Letters to the Editor, Jerusalem Post, October 26, 2022
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| X-55 (top projection) |
Dave Anderson in his opinion piece, “The peace summit needed now” (October 12), equates Russia, the aggressor, and Ukraine, the victim of aggression, by saying “the leaders of Russia and Ukraine do not appear to have peace as their number one objective at this time” and “they [the Ukrainians] are seeking to keep as much of their own territory as possible.” No kidding!
Appeasing Russia is not the answer. What kind of world would it be if a nuclear-armed country would gobble territory from a non-nuclear country and threaten the use of nuclear weapons if the non-nuclear country resisted, and then insists on peace negotiations while keeping the occupied territory?
Russia has been losing the war and is running out of options. Earlier this month, Russia started targeting Ukrainian civilian infrastructure with massive rocket attacks, the most intense since the invasion on February 24.
According to military expert Yuri Fedorov, in the mid-1990s, Ukraine, following the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, transferred to Russia some 580 X-55 long-range cruise missiles. These missiles are the very ones that Russia has been using to attack Ukrainian civilian energy facilities. What were the US and UK thinking back then?
The West needs to stand up to Putin’s nuclear blackmail. And it has been doing so by issuing deliberately vague threats of unprecedented consequences for any Russian use of nuclear weapons and being prepared to follow through with conventional military strikes on Russian forces if deterrence fails.
Yes, the world is in the greatest danger since the Cuban Missile Crisis. But even Russian generals who now approve of the massive targeting of Ukrainian civilian energy targets know that using nuclear weapons is not an option.
MLADEN ANDRIJASEVIC
Beersheba
