Nauman Sadiq,
Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Gen. Mark A. Milley, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, have tried to set up phone calls with Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and Gen. Valery Gerasimov but the Russians “have so far declined to engage,” said Pentagon spokesman John Kirby in a statement Wednesday, March 23.
“A nightmare scenario would be a Russian missile or attack aircraft that destroys a U.S. command post across the Polish-Ukrainian border,” James Stavridis, a retired admiral who served as the Supreme Allied Commander at NATO from 2009 to 2013, told the Washington Post. “A local commander might respond immediately, thinking the event was a precursor to a wider attack. This could lead to rapid and irreversible escalation, to include potential use of nuclear weapons.”
According to a CNN report detailing a rare face-to-face meeting between Russian and US military officials last week, the US believes that the refusal for high-level meetings is due to Kremlin worries that the encounters would show them to be vulnerable if they allowed such meetings, because it risks a tacit admission that an abnormal situation exists, according to the readout of the meeting.
The real reason the Russian military leadership has allegedly shunned maintaining high-level contacts with the Pentagon’s top brass appears to be the duplicitous and treacherous role played by the transatlantic NATO alliance of significantly escalating the conflict by substantially increasing the NATO military footprint in Eastern Europe along Russia’s western flank, publicly providing billions of dollars’ worth lethal weapons to Ukraine’s security forces and allied neo-Nazi militias while asininely claiming to be “peacemakers” extending chivalrous courtesies to the arch-rival.
Ahead of the NATO summit attended by President BidenThursday, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg announced the transatlantic military alliance would double the number of battlegroups it had deployed in Eastern Europe.
“The first step is the deployment of four new NATO battlegroups in Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania, and Slovakia, along with our existing forces in the Baltic countries and Poland,” Stoltenberg said.
“This means that we will have eight multinational NATO battlegroups all along the eastern flank, from the Baltic to the Black Sea.”
NATO issued a statement after Thursday’s emergency summit attended by Joe Biden and European leaders: “In response to Russia’s actions, we have activated NATO’s defense plans, deployed elements of the NATO Response Force, and placed 40,000 troops on our eastern flank, along with significant air and naval assets, under direct NATO command supported by Allies’ national deployments. We are also establishing four additional multinational battlegroups in Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania, and Slovakia.”
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