Europe should agree to send troops to Ukraine.
Putin is evil but he is not stupid. Putin is just as afraid to start WWIII as any European. If he really was willing to risk WWIII, he would have attacked the Baltic States that annoy Russian patriots a lot more than Ukraine. However, he attacked Ukraine because Ukraine has no Article 5 or equivalent to protect it. This made Ukraine into a target.
Putin is careful and calculating, he will test the ground before committing to attack. The only reason he committed to the invasion was because he was certain he will get away with it. It was the same with Crimea back in 2014, unmarked troops (Little Green Men) could have been easily disowned by Kremlin if serious consequences would emerge.
Yes, Russian officials throwing words, like: 'any European troops presence or NATO membership is unacceptable' and vow to retaliate, but there are just empty words. They will not act on them if there is real risk of their own nuclear annihilation. None of them wants to die.
Generally, USSR and Russia have a clear history of using words as tools of war. However, these are empty words, and they cannot hurt by themselves, and Russians have no troops to back these words with action. Remember peace talks in Korean War, trained by Russians, North Koreans pulled so many dirty tricks, but all that amounted to nothing.
Ultimately Putin only playing a game of chicken. He just bet that Europeans chicken out first and leave Ukraine to its fate. All these threats are mere extension of this game. He will not fight nuclear armed France or UK, no matter how much people like Lavrov say they would.
He would not have done it even if he really was winning on the battlefield, but Russian army struggles with Ukraine's military alone, they physically cannot take on two more militaries at the same time. All they can do is growl at evil West from their corner.
Talking to Putin will never amount to anything. He knows that talks like these cannot hurt him. So, he will attend any peace talks it's just to fool around and demand unreasonable things like for NATO destroyed itself from within. So long as Europeans are too afraid to actually do anything, the war will continue.
Sure, there are sanctions but being perpetually in war does not hurt Putin personally in any way. Million Russians died but he will not care even if 10 or 20 million die. Russia is no Europe where people of military age can be useful for economy, in Russia they are only risk of uprising against Putin's continued rule so he will not cry as he sends them to certain death. Economically wars tend to cause prices of oil and gas to rise, and these are coincidentally the main Russian exports. Yes, there are sanctions but there are also creative ways of bypassing them.
On the other hand, for Europe and the US war is bad for economy. Putin not only knows that but more than willing to deliberately exploit. He will stay in this war for as long as possible just to cause more harm to EU and America.
Only a risk of actually dragging more nations into a war that is already not going well, will make Putin pause and think. Europe should present him with just such risk and positioning troops in Ukraine together with warning of retaliation if any of them get hurt by Russian attacks. Only a setup like this can really put breaks on Russian invasion.
As for actual deployment, then Europeans should position their troops just far enough from the frontlines to avoid accidental fire, but on clearly identifiable positions, close enough to front. That will make the real red line that Putin will not dare to cross. Putin will rant about such interference, but he will not dare to actually attack them.
That is the only way to achieve peace at all. Everything else will just cause war to drag on.
Short of escalating war into something Russian military could no longer handle, Putin has no other insensitive to end war. Thus, to end the war, Europe needs to make possibility of escalation real by deploying troops in Ukraine.
No comments:
Post a Comment