries are giving Ukraine more of what it needs militarily, but the skies over Ukraine remain largely unprotected, and it’s almost a guarantee we’ll see more war crimes and atrocities, especially now that Putin has tapped Dvornikov, the “Butcher of Syria,” to take over in Ukraine.
The Bucha massacre. The missile strike on the Kramatorsk train station. The leveling of Mariupol. The UNHCR estimate that one quarter of the entire population of Ukraine has either fled Ukraine or been displaced. None of these events has yet moved the dial of the U.S. and NATO past sanctions and weapons assistance.
Why is this?
Some consider that it would be tantamount to WWIII or that it might provoke Putin to unleash nuclear weapons. Is it really WWIII if we remove one country’s forces from a country it illegally invaded? And quite frankly, Putin is no dummy, he knows who is supplying all the military assistance to Ukraine, so in essence a version of WWIII is already in progress. At the least, it’s a proxy war between western democratic versus authoritarian ideologies.
As for the potential for nuclear conflict if NATO intervenes, some of our most respected retired generals and admirals doubt Putin would resort to all-out nuclear war. Douglas London, ex-CIA station chief agrees: “But he’s not the suicidal type either if escalating pressure is brought to bear.”
Roman Popadiuk, the first U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, feels in interviewer John Harwood’s words that “…the allied response remains too constrained by fear of nuclear escalation.”
Sen. Durbin offered a cogent perspective on Meet The Press: “Listen, if the end game is that Vladimir Putin scours the earth in Ukraine and kills half the people and displaces the other half, and then he leaves, and we suggest that’s a victory for the West, we stood up for Ukraine, that’s not an ending I want to sign up for. We have to be ready to stop this man because I can tell you he won’t stop at Ukraine.”
Putin is already well along to scouring the earth and killing off the Ukranian people. It would be naive to think that sanctions and military aid alone will quickly end things, and speed is what matters now. Otherwise, growing consensus signals that the war will drag on for a long time, meaning more horrible deaths and more Ukrainian cities reduced to rubble.
When is enough enough? How much brutality and human suffering are we willing to watch others endure? What is your threshold for the number of Buchas, Kramatorsks, and Mariupols?
In the final analysis it’s simple: Putin is a bully. Bullies don’t stop bullying until someone stops them. Bullies will back down in the face of overwhelming force. The West — the U.S. and its NATO allies — are easily capable of providing overwhelming force in Ukraine to push Putin’s forces back to the 53rd parallel.
Is it time for NATO, as a whole or as a coalition of the willing, to end the heartbreaking suffering in Ukraine?
— Randy Smith is a local guest columnist for the News Leader.
This article originally appeared on Staunton News Leader: Russian aggression: Ukraine atrocities not being stopped by the West