“No one answered”

Why Putin attacked

From my Writing Room
Copyright © 2022 by Uwe Bahr

He is still the President of Ukraine, but his hours are probably numbered. It is to be hoped that he and his family will get out of the country in time and unharmed, because he is still young. But Volodymyr Selensky will have his own story to tell about the reliability of the West.

The phrases from Washington to Berlin have proven to be rhetoric of outrage and compassion fading away like the echo in the cave.

His home country has been betrayed and sold by its western “partners”, in the end mercilessly abandoned, in spite of all the full-bodied words towards Kiev. Yet the country had been the plaything of Washington before, as Trump’s envoys sought to enrich themselves at the country’s expense, such as one Rudi Giuliani and his criminal Ukrainian business partners. We remember: American payments for defense purposes were used as leverage for statements by the Ukrainian president about Trump and his alleged blamelessness. This was nothing but a form of state terrorism and blackmail on the part of the USA.

It is significant what Volodymyr Selensky had to say last night on camera: he had addressed the leaders of 27 countries in the past hours to accept Ukraine into NATO immediately. “But everyone is afraid, no one has answered.”

Ukraine in NATO would activate in this hour the immediate alliance case, with which all member states would have to support Ukraine immediately militarily. The conflict would most likely turn into a global conflagration. Conversely, if Ukraine had been in NATO for a long time, Putin would not have attacked it. It was his unbearable nightmare that the country could join the Atlantic Alliance and Russia would be strategically cornered more and more. That is why he attacked.

There is little likelihood that Ukraine will settle down after the war; a human tragedy emerges. Europeans can prepare themselves for a new wave of refugees. All this is happening mainly because the West, in boundless hubris and arrogance over the past two decades, thought it could put Putin in his place and push Russia back.