Arm Ukraine or Surrender

2014/9/1 10:47:29

 A few more months without meaningful Western help and Ukraine will have lost the fighting core of its army — and its infatuation with the West. This will be replaced by a sense of betrayal, and there will be no way for Ukraine’s pro-European liberals to survive the backlash. The far-right extremists now on the fringe will ride into Kiev’s parliament on the lids of the caskets being shipped back from the front. Ukraine will become a ravaged conflict zone: a European Syria, or a hideously enlarged Bosnia.


From New York Times, 31 August 2014

 

Russia and Ukraine are now at war. At least 2,200 people have died in the conflict; thousands more may die yet. The Western powers — America, Europe, NATO — now have no good options, but they cannot do nothing. President Vladimir V. Putin has left us with two dire choices, both fraught with risk: Either we arm Ukraine, or we force Kyiv to surrender and let Mr. Putin carve whatever territories he wants into a Russian-occupied zone of “frozen conflict.”

 

It is a stark choice, and Mr. Putin is not rational. Any rational leader would have reeled from the cost of Western sanctions. Russia’s economy is being hit hard by a credit crunch, capital flight, spiraling inflation and incipient recession. This will hurt Mr. Putin’s surging popularity at home. But none of this has deterred the smirking enigma.

 

Ukraine cannot win this war. Mr. Putin has made it clear that the Russian Army will annihilate Ukrainian forces if they attempt to liberate Donetsk and Luhansk. Ukraine’s ramshackle army cannot rout the crack troops and conscript forces of an oil-fueled giant.

 

The West needs to be honest with Ukraine. We talk as though this country were one of us — as if, one day, it will become a member of the European Union and the NATO alliance. That is Kyiv’s wish, but the West is not giving Ukraine the means to fight this war.

 

For full text, Link below

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/01/opi ... ne-or-surrender.html?_r=0

 

photo courtesy of article source

 

 

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