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Adding insult to injury — if the cowardly downing of a passenger airliner can be couched as such — Russian president Vladimir Putin is responding to the outrageous crime by his thugs in eastern Ukraine by escalating military aggressive actions against Ukraine.
This morning, both Reuters and the Washington Post report on Russia firing artillery across its border with Ukraine targeting Ukrainian military positions and continuing to send its tanks, artillery and other heavy weapons into Ukraine.
This after two more Ukrainian military jets were hit by anti-aircraft missiles on Wednesday, “which Ukrainian officials said had been fired from Russia.”
According to Reuters, the State Department also claims that there is evidence that “Russia intended to deliver heavier and more powerful multiple rocket launchers to the separatist forces.”
Referring to the alleged lack of a credible, tangible response by both the U.S. and the European Union, the Post adds:
While the West temporizes, a de facto Russian army is rapidly assembling in occupied portions of eastern Ukraine. A report in the Financial Times, sourced to U.S. intelligence officials, says it includes dozens of T-64 battle tanks, Grad rocket launchers, self-propelled guns, infantry combat vehicles with automatic cannons and armored personnel carriers, in addition to anti-aircraft systems like the one that shot down the Malaysian plane. This force is commanded by Russian citizens who infiltrated Ukraine from Moscow, including a Russian secret police colonel, and made up in large part of fighters from Russia.
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Incredibly, the European Union’s position — tacitly supported by Mr. Obama — is that the Ukrainian government should stop attempting to expel the invaders from its territory and instead negotiate with them about the political future of Ukraine. Fortunately, newly elected President Petro Poroshenko has not capitulated to this appeasement strategy. However, his appeals for military aid from the United States and NATO, or at least more substantial sanctions, have so far been turned aside by Mr. Obama and the Europeans.
Also sounding the alarm about Russia’s increasingly aggressive and irresponsible actions, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff U.S. Army General Martin Dempsey did not mince words at a security forum yesterday in Aspen, Colorado.
Dempsey warned that recent military actions by Russia against Ukraine transform Europe’s security landscape.
“You’ve got a Russian government that has made the conscious decision to use its military force inside of another sovereign nation to achieve its objectives — first time, I think, probably, since 1939 or so that that’s been the case,” the General said.
Claudette Roulo at the DoD News Defense Media Activity reports more extensively on Dempsey’s remarks:
The military actions in Ukraine mark a change in the relationship between Europe and Russia, and between the United States and Russia, Dempsey said, though the true meaning of the change isn’t yet defined.
Since 2008, the Russian military has increased its capability, its proficiency, and the level of its long-range aviation and air-launch cruise missile testing activities, the chairman said.
“They clearly are on a path to assert themselves differently, not just in Eastern Europe, but in Europe in the main and toward the United States,” he said.
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Suggestions that the U.S. withdrawals from Iraq and Afghanistan caused the nation to appear weak or unwilling to use force and created an opening for the Russian military actions in Ukraine are without merit, the chairman said.
“I think this is very clearly [Russian President Vladimir] Putin, the man himself, with a vision for Europe, as he sees it, to what he considers to be an effort to redress grievances that were burdened upon Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union, and also to appeal to ethnic Russian enclaves across Eastern Europe with … a foreign policy objective, but also a domestic policy objective,” Dempsey said. “And he’s very aggressive about it, and he’s got a playbook that has worked for him now two or three times. And he will continue to [use it].”
Russia’s violations of Ukraine’s sovereignty have triggered a rise in nationalism around Europe, the chairman said. “If I have a fear about this,” he added, “it’s that Putin may actually light a fire that he loses control of.”
Dempsey said he believes in keeping an open line of communication with his Russian counterpart, Army Gen. Valery Gerasimov, the chief of the General Staff.
“I think that the Russian military is probably reluctant — — you know, this is risky for me to say this, and 10 of them could end up in a gulag tomorrow — but I think that the Russian military and its leaders that I know are probably somewhat reluctant participants in this form of warfare,” he said.
His real concern, the chairman said, is that having this fire in an isolated part of Eastern Europe may not stay in Eastern Europe.
“And I think that’s a real risk,” he added. “So I am maintaining an open line of communication with my counterpart, and so far, he’s doing the same with me.”
The United States isn’t sitting idly by as these events unfold, the nation’s top military officer said. An active process is going on to determine what support can be provided to Ukraine, he said, and the United States is working with its NATO allies to build capability and readiness.
In addition, he said, “we’re looking inside of our own readiness models to look at things we haven’t had to look at for 20 years, frankly, about basing and lines of communication and sea lanes.”
View and listen to Dempsey’s complete remarks on Ukraine and on other global issues in the video below.
Dempsey’s comments on the Ukraine start at minute 20:30 and he returns to the subject later on.
Lead photo: Army Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, answers a question from moderator Lesley Stahl during the Aspen Security Forum in Aspen, Colo., July 24, 2014. Photo DoD
The author is a retired U.S. Air Force officer and a writer.