By Patrick J. Buchanan
November 22, 2022:
Information Clearing House
-- Winter has often
proven an indispensable ally of Mother Russia.
The impending winter of 1812-13 forced
Napoleon’s withdrawal from Moscow, a retreat
from which his Grande Armee never recovered.
The winter of 1941-42 sealed the ultimate
fate of the invading armies of Adolf Hitler’s
Third Reich.
Vladimir Putin’s new strategy in the war he
launched on Ukraine in February is to conscript
the coming winter of 2022-23 as an ally of his
failing army.
For weeks, there have been reports of Russian
air, missile and drone strikes on power plants
in every major Ukrainian city.
The false report that a Russian-fired rocket
had landed in Poland, killing two civilians,
came on a day when 100 Russian bombs, rockets,
missiles and drones hit “infrastructure” targets
across Ukraine.
It was the heaviest Russian barrage to date
in the nine-month war.
Putin’s goal: As the Ukrainian army battles
the Russian army in the Donbas and Kherson, the
power grid upon which the Ukrainian nation and
people depend is to be systematically attacked,
shut down, destroyed.
Without electric power, there will be no
light or heat in Ukrainian homes, hospitals,
offices or schools. Without electricity, food
cannot be preserved, stoves do not work, water
cannot be pumped.
Without power, light and heat, Putin’s
expectation is that the Ukrainian people, who
have patriotically supported their army, will,
in the tens of thousands this winter, be at risk
of freezing to death in the dark.
Winter, from mid-December to mid-March, is
the coldest and darkest of the seasons, and it
begins in four weeks.
On Friday, CNN reported that, after the
latest wave of Russian strikes, 10 million
Ukrainians, a fourth of the nation, were without
power.
“Russia is turning winter into a weapon, even
as its soldiers flail on the battlefield,” wrote
The New York Times on Sunday. “In a relentless
and intensifying barrage of missiles fired from
ships at sea, batteries on land and planes in
the sky, Moscow is destroying Ukraine’s critical
infrastructure, depriving millions of heat,
light and clean water.”
Ukraine’s state energy company adds: “Due to
a dramatic drop in temperature, electricity
consumption is increasing daily in those regions
of Ukraine where power supply has already been
restored after massive missile strikes on
November 15 on the energy infrastructure.”
The U.S. stance in this war is that the
fighting stops and peace talks begin only when
Kyiv says the fighting stops and the
negotiations begin.
But Americans, whose support for Ukraine has
been indispensable in this war, also need to
have a voice in when the war ends.
For us, the greatest stake in this
Russia-Ukraine war is not who ends up in control
of Luhansk, Donetsk or Kherson, but that we not
be drawn into a military conflict that would put
us on the escalator to a war with Russia, a
world war and perhaps a nuclear war.
Nothing in Eastern or Central Europe is worth
a major U.S. war with Russia that could go
nuclear and cost millions of American lives.
The Donbas and Crimea may be of great
importance to Kyiv and Moscow, but nothing in
these lands would justify a U.S. war with a
nuclear-armed Russia, the kind of war we managed
to avoid through the Cold War from 1949-1989.
The recent incident of the S-300
surface-to-air missile misfired by Ukrainian
forces, which landed several kilometers inside
Poland, killing two Polish citizens, is a case
in point.
Hawkish cries for NATO retaliation against
Russia, under Article 5 of the NATO treaty,
revealed that America’s War Party is still very
much with us and eager for the next
confrontation with Putin’s Russia.
In the final days of this lame-duck Congress,
before control of the House passes to
Republicans in January, Democrats are expected
to approve Joe Biden’s request for another $38
billion for the Kyiv regime, its army and its
war. Passage of this legislation would virtually
guarantee that the U.S. continues to finance
this war and extend the fighting until spring.
Why would we do this?
The U.S. ought not dictate to Kyiv when it
should move to the negotiating track to end this
war. But we Americans do have, given our
indispensable contributions to the Ukrainian war
effort, the right to tell Kyiv when we believe
that the risks of further fighting exceed any
potential gain for us; and, if Kyiv is
determined to fight on, to give notice that
Ukraine will be doing so without any more U.S.
munitions.
Great powers should never cede to lesser
powers, unconnected to their vital interests,
the capacity to drag them into unwanted wars.
The Polish missile incident, and the noisy
clamor that arose for retaliation against Russia
for hitting a NATO country, exposed the risks
inherent in our many treaty commitments, where
we are obliged to go to war for scores of
nations, most of which are not remotely related
to the security or vital interests of the United
States.
Views expressed in this article are
solely those of the author and do not necessarily
reflect the opinions of Information Clearing House.
in this article are
solely those of the author and do not necessarily
reflect the opinions of Information Clearing House.
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