By Scott Taylor
The NATO narrative is very simple and very concise: Russian President Vladimir Putin has massed his troops along the Ukraine border and is poised to invade.
The early intelligence reports predicted that this inevitable military incursion would take place in December and then was revised to January 2022. Satellite images provided by US intelligence sources clearly depict parade squares full of Russian armoured and logistics vehicles parked bumper to bumper in locations we are told are ’near’ the Ukrainian border.
Estimates of the Russian troop build-up ranges from 70,000 to 135,000 soldiers pre-deployed along Ukraine’s eastern boundary (or the ‘Front’ as many hysterical western media reports now describe it).
This is all very frightening stuff if taken at face value and I must admit that many friends, neighbours and relatives have written to me expressing their fears that we are on the brink of a planet -destroying nuclear conflagration.
These fears are of course being deliberately mongered by the brain trust at NATO high command who are playing to the masses in order to pour fuel on the current unlit powder keg.
The problem with the public affairs zealots at NATO HQ is that they cannot keep their fear-du-jours’ in order. To wit: We have been told for nearly eight years now that Russian aggression and Putin’s desire to restore Russia to the Soviet Union’s previous glory days has put the three Baltic States - Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania - in imminent danger of invasion.
To counter this, Canada along with numerous other NATO countries have deployed thousands of troops into the Baltic states as a deterrent to Putin’s allegedly insatiable lust for land. There are presently approximately 650 Canadian combat soldiers forward deployed to Latvia as part of Operation Reassurance.
Which is why it was somewhat surprising that last week Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania all announced that they were shipping a vast arsenal of US supplied anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles to Ukraine in advance of the expected Russian invasion. If we were to believe at face value the NATO hype, once Putin gobbles up Ukraine he will be polishing off the Baltic States, which is why we have so many Canadian soldiers pre-deployed to re-assure the locals of our NATO commitment to a collective defence.
So, how is it that these same threatened Baltic States can suddenly divest themselves of their US-suppled defensive hardware? Which brings us to the question of why everyone is so quick to simply discount the Ukrainian military as its own standing deterrent to Putin’s forces.
Most pundits seem to assume that once the Russians start to roll in, the Ukrainians will offer little to no resistance and that the capital Kiev will fall in a matter of hours. To reinforce this theory, Canada along with the UK, US, Germany and Australia have already engaged in a bit of pre-emptory theatre by withdrawing most diplomats and their families from Kiev in advance of the supposed big Russian push.
Again, why is everyone so quick to dismiss the capabilities of the Ukrainian fighters? There are presently about 280,000 soldiers in the Ukrainian regular forces which could be mobilized to close to one million personnel if you include the newly constituted territorial volunteer units. Bolstering this force, the Ukrainian army possesses some 2400 Main Battle Tanks.
While many of those tanks could be considered obsolete, it should be remembered that the Taliban in Afghanistan never numbered more than 30,000 fighters and they had no armour whatsoever. Yet NATO deployed over 150,000 of the best equipped soldiers the world has ever seen and could not win that two-decade long war.
Surely Putin’s 135,000 troops would fare no better against a determined million-strong Ukrainian military and hostile population of roughly 44 million?
In recent days, the UK and US have pumped into Ukraine an estimated $600 million (US) worth of sophisticated weaponry and munitions. Add to that the fact that NATO instructors, including Canadian military personnel, have been actively training Ukrainian troops since 2014.
Surely all that training and equipment provides one hell of a deterrent to Putin, let alone the threat of increased sanctions or, worst case scenario, NATO intervention in support of Ukraine.
Another thing we should all keep in mind is that Russia has produced some of the world’s best chess players and their military generalship is historically renowned for its strategic deception operations, or ‘maskirovka’ as the Russians call it. The sight of all those Russian vehicles parked near the Ukraine border may look ominous. That is because they are meant to.
There is an old Siberian saying that ‘when the tiger prowls you cannot see him, or smell him’. At the moment we can see the Russian military build-up and it all smells rather fishy to me.
Meanwhile, our NATO leadership is still playing checkers when the game being played by Putin is chess.
