At 5:58 pm on December 18, 2022, the Twitter account, @blackintheempir (“Black in the Empire”, belonging to an “Anti Establishment Vet w/ commentary from experience inside the war machine and life in the civilian world as a Black man”) posted the following tweet:
If Russia’s military is so pitiful, why hasn’t NATO beat them yet?
— Black in the Empire (@blackintheempir) December 19, 2022
A fair question, given the reality that the 10-month-old war raging in Ukraine has, from its very inception, been a conflict between Russia and the “collective West,” where Ukraine has functioned as a de factor proxy for the US-led North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).
This status did not evolve because of “Russia’s unprovoked war of aggression” against Ukraine, a common western narrative, but rather functions as a direct result of the intent of NATO, expressed through a policy more than a dozen years in the making, to use Ukraine as a vehicle to undermine and weaken Russia through a proxy war of attrition, one where NATO was willing to sacrifice the national integrity, sovereignty, viability, blood, and treasure of Ukraine for its intended purpose.
We know this how? The memorandum written by William Burns, the current Director of the CIA, and former US Ambassador of the US to Russia, on January 30, 2008, regarding NATO efforts to bring Ukraine into its fold, provides a good starting point. In short, Burns predicted that any effort to make Ukraine a NATO member would lead to civil war in Ukraine between Ukrainian nationalists and ethnic-Russians that would compel a Russian military intervention—classic cause-effect analysis.
Despite this stark warning, in April 2008, during the NATO Summit held in Bucharest, Romania, the organization announced that Ukraine would eventually become a member of the organization, a move that the US Secretary of Defense at the time, Robert Gates, decried as “recklessly ignoring what the Russians considered their own vital national interests.”
Thanks to the stunning admissions of both former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko and former German Chancellor Angela Merkle, we now know that the 2014 and 1015 Minsk Accords, negotiated by Germany and France (both NATO members), together with Ukraine, were nothing more than a sham designed to buy time for NATO to build a Ukrainian military capable of defeating ethnic Russians who opposed the February 2014 coup that ousted the constitutionally-elected Ukrainian president, Viktor Yanukovich, replacing him with a government which embraced the odious ideology of the ultra-nationalist (and one-time ally of Adolf Hitler), Stepan Bandera.
The Minsk agreements ostensibly set in motion a ceasefire which saw the ethnic Russian opponents of the Ukrainian nationalists trade their military advantage (they had surrounded and were preparing to defeat a significant portion of the Ukrainian military in and around the town of Debaltseve) for the prospects of a negotiated peace that would see the breakaway territories of the Donbas remain under Ukrainian sovereign control in exchange for constitutionally-guaranteed autonomy that protected their Russian cultural heritage.
But neither Ukraine nor its NATO masters had any intention of seeing the Minsk agreements reach fruition. Instead, in 2015, the US and NATO established the Yavoriv Combat Training Center in western Ukraine, near the city of Lvov where, for the next seven years, more than 27,000 Ukrainian soldiers (10% of the regular establishment of the Ukrainian Army and including thousands of pro-Nazi members of the Azov Regiment) were trained for the sole purpose of fighting Russians in eastern Ukraine.
There is no doubt that the current conflict in Ukraine is a byproduct of a NATO master plan which sought to bring Ukraine into its ranks for the sole purpose of promulgating a conflict with Russia where Ukraine would function as NATO’s proxy to weaken, and eventually defeat, Russia through a war of attrition that NATO planners knew would result in the destruction of Ukraine.
With this background in mind, @blackintheempir’s tweet seemed like a fair question, especially since this was a war that NATO had been preparing for since at least 2008.
Enter Adam Kinzinger, stage right. On December 19, 2022, the Republican Representative from Illinois tweeted out a response:
I’m hoping this is a joke. NATO vs Russia would be like a real three day operation. https://t.co/kf53SJhWE8
— Adam Kinzinger #fella (@AdamKinzinger) December 19, 2022
Kinzinger’s Twitter bio defines the Congressman as a “Husband, dad, pilot, Lt. Col in @AirNatlGuard, founder of @Country_F1rst. US Congressman challenging conspiracy theories, always standing for truth. #NAFO.”
I was struck by the unprofessional language used by someone who openly embraces his status as a Lieutenant Colonel in the Air National Guard, namely that a war between NATO and Russia (two nuclear armed entities) would be, like, “a real” (as opposed to “fake”) 3-day operation.
Besides the college frat-boy semantics involved (like, wow), Kinzinger’s tweet exposes a level of ignorance which, unfortunately, is not unique to the wannabe tough guy from the Illinois National Guard.
Kinzinger knows nothing about the kind of “real war” that would be waged between NATO and Russia for the simple fact that he spent that past two decades participating in the “fake” wars waged by the US in both Iraq and Afghanistan—the man flew KC-135 tankers, before transitioning to the smaller RC-26B twin-engine spy plane, which Kinzinger flew in the permissive airspace over Iraq, supporting US special operations forces as they hunted down Iraqi insurgents.
I’m not denigrating Kinzinger’s service—the US military is a team, and as a former intelligence officer myself, I know that it takes every member of the military team to execute a successful military operation. But let’s not delude ourselves—Kinzinger was more at risk of being knocked out of the sky by a bird strike than hostile fire. Kinzinger may know a thing or two about flying small aircraft high in the sky over the deserts of Iraq, but he knows nothing about “real war.”
Read the whole article here.
