So, you really want to stop the war in Ukraine?
Well, don't we all. But I'm afraid we'll need to put a lot more Russians in coffins.
Let’s start this off properly. Let’s talk about World War III.
I see my column in the National Post & the Ottawa Citizen has upset the self-professed anti-war crowd on the “left” and the “right,” again, and again I’m “a warmonger.” Do read it and make up your own mind. Head & subhead: The brutal reality of what's needed to end the Ukraine war — Coffins, with Russian soldiers in them. After the war, the Russian Federation needs to be dissolved and Russia demilitarized.
I attribute those views to Eliot Cohen, the Johns Hopkins University professor and former counsellor for the U.S. State Department, and to Anders Ostlund, from the Centre for European Policy Analysis. These are conclusions I happen to have reached myself quite a while ago. So let’s talk about the prospect of nuclear war, which is causing such angsty blubbering again in the leafier suburbs of the NATO countries.
Let’s start with a hypothetical, because after all, that’s all we’ve got in any discussion about whether Vladimir Putin would really resort to a tactical nuclear strike in Ukraine. Let’s say Putin is serious, that he’s not bluffing, that he’d really resort to that degree of savagery if his “special military operation” in Ukraine continues to drag on, chalking up one humiliating defeat, failure and retreat after another.
It is, after all, what he has been threatening, obliquely but persistently, since he launched his war of invasion back in February. A question, then: Should we obliterate Putin and his ministers after he pushes the red button, or before?
Sooner or later this final penny will have to drop and this question will be the only one that really matters. Before, or after?
Andriy Zagorodnyuk, Ukraine's former Defence Minister, says a Russian nuclear strike won't end the war, or at least it certainly won’t end the Ukrainian resistance: "Ukrainians would also fight on even if hit by a nuclear attack. For Ukrainians, there is no scenario worse than Russian occupation."
David Petraeus, the retired four-star general and former director of the Central Intelligence Agency, says he agrees that a tactical nuclear strike would not reverse Russia’s misfortunes in Ukraine, and Putin has been warned repeatedly what a NATO response would look like.
“Just to give you a hypothetical, we would respond by leading a Nato – a collective – effort that would take out every Russian conventional force that we can see and identify on the battlefield in Ukraine and also in Crimea and every ship in the Black Sea.”
So the question I have is: Why wait?