Is this so-called expert correct? We will see! View the video. Cut off from the Russian border and under increasing pressure from Ukrainian military forces, the pro-Russian separatists stronghold of Donetsk could become the flashpoint for a Russian invasion of eastern Ukraine, an expert on U.S. and Russian national security predicted Thursday. Appearing on Fox News Happening Now, Matthew Rojansky, director of the Kennan Institute of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, laid out a grim scenario. This is going to be like Stalingrad. Its going to be urban warfare, Rojansky warned. The pro-Russian separatists are not going to give up… I think this is going to be a fight to the death. So its going to be very dirty, very ugly and I think thats going to provide the justification the Russians need -- sometime soon, maybe weeks, maybe months -- to declare a humanitarian emergency. Such an emergency could serve as the pretext for open Russian military intervention he said. Theyll claim it’s just like [the US has] done in the Middle East many times and in other places in the world, Rojansky predicted. Theyll use air power, theyll use rockets, theyll use artillery and theyll say Ukrainians, you must not advance here and theyll enforce that. They have the ability to do it. Asked how the US should respond to the deepening crisis, Rojansky noted that the White House faces a prisoners dilemma. We dont want a war. We cannot win a war against Russia. You know, this is not Al Qaeda. This is not the government of Saddam Hussein. This is the Russian Federation, the inheritors of the Soviet Unions nuclear arsenal. We cannot get dragged into this war. But by the same token, the Ukrainians cant win it by themselves. If we keep going with sanctions, its a dead-end process, Rojansky concluded. We can continue to do it for moral reasons to show that were doing something, but weve also got to have an endgame negotiation that the Russians are part of. Further, Rojansky warned, retaliatory rounds of sanctions are dividing the world into two camps: Were going to need to act quickly on this before sanctions really start to divide us so deeply.
Posted on: Fri, 08 Aug 2014 07:42:53 +0000
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