PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS: Putin's Condition for Peace
We are approaching the point where the conflict opens into a full-fledged war. The question is: Does anyone in the Western governments understand this?
BY PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS
The latest news on the war front serves to introduce today’s column:
The Ever-Widening War
With Putin focused on useless “peace talks,” Ukraine (or Washington or NATO) attacked four Russian Air Force bases and destroyed a number of strategic Russian bombers. The BBC reports:
“In an operation said to have taken 18 months to prepare, scores of small drones were smuggled into Russia, stored in special compartments aboard freight trucks, driven to at least four separate locations, thousands of miles apart, and launched remotely towards nearby airbases.”
If this is true, Russia’s strategic nuclear forces were attacked from inside Russia.
This seems to be a massive failure of Russian intelligence.
MACGREGOR: WHY HASN’T TRUMP SPOKEN OUT AGAINST THE DRONE ATTACK?
Curiously, the Russian English language sites, RT and Sputnik, have little to say this morning about the successful attack that Ukraine claims destroyed one-third of Russia’s strategic bomber fleet.
Instead, the news services babble on about the second round of peace talks.
There are also Russian news reports that two bridges inside Russia were blown up, resulting in deaths and injuries.
It seems that Putin still does not realize that Russia is at war.
Putin’s Condition for Peace is the Roll Back of NATO’s Border from Russia
During the long conflict in the Russian provinces in Ukraine, I have posted many reports on the ever-widening war. We are approaching the point where the conflict opens into a full-fledged war. The question is: Does anyone in the Western governments understand this?
It remains to be seen whether the successful Ukrainian attack on Russia’s strategic bombing fleet will finally wake Putin up to the cost of his ever-widening war.
The cost is likely to rise as the Europeans have removed all limits on the weapons and on the range of the missiles that will be supplied to Ukraine. Is this a negotiating tactic to pressure Putin, or is it Europe’s entry into a war with Russia that European politicians have recently talked so much about?
If it is the latter, why does Trump permit it as it undercuts the peace negotiations that Trump said would end the conflict?
I have explained Putin’s patience with the conflict in terms of his hope that peace negotiations can be turned into a wider agreement that achieves mutual security and an end of the conflict between Russia and the West. Putin’s view of what these conditions are have gone without examination in the Western world. Instead, there have been absurd demands that Putin agree to an immediate ceasefire before he knows what the agreement is, that Putin agree to give back some of the conquered territory, that Putin drop his demand for demilitarization of Ukraine, and so forth.