Scott Ritter, a former Marine intelligence officer who served as a UN weapons inspector in Iraq, published an article in RT which sharply criticized the Biden administration’s decision last week to provide HIMARS rocket systems to the Kyiv government. The sophisticated new weapons are capable of accurately striking targets at a distance of nearly 50 miles, and thus are capable of hitting targets inside Russia if placed at the border.
Ritter says that the move will only “ensure more deaths in Ukraine, but won’t change the conflict’s eventual outcome,” adding that it only shows that “the U.S. is willing to sacrifice countless lives to weaken Russia…. The U.S. is doing everything possible to extend the suffering of the Ukrainian people by creating conditions that appear to mandate an expansion of Russia’s military effort, and the subsequent destruction of the Ukrainian nation.”
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov told a British reporter at his online press conference on June 6 that “I can only add that the longer-range arms you supply, the farther will we push from our border the line where the neo-Nazis will be able to threaten the Russian Federation.”
Ritter then presented his evaluation: “Biden’s posture flies in the face of historical and practical reality. Russia will never give up Crimea, nor will it pressure the newly independent republics of Lugansk and Donetsk to rescind their hard-won liberation. Any other questions of territorial status are directly related to battlefield realities, and everything indicates that not only will Ukraine be unable to reverse Russia’s territorial gains but will more than likely lose additional swaths of territory, in the weeks to come, as the fighting continues.
“Biden, by providing advanced weapons to Ukraine, is seeking to accomplish the impossible—a negotiated Ukrainian victory.… The ongoing Russian-Ukrainian conflict is one that should never have been fought and once started, should have been brought to a quick conclusion. The blame for both the initiation of the conflict, and the fact that it is still ongoing today, does not lie, as Biden suggests, with Russia … but rather as a direct result of the policies undertaken by both NATO and Ukraine to threaten the legitimate national security interests of the Russian nation.” (http://www.rt.com/russia/556716-russia-ukraine-himars-us/)
