President Biden contiues to EVERYTHING he can to convey to the Russian President that he is worried about Putins threats of going nuclear …..
One wonders what the President would do , if anything, if a NATO country is actually attacked….
The Russian’s attacked a West Ukraine airport that is the entry point for resupplying the Ukraimne military…
One might want to ask WTF that airbase does not an air defense system in place?
(See below….Biden won’t allow an American anti -aircraft system while supplying other munitions, because Americans need to operate them…The Ukraine military have anti-aircart weapons in use in close combat locations ….And?…The Ukianains DO have military aircraft and armed drones….
If the Russians start air sorties across the untouched Western Ukraine?
The country is screwed, and so is NATO, which would have the Russians sitting closer to NATO and EU countries…
The Russians contiue to level the two major cities bordering Russia and consolidating their gains in the Southern territory that will be lost to the Ukrainians …
Russia took direct aim on Sunday at a hub for Western arms shipments and fighters in Ukraine, launching a barrage of airstrikes at a military base near the Polish border that killed at least 35 people and brought the war perilously closer to NATO’s doorstep.
A day after warning that weapons flowing into Ukraine from Western allies were “legitimate targets,” Russia carried out the aerial assault against the base 12 miles from the frontier with Poland, where American troops are deployed to bolster NATO’s defenses. Ukrainian officials said that Russian warplanes launched from western Russia and the Black Sea fired about 30 missiles, 22 of which were intercepted by Ukraine’s air defenses.
Besides being a transit point for arms for Ukraine, the base, known as the International Peacekeeping and Security Center, was a training ground for up to 1,000 foreign fighters as part of the new International Legion that Ukraine has formed to help fight Russia, a Ukrainian military official said.
On “Meet the Press” on Sunday on NBC, President Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, described the strike, which also wounded at least 134 people, as a sign that Russian forces were expanding their targets in Ukraine because they were “frustrated by their lack of ability to take some of the major cities” and failure to meet their objectives. Here are the latest developments:
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Ukrainian officials called Russia’s strike against the military base, where American troops and other foreign military personnel have long helped train Ukrainian forces, a “terrorist attack,” and they renewed calls for NATO to establish a no-fly zone.
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A Russian airstrike killed nine civilians in the heavily contested southern port city of Mykolaiv, the regional governor said, making it one of the deadliest attacks on a residential area in the city since the war began more than two weeks ago.
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An American filmmaker and journalist, Brent Renaud, was killed while reporting in Irpin, a suburb of Kyiv, Ukrainian officials said. Mr. Renaud’s reporting partner, Juan Arredondo, who was wounded, said they were shot in a car after they passed a checkpoint while going to film civilians fleeing the fighting.
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The new, Russia-installed mayor of the southern Ukrainian city of Melitopol told residents to adjust to “the new reality” and to end their resistance, a day after hundreds protested the detention of the city’s mayor by Russian forces….
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Kirby told ABC’s “This Week” co-anchor Martha Raddatz that he didn’t think the no-fly zone would have stopped the attack on the base near Lviv.
“No, I don’t think so, Martha. Look, I mean, no-fly zone has a nice air policing kind of sound to it, but I participated in one as a young officer on an aircraft carrier way back in the early 90s. It is combat. You have to be willing to shoot and to be shot at. President Biden has made it clear that US troops are not going to be fighting in Ukraine.”
Ukrainian officials have continued to call for a no-fly zone to be enacted over their country.
Noting the attack’s close proximity to the Polish border, Raddatz asked Kirby what would happen if Poland, a member of NATO, was attacked by Russian forces. If Poland is attacked, Article Five of the NATO treaty states that fellow member countries must consider it an attack on all of them.
“We take our Article Five commitment very seriously, and the vice president was was pretty firm about that on a recent visit. So has been Secretary Austin,” Kirby said. “An armed attack against one is considered an armed attack against all. That is why, Martha, we continue to flow and to move and to reposition forces and capabilities along NATO’s eastern flank to make sure that we can defend every inch of NATO territory if we need to.”…
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In December 2021, senior U.S. military officials told lawmakers that they wanted to send a “few hundred” additional special operations personnel to Ukraine to provide military advice and training on unconventional warfare. At the time, Russia had amassed roughly 100,000 troops on the border with Ukraine, and concerns were growing in Washington and Europe about a broadening invasion.
But White House officials had concerns about the deployment and the troops were never sent, according to two people familiar with the two December briefings with lawmakers and congressional aides. They also said Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin planned to directly press President Joe Biden to approve the mission.
A senior military official told House lawmakers that the White House was concerned that sending the troops would escalate the already tense situation with Russia, according to the two people. A third congressional official told POLITICO that a Pentagon official briefed the Senate Armed Services Committee that plans had been scrapped due to those concerns. The Biden administration hoped diplomacy might still work, and feared an influx of U.S. troops could scuttle those efforts….
Crazy Shit…
Finding a Way Out of the War Proves Elusive
“The United States accurately predicted the start of the war in Ukraine, sounding the alarm that an invasion was imminent despite Moscow’s denials and Europe’s skepticism. Predicting how it might end is proving far more difficult,” the New York Times reports.
“There are three separate back-channel efforts underway to start negotiations — by the leaders of France; Israel and Turkey; and, in a recent entree, the new chancellor of Germany. But so far, all have hit the stone wall of Russian President Vladimir V. Putin’s refusal to engage in any serious negotiation. At the Pentagon, there are models of a slogging conflict that brings more needless death and destruction to a nascent European democracy, and others in which Mr. Putin settles for what some believe was his original objective: seizing a broad swath of the south and east, connecting Russia by land to Crimea, which he annexed in 2014.”
“And there is a more terrifying endgame, in which NATO nations get sucked more directly into the conflict, by accident or design.”