A view taken on October 12, 2022 shows the Kerch Bridge that links Crimea to Russia, near Kerch, which was hit by a blast on October 8, 2022. (Photo by STRINGER / AFP)

Kyiv Post: There are increasing rumors that a major attack on the Karch Bridge connecting Russia to Crimea is imminent. How high do you think the chances are that such an attack is actually imminent and could be successful? At what point in time?

Andreas Umland: This now seems possible insofar as the Ukrainian army can reach the Kerch Bridge with the ATACMS missiles. However, the question arises as to whether the power of the warheads of the American missiles already makes such an attack worthwhile. As I understand it, Ukraine requested the Taurus cruise missiles from Germany to destroy the Kerch Bridge. In this respect, this may be a technical rather than tactical or strategic decision for Kyiv, depending on the assessment of the chances of success of bombing the bridge with the ATACMS.

Kyiv Post: How well prepared is Russia for such an attack?

Andreas Umland: The Kremlin wants to avoid destroying the bridge for a number of reasons, and there is a considerable military infrastructure to protect the Kerch Bridge. While the importance of the bridge as a supply route for the Russian army has recently declined, the symbolic significance of the structure for Putin and his regime remains high. In addition to the great importance of the bridge as a supply route for the Russian army, the symbolic significance of the structure for Putin and his regime is high. It would be an enormous embarrassment for the Kremlin if Ukraine were to succeed in rendering the bridge unusable or even causing it to collapse. Moscow will therefore do everything it can to avoid or fend off such an attack. There are now even suggestions that Russia is threatening to use tactical nuclear weapons in response to the attack on the bridge.

Kyiv Post: Do you see the delivery of ATACMS as a game changer for Ukraine when it comes to Crimea and the Kerch Bridge?

Andreas Umland: This is also a question for missile technicians and warhead experts rather than political scientists. Until now, only the Taurus cruise missiles were considered suitable for destroying the bridge. This may also be the reason for the German government’s decision to withhold the delivery of these German weapons to Ukraine. I could imagine that Moscow has threatened Berlin with some kind of “retaliation” in this case.

Kyiv Post: What consequences would a successful large-scale attack on the Crimean bridge have for Putin?

Andreas Umland: There have already been several Ukrainian attacks on the bridge. The question is more about the consequences of a possible destruction of the structure. This would be problematic for Russian troops in Crimea and southern mainland Ukraine as well as for Putin’s image within Russia. It is also possible that the high domestic political salience of the Crimea issue is the reason for Moscow’s recently renewed threat to deploy tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine.

Source: Kyiv Post

Maybe NATO needs to wake up to the reality that the US is now politically dysfunctional, and the GOP is not going to green light enough support to Ukraine to hold its defense.

To avoid a catastrophic defeat for Ukraine and the West/EU/NATO, we need to think quickly and outside the box. Necessities now should be:

Extend a NATO missile defense to Ukraine, as currently being offered to Israel by the West. This can be provided externally to Ukraine from systems operated by NATO border states. NATO is not becoming party to a direct conflict with Russia as neither the US., UK. or Jordan have by shooting down Iranian missiles heading for Israel. NATO just needs to find its balls before Putin cuts them off.
Allocate the full $330 billion in immobilized Russian assets to Ukraine’s defense. If the West is unable to provide adequate funds for Ukraine’s defense let Putin provide the funds to allow Ukraine to buy its own arms/munitions. If Zelensky had $330 billion to buy arms, even Trump and the GOP could not say no.
Adopt a zero tolerance on Russia approach to sanctions. Massively ramp up secondary sanctions on third country sanctions busters. Change the default setting on sanctions to zero trade with Russia being permitted except where special licenses are approved – we could set the implementation date sufficiently far in the future (3-5 years hence) to limit the near-term disruption to global markets. But the signaling impact to global markets would be immense – get out of Russia.
And if the West is not willing to do these, then it should start to think through what a Russian victory in Ukraine means – and begin to plan for that. It means a huge economic hit to Europe in defense spending (hundreds of billions more a year), tens of millions of Ukrainian migrants moving West, socio-economic, political and security crisis (wars) in Europe and the collapse of the Euro.

Source: Kyiv Post

Vivek Ramaswamy speaks to members of the media on November 8, 2023. GIORGIO VIERA / AFP

I was not planning to listen to the recent Republican party primary debates on Nov. 8 because, at the time, I was buried in work aimed at helping Ukraine obtain a new tranche of much needed Western military aid. But a friend of mine convinced me to tune in because she thought I should hear Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley’s incisive approach to matters domestic and global (including Ukraine).

When I did, I realized that my friend was right about Haley – she did cut an impressive figure. I, nevertheless, was more struck by the opinions of another Republican candidate – often described as “Make-America-Great-Again without the Trump” – Vivek Ramaswamy.

If, at any earlier point, Ramaswamy’s scandalous pronouncements were simply background noise in the upcoming campaign for the US presidency, his rather obnoxiously cavalier assertions about an issue for which I bled – the survival of the land of my ancestors – gave me serious pause, or, more frankly, got my goat.

In my state of anger and knowing that Ramaswamy is set to take part in the fourth primary debate on Dec. 6 in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, I decided that his remarks, or at least his key points, should not go unanswered.

The first issue to note about Ramaswamy’s comments was his thinly disguised contempt for (or disregard of) Ukraine. He apparently had nothing to say about Russia’s full scale naked aggression against the country – an attack meant not only to strip Ukraine of territory (as in 2014), but to eliminate its sovereignty altogether.

He seemed to have no concern for the genocidal-in-scale damage done; the multiple tens of thousands of dead or wounded; whole Ukrainian cities left in ruins; children kidnapped and deported to an enemy state; and wholesale thievery and rape brandished as a tool of terror.

In Ramaswamy’s mind, Ukraine seemed be a land associated with a Trump impeachment conspiracy, a Hunter Biden corruption scandal, and a thorn in the side of US-Russia relations.

Ramaswamy’s tirades against Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky got personal, suggesting him to be anti-democratic, a persecutor of Christians, and with links to Nazism. The problem is not simply that such attacks are baseless, but that some of his assertions betrayed an underlying train of thought that was, at the very least, troubling.

For one, Zelensky was elected in 2019 by a landslide margin and remains extremely popular to this day according to authoritative sources (his approval ratings easily score in the range of 75-90 percent). Additionally, the Nazi reference appeared to stem from a Kremlin campaign in 2022 that the US State Department condemned in the revealingly entitled study: “To Vilify Ukraine, The Kremlin Resorts to Anti-Semitism.”

Absolutely unnerving was the effortless way Ramaswamy seemed to link the word Nazi to Ukrainians in general. He clearly had no clue about the Ukrainian experience in World War II. In eastern Ukraine, most families had a member who served in the armies that swept the Nazis out of Eastern Europe; a couple of million had the misfortune during the height of German occupation to be shipped to Germany to serve as Ostarbeiters (slave laborers); while the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) lost thousands of souls to either Nazi concentration camps, firing squads or lamppost hangings.

I found myself becoming increasingly curious about what would possess Ramaswamy to take this stance, i.e., what would make him so callous to the suffering inflicted by the Russians on the Ukrainian nation. These reflections, and my subsequent short research, bore some seriously disturbing (and anomalous) fruits that cast the erstwhile presidential candidate’s possible motives in very dark colors.

Possible motives and influences

Why would a figure trying on occasion to out-MAGA even Trump be so interested in playing a “Nazi card” with anyone? After all, the more outlandish section of the MAGA phenomenon, with its accent on constantly stirring the fear of the other had less to do with classic Anglo-American conservatism and more to do with the populist right of Europe in the 1930s (fascism might just be too strong a word) that seems to have been making a comeback in the 21st century.

Having best-friended an authoritarian rightist like Victor Orban, might not someone admonish Ramaswamy and Co. (political commentator Tucker Carlson and politician Majorie Taylor Greene also come to mind here) about not throwing stones when living in actual glass houses?

The Nazi reference has an even more curious component to it. The same canard has been thrown at the Ukrainians from the hard (call it neo-Stalinist) left. Ukrainians, having earlier opposed the Soviet Union (mother of all revolutions) and now seeking military assistance from what might be termed the “Imperialist West” would automatically seem to qualify them as fascists, or Nazis.

Indeed, such arguments would suggest that Nazism had nothing inherently to do with the Holocaust or the genocidal slaughter of Jews and that the term could – paradoxically – be applied to the Jewish State (note the slogans at many of the recent pro-Hamas rallies around the world).

Seeing this apparent confluence of two supposedly deadly ideological opposed camps was striking on so many levels. Equally concerning is that the meeting of the “yahoo” minds appears not too far afield from the toxically fertile brain of far-right Russian political thinker Alexander Dugin, author of mind-bending pseudo political theoretical tracts with fun names like “Foundations of Geopolitics: The Geopolitical Future of Russia” and “The Fourth Political Theory: Beyond Left and Right But Against the Center.”

Since his days of dabbling with something called “National Bolshevism” in the wake of the USSR’s breakup, Dugin had propagated a global convergence of ultra-left and ultra-right forces led by a resurrected Russia against the so-called decadent (if temporarily victorious) democratic West, and dreamt of an apocalyptic clash that would return Russia to its rightful “civilizational” place at the head of the global parade.

Notwithstanding the fringe nature of his thinking, Dugin has become someone to be reckoned with in the last two decades. Forces in the Kremlin have come to consider him a master strategist or, more mystically, something of a prophet. One might say that Dugin has emerged as Russian President Vladimir Putin’s Rasputin. If so, then Ramaswamy appears to be in a “mind meld” with some seriously dangerous folks.

Given Russian interference had been detected both in the 2016 and 2020 US elections, perhaps it is worth ending with a rhetorical question or two: “Mr. Ramaswamy, have you discussed your position on Ukraine with anyone in the Kremlin?”; or “Mr. Ramaswamy, have you ever made any deals with the Kremlin before the US-Russia deal you proposed recently?”

But to do that would risk playing the same impugning game as Mr. Ramaswamy himself. So perhaps it’s better to end the commentary with a simpler question, taken straight from American historical lore: “Sir, have you no shame?”

Source: Kyiv Post

By Victor Rud

Russians and US flags are seen on the Mont-Blanc bridge on June 16, 2021 in Geneva ahead of the summit between Russian leader and US President. Fabrice COFFRINI / AFP

In the 1980s, Fred Coleman, Moscow correspondent for Newsweek, walked into the Soviet embassy in Washington to ask if Soviet Ambassador Dobrynin was ready to meet with the new American president. Dobrynin had already served through several Presidencies. Dobrynin’s secretary’s reply: “The Ambassador is looking forward to working with the new president the way a kindergarten teacher looks forward to the first day of school.”

Forget arrogance. The episode illustrates a glaring constant in America’s relations with Moscow: our inability to extrapolate lessons from our own experience. We’re a nation that’s hardwired for instant gratification, with a low frustration threshold that doesn’t even begin to compare with the patience of our enemies.

With a time horizon, both forward and backward, that’s limited to an election cycle, we’re unable to extrapolate necessary lessons from the past and consequently are unable to anticipate and plan for the future.

“The willingness to allow Russia to become the sole nuclear and economic power to emerge from the Soviet Union is a dangerous prospect for Western security.” – a US Navy Officer, 1991.

Simply put, we lack a strategic instinct. Couple that with a pauperized knowledge of history, generally, and scarcely a grip on geography, and we have the wreckage of our global security posture as we’re being slashed from all quarters.

Consider the lessons never learned. After WW I, Ukraine was denied a seat at the Paris Peace Conference but in a letter to its President, Georges Clemenceau, the Ukrainian delegation warned of the existential threat that Moscow would soon represent to the West.

The Western allies sniffed their indifference, Washington reneged on contracted aid to Ukraine, and Moscow soon overran the country. Its destruction of Ukraine’s national ethos by the elimination of Ukraine’s religious, cultural, political and intellectual strata was massive.

Simultaneously, as he was retooling the Tsarist Empire into a “Soviet Union,” Stalin desperately sought outside economic support and diplomatic approbation. We obliged, and on November 16, 1933, extended diplomatic recognition to the USSR.

Ours was the ultimate imprimatur of legitimacy for a monstrous regime, and also the acme of strategic witlessness. The pre-eminent capitalist power that the Kremlin had sworn to destroy rewarded its planned executioner.

Worse still, our invitation of the Great Sun to the diplomatic soiree coincided with Moscow’s starvation of Ukraine in 1932-33. The Holodomor.

In a report to the Royal Embassy of Italy in Moscow, its counsel in Ukraine quoted a top officer of the GPU secret police that the starvation was engineered to “change the ethnographic materials” of Ukraine by massively resettling Russians into a “cleansed” Ukraine to “make Ukraine a part of Russia.”

Raphael Lemkin, father of the UN Genocide Convention and originator of that term, described it as classic genocide. Our recognition not only masked the genocide, in effect it rewarded the perpetrator. It also cut directly against our own security interests.

We stripped Ukraine of its nuclear arsenal and required its transfer to Russia, lectured Ukraine, not Russia, about nationalism, and pronounced that democracy would flourish sooner in Russia than in Ukraine.

We continued with our obliviousness to the reality that we had been warned of a decade before: Russian control of Ukraine was critical to the creation and ongoing viability of the USSR.

The global consequences were near calamitous. Arlington National Cemetery outside Washington expanded to accept 100,000 of our finest, and we burned through $13 trillion in the ensuing Cold War.

But it was worse. Stalin wasn’t the supplicant. America was. Recognition opened the floodgates to even further American capital and technology that had begun even before 1933. We established not only the foundation for the Soviet economy and military, but in various degrees maintained them on life-support for almost their duration.

Among other capitulations in our recognition, we all but erased a $60 billion debt (that’s principal only, in today’s dollars) that Moscow owed to the American taxpayers and investors.

What did we get in exchange? Moscow agreed “to refrain from… any act overt or covert liable in any way whatsoever to injure the tranquility, prosperity, order or security of the whole or any part of the United States, in particular any agitation or propaganda.” Need more be said?

Days afterward, Soviet Foreign Commissar Maxim Litvinov, who had negotiated the recognition with a thoroughly credulous President Roosevelt, visited the headquarters of the Communist Party of the USA where he boasted about his own duplicity.

The menu in Ukraine had less panache. A grief-stricken little girl cried, “Mommy told us to eat her when she died.”

And only days after that, on November 26, 1933, Republicans and Democrats joined to honor the same Litvinov at a banquet at the Waldorf Astoria in New York City.

It was surreal, as the titans of American finance and industry sprang to their feet and rendered a lusty rendition of the Communist International, the sing-along of the world communist movement dedicated to their own demise.

The menu was Beluga Caviar Canapes, Bortschok, Celery, Olives, Coulibiac of Lake Trout, Filet de Boeuf Stroganoff, with New Green Peas and Potatoes Noisette, Autumn Salad, Rissole of Cheese, and Café Filtre. Dessert was a decidedly non-proletarian Bombe Glace Chocolate Praline Wladimire Gourmandises.

The menu in Ukraine had less panache. A grief-stricken little girl cried, “Mommy told us to eat her when she died.”

In 1979 we displayed a similar strategic failure by withdrawing our recognition of the Republic of China (Taiwan) and kowtowing to the communist regime in Beijing. We fantasized of using communist China as a counterweight to the USSR, precisely the enemy that we had, in the same manner, elevated in 1933.

And, as with Moscow, our technology, know-how and capital put Beijing on its economic feet. And we’re coming to our senses only now?

The irony, and tragedy, is that it was a trillion (today’s value) of American taxpayer dollars in Lend Lease assistance to Moscow that continued after WW II and that Moscow used to help establish communist dystopias in China – and North Korea – in the very first place.

After 1979, our myopia continued as we reversed victim and perpetrator. President Bush in his 1991 “Chicken Kiev” speech hectored Ukraine to remain Moscow’s vassal. But the USSR nonetheless imploded precisely because Ukraine left the party and capped the $13 trillion gusher.

America was “great again,” recouping its primacy in the world. Even then, we still didn’t connect the dots. We stripped Ukraine of its nuclear arsenal and required its transfer to Russia, lectured Ukraine, not Russia, about nationalism, and pronounced that democracy would flourish sooner in Russia than in Ukraine.

A young US Navy lieutenant in 1993 was prescient: “Regenerating Russia as the superpower successor to the Soviet Union will be a threat to the security of Ukraine and Europe… The willingness to allow Russia to become the sole nuclear and economic power to emerge from the Soviet Union is a dangerous prospect for Western security…

“The United States will have assisted in creating a regime that is a serious threat to the democratic community of states. Were Russia to embark on a campaign to reconstitute, what options would the West have?”

So, what is the latest iteration of our strategic acumen? Thomas Graham, seemingly a Russia expert, recently declared in Foreign Affairs that we should embrace Russia in dealing with China. We originally failed with Russia before, then again spectacularly with China, then with Russia again. And now just do it over again? It’s vertiginous.

From the Ukrainians’ warning to at the Paris Peace Conference:

“[T]he bolshevik Government of Russia has sent its troops against Ukraine and broken the Ukrainian front near the frontier of the Ukrainian Republic.

“Now they are advancing into the heart of our country and the bolshevik Government has not only no intention of fulfilling the conditions laid down by the Peace Conference at Paris to establish a truce, to retire its forces and to cease all military action; on the contrary, it has just developed its military offensive to destroy the independence of the Ukrainian Republic.

“One knows that the traditional history of Russia was always, and through the present, an imperial policy, and now she wishes to pass over the body of independent Ukraine to put one hand on the Dardanelles and Suez and the other on the Persian Gulf.”

Source: Kyiv Post