THE POSSIBILITY OF A NATO-RUSSIAN WAR INCREASES

Last night, Russian missiles struck a military training base in western Ukraine near the country’s border with Poland. The site, the International Peacekeeping and Security Center, serves as a hub for Western arms shipments, and for Western forces to train Ukrainian fighters. The airstrike killed at least 35 and left more than 100 injured. Russia’s attack followed its threat to target foreign weapon shipments sent by the U.S. and other countries to assist Ukraine.

This is not good news.

Former CIA director John McLaughlin said this morning that, following this event, “We are in the wild blue yonder. There is no rule book for this.”

McLaughlin pointed out that, following the Russian warning that they would consider Western arms shipments to Ukraine to be “legitimate targets,” that - if Putin’s army continues to fail as it has - he may in desperation strike a NATO base in Poland where supplies are being organized. “This puts us directly in Article Five territory.” For those who don’t know the nomenclature, Article Five of the NATO treaty is the one that says an attack on one member is an attack on all.

Should the Russians fully take over Ukraine and an insurgency supported by the West develops, such a possibility becomes even more likely. “Some hotheaded Russian commander in hot pursuit, after insurgents had blown up, say, a bunch of Russian soldiers, could easily stray across the border. And bingo, we would be in direct contact.”

There is also the likelihood of a cyber war. An attack on a national power grid would be considered an act of war.

There is the additional threat that the Russian forces might commit a “Srebrenica” moment. For those who have forgotten, back in the Balkan wars, Serbian forces massacred 7,000 Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica. That act was the moment that President Clinton later said was when he knew that there would be some form of outside intervention, that the demand for the Western powers to do something, would become irresistable.

We have already seen Russian war crimes, such as the deliberate attack on the maternity hospital in Mariupol. An assault that levels Odessa or Kyiv could lead to further outrages. As readers here know themselves, we are all feeling frustration to view what the Russians have done in this unprovoked attack on Ukraine. We are “living in a time of decades in days,” and public opinion could swing decisively toward intervention in such a way that it would become irrestable. The Russians are acting in Ukraine the way the Imperial German Army acted in Belgium at the outbreak of World War I. We know what happened.

In many ways, the cities reduced to rubble; the civilians caught between armies; the refugees moving in large numbers across European borders; the threats of nuclear annihilation, bring to mind the the circumstances that shocked world powers into creating an international system in 1945 to prevent another world war.

It is no coincidence that at precisely the time when living memory of World War II is fading as the last of the participants “fly west,”we have failed to heed the lessons of our worst history. We allowed Putin to act with more impunity and less notice with the Chechen War, the Georgian War, the assassinations, the Syrian war than Hitler received with his demands and acts of the 1930s that finally led France and Britain to guarantee Poland when it was too late to actually protect that country, but nevertheless that invasion “to protect Germans from harm” led us to a war whose terrible results none could have predicted at the outset.

There may have been crowds throwing flowers to the troops as they headed toward the front in August 1914, but in September 1939, no one looked at the coming war with such innocence. Hitler had to use propaganda the same way Putin has in order to overcome the German people’s aversion to the path he had put them on.

What would have happened today, if among The 35 dead from the Russian airstrike last night, there had been NATO troops or representatives being placed in body bags?

There are no easy answers.

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