Russia feeling newly aggressive now that Trump is gone: Moscow threatens to BOMB British warship HMS Defender if it sails close to Crimea again
Every time Joe Biden speaks, he proves to our adversaries that the United States, the titular head of NATO, is being led by an invalid who should be at home sitting on a shaded deck with a cold glass of tea watching the birds, not in the Oval Office.
And every time he speaks and sounds as though he’s halfway to dementia and Alzheimers, he further empowers those enemies to act.
When Donald Trump was president, he made it clear to our allies and enemies alike he was large and in charge and fully in control of his faculties. They knew when he spoke, when he warned, when he threatened, he wasn’t bluffing, as he proved on numerous occasions.
But these adversaries don’t fear Biden, and they certainly don’t fear his back-up, ‘Vice President’ Kamala Harris. They see her as uber-focused on enhancing her own power once Biden’s handlers 25th Amendment him into retirement, so they’re not worried one iota about what he or she will do if they step up to protect their own interests as Russia has just threatened to do.
Britain might have had the mightiest naval fleet once upon a time, but it doesn’t anymore, and Moscow knows it; that’s why Vlad Putin has warned London he’ll blow one of Her Majesty’s warships out of the water if it breaches Russia’s naval security zone near Crimea again.
A top Russian official has warned British warships could be bombed the next time they sail too close to Crimea after warning shots were fired at HMS Defender on Wednesday.
The British Type 45 destroyer sailed within the 12-mile limit of Crimea near Cape Fiolent in the Black Sea which Russia claims as its own territory but the West sees as international waters.
After the flashpoint, which saw 20 Su-24s buzzing over the Royal Navy vessel, Russia’s deputy foreign minister Sergey Ryabkov warned: ‘What can we do? We can appeal to common sense, demand respect for international law.”
“If this does not help, we can bomb not only in the direction but also on target, if our colleagues do not understand,” Ryabkov continued. “I warn everyone violating the state borders of the Russian Federation under the slogan of free navigation, from such provocative steps, because the security of our country comes first.”
But wait; isn’t an attack on one NATO member the same as an attack on all NATO members? Yes.
And aren’t all NATO members obliged to respond to such attacks? Yes, under Article V of the NATO Charter.
However, who believes that’s seriously going to happen? Who believes that Europe, which comprises nearly all of NATO, will go to war against Russia, especially after Russia is set to complete an energy pipeline into Germany, Europe’s richest NATO member?
No one in their right mind believes that. No one who is serious about world affairs as they stand today believes that.
More to to the point, Russia obviously doesn’t believe NATO will retaliate, either; otherwise, a top Russian official, who speaks on behalf of Putin, would never have threatened to destroy a NATO member’s warship. Especially a nuclear-armed NATO member.
So clearly, Putin sees in Biden what he saw in Barack Obama: Weakness. The same weakness and lack of resolve that led him to invade the Crimea in the first place, during Obama’s second term, and to launch an insurgency in nearby Ukraine.
At least the British are looking at the situation clear-eyed.
“There’s huge scope for an accident to occur, misinterpretation, leading to an actual kinetic engagement and it could be a bit of time before somebody grabs that red phone and calms things down,” Britain’s Chair of the Defence Select Committee, Tobias Ellwood, told the Daily Mail.
Sources include:
DailyMail.co.uk
NationalSecurity.news