Jean-Daniel Ruch, Switzerland’s former Ambassador to Türkiye, was interviewed on Dec. 15 by YouTube channel “Antithèse.” Ruch, as Ambassador to Ankara, had participated in the Istanbul peace talks in March 2022 between Ukraine and Russia, and relayed his experience and responses to the U.S. and British decision to “pull the plug” on the negotiations.
“The West pulled the plug on the negotiations that were on the verge of leading to a ceasefire,” Ruch said. “We had the opportunity to stop a war,” he went on, and it was clear at that time that if it weren’t stopped, hundreds of thousands would be killed.
So “why did all these people die?” he asked. “I found that there was something deeply immoral in the decisions that were taken in London, in Washington, in Kiev. Also in Moscow … because we already had a ceasefire close at hand, and then it was the Americans with their British allies who said ‘no’….The [U.S.] Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, whom we can quote, said a few days later: ‘No, it’s too early, we must first weaken Russia.’ They may have weakened Russia, but they weakened the whole West at the same time!” Ruch said.
Ambassador Ruch also noted that then-British Prime Minister Boris Johnson had flown to Kiev to tell Zelenskyy to tear up the peace agreements, though he incorrectly ascribes Johnson as having acted on the orders of the Americans.
Ruch then brings up Russia’s Oreshnik hypersonic missile. If Russia really does have a lot of these, “the West really doesn’t have many solutions. Anti-missile systems don’t work, drones don’t work, so the only way to counter this is by threatening to use even more destructive weapons … nuclear weapons…. Before we were worried it was Russia that will use nuclear weapons, but now that they have their new hypersonic missile, which is apparently unstoppable, which has a destructive power equivalent to that of a small nuclear bomb.… The Russians no longer need to raise the nuclear threat but now the Westerners do it.”
And if we put troops on the ground, referring to the French President Emmanuel Macron’s proposal, among others in NATO, he asks: “are we really ready for a NATO-Russia war?”