Former weapons inspector Scott Ritter posted an op-ed to Consortium News on Sept. 22, in which he warned that the clock is ticking and is very close to the end. In it, he minces no words: “The reality is that since the collapse of the Soviet Union at the end of 1991, the U.S. and its European allies have been conspiring to subjugate Russia in an effort to ensure that the Russian people are never again able to mount a geopolitical challenge to an American hegemony defined by a ‘rules-based international order’ that had been foisted on the world in the aftermath of the Second World War,” he writes.
Ritter argues that in fact, Russia accomplished its goal of demilitarization of Ukraine “But the very forces which Putin had described in his mobilization address conspired to further their anti-Russian agenda by pouring in tens of billions of dollars of military aid (exceeding, in a manner of months, the entire annual defense budget of Russia) designed not to promote a Ukrainian victory, but rather hasten a strategic Russian defeat.”
“Putin’s decision to order a partial mobilization of the Russian military, when combined with the decision to conduct the referendums in the Donbass and occupied Ukraine, radically transforms the SMO [special military operation] from a limited-scope operation to one linked to the existential survival of Russia. Once the referenda are conducted, and the results forwarded to the Russian parliament, what is now the territory of Ukraine will, in one fell swoop, become part of the Russian Federation—the Russian homeland,” Ritter writes. “All Ukrainian forces that are on the territory of the regions to be incorporated into Russia will be viewed as occupiers; and Ukrainian shelling of this territory will be treated as an attack on Russia, triggering a Russian response. Whereas the SMO had, by design, been implemented to preserve Ukrainian civil infrastructure and reduce civilian casualties, a post-SMO military operation will be one configured to destroy an active threat to Mother Russia itself. The gloves will come off.”
So, the question, Ritter says, is will U.S./NATO policy continue to be simply to aid Ukraine to defend itself, or will it be the strategic defeat of Russia? If it’s the second, that “means attacking Mother Russia. This means war with Russia.”
Ritter explains that Russia considers itself to already be in a war with the West, as stated by Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu in his TV interview following Putin’s address. “Put in this context, the Russian partial mobilization isn’t designed to defeat the Ukrainian military, but to defeat the forces of NATO and the ‘collective West’ that have been assembled in Ukraine,” Ritter continues. He then refers to Putin’s statement on Russia using all available means to defend itself should its sovereignty and territorial integrity come under attack, means that include its nuclear forces. “This is what the world has come to—a mad rush toward nuclear apocalypse predicated on the irrational expansion of NATO and hubris-laced Russophobic policies seemingly ignorant of the reality that the Ukraine conflict has now become a matter of existential importance to Russia.”
“The U.S. and its allies in the ‘collective West’ now have to decide if the continued pursuit of a decades-long policy of isolating and destroying Russia is a matter of existential importance to them, and if the continued support of a Ukrainian government that is little more than the modern-day manifestation of the hateful ideology of Stepan Bandera is worth the lives of their respective citizenry, and that of the rest of the world,” Ritter concludes. “The doomsday clock is literally one second to midnight and we in the West have only ourselves to blame.” (https://consortiumnews.com/2022/09/22/scott-ritter-reaping-the-whirlwind/)
