The Minds of Desperate Men
by Scott Ritter | Mar 5, 2024
“O mischief, thou art swift, to enter in the thoughts of desperate men!”
—Romeo and Juliet, Act 5, Scene 1
With these words, William Shakespeare, the immortal bard, captures the psychology of men who, believing they are confronted with a situation for which there is no hope of resolving, undertake actions that will inevitably lead to their death.
Although set in 14th century Mantua, Italy, Shakespeare’s tragedy could easily have been transported in time to present day France, where French President Emmanuel Macron, in the role of a modern Romeo, after learning of the demise of his true love, Ukraine, decides to commit suicide by encouraging the dispatch of NATO troops to Ukraine to confront Russia militarily.
Macron was hosting a crisis meeting last week, convened to discuss the deteriorating conditions on the battlefield in Ukraine following the Russian capture of the fortress city of Adviivka. The meeting was attended by senior representatives from NATO member states, including the U.S. and Canada.
“We should not exclude that there might be a need for security that then justifies some elements of deployment,” Macron said during a press conference convened after the meeting. “But I’ve told you very clearly what France maintains as its position, which is a strategic ambiguity that I stand by.”
The other participants of the meeting immediately rushed forward to announce that, from their perspective, there was no “strategic ambiguity” — the dispatch of NATO forces to Ukraine was not on the table.
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who attended the Paris talks, rejected Macron’s proposal out of hand. “What was agreed from the beginning among ourselves and with each other also applies to the future,” Scholtz declared, “namely that there will be no soldiers on Ukrainian soil sent there by European states or NATO states.”
Scholz’s statement was echoed by other NATO leaders, leaving France standing alone to bear the consequences of Macron’s “strategic ambiguity.”
Even as NATO rushed forward to bring clarity to Macron’s stance, Russia made it quite clear what the consequences of any precipitous deployment of NATO forces to Ukraine would be. Dmitri Peskov, the Kremlin spokesperson, declared that, in the event of any NATO deployment into Ukraine,
“we should not talk about the probability but about the inevitability [of a direct war with NATO]. That’s how we assess it.”
Peskov noted that most NATO nations participating in the Paris conference “maintain a fairly sober assessment of the potential dangers of such an action and the potential danger of being directly involved in a hot conflict, involving them on the battlefield.”
He also noted Macron’s stance regarding “the need to inflict a strategic defeat on Russia,” an objective shared by the U.S. and the NATO secretary general.
Putin Responds
In his annual address to the Russian Parliament, delivered a few days after Macron gave his press conference, Russian President Vladimir Putin removed any ambiguity as to what the consequences of any NATO intervention in Ukraine would be.
“We remember the fate of those who once sent their contingents to the territory of our country,” Putin said, referring to the past invasions of Russia by Hitler and Napoleon. “But now the consequences for potential interventionists will be much more tragic.”
And, just to drive the point home, Putin went on to describe Russia’s most recent advances in the field of strategic nuclear weapons — a new nuclear-powered cruise missile, the Burevestnik, which is in the final stages of development, and the deployment of Sarmat heavy intercontinental ballistic missiles and Avangard hypersonic warheads that are immune to Western anti-missile defenses.
Putin pointed out that two of these new Russian weapons — the Zircon and Kinzhal —have seen combat duty in the Ukrainian conflict.
The NATO leaders “must grasp that we also have weapons capable of striking targets on their territory,” Putin said. “Everything they are inventing now, spooking the world with the threat of a conflict involving nuclear weapons, which potentially means the end of civilization — don’t they realize this?”
The clearest evidence available that NATO leaders do not realize the consequences of their actions comes in the form of a transcript of a conversation, released by the editor-in-chief of RT, Margarita Simonyan, on her page on the VK social network, which has four senior German military officers discussing how they planned to implement instructions given to them by German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius regarding the delivery of the Taurus cruise missile to Ukraine.
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