Are NATO-Russia On The Brink Of War In Ukraine?

While the cable news jockeys are busy fomenting violence in the Twin Cities in Minnesota, maybe they should start paying more attention to potential military violence overseas.

There have been several reports recently that Vladimir Putin is looking to shore up his status by invading Ukraine to bring it back within the old Soviet empire, because Ukraine is seeking NATO member status, and Putin is making ominous moves that may put NATO-Russia on the brink of war.

President Joe Biden urged Russian President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday to “de-escalate tensions” following a Russian military buildup on Ukraine’s border in their second tense call of Biden’s presidency. “Not the Puppet” like the Florida Man. Biden raises concerns with Putin about Ukraine confrontation:

Biden told Putin the U.S. would “act firmly in defense of its national interests” regarding Russian cyber intrusions and election interference, according to the White House. Biden proposed a summit in a third country “in the coming months” to discuss the full range of U.S.-Russia issues, the White House said.

Putin tried to show that he is tougher, Kremlin to Washington: Putin-Biden summit depends on U.S. behavior:

The Kremlin said on Wednesday that a summit between Russian President Vladimir Putin and his U.S. counterpart Joe Biden would be contingent on U.S. behavior after reportedly telling Washington to scrap a plan to impose new sanctions on Russia.

Putin’s spokesman Peskov played down the prospect of a summit earlier on Wednesday, saying it was too early to talk about it in tangible terms.

“It’s a new proposal and it will be studied,” Peskov told reporters, saying no preparations for the summit were yet underway.

Moscow says the build-up is a three-week snap military drill in response to what it calls threatening behaviour from NATO and has said the exercise is due to wrap up within two weeks.

Russia has been preparing to be hit by new sanctions since Biden said last month that Putin would pay a price for alleged Russian meddling in the November 2020 U.S. presidential election.

Tensions between Washington and Moscow are strained too by the expected imminent arrival of two U.S. warships in the Black Sea, a step Moscow has called an unfriendly provocation designed to test its nerves.

EARLIER: Russia on Tuesday called the United States an adversary and told U.S. warships to stay well away from Crimea “for their own good”, calling their deployment in the Black Sea a provocation designed to test Russian nerves. Russia calls U.S. an adversary, warns its warships to avoid Crimea.

The Russian navy began a military exercise in the Black Sea on Wednesday ahead of their expected arrival.

The AP continues:

There is growing concern in the West about a surge of cease-fire violations in eastern Ukraine, where Russia-baсked separatists and Ukrainian forces have been locked in a conflict since Moscow’s 2014 annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula. Biden’s call with Putin came as the top U.S. diplomat and the leader of NATO condemned the recent massing of thousands of Russian troops.

“President Biden emphasized the United States’ unwavering commitment to Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity,” the White House said in a statement. The White House added that Biden made clear that Russia must “de-escalate tensions.”

More than 14,000 people have died in fighting in eastern Ukraine, and efforts to negotiate a political settlement have stalled. Over the past week, there have been daily reports of Ukrainian military casualties and rebels also have reported losses.

Ukraine has said Russia has 41,000 troops at its border with eastern Ukraine and 42,000 more in Crimea. Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said Tuesday the military buildup of the past three weeks was part of readiness drills in response to what he described as threats from NATO. He added the maneuvers in western Russia would last for two more weeks.

“The troops have shown their full readiness to fulfill tasks to ensure the country’s security,” Shoigu said.

The Kremlin in a statement said “during an exchange of opinions on Ukraine’s internal political crisis,” Putin told Biden about “approaches to a political settlement” based on the 2015 peace deal brokered by France and Germany and signed in Minsk, Belarus.

[P]utin has repeatedly brushed off calls by U.S. officials to cease provocations on Ukraine’s border and on other issues. Still, the White House said that holding talks can be useful.

“When it comes to diplomacy you don’t stop calling for what are the right actions and the appropriate actions and the actions the global community believes are right just because you see a hesitation,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki said.

Earlier Tuesday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who was in Brussels for meetings with NATO allies and Ukraine’s foreign minister, accused Russia of taking “very provocative” actions with the massing of troops.

NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg also called the Russian movements “unjustified, unexplained and deeply concerning.” He said the Russian deployment was the largest concentration of troops near the Ukrainian border since 2014.

Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba urged Western countries to make clear to Moscow that it would pay a price for its “aggression.”

“The U.S. stands firmly behind the sovereignty and the territorial integrity of Ukraine,” Blinken told Kuleba at the start of their meeting at the residence of the U.S. ambassador to Belgium, a post once held by Blinken’s uncle. “That’s particularly important at a time when we’re seeing, unfortunately, Russia take very provocative actions when it comes to Ukraine.”

Kuleba replied that Ukraine was grateful for the support of the U.S. and NATO, an alliance that Kyiv is looking to join over fierce Russian objections.

On a more positive note:

Leonid Slutsky, a senior Russian lawmaker who chairs the foreign affairs committee in the lower house of parliament, said Biden’s call marked “a step away from confrontation to dialogue.”

“Such a position meets not only mutual interests, but also the interests of international security,” Slutsky said in remarks carried by Russian news agencies. “The good news is that the leaders of the two largest nuclear powers have confirmed their readiness for interaction on issues of strategic stability and arms control.”

Tensions remain high:

Last month in an interview with ABC News, Biden agreed with the description of Putin as a “killer” and he has criticized the jailing of Navalny, the opposition figure. U.S. intelligence released a report last month finding that Putin authorized influence operations to help former President Donald Trump’s reelection bid.

Putin in response to Biden’s killer comment recalled his ambassador to the U.S. and pointed at the U.S. history of slavery and slaughtering Native Americans and the atomic bombing of Japan in World War II.

In his first call with Putin as president in late January, Biden raised concerns about the arrest of Navalny, Russia’s cyberespionage targeting the U.S., and thereports of Russian bounties on American troops in Afghanistan. The Kremlin, meanwhile, focused on Putin’s response to Biden’s proposal to extend the last remaining U.S.-Russia arms control treaty.

After that call, Biden said in a speech before State Department officials that the days of the U.S. “rolling over” to Putin were over.

Russian state media wants a “cyberwar showdown”

The Daily Beast reports, Top Kremlin Mouthpiece Warns of ‘Inevitable’ War With U.S. Over Another Ukraine Land Grab:

All-out cyberwarfare, nation-wide forced blackouts, and the targeted disruption of internet services—for one of the Kremlin’s top propagandists, all of those tactics are fair game in what she describes as a fated war-to-come against the U.S.

“War [with the U.S.] is inevitable,” declared Margarita Simonyan, editor in chief of the state-funded Russian media outlets RT and Sputnik, who believes the conflict will break out when, not if, Vladimir Putin moves to seize more territory from Ukraine.

As Russia’s military buildup on Ukraine’s doorstep mounts, Kremlin loyalists have been urging for even more overt aggression and bloodshed in the campaign to annex Ukraine’s Donbas region. The only thing standing in the way, they say, is U.S. support for their beleaguered neighbor.

NATO issued a statement on Wednesday demanding an end to Russia’s troop movements on the border with the disputed territory of Donbas in eastern Ukraine. It is the largest buildup of Russian troops since the annexation of Crimea in 2014. The U.S. underlined the statement this week by deploying two warships to the Black Sea.

On Tuesday, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov threatened retaliation. “We warn the United States that it will be better for them to stay far away from Crimea and our Black Sea coast. It will be for their own good,” he said.

The escalation was foreshadowed on state television’s Sunday Evening With Vladimir Soloviev over the weekend. Simonyan explained that it was time for Russia to gear up for a showdown against the U.S., and prophesized a kind of war driven by hacking, the forced disruption of internet access, the shutting down of power supplies, and an all-out offensive on U.S. infrastructure.

“I do not believe that this will be a large-scale hot war, like World War II, and I do not believe that there will be a long Cold War. It will be a war of the third type: the cyberwar,” said Simonyan.

She warned that—in this theoretical battle—the U.S. would plot to cut off the electricity of entire Russian cities. In turn, she speculated, Moscow would be able to force a blackout in Florida or New York’s Harlem at the flip of a switch. [Why Harlem of all places?]

“In conventional war, we could defeat Ukraine in two days,” Simonyan said, “but it will be another kind of war. We’ll do it, and then [the U.S.] will respond by turning off power to [the Russian city] Voronezh,” she said.

The top RT editor asserted that “[Russia] needs to be ready for this war, which is unavoidable, and of course it will start in Ukraine,” arguing that the Kremlin is “invincible where conventional war is concerned, but forget about conventional war… it will be a war of infrastructures, and here we have many vulnerabilities.”

Her solution consists of Stalin-type measures to eliminate “vulnerabilities” in the run-up to another escalation, emphasizing the need for a hack-proof, government-controlled internet. “We still don’t have a sovereign internet, but God willing, we will,” she said.

She wholeheartedly endorsed a suggestion from Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the ultranationalist leader of Russia’s Liberal Democratic Party, who argued that all of Russia’s opposition must be eliminated by May 1, 2021. With imprisoned opposition leader Alexei Navalny on a hunger strike—and suffering from severe health ailments after being denied appropriate medical treatment—the Kremlin seems to be firmly set on that course.

Simonyan argued that once Russia minimizes its vulnerabilities and renders Putin’s opposition powerless—which she argued could happen in a matter of months—the Kremlin will finally be ready to annex Ukraine’s eastern region.

“I’ve been agitating and even demanding that we take Donbas. We need to patch up our vulnerabilities as fast as we can, and then we can do whatever we want,” she boldly proclaimed. The host, Vladimir Soloviev, wholeheartedly agreed: “We only lose if we do nothing.” He argued that by absorbing parts of Ukraine—or the entire country—Russia would be able to remove the zone of American influence further away from its borders.

As one of the Kremlin’s most valued propagandists, Margarita Simonyan [think of her as the Russian equivalent of Fox’s Maria Bartiromo] is notoriously close to the Russian president and has received multiple awards directly from Putin. After accepting one such award in 2019, Simonyan thanked Putin “for the most important reward in life… this honor to serve one’s Motherland.”

Her “service” has involved RT and Sputnik-driven disinformation operations aimed at influencing the 2016 U.S. presidential election, which she often boasts about by pointing to the inclusion of her name in various U.S. intelligence reports.

Russia’s recent cyberspace activities seem to serve as good practice for the “inevitable war” foreshadowed by Simonyan.

Last year, six Russian intelligence officers were criminally charged by the U.S. for using the world’s most destructive malware to force blackouts in Ukraine and damage the critical infrastructure of multiple countries, which caused nearly $1 billion in losses. On Monday, hackers operating from Russia targeted France’s homeschooling platform.

The Kremlin is prepared to intensify its offensive against the West but fears the retaliation that would follow. The idea of a bulletproof “sovereign internet”—completely under government control within Russian borders—is already on the books, with Moscow having introduced the idea as a preventive measure against retaliatory hacking attempts from other nations.

Simonyan argued that Russia will surely be able to exploit the U.S.’s “catastrophic” educational standards, and referred to American military analysts and specialists as incompetent and stupid. She heartily laughed about news that more than 200,000 U.S. service members experienced hearing loss due to defective earplugs.

“We can never come to any agreements with [Americans],” Simonyan said, arguing that instead, Russia can just as easily defeat the U.S. in a cyberspace war.

She added, mockingly, “We don’t even need the nukes.”

On this we can agree. The MAGA/QAnon personality cult of Donald Trump, Putin’s puppet, views Russia more favorably than they do their own country. In any conflict between NATO-Russia, we need to be concerned about whose side are they are on. They can be Putin’s fifth column of fellow travelers in the U.S.

Olga Stefanishyna, deputy prime minister of Ukraine for European and Euro-Atlantic integration, writes at Foreign Policy reports, Ukraine Needs a Clear Path to NATO Membership (excerpt):

Russia is now building up its military presence close to the Ukrainian border on a scale that has forced Ukraine and international observers to consider the possibility of another Russian offensive. Key governments have made strong statements in support of Ukraine, calling on the Kremlin to stop the aggression. But statements are not enough; Ukraine needs decisive action from the states committed to democratic principles and rules-based order.

Democracies’ coordinated efforts may represent the only way for them to prevail over aggressive politics. As Ukraine’s deputy prime minister for European and Euro-Atlantic integration, I welcome U.S. President Joe Biden’s initiative to hold a Summit of Democracies, as well as his commitment to restore and strengthen cooperation across the Atlantic. Now is the moment that democracies can determine the trajectory of the future, just as it was at the Bucharest summit in 2008.

[I]n light of Ukraine’s institutional and political transformation, it is past time for NATO leaders to begin consultations to chart a path to membership, as they pledged in 2008. Our common goal is to confront our opponents in the region: authoritarianism and aggression. There is no better place to start than supporting Ukraine’s efforts to strengthen NATO’s eastern flank by moving forward with its road map to membership. If NATO doesn’t want to concede its play on the chessboard to Russia, the alliance must act. Moscow, after all, will not skip its turn.

This is high stakes foreign policy, military policy, and national security policy. Can the cable news jockeys and the rest of the media please start covering this?