Scott Ritter and Ray McGovern presented a sobering picture of the direction the confrontation between NATO and Russia has taken in Ukraine, in a May 14 podcast with Garland Nixon. Ritter acknowledged upfront that he has changed his previous assessment of the likelihood of success of the Russian special military operation (SMO), due to the combined effect of the massive flow of weapons and support to Ukraine from the U.S. and NATO, and Russia’s unwillingness or inability to interdict weapon shipments into the western part of the country. This has given the Ukrainian military time to constitute a credible force to inflict damage on the Russian forces engaged. The Russians are continuing to carry out an effective degradation of Ukraine’s forces in the east, but the new weapons delivered give Ukraine the capability to inflict some defeats on the Russians, and mean that Russia is facing an unending counterinsurgency that will bleed them dry. The Russian General Staff is aware of this, and he expects they will be forced to shift from a SMO to general war with the intention of pulverizing western Ukraine and destroying Kyiv. This will require Russia to mobilize an additional 1.5 million troops.
A second major point is that the two agreed that Russia will not allow Finland to join NATO, as it goes against Putin’s demand that there be no further NATO expansion. Ritter said he is convinced Russia will launch an SMO to “destroy Finland as a modern nation state” if Finland joins NATO. The danger is that this would lead to a war between Russia and NATO.
Both McGovern and Ritter stated directly that the present political and military leadership of the U.S. is insane, echoing Helga Zepp-LaRouche, saying that the evidence of their insanity is that they believe they can win a nuclear war. As the “empire goes down” and the U.S. leaders recognize that its conventional military capability is too weak to win a conventional war, they will be more inclined to go nuclear.
In the beginning of the discussion, Ritter said that Biden promised Putin in their December 30, 2021 phone discussion that the U.S. would not place offensive weapons in Ukraine. Either he was lying, or was overridden by the military-intelligence chiefs, as they have been engaged in planning to destroy Russia since the collapse of the Soviet Union. (http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/67487)
The discussion lasted for more than an hour, and contained many more valuable insights. The link for the podcast is https://youtu_be/m4SISILtlpc
