NATO members are drawing dangerously close to direct involvement in the Ukraine conflict, a former US Marine told Sputnik, noting that when it came to the military bloc's stand-off approach to hostilities, "the ten foot pole is now two feet long."
"We saw this all throughout the US proxy war in Syria until they ended up invading Syria themselves, occupying the eastern part of the country east of the Euphrates River," independent journalist and commentator Brian Berletic said.
"And they continued participating in the hostilities, which included against Russia in a more or less indirect way. But they did get closer and closer to direct confrontation, and there were some close calls."
The webcast presenter said the same situation was now playing out in Ukraine, where last Friday's attack on the headquarters building of the Russian Black Sea Fleet in Sevastopol were carried out with British and French-supplied cruise missiles — allegedly guided by US surveillance aircraft flying off the Romanian coast.
During the missile attack on Sevastopol, an American Boeing P-8A Poseidon reconnaissance aircraft of the U.S. Navy was located in the area of the Black Sea coast.
The Ukrainian armed forces "don't have their own satellites. They don't have their own long range intelligence gathering capabilities," Berletic pointed out. "They have throughout the entirety of this conflict depended on the West for intelligence — and collecting intelligence is part of carrying out an armed conflict which makes the US, the UK and others participants in this conflict already."
He warned that NATO was "creeping even further into direct conflict with Russia," a situation he called "very dangerous."
"The West trying to goad Russia into some sort of escalation," Berletic said, "because you can see how disinterested the general West is in this conflict."
He cited the ongoing international scandal after the Canadian parliament gave two standing ovations to 98-year-old Yaroslav Hunka, an immigrant from Ukraine who fought for the Nazis in the Second World War as part of the 14th Waffen SS Grenadier Division, during a visit by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
"People are growing tired of this, and the West needs something extreme to stir everyone up and galvanize them to supercharge this, to give them the political capital they need to escalate," Berletic said, because "Russia has more or less won this."
Those who are aware of NATO's push to escalate the conflict are "increasingly appalled" by them, he said.
For more incisive commentary on the top news stories, tune in to our Sputnik Radio show The Critical Hour.