Darrell Castle talks about the war in Ukraine and how the NATO forces opposing Russia are growing increasingly desperate as Russia continues to grind down the Ukrainian military.

Transcription / Notes

DESPERATION IN UKRAINE

Hello, this is Darrell Castle with today’s Castle Report. This is Friday the 12th day of April in the year of our Lord 2024. I will be talking about the war in Ukraine and how the NATO forces opposing Russia are growing increasingly desperate as Russia continues to grind down the Ukrainian military. The state of the war is becoming obvious and hard to ignore to all but the most ardent anti-Russia types.

My beat is war again and this time it’s a war that is all but forgotten with the war in Gaza starting to take Ukraine from the minds of the media. The increasing desperation is evidenced by the threats of French President Emmanuel Macron to send French troops to Ukraine. The Russians, in response, said that French troops would become priority targets if they entered Ukraine. These French troops would be independent of NATO, but that would still put the U.S. on a dangerous path that could lead ultimately to nuclear war.

It should be obvious to any rational person that Russia has thousands of nuclear weapons and if Russian backs are against the wall by NATO on its border would use them. Unfortunately, it appears that there are a lot of irrational people running foreign policy in the U.S. and other NATO countries. Things could and probably would escalate quickly if Macron sent French troops to Russia’s border. The vice president of the Russian Duma which is the equivalent of Congress or parliament is Pyotr Tolstoy, a descendent of the great Russian, Leo Tolstoy. He warned that it would take only two minutes to nuke Paris.

The Russian air force is becoming more and more active in Ukraine because Ukraine’s air defense system has been degraded by the war so, in response, NATO says it will step up the schedule for delivery of F-16’s. I’ve mentioned before when the F-16 decision was first announced that Ukrainian airfields cannot accommodate those aircraft. They would, therefore, need bases outside Ukraine in NATO countries and Putin has warned that those bases would be legitimate targets. Russia has hypersonic missiles that are extremely difficult to defend and that would, of course, require a NATO retaliatory response. Where would all that madness lead, I wonder.

The listed reason for all this escalation is that Russia poses some existential threat to NATO and/or Europe but that premise is clearly absurd. The U.S. has already caused severe damage to the economies of most European countries, especially Germany by destroying the Nord Stream Pipeline, so who is the bigger threat to Europe. Isn’t that destruction a message that says obey me or else. The reason I say that the idea that Russia could invade other countries in Europe is absurd is that Russia has nothing to gain by it. The Russian military has struggled for more than two years to occupy a small territory on its border with Ukraine.

Why would Putin want to trigger an Article 5 NATO response when none of those countries can do anything for him and would put him on a fast track to nuclear war. Sometimes people point out that Putin once said, “whoever doesn’t miss the Soviet Union doesn’t have a heart.” They conveniently leave out the rest of the sentence which was, whoever wants it back doesn’t have a brain.” He has a brain and he has no intention to restore the Soviet Union. Russia does, however, have strategic interests like any great power.

Ukraine, and especially Crimea, have always been strategic interests of the most vital sort to Russia. So, Washington says that Ukraine is a free and independent nation and can join NATO anytime it wants and doesn’t need Russian permission to do so even though it is on Russia’s border. The U.S. is free to declare the entire Western Hemisphere off limits by way of the Monroe doctrine whi...