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Was the Russia-Ukraine war predictable and preventable?
By Kent R. Kroeger (April 4, 2022)
Could anyone have predicted, years in advance, Russia’s February 24th invasion of Ukraine?
The answer is so emphatically ‘Yes!,’ it is hard to fathom what the counter-argument might be.
Perhaps we should start with the main instigator himself, Russian President Vladimir Putin, who said to American film director Oliver Stone four years ago during an interview, “I believe that Russians and Ukrainians are one people … one nation. In fact, when these lands that are now the core of Ukraine joined Russia … nobody thought of themselves as anything but Russians.”
And we are surprised that, as U.S. and NATO allies supplied Ukraine over the past five years with millions of dollars with some of the most sophisticated anti-armor and anti-aircraft weapons in existence, Russia would decide to respond?
Barack Obama’s administration was at war with itself over whether to significantly arm Ukraine in its defense against Russia, but it took Donald Trump’s deep-seeded insecurities to end that debate. Trump poured gas on a flammable situation when he approved the sale of anti-armor Javelin missiles to Ukraine in 2019. The Biden administration’s subsequent increase in military assistance to Ukraine, including 300 additional Javelin…
