In 1994, the US Succeeded in Convincing Ukraine to Give Up Its Nukes But Failed to Secure Its Future; Russian Military Ready 'right now' to Attack Ukraine and Divide NATO; Yes, It Sure Looks Like Vladimir Putin Is Calling Biden’s Bluff

Author photo

In 1994, the US succeeded in convincing Ukraine to give up its nukes but failed to secure its future:

In March 1994, I stood in a chilly, windswept field in the fertile farmlands of Pervomaysk, Ukraine, where, as the last of the spring snow was melting, William Perry and other U.S. officials were peering into a deep underground missile silo to see something that wasn’t there.

I had traveled to Pervomaysk with Perry, the first U.S. defense secretary, to visit a former Soviet ICBM base to observe how U.S. tax dollars were helping to fund the denuclearization of Ukraine, a top priority of the Clinton administration.

Perry’s tour guide, Ukrainian Defense Minister Vitaly Radetsky, pointed to a Soviet SS-24 intercontinental ballistic missile still in the ground, but with its nose cone containing 10 independently targeted warheads gone, loaded on rail cars and shipped to Russia for dismantling.

Radetsky had already shown Perry around the underground command center. A giant wall map of the United States and Europe had cities marked with tiny lights, and Ukrainian missileers demonstrated the launch sequence for their guests.

“We watched the countdown and stared at the targets highlighted on the maps — cities in Germany and England, in Kansas and Oregon,” Perry would later write in his 1999 book Preventive Defense.

“Never had the ‘balance of terror’ seemed as real and terrible … as at that moment.”

Just two months earlier in Moscow, Ukrainian President Leonid Kravchuk, along with President Bill Clinton and Russian President Boris Yeltsin, signed a trilateral agreement, brokered by the U.S., to transfer all nuclear warheads to Russia for elimination. --->READ MORE HERE

AP

Russian military ready 'right now' to attack Ukraine and divide NATO:

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s military forces are ready to conduct an assault on Ukraine at any moment, according to U.S. lawmakers and observers, and his choice of target could expose a deep rift within NATO and the European Union.

“From my understanding, they are likely pretty close to what they need,” Senate Foreign Relations Chairman Bob Menendez told the Washington Examiner this week. “They have a very good foundation for what they might want to do. I’m not saying that it’s absolute yet, but it’s a very good foundation.”

Senior U.S. officials surmise Putin “may not even know yet” what he wants to do. Yet, the size and posture of the Russian forces around Ukraine raise the grim likelihood Putin is considering a plan to crack the trans-Atlantic alliance. However, it wouldn't be through a full-scale conquest of Ukraine, but rather a “creeping incrementalism” that might buckle Ukrainian defenses while exploiting Western Europe’s desire to avoid confrontation.

“The forces that he has there, those forces are absolutely capable of several options that he can execute to bring great pressure on Ukraine and great pressure on the West,” retired four-star Air Force Gen. Philip Breedlove, NATO’s supreme allied commander when Putin annexed Crimea in 2014, told the Washington Examiner. --->READ MORE HERE

Follow link below to a related story:

+++++Yes, It Sure Looks Like Vladimir Putin Is Calling Biden’s Bluff+++++

If you like what you see, please "Like" us on Facebook either here or here. Please follow us on Twitter here.