Putin has done precisely what he warned multiple times would be done in the circumstances created by the refusal of Nato to give an assurance that Ukraine would not be admitted.
After the Taliban, Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi and Bashar Assad, Nato is taking on Putin. The military in Iraq had been neutered by the sanctions and prohibitions imposed after the 1991 Operation Desert Storm. Unwilling to risk another clash of arms with the US, Iraq complied with the conditions imposed on him, which degraded the capability of his armed forces such that they were only capable of taking action against their own cowed civilians. Those who had been in charge of Saddam’s weapons program several times confessed publicly the absence of WMD in Iraq after President George W. Bush indicated interest in attacking Iraq again. Despite having a small army of weapons inspectors and spies on the ground in Iraq, both President Bush as well as Prime Minister Blair claimed that Saddam was concealing a considerable store of WMD. Despite their professed belief, both were reckless enough to send into Iraq military logistics chains stretching several miles in length. Given their stated belief in Saddam’s imaginary WMD, both Bush and Blair must have been praying each day that the killer weapons that they believed Saddam had in abundance would somehow not be used by the “brutal monster” (a description of the then President of Iraq in media across both shores of the Atlantic). They subsequently behaved as though the absence of WMD in the 2003 Iraq conflict despite the regime being in its death throes was the effect of their prayers. Only much later did voters realise that the two had got it wrong in apparently disbelieving what those in Iraq connected with the weapons program had said, that there was no WMD left. That fury led to the Republican and Labour parties losing power in subsequent elections. International weapons inspectors were understandably reluctant to cut short their well-paid tenures by reporting that there was no longer any WMD to locate.
The next Middle Eastern dictator to fall after his country was bombed by Nato enough to reduce Libyan forces into a wreck was Muammar Gaddafi in 2011. This was many years after he had been promised immunity by the US and the UK from such attacks after voluntarily disclosing and destroying his WMD stockpiles. The Libyan dictator had the distinction of being described in Atlanticist media as being not only brutal and a monster in the way Saddam Hussein was, but certifiably insane as well. A hitherto untried method of seeking to rid Gaddafi of insanity was resorted to near Sirte in October 2011 after surgical volunteers were informed of his whereabouts by the intelligence service of a European country, who was eager to test a new treatment for insanity. This involved gruesome physical abuse that finally made an end of the patient. Whether in his final moments Gaddafi recovered his sanity has not been revealed by the mental health specialists attending on him during that fatal encounter.
There was a fresh attempt, again through Nato bombardment, to repeat the Gaddafi treatment, this time to the President of Syria, Bashar Assad, who had just handed over his chemical weapons stockpiles to Nato so as to prevent any such innovative medical treatment. Immediately after the surrender of his WMD stockpile, Assad’s forces were fought by medical volunteers (also known as “freedom fighters”) who earlier had shown considerable expertise in neck surgery. Such operations were performed on patients who were Shia, Alwaite, Druze or Christian. In order to spread knowledge of the methods used by the Nato-assisted surgical volunteers in Syria, several of them revealed on social media “before and after” images of the individuals who had received surgical treatment of the neck at their hands. As it transpired, patients who were operated upon by medical volunteers who were favourites of Nato, succumbed during surgery.
Just as with Saddam, Gaddafi and Assad, Putin is daily being described in Atlanticist media as insane, besides of course being a brutal monster. The current President of the US in the past delicately described Putin as a killer, while the present Defence Secretary of Britain referred to the Russian President as crazy on television. A unique way of carrying out diplomacy. Atlanticist media, now that Russian forces have marched into Ukraine, are united in saying that Putin broke his promise not to enter into a conflict. That promise was made on the condition that Nato announce publicly that it would not admit Ukraine. Should that alliance with its army of generals and officials not make such a commitment in writing, Putin was clear that means other than verbiage would be used to ensure that Ukraine not join Nato. In 2014, membership had seemed come close to being realised. President Putin took President Petro Poroshenko’s hints of joining Nato seriously, and integrated the Crimea with Russia, together with carving out a slice of territory in the east. Given Poroshenko’s experience, it had been expected that his successor Volodymyr Zelenskyy would be more circumspect. Instead, he repeatedly called for Nato to admit Ukraine immediately, so as to clear the way for occupying by force regions that had already become, or wanted to be, part of Russia. Nato declined to reject such entreaties, giving rise to suspicions that the Poroshenko line may finally come about. In their assessment of Putin, US, UK and other leaders went by the diagnoses of those infallible repositories of truth, the tabloid press. Now that Putin has done precisely what he warned multiple times would be done in the circumstances created by the refusal of Nato to give an assurance that Ukraine would not be admitted, the UK, US are accusing him of not keeping his word, when Putin did precisely that. Nato expertise in sending oil and other commodity markets skyrocketing upwards is indisputable. Nato is now succeeding in sending up the price of oil and natural gas, exactly as in 2003 and 2011 when the alliance drastically downsized the production of that fossil fuel in Iraq and Libya. With each additional tranche of sanctions by Nato members, the response of President Putin is getting ever closer to the point where a European war accidently gets ignited. That worry seems unlikely to stop the Bidens and the Johnsons from imposing more and more sanctions on Moscow, thereby sparking a greater and greater expansion of the war in Ukraine that Putin is waging. What was it that was said about those who keep repeating the same actions over and over again, despite its being shown to be counter-productive each time?