'No Chance' War-Weary Neocons Will Put NATO Boots on the Ground in Ukraine Amid Putin's Warning
15:21 GMT 13.03.2024 (Updated: 15:41 GMT 13.03.2024)
© AFP 2023 / VANO SHLAMOV
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Russia’s president has offered his sternest warning yet against the deployment of regular NATO ground troops in Ukraine, saying Moscow would treat them as invaders, and that Washington knows it. Sputnik reached out to respected Russian and US military and foreign affairs experts to get a better sense of the implications of Putin’s remarks.
Watch the full video of President Putin’s interview with Rossiya Segodnya director general Dmitry Kiselev here.
President Putin has given another no-holds barred interview, this time to Dmitry Kiselev, the chief of Sputnik parent Rossiya Segodnya, commenting on an array of global problems, from the crisis in Ukraine to strategic risks facing the globe thanks to the Damocles Sword of nuclear weapons hanging over humanity’s head.
A large portion of the interview centered around Ukraine and the proxy war Russia’s military is fighting against the NATO alliance, with Putin making several major statements on the risks of escalation.
“The United States have announced that they are not going to send troops [to Ukraine, ed.]. We know what American troops on Russian territory would be – they would be invaders. We will treat them the same way even if they appeared on the territory of Ukraine. They understand this,” Putin said.
Putin added that no amount of foreign weapons or even troops on the ground would change the situation on the battlefield, with the Western-backed regime in Kiev already crawling with foreign “advisers” and “mercenaries” and still suffering horrific losses at the hands of Russia’s Armed Forces.
‘Cowardly’ Neocons Risk Awakening Russian Bear
“Americans are very cowardly warriors. I dealt with them in Afghanistan, in other hot spots, in Yugoslavia when they were bombing the country. They are only capable of fighting from within the range of their artillery,” Col. Gen. Georgy Shpak (ret.), a former commander of Russia’s Airborne Forces, told Sputnik, adding that Putin’s warning about NATO boots on the ground in Ukraine was both “timely and correct.”
“The whole world knows that all of the conscience, honor and dignity” among US elites “have long been exhausted,” with the Washington establishment only seeming to respect an adversary that displays “strength,” Shpak said.
“The president demonstrated this strength today. He calmly said that as soon as an American soldier sets foot on the territory of Ukraine, he will be an invader, and the appropriate conclusions will be drawn. The whole world knows that Russians know how to fight. Today, for example, about 1-2 percent of the capabilities of our people are engaged in Ukraine. Well, we can mobilize the whole of the people to fight the interventionists,” Shpak stressed.
“The Russian people know how to pull themselves together, and we have the capabilities, the experience and the plants and factories. Most importantly, our people are hard workers who will stand up for the defense of our Motherland,” the retired general added.
Dr. Joe Siracusa, a US-born international affairs observer, historian and Russia specialist at Australia’s Curtin University, agrees that Putin’s choice of words made it obvious in no uncertain terms that Russia wouldn’t back down in Ukraine.
“He made it very clear that if the United States or its European allies actually put boots on the ground in Ukraine, they’d probably be at war with the Russian Federation. He’s made it very clear what the ‘red line’ here is, and that is the introduction of American or NATO forces there,” Siracusa, the dean of Curtin’s Global Futures program, told Sputnik.
Accordingly, the academic is confident that there’s really “no chance” of the US or NATO getting involved on the ground in Ukraine, even if “sometimes some of the Europeans get very excited about this, particularly the Poles and the French. But it would be very risky on their part because the United States Congress is frankly in no mood to continue funding” the conflict, as evidenced by the continued holdup of some $61 billion in proposed spending by the MAGA Republican-led House of Representatives.
Russia’s War Economy
Putin also dedicated part of his interview to the growing capabilities of Russia’s defense industrial base, saying it is increasingly in a position to outproduce and outmatch the collective West, and at a fraction of what NATO spends on defense. Putin said the development of Russia’s defense sector is “progressing, without any exaggeration, by leaps and bounds,” and “nullifying” entire classes of NATO weapons systems (such as missile defenses) with its new strategic capabilities, notwithstanding the Pentagon’s gargantuan “black hole” of a defense budget. Russia will continue to increase its capabilities in this area, the president indicated.
General Shpak said such measures can only be characterized as “timely” in light of the crisis in relations with the US and NATO.
“We have very strong design bureaus. When I was a commander, I visited almost all of them, from those in Volgograd to the factories in Tula and the Urals. They are an example for the whole world in how to make excellent equipment, excellent ammunition, excellent weapons out of nothing. And today the president understands that we cannot stand in one place. We must immediately allocate the necessary funding for our design bureaus, to meet the needs of our industry, especially the defense industry,” Shpak said.
For his part, Dr. Siracusa said it has become patently obvious that Russia has proven its ability “to reproduce or to replenish munitions as soon as they’re used in Ukraine. In fact, I think Russia outproduces Americans by 10 to 1 in terms of ammunition reproduction.”
Washington's Miscalculated Proxy War
Attributing Russia’s successes to superior organization, the academic emphasized that “the United States did not expect to be bankrolling Ukraine this long,” with Washington paying not only for Kiev’s arms bills, but even the salaries of public servants. “But there’s really no interest in the United States in pursuing Biden’s policy of supporting Zelensky against Russia,” especially given his role in causing the crisis in the first place, Siracusa said.
“I’m sure that Putin and Biden could have worked this out before the conflict began. Putin has made it very clear since 2007 about the danger of the encroachment of NATO, and the United States has been tone deaf to these suggestions. So, as far as I’m concerned, Joe Biden left President Putin with very few options in February 2022, because the United States failed to come to the party, they failed to agree to a negotiation, they failed to rebalance, recalibrate the balance of nuclear terror in that part of the world," the academic explained.
“I’m sure Putin didn’t want a war. What he wanted was a settlement with the United States to make sure that Ukraine did not join NATO, and there would be no advanced NATO weapons systems on Ukraine’s borders. Very few people in the United States realize that Ukraine’s borders are about 400 miles [450 km, ed.] to Moscow, and a rocket going at it at the speeds that they’re going at, they could deliver a nuclear warhead in about three minutes,” Siracusa said.
If the shoe were on the other foot and an adversary of the Washington’s tried to deploy strategic weapons in the Americas, Siracusa expressed confidence that the Americans too “would threaten war, as indeed they did in 1962” during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
“Are we ready for negotiations? Yes, we are. But we are only willing to negotiate based on the realities that have emerged, as they say in such cases, on the ground, rather than some kind of fantasies created by psychotropic drugs,” Putin said in his interview with Kiselev, alluding to President Zelensky’s ‘peace plan’.
“Negotiating now just because they’ve run out of ammunition would be ridiculous on our part. We are, however, ready for a serious conversation, and seek to resolve all conflicts, especially this conflict, by peaceful means. But we must clearly and precisely understand for ourselves that this is not a pause for the enemy seeks to take to rearm, but a serious conversations with security guarantees for the Russian Federation,” the Putin emphasized.
