In a lengthy article posted to Consortium News on Jan. 24, former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter warned that the anger NATO is ignoring, is that its escalation is pushing Russia towards a situation where, under its own military doctrine, a nuclear response could be called for. Ritter cites U.K. Defense Secretary Ben Wallace, during a Jan. 16 address in which he announced the U.K. plan for sending Challenger tanks to Ukraine, telling the House of Commons that it meant that the Ukrainians “can go from resisting to expelling Russian forces from Ukrainian soil.”
“Wallace seems to ignore that by empowering Ukraine to expel Russian troops from what are—following the annexation of the four former Ukrainian territories (Lugansk, Donetsk, Zaporozhye and Kherson) last September—permanently part of the Russian Federation, NATO would be potentially creating the conditions under which Russia would be able to doctrinally employ nuclear weapons,” Ritter writes. “Those conditions would be to defend against the accumulation of conventional military power capable of threatening the existential survival of Russia.”
“Russia, however, has not ignored this,” Ritter continues. “Speaking after the Ramstein Contact Group finished its meeting, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters, ‘Potentially, this is extremely dangerous, it will mean bringing the conflict to a whole new level, which, of course, will not bode well from the point of view of global and pan-European security.’”
The first part of Ritter’s article is devoted to a review of the history of how we got to where we are, culminating with the Jan. 20 Ramstein meeting. He concludes with a warning to the West, an image of the troops of the Red Army’s 8th Guards Army in Berlin in 1945, the modern descendants of whom know fully well their historical legacy and what is expected of them. “This, more than anything else, is the true expression of the Ramstein effect, a cause-effect relationship that the West does not seem either able or willing to discern before it is too late for the tens of thousands of Ukrainian soldiers whose lives are about to be sacrificed on an altar of national hubris and ignorance,” Ritter concludes. (https://consortiumnews.com/2023/01/24/scott-ritter-the-nightmare-of-nato-equipment-being-sent-to-ukraine/)
