Understanding the Origins and Likely Outcomes of the Russo-Ukrainian War

Answering the questions as to why Russia invaded Ukraine, why Biden's strategy is doomed to fail and what the US must do to end the conflict to prevent it from escalating to a nuclear Third World War

Russian President Putin announcing a Special Military Operation in Ukraine on February 24, 2022

In order to understand the true origins of the Russo-Ukrainian War, it is important to understand that more than anything the outbreak of this preventable war in Europe represented a spectacular failure of the US national security strategy of liberal hegemony which it has pursued for most of the past three decades, including the eastward expansion of NATO, which precipitated it. During the entirety of the Cold War against the Soviet Union from 1945-1991, America was led by clear-eyed foreign policy realists from Harry Truman to George HW Bush, who instinctively understood the inherent limits and constraints of US military power and acted in such a way as to avoid getting the US bogged down in fighting unnecessary wars or at least acted to limit our military involvement in such conflicts. However, for the past few decades, with the exception of President Donald Trump, the US has been led by liberal internationalists and neoconservatives who mistakenly believe the world is defined by a unipolar world order and that the US can interfere militarily in Russia’s and China’s spheres of influence at their whim, willfully blind to the ever-increasing and existential threat posed to the US by the Sino-Russian alliance.

They have done so with little concern of major retaliation against US critical infrastructure with cyber or super Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) weapons or blowback from Moscow or Beijing, let alone of a potential two front war, which the US would be very likely to lose, given our current state of military unpreparedness. That hypothesis is now undergoing its first major stress test with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and, thus far, the results, while still inconclusive, have been far from encouraging. The US will be very fortunate if the Biden administration’s provocative foreign policy towards Russia and China does not cause the US to stumble into an unnecessary Third World War with them that will almost certainly escalate to the nuclear level, which America would not likely survive.

US leaders could stand to benefit by showing a little more strategic empathy towards Russia to help them understand why Putin invaded Ukraine and how we can better satisfy Russia’s legitimate security concerns to prevent any future Russian aggression. Russian leaders from Lenin to the present have been paranoid of the Western Powers ever since the Soviets came to power given that the Western Allied armies invaded Russia after World War One to try to help the White Armies “strangle Bolshevikism in its cradle” to borrow Churchill’s phrase, while Churchill himself attempted to have Lenin assassinated. After the Cold War, Russia lost its Eastern European Empire, nearly half of its Soviet-era population and nearly one-quarter of its territory, totaling over twice as much territory as it was forced to give up under the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in 1918.  At the end of the Cold War as part of Soviet agreement to permit the reunification of Germany in 1990, Secretary of State James Baker promised Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would never be expanded east of Germany. From a Russian perspective, the US broke this promise when it expanded NATO to Russia’s borders for the first time in its history, less than a decade later, including nearly all of the nations that comprised the former Warsaw Pact. Even more provocatively, NATO expanded its membership to include the former Soviet republics of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania infringing upon what Russia considered to be its sphere of influence. This reduced the distance between NATO and Moscow by over two-thirds potentially reducing the warning time for a NATO nuclear missile launch against Russia’s capital to as little as five minutes even though the US has not had any nuclear missiles in Europe for decades and has no plans to deploy them there. Putin has vehemently opposed NATO’s eastward expansion and has repeatedly stated that Ukrainian membership in NATO would be crossing a red line for Russia that could lead to armed conflict but Western leaders did not listen.

As Dr. John Mearsheimer has pointed out, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s decision to engage in an illegal war of aggression against Ukraine was a calculated response to continuing Western provocations and their crossing Russia’s brightest of redlines beginning with NATO’s issuance of the Bucharest Declaration in 2008 which stated that Ukraine would be admitted as a NATO member in the near future. This was followed by the CIA funded coup overthrowing Ukraine’s democratically elected pro-Russian President in February 2014, Ukrainian President Zelensky’s declaration that Ukraine would take back control of Crimea by war if necessary and President Joe Biden's November 2021 strategic partnership agreement with Ukraine reiterating US support for Ukraine joining NATO. However, the final straw for Putin, which led him to order Russia's military to invade Ukraine, was Biden’s refusal to issue a written guarantee that Ukraine would never join NATO something that we already knew and would have cost us nothing to publicly admit. Given all of these provocations, it is a wonder why so many Western leaders were surprised that  Putin took us seriously and invaded Ukraine to prevent its de-facto NATO membership from becoming official?

The map above shows NATO’s expansion into the former Warsaw Pact and former Soviet republics from 1999-2009 with Ukraine as a NATO applicant that Russia views as an existential threat to its security.

According to a Russian source with good insights into Putin’s thinking, Putin stated that he would not withdraw Russian troops from Ukraine’s borders until the US and NATO provided a written guarantee that NATO would never be expanded to include additional former Soviet republics and that his hope was that the West would provide those guarantees so he would not feel the need to order an invasion of Ukraine. In Putin’s mind, Biden's call for regime change and efforts to collapse Russias economy since the Russian invasion have proven all of his paranoid suspicions about the US planning on overthrowing him true, thus fully justifying his decision to invade Ukraine to prevent it from joining NATO as the only rationale response according to his thinking and the thinking of Russia's top leaders. Of course, if we had invited Russia to join NATO by 1995 (which will be the subject of one of my next articles), Russia would never have allied with Communist China and the US as well as our European allies would be safe and secure today instead of threatened like never before with an increasingly imminent nuclear/EMP Armageddon.

Biden’s War against Russia Increasing the Chances of Russian Nuclear Escalation

Today, the US today finds itself not just in a proxy war but in a seemingly ever escalating, albeit as yet relatively, low-level war, with the Russian Federation over Ukraine. The US has helped Ukraine kill thousands of Russian soldiers, a dozen Russian generals, their Black Sea flagship and as Ukraine has engaged in kinetic attacks, sabotage operations and cyberattacks designed to severely damage Russian military-industrial targets inside Russia aided by an unprecedented sharing of actionable US intelligence. Ukraine has engaged in kinetic attacks, sabotage operations and cyberattacks designed to severely damage Russian military-industrial targets inside Russia

Meanwhile, General Paul Nakasone who serves as Commanding General of US Cyber Command revealed earlier this month that the US has been engaging in cyber offensive operations against Russia in support of Ukraine while Russia may be using cyberattacks and sabotage to severely damage or destroy US food production centers and our energy sector in retaliation for Biden’s undeclared war against Russia in Ukraine. This is a very dangerous and risky policy for the Biden administration to pursue because at any moment, Russia could escalate the war and attack NATO supply lines on Ukraine’s western border through which they are supplying weapons to Ukraine that could provoke an Article V declaration by the NATO member whose territory was attacked resulting in NATO declaring war on Russia and the outbreak of World War Three. Even worse, it could escalate to a full-scale Russian cyber or super EMP attack on America’s critical infrastructure which could result in the collapse of the US government and destroy our country. In addition, the New York Times recently reported that the Biden Administration has sent CIA operations officers while several NATO countries have sent hundreds of special forces troops to Ukraine to help it kill Russian troops and destroy Russian military assets.

Lithuania’s recent decision to abrogate its agreement with Russia to allow road and rail transportation through its territory to connect it with its Kaliningrad enclave and essentially enforce a land blockade of Kaliningrad is an alarming development. This action along with the threats of a former Latvian minister for NATO to invade and occupy it in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and a Polish general’s urging for Poland to annex it outright provide a disturbing example of how the conflict in Ukraine could potentially escalate to a full-scale war between Russia and NATO. This is due to the fact that Kaliningrad is a very strategic outpost for Russia as the headquarters of Russia's Baltic Fleet with lots of land, sea and air-based nuclear weapons. The Western Allies seem to have learned nothing from its failed Versailles Treaty which cut Germany in two with Danzig and the Polish Corridor and sparked an unnecessary world war that led to the deaths of 70 million people.

Russian SS-26 Iskander nuclear ballistic missile of the type that is based in the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad capable of hitting some NATO capitals.

As former Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) Agent and America First Congressional Candidate Andrew Badger has stated the US is giving the Ukrainians advanced weapons identifying Russian military targets  and actionable intelligence and “then getting them to pull the trigger.” These actions constitute virtual acts of war, being committed by the US against Russia that no US President would tolerate if the situation were reversed, yet Congress has not issued any declaration of war to authorize these warlike actions against an opposing nuclear superpower that could escalate very quickly and with little warning into a limited nuclear conflict or even a full-scale nuclear exchange which would result in unparalleled death and devastation to the US and Europe.

What is Wrong with Biden’s Russo-Ukrainian War Policy?

Ukrainian President Zelensky has all but admitted that one of his top foreign policy objectives is to get the US and NATO into a direct shooting war with Russia yet Biden continues to give him a blank check of military assistance even though his goals are very much oppositional to our own national security interests which could lead the US to stumble into a nuclear World War III with the Russian Federation.

As I stated in a recent video interview, I believe that Biden’s war against Russia in Ukraine is both a morally and strategically bankrupt policy. The reason I call it Biden’s war is because Russia would not have invaded if Biden had issued a written guarantee to Russia that Ukraine would never join NATO that the US supported the full implementation of the Minsk II peace agreement. Western leaders could have even offered to withdraw all 9,000 western NATO troops from Eastern Europe in exchange for the reduction of Russia’s 190,000 troops deployed along its border with Ukraine to February 2021 levels of 60,000 and the withdrawal of all Russian troops from Belarus. The implementation of such an agreement would have essentially eliminated the threat of Russian aggression against Ukraine.

It is morally bankrupt because it is giving false hope to the Ukrainians that they have a chance to defeat Russia and expel Russian forces from its territory and because it its aim is to fight Russia to the last Ukrainian, prolong the war unnecessarily for years to come, maximize the deaths and destruction in Ukraine, which Ukraine claims include up to 30,000 civilians thus far, while provoking Russia to either nuke Ukraine and/or attack the US and NATO and potentially cause the deaths of over 200 million Americans and potentially as many Europeans.

It is strategically bankrupt because the Biden’s stated war aims of expelling Russian forces from Ukrainian territory, including Crimea which Russia annexed eight years ago, destroying Russia’s ability to wage offensive war, collapse the Russian economy and overthrow Russian President Putin has no real prospect of success. Biden’s undeclared proxy war on Russia is driving Russia into an even closer military alliance with Communist China at the very time that the US needs to be improving relations with Russia to neutralize its military alliance with Beijing. According to his own Directors of National and Central Intelligence, Putin will only likely resort to the use of nuclear weapons if he feels Russia is losing the war in Ukraine. Top US foreign policy theorist Graham Allison thinks that if Russia is losing there is a 75% chance Putin would use nukes against Ukraine. Thus, by definition, Biden’s war policy to ensure Russia loses its war in Ukraine is serving to maximize the chances of Russian nuclear escalation against Ukraine and/or the US and NATO.

Thanks to Biden’s policy of waging an undeclared war against Russia in response to their invasion of Ukraine, the threat of nuclear war is at least as great today than it was even during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 and in the Cuban Missile Crisis, President John F. Kennedy was willing to give major concessions to the Soviets to avert nuclear war in 1962 and Biden is not so the chances may well be even higher. This is because Putin knows that if he uses nukes in Ukraine, Biden will do nothing to respond in kind and is very unlikely to support a non-military response against Russia because Ukraine is not a NATO ally so as I have written in my National Interest articles there is very little to disincentivize him from doing so. But if he did, Putin likely would be able to use nuclear blackmail to get the other former Soviet republics to do his bidding and China might follow suit by using EMP and nuclear weapons in their invasion of Ukraine.

Is Putin Crazy?

Some Western analysts over the past few months have suggested that Russian President Vladimir Putin must be mentally ill to have decided to invade eastern Ukraine, given the fact that his invasion has led to even more severe Western economic sanctions on Russia than were in place before. However, I have seen  no evidence whatsoever to support this proposition. His invasion of Ukraine was a rational and calculated response to continuing Western provocations and crossings of his red lines over the past fourteen years.

Not only is Putin of sound mind, but I have been surprised by the level of restraint he has shown to escalating US actions including not merely helping Ukraine to kill thousands of Russian soldiers, a dozen generals and Russian military assets like their Black Sea Fleet flagship Moskva but also sending dozens if not hundreds of CIA case officers to help coordinate Western military aid and coordinate Ukraine's attacks while a four star general has openly stated the US is engaging in cyber offensives against Russian targets likely explaining the mysterious fires that have been severely damaging Russian military targets inside Russia itself. Putin had the opportunity to help pro-Russian Ukrainian President Yanukovych return to power in February 2014 after he was deposed in a CIA-funded coup de etat and he opted to let Ukraine remain under the control of leaders hostile to Moscow instead, not exactly the actions of a crazed lunatic psychopath some Western commentators would suggest.

If Putin is crazy, then why hasn't he used massive cyberattacks, EMP weapons and nuclear weapons or even chemical or biological weapons to defeat Ukraine swiftly in as little as a single day? Why hasn't he systematically targeted Ukrainian civilians to terrorize them into demanding Zelensky end the war by accepting Russia's as yet lenient peace terms? Why has he refused to declare war on Ukraine and mobilize Russia's two million man reserves to crush Ukraine and occupy all of it instead of merely 20% of its territory? Why hasn't Putin engaged in interdiction attacks along NATO's borders to interrupt the flow of Western arms to Ukrainian forces? And the biggest question of all--why hasn't he engaged in a massive cyberattack/EMP or any of Russia's 8,000 nuclear weapons against US critical infrastructure to collapse America's economy like Biden has attempted to collapse Russia's? As I pointed out in a previous article, escalating to the tactical nuclear level in Ukraine would be Putin's trump card as there is no chance that Biden would respond in kind and very little chance he would even respond with a direct military attack against Russia yet Putin has opted not to do so thus far.

Far from the actions of a madman, these are the actions of a leader who has proven loathe to take more than calculated risks, assured of success. Furthermore, Putin has no intention of restoring Russia's Soviet-era borders as I thought he did before he invaded Ukraine in February. If he had, he would have certainly sent enough Russian troops to Ukraine to conquer and annex the entire country, not merely engaged in a limited war to occupy small slivers of it alongside Russia's borders. Rather than sending 500,000, he only sent 200,000 troops. That alone should have told us his intentions were quite limited. Yes, Putin has threatened the Baltics with invasion if they continue crossing his red line by arming and helping the Ukrainians kill Russian troops. In my edtimstion, the only way that Putin will attack NATO countries is if we keep provoking him to in a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Is Putin a War Criminal and Could He Be Removed from Power?

Despite Biden’s accusations that Putin is a war criminal due to the deaths of Ukrainian civilians that have resulted from Russia’s illegal war of aggression, there is little to no evidence that Putin has ordered the Russian military to attack civilian targets for the purposes of causing civilian casualties. Quite the contrary, the UN Human Rights Council has stated that less than 5,000 civilian deaths have been confirmed thus far, which is a surprisingly modest death toll for a war of this magnitude. Furthermore, based on the Ukrainian governments own reported civilian casualty figures, during the past two months of fighting, the civilian death rate has fallen precipitously. While the Ukrainian government has claimed that over 25,000 civilians died during the first two months of the invasion while the Ukrainian military was engaging in urban warfare against invading Russian forces during the first phase of the war, they have claimed that less than 5,000 civilians have been killed during the second phase of the war which has lasted ten weeks in which urban warfare has been much rarer. This fact strongly suggests that the vast majority of Ukrainian civilians killed during the opening phase of the war which was more focused on urban combat on the outskirts of Kyiv, Kharkiv and some of Ukraine’s other largest cities likely died as the result of inadvertent collateral damage which is not considered a war crime under international law. That said, there is no doubt that small-scale war crimes have been committed by both sides likely more so by Russian forces.

Top Russia expert and former senior Defense Intelligence Agency official and author of the outstanding book, “Putin’s Playbook-Russia’s Secret Plan to Defeat America” Rebekah Koffler revealed in her latest podcast warned that Russia was serious about invading Ukraine back in December or January and recommended that the US not get involved in the fight by sending arms to Ukraine as it would risk World War Three with Russia. She revealed that while serving as a senior DIA official, she participated in multiple wargames and Russia defeated NATO each time because it escalated to the nuclear level and would do so if the US and NATO were to send troops to fight Russia in Ukraine. She warns that Putin may use a tactical nuclear weapon or super EMP weapon against Kyiv to force Ukraine to surrender.

She stated that Putin may have cancer, but it is not terminal and will not likely impede him from finishing out his remaining constitutionally allowed terms of office through 2036. In response to a question as to whether Biden’s call for regime change against Putin is realistic, Koffler replied that there is 0.1% chance that Putin will be removed in a coup given that all of his inner circle are former KGB officers and Putin loyalists and that the Russian oligarchs have zero political power and Putin has assassinated a few of them who oppose him. She also said that if Putin were to die, he would likely be succeeded by Putin's close friend Nikolai Patrushev, who succeeded him as FSB Director and who currently serves as Secretary of the Russian Security Council who is as much if not more of a hardliner than he is. On a more hopeful note, she did say that Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov has stated that Russia's special combat operation in Ukraine will soon be completed suggesting that once Russia wins the Battle of the Donbass, Putin may order a cease fire and maybe make one last peace offer to Ukraine for Russia to trade land for peace before he starts annexing Russian occupied Ukrainian territories.

Is Putin Planning to Attack Other Countries?

Many neoconservatives and liberal internationalists claim that Putin is planning to use Ukraine as a mere stepping-stone in a grand plan to re-annex the Baltic states, Moldova and the other former Soviet republics with little support for their claims. However, they also claim that Ukraine alone can defeat Russia so long as the US and NATO continue to provide it with sufficient weapons to do so, which if true, would strongly suggest that Russia poses no conventional military threat to NATO whatsoever. One analyst even made the startling, yet entirely unsupported, claim that Russia has no additional troops left to deploy without risking internal rebellion which could potentially lead to the dissolution of the Russian Federation and is unable to project Russian military power beyond the farthest reaches of eastern Ukraine, hundreds of miles from NATO members, and Ukraine's southeastern coastline. If it were true that Putin can't deploy more than 7% of his total military personnel outside of the Russian Federation, then one would also have to conclude the Russian conventional military threat to NATO is non-existent. Either Putin has a military powerful enough to invade and annex the Baltics, Ukraine and other former Soviet republics or he does not. The truth is that if Russia were to order a general mobilization, it could successfully invade NATO’s frontline states such as Poland and the Baltic states which border on Russian territory were it to employ massive cyberattacks to knock out NATO's command and control, internet and GPS targeting capabilities. However, it would most likely only do so if the Biden administration and other Western leaders continue to provoke Russian retaliation for NATO’s undeclared proxy war in Ukraine. Certainly, the US must remain on its guard against more serious Russian and potentially Chinese cyberattacks on our critical infrastructure which Biden's foolish policies may have made imminent certainly if the PRC invades Taiwan by October in which case Putin will likely exact his revenge upon the US for Biden waging his undeclared war against Russia over Ukraine, with Chinese support. 

How Can We End the War in Ukraine?

While the liberal Western media continues to portray Ukraine as winning the war, the truth is that Russia is winning the Battle of the Donbass, inflicting up to 1,000 Ukrainian casualties a day with Ukraine badly overmatched by Russian forces having lost 50% of its heavy weapons. Russia is now in control of over three quarters of the region and in a position to complete the conquest of the entire Donbass region by the end of the summer. Since neither the US, or any other country in the world is willing to send troops to Ukraine there is actually no chance Ukraine will be able to defeat Russia on the battlefield and in the extremely unlikely event they did, Russia would nuke them in accordance with their “escalate to de-escalate” military doctrine, US policymakers have to pick the least bad of two options. The first option is to mediate a negotiated compromise peace agreement between Russia and Ukraine in which Russia has to withdraw from in which he agrees to withdraw all Russian military forces from three of the five Ukrainian oblasts it currently occupies including all but 6.4% of the territory under Ukrainian control before their invasion in accordance with their peace offer which has been on the table since early March. The second option is to continue to urge Ukraine not to negotiate with Russia and let Putin follow through with his threats to annex all 20% of Ukrainian territory Russia currently occupies. In that instance, unconstrainted by any peace agreement, Putin might well opt to go for broke and invade and annex a lot more while maximizing the chances the war will escalate to the US and NATO potentially resulting in the destruction not only of NATO but of all of our European allies as well.

I have yet to see a single US leader in the Biden administration or in Congress come up with a viable proposed solution to end the war in Ukraine so I published a 15 point peace plan to end the war in Ukraine in The National Interest a few weeks ago which was one of the top five, most read articles for the first nine days after it was published. In recognition of the fact that Russia’s objective in invading Ukraine was to restore it as a permanently neutral buffer state between Russia and NATO to ensure Russian security, returning Ukraine to its pre-2014 status quo, under this peace plan Ukraine would agree to permanent neutrality outside of NATO. Ukraine would also recognize Russia’s annexation of Crimea and mandate a Russia’s military withdrawal from all Ukrainian territory except the area of the Donbass it currently controls. If Ukraine were to win a popular referendum, then Russian forces would have to withdraw from the Donbass as well but if it voted for independence than Ukraine would lose control of 2.4 million citizens in the western Donbass (most of which are already living under Russian military occupation) is essentially what this war is being fought over since Zelensky has previously agreed to all of Russia’s other peace terms. For those that have denounced my recent peace proposal as constituting ‘appeasement’ because it would effectively cede the western Donbass to Russian control in the event Russia were to win the popular referendum, I have to ask them whether a Russian annexation of 20% of Ukrainian territory they currently occupy including 70% of Ukraine’s southern coastline would be a preferable solution for them? I would argue that that would be much more of a de facto appeasement of Moscow than the Wilsonian “peace without victory” which I have proposed.

The truth is that Russia and Ukraine were reportedly quite close to finalizing a peace deal back in late March and early April with the only remaining issues being the boundary line of the newly independent Donetsk and Luhansk republics, the size of the postwar Ukrainian Army and whether the US, Britain and France would provide Ukraine with security guarantees to ensure its neutrality.  But then in mid-April, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson (who resigned earlier today following numerous ethics scandals) and the Biden Administration told Zelensky to break off peace negotiations with Russia giving him a blank check of US-UK military support to fight this unnecessary war to the last Ukrainian. How many tens of thousands of Ukrainian lives could we have saved had we supported Zelensky's efforts to finalize a peace deal in April and liberated 93.6% of the territory Ukraine controlled before the war from Russian occupation? Time will only tell. If this war continues the Ukrainian death toll could be ten times higher in another year of fighting and to what end? Russia will just end up annexing more Ukrainian territory so the outcome will be much worse for Ukraine the longer they wait to negotiate an end to the war. Obviously, my main concern is not merely pushing Russia out of virtually all of Ukraine but more importantly to prevent a nuclear World War III with Russia which Biden's morally and strategically bankrupt policy is designed to maximize the chances for. That is America's only vital national interest in Ukraine and that's the one Biden has been ignoring.

Conclusion

There are historical parallels to the abortive peace efforts between Russia and Ukraine since the war began and the peace initiatives that fell short of ending the First World War a couple years earlier. In his outstanding book,  “The Road Less Traveled—The Secret Battle to End the Great War 1916-1917” Philip Zelikow discusses the little known fact that by August 1916, British, French and especially German leaders wanted to make peace and end the war on mutually acceptable terms that would have prevented the Nazi takeover of Germany and the Communist takeover of Russia. Sadly, they were unsuccessful in getting President Wilson to mediate such a peace and had no direct lines of communications with each other as they had broken off diplomatic relations when the war had broken out. German peace attempts failed because Wilson could not get the British to agree to an armistice in which the Germans would trade land for peace in exchange for a peace conference and he didn’t realize that he could have used America’s massive financial leverage given it was supplying much of the weapons and supplies sustaining the Allied war effort, to force the British to make peace with the Central Powers.

Tragically, US entry into World War One resulted in exactly the kind of crushing and humiliating peace of the victors which President Woodrow Wilson had wisely sought to avoid with his January 1917 “peace without victory” speech, precipitating a series of events ensuring the fall of Russia to Communism, causing the rise of Hitler and the Nazis in Germany and sparking a Second World War four times more deadly than the last. Just as Wilson failed to realize the US had massive financial leverage over Britain which could have been used to pressure them to accept the very moderate terms of Germany’s peace offer over a century ago,

Today, the stakes we are playing for aren’t just another world war that would result in the deaths of up to seventy million people and a Communist takeover of one-third of the world leading to the deaths of tens of millions more, but rather the continued existence of the US and NATO in the event we were to stumble into an unnecessary nuclear war with Russia. The more assistance the Biden administration provides to help Ukraine kill tens of thousands of Russian soldiers and destroy thousands of Russian tanks, armored fighting vehicles, combat aircraft and other military targets, the greater the risk its actions will provoke Russia to respond by escalating the war to the nuclear level, potentially including direct attacks on the US and NATO themselves.

As President Nixon wisely stated, the US should engage in peaceful accommodations of Russia and China in return in for reciprocal concessions which serve to satisfy the vital interests of all three nuclear superpowers to avert unnecessary conflicts, promote peace while increasing international stability and security. That is exactly what President Ronald Reagan did to help win the Cold War and what President John F Kennedy did in negotiating an end to the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger recently recommended that the Biden Administration do exactly that by mediating a negotiated peace agreement similar to what I have recommended in which Ukraine would declare permanent neutrality, recognize Russia’s annexation of Crimea and the independence of the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics in exchange for a full Russian military withdrawal from all other Ukrainian territory.

Reagan’s policy of peace through strength works, but sadly has never been tried by the Biden administration. Biden's policy of war through weakness is doomed to failure and I believe the annals of future history will bear that out. I think it should be obvious to most observers that President Biden is more of an irrational actor in this equation than anyone else and he will likely continue leading us and our allies off into the nuclear abyss unless a bipartisan peace coalition persuades him to change his policies before it is too late. Reports indicate that Biden is growing increasingly grumpy and isolated and has cut out the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of State and his own National Security Advisor from Russo-Ukrainian war policy, putting his Chief of Staff Ron Klein, who has zero military or national security experience, in charge of his war in Ukraine which is alarming to say the least given that Biden’s provocative policies have served to greatly increase the risks of escalation to a full-scale nuclear/EMP war with Russia.

As Dr. Peter Pry, who serves as the Executive Director of the EMP Task Force on National and Homeland Security, has wisely suggested, we need to find a way to strategically partner with Russia to neutralize their military alliance with Beijing if the US ID to have any real hope of surviving the decade, let alone the Biden presidency. My proposed peace plan offers a good path forward to achieve that objective and thereby neutralize both the Russian and Chinese nuclear and EMP threats to the United States. Doing so would serve to buy the US the time we need to double or triple the size of our decrepit strategic nuclear arsenal, deploy a comprehensive, multi-layer, space and sea-based national missile defense system and most importantly to harden our entire critical infrastructure from EMP attack starting with our electrical power grid.

© David T. Pyne 2022

David T. Pyne, Esq. is a former U.S. Army combat arms and Headquarters staff officer, who was in charge of armaments cooperation with the former Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Africa and the Americas from 2000-2003, with an M.A. in National Security Studies from Georgetown University. He currently serves as Deputy Director of National Operations for the EMP Task Force on National and Homeland Security and is a contributor to Dr. Peter Pry’s new book Blackout Warfare. He also serves as the host of the Defend America Radio Show on KTALK AM 1640 and as Editor of “The Real War” newsletter at dpyne.substack.com. He may be reached at emptaskforce.ut@gmail.com.