America Pours Oil on the Fire in Ukraine

Three days ago, the U.S. Army Command reported that it will transfer 300 soldiers from the U.S. 173rd Airborne Brigade stationed in Italy to western Ukraine — Operation “Fearless Guardian.” They are there to provide the Ukrainian National Guard tactical training, the beginning of a rotation lasting six months.

A similar mission is already underway with the Canadians and the British, albeit with much fewer numbers. The assistance should be “non-lethal,” and the non-lethality of the assistance that the Americans provide — the difference between lethal weapon systems and technical assistance such as artillery radar — is a matter of definition.

It should be noted that the Minsk II agreement, in which the German chancellor has invested considerable political capital, is still valid. Nothing better is available, and after the accord came a leap into the darkness. There are those who forget that there is no upper limit to the escalation and that nuclear weapons are a last resort in this game. The Russian military doctrine values them as advanced artillery, and Russian generals have recently spoken accordingly. Those who forget must know that an emergency looms that no one from today’s generation of politicians can even remotely fathom. Nuclear weapons have been forgotten in the West, but they’re not absent from this world.

The Way to Pre-War

What may look to American military personnel like an accurately measured stabilization of the situation towards eastern Ukraine and the separatists supported by Moscow, appears instead from the perspective of the Kremlin to be confirmation of the greatest fear of being surrounded and the assumptions made when it comes to American strategy. The way to a pre-war period has been and is now paved with misunderstandings.

Today, it is not a case of stable confrontation and rehearsed conflict management, unlike the late stages of the Cold War. That period is over and will not come again soon. Too great the distrust, too deep the convictions. On one side stand democracy and the law of nations, and on the other, Mother Russia claiming its legacy following the collapse of the Soviet Union.

There will instead be a reinventing of the rules of intercourse between nuclear superpowers in an open experiment, similar to five decades ago in the two-sided crisis over Berlin and Cuba. This can be perilous, as before.

The posting of Western advisers is apparently a controlled entry, for the time being. But there’s not only a lack of strategic concept. One should remember Clausewitz, who warned: “In such dangerous things as war, the worst are the errors that that arise out of goodness.”

The German chancellor must stand firm: no weapons, no soldiers.