Russia-Ukraine war: Moscow's multi-front military posturing | WION Pulse
The arrival today in Havana of the small Russian naval task force led by the frigate Admiral Gorshkov has attracted media attention around the world, and I was not particularly surprised to be invited by WION, India’s premier English language global broadcast to comment on what they consider to be Russia’s latest escalation in their war with NATO in Ukraine.
See Russia-Ukraine war: Moscow's multi-front military posturing | WION Pulse
I don’t blame the WION editorial team for cutting my interview by more than 50%, eliminating my introductory remarks which were more far-ranging than is traditional in such video spot interviews.
However, on this proprietary platform I reproduce those opening remarks, because I consider them very germane to the whole question of “escalation” and who is doing what to whom.
I thanked my hosts for mentioning in their remarks on my background that I am also an historian, because that fact conditioned my answer to their question: to be specific, in the historian’s craft we are very interested in the line of causality and in tracing any given event to what preceded it.
With that in mind, I remarked that if you ask any Estonian, Lithuanian or Latvian when the history of the world began, they will instantly put the date at 1939 and mention the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact that resulted in their independent, sovereign and democratic nations being swallowed up by the Soviet Union. They will never take you back in history to tell you that their statehood came about in 1919 after WWI and the collapse of the Russian Empire. They will never tell you that they were part of the Russian Empire from the first quarter of the 18th century up to 1919 as a result of dynastic marriages or military conquest.
So it is with the question of “escalation” by Russia through its various actions, among them the dispatch of the naval task force to Cuba, demonstrating its readiness to use tactical and strategic nuclear arms if its sovereignty is threatened.
From the Russian perspective, these warnings were in response to the belligerent statements and actions coming from Western Europe and the United States in the preceding week, when the United Kingdom, France, Germany, the USA and other allies announced that they were giving Kiev free hands to decide how to use the long-range missiles and other advanced hardware they had delivered to Ukraine as the Zelensky regime sees fit. This means that the Ukrainians are free to strike deep into the Russian heartland using Western hardware.
At the same time in that preceding week, Emanuel Macron of France announced he would he sending Mirage 2005 all-purpose fighter jets to Ukraine and is training their pilots now. France also said it is planning to deploy military instructors inside Ukraine to prepare a brigade for combat against the Russian forces.
It was against this background that the Russians have in the past few days flexed their muscles to give a warning message to Washington.
©Gilbert Doctorow, 2024