Former NATO Deputy Supreme Commander General Sir Richard Shirreff warned this week that the U.S. and European leaders are asleep at the wheel when it comes to confronting Russia in Ukraine.
Shirreff told the BBC that he believes that remarks made by U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio in Saudi Arabia were “Cloud Cuckoo Land.”
“I think that it shows a failure to understand what Russia is about,” he said. “What Russia is about is removing Ukraine from the map as a sovereign state, incorporating Ukraine, either physically annexing it in terms of the Eastern and Southern regions of Ukraine, or installing a puppet government in Kiev so that Ukraine becomes a sort of client state, rather like Belarus.”
He said that any negotiator who believes that Russia will accept peace terms that Ukraine is comfortable with “is deluding themselves.”
Shirreff said that President Donald Trump’s intense criticism of Ukraine and its president, Volodymyr Zelensky, means that “Pax Americana is finished.”
“America has effectively abdicated its leadership of the free world,” he said. “Because with leadership comes responsibilities, and it has made it very clear that it is not going to be the security guarantor for Europe.”
He said that it was up to Europe and Canada to forge a new security alliance without the U.S. to guarantee their own safety.
Shirreff warned that if Russia senses that NATO is weakening that it may invade all the Baltic states in an attempt to rebuild the Russian empire.
“We through our failure to spend more on defense, our willingness to freeload off American largesse for the last umpteen decades, have now got to dig deep,” he said. “Because now we’ve got to replace the capabilities that America brought to the alliance. Now, that is one massive ask. Of course, it is.”
He said the only way to stop Russian aggression on the continent was to build a “strong NATO deterrent presence from the Baltic to the Black Sea, incorporating Ukraine as a NATO member.”
“That requires every NATO member—including America—to lean in and, as a start, put together a strategy to support the Ukrainians in defeating Russia,” he added. “Because that’s the only way Russia is going to be stopped. Anything less than that, which is what we’re seeing now in spades, is merely starting the unraveling of European security, which could so easily end in catastrophe.”
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