NATO allies are inching closer to sending troops into Ukraine to train Ukrainian forces, a move that would be another blurring of a previous red line and could draw the United States and Europe more directly into the war.
Ukraine’s manpower shortage has reached a critical point, and its position on the battlefield in recent weeks has seriously worsened as Russia has accelerated its advances to take advantage of delays in shipments of American weapons. As a result, Ukrainian officials have asked their American and NATO counterparts to help train 150,000 new recruits closer to the front line for faster deployment.
So far the United States has said no, but Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said on Thursday that a NATO deployment of trainers appeared inevitable. “We’ll get there eventually, over time,” he said.
Sure, NATO advisors will be training 60-year-old Ukrainians to fight. They need the draft age to go down to 14 years old.
What do you suggest as an alternative? Allow Russia to annex Ukraine?
Russia does not want to annex Ukraine, and it is doing so anyway, so that is irrelevant. It is a demilitarizing process. The nuance is key. Since NATO is a persistent threat that likes to test boundaries, they will annex is the Russian-speaking oblast of Ukraine or make them their own republics. Ukraine ideally was supposed to be a neutral buffer zone between NATO and Russia. There is no trust for that, so the Russian elites decided that the next best thing is to invade Ukraine in order to eliminate its war fighting capability. Ukraine conflict made the Russian military stronger and made the Ukrainian army much weaker. The issue is trust between NATO and Russia. If NATO and the EU left Ukraine as a non-aligned, neutral country, the Russians would have not invaded. There is a reason why the Russians did what they did, not because they want to, but for future survival. The decision to invade Ukraine did not come easy. Israel on the other hand chooses to bomb Gaza and Hamas is nowhere near the threat that NATO is to Russia, in the eyes of the Russians.