As against the Napoleonic army and later to the Third Reich, Russia returns to bet on the “general winter”. Vladimir Putin tries to freeze the Ukrainians to death. He makes sure that the snowfall and freezing temperatures do the job that the troops he is sending en masse are not doing. Ukraine.
He relieved all the generals who started the invasion, including Colonel General Alexander Lapin, who arrived in Donbass cWith the decorations he won on the Syrian battlefields and was named a “hero of Russia” for the conquest of Luhansk, but later he began to collect defeats before the counter-offensive of the Ukrainians.
The Kremlin no longer has generals left to entrust military victory in combat between troops, so it turned its strategy betting on “general winter”. Assuming that the demotivation of Russian soldiers in this unjustified war is a difficult factor to reverse, Putin resorts to what he wanted to avoid so as not to further affect the image of Russia and its invasion of Ukraine: his missile power used against the civilian population. .
Showers of missiles fall on the cities and on the gas and electricity distribution networks. The ally of this cruel offensive is the winter that will freeze the Ukrainians by destroying their ability to generate heating.
“General Winter” was always helped by Russian meat generals and bone. Mikhail Kutusov he gained fame in the Russo-Turkish war at the end of the 18th century and facing Napoleon’s armies at the beginning of the 19th century; while Marshal Zhukov vfired up the Wehrmacht troops in Moscow, Leningrad, Stalingrad and Kurskin addition to having commanded Operation Bagration that withdrew the German forces to their own territory and finally crowned the victory with the capture of Berlin.
On this occasion, more than the generals, it will be the Russian missiles and the Iranian drones that will grip the Ukrainian resistance against the winter cold, trying to completely break it. The head of the Kremlin He hopes that destroying gas and electricity production and distribution infrastructure, in addition to killing civilians or leaving them out in the open bombing cities, will allow him to achieve what his strategists and troops failed to achieve: overcome the tenacious resistance of the invaded country.
As Ukrainians face cold and shelling, northwestern leaders show their mistrust of Volodymyr Zelensky. An unexpected help for the isolated and befuddled Russian president.
The missiles that caused destruction and two deaths in Poland created dark dilemmas for NATO. It happens that two of the hypotheses about what happened pose nightmare scenarios. The first is that it was a deliberate attack by Russian forces, to probe the reaction of the Atlantic alliance and its true predisposition to enter into direct confrontation with Russia.
The second hypothesis points to a ploy by the Ukrainians to achieve what Zelensky has sought, without success, since the invasion began: NATO to go to war with Russia.
The missile or missiles that fell in Poland They made it clear that the leaders of Europe and the United States suspect more of an operation mounted by Zelenski than of a deliberate attack by Putin.
In history there are many such operations. The suspicion of a self-attack in the sinking of the battleship Maine in Havana Bay was never dispelled, to justify the war in which Spain lost, at the end of the 19th century, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines, turning United States in what until then had been the Iberian state: an overseas power.
The asymmetry between Russia’s and Ukraine’s military power justifies Zelensky’s efforts to get Western powers to send troops to Ukraine and attack the invaders from the air in the Donbass, the Crimea, the Black Sea, and Russia itself. What would not be justified is that, because his requests and efforts have no effect, he tries to activate article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty by launching projectiles at Poland to blame Russia for the deaths and destruction they cause.
If it was a deliberate Russian attack, NATO would face a dire dilemma: take military retaliation against the country that attacked one of its members, as stated in the fifth article of its constitution, or give priority to the Doctrine of Mutual Destruction. Secured, which prevented clashes between superpowers because such a confrontation would lead to a nuclear conflagration in which all parties would suffer devastating destruction.
In case it is discovered that, by firing missiles at a Polish village, Putin wanted to verify how willing NATO is to enter into a direct clash with Russia, the leaders of the North-Western powers cannot sit idly by because it would be a sign that would encourage the leader Russian to new wars of expansion. For example, launching into Transdniestria to seize Moldova and annex to Russia that territory that pro-Russian militias de facto separated in 1992.
It also creates a terrible dilemma that the explosions that caused destruction and deaths in Poland respond to a plan hatched in kyiv to create a casus belli.
If it is proven that it was a Ukrainian ploy to cause a direct war between the Atlantic alliance and Russia, the deliberate nature of the act should provoke retaliation from NATO, but against Ukraine. In other words, if that hypothesis is correct, Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty, by which NATO must attack the power that attacks any of its members, should be applied to the invaded country that they have been assisting with thousands for months. of millions of dollars in arms and economic aid. Ergo, a contradictory situation to the point of absurdity.
Biden obviously can’t stand the Ukrainian president. Nor do several European leaders like Zelensky. And it was noted that, both in Washington and in Brussels, there was a tendency to suspect a plot hatched in kyiv to force NATO to do what it does not want: to go to direct war with Russia. But everyone knows that the young comic actor who was left in the center of the war stage is a key player in the Ukrainian resistance. Zelensky surprised Putin and the entire world by his performance since the conflict began. If his image collapsed, a flank of vulnerability would open up. And NATO leaders are clear that the priority is the failure of the Russian leader.
