In a 7-page article published on the Ukrainian news site Ukrinform on Sept. 7, commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian Armed Forces Gen. Valeriy Zaluzhnyi and co-author Lt. Gen. Mykhailo Zabrodskyi, the First Deputy Chairman of the National Security, Defense, and Intelligence Committee of the Verkhovna Rada, argue that to be defeated, Russia must be robbed of its sense of “impunity” to act as it wishes in Ukraine and that requires a global war. The publication of the article on the day before the Sept. 8 Ramstein air base meeting of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group, makes it likely that the document in fact originated with NATO.
The most shocking part of the article, “Prospects for Running a Military Campaign in 2023: Ukraine’s Perspective,” was its demand that the West preemptively attack Russia in order to stop what might be Moscow’s plan to launch tactical nuclear weapons. “It is hard to imagine that even nuclear strikes will allow Russia to break Ukraine’s will to resist,” they boast. “But the threat that will emerge for the whole of Europe cannot be ignored. The possibility of direct involvement of the world’s leading powers in a ‘limited’ nuclear conflict, bringing closer the prospect of World War 3, cannot be completely ruled out either.
“As a forced step, which is still extremely necessary, we must return to the source of Russian confidence, which is impunity. Any Russian attempts at practical steps in the use of tactical nuclear weapons must be preempted by employing the entire arsenal of means at the disposal of world powers. After all, starting from this moment, the Russian Federation will become not only a threat to the peaceful coexistence of Ukraine, its neighbors, and a number of European countries, but also a truly global-scale terrorist state,” Zaluzhnyi and Zabrodskyi conclude.
