Tour of Ukraine-Russia Border Finds No Signs of Military Buildup -- Jim Maceda, NBC
All is not quiet on the Western Front, but the drumbeat of war along the long Ukraine-Russian border is nowhere near as loud as it sounds in Moscow.
According to dire warnings from U.S. military and intelligence officials, Russian President Vladimir Putin, fresh from his daring annexation of Ukraine’s strategic Crimean Peninsula, has concentrated tens of thousands of his forces on the border with Ukraine. Camouflaged and concealed to throw off U.S. spy satellites, the warnings say, the heavily armed combat troops and special operations forces are coiled and ready to spring across the border into restive regions of Eastern and Southern Ukraine such as Kharkov and Donetsk, where pro-Russian populations are eager to be annexed by Russia, just like Crimea.
Top Russian officials – including Putin himself – have denied any such troop concentrations near the Western border. One minor Ministry of Defense official, who didn’t want to be named because he wasn’t authorized to comment, told NBC News that there had been training exercises – war games – in the border region but, once ended, those troops and armor returned to their bases. “All of this international hype is completely unfounded,” he told us earlier in the week.
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My Comment: OMG!!!!! NBC actually has a reporter who does what reporters should do .... investigate. In all fairness .... Jim Maceda is an excellent reporter .... and he did what I was hoping that a western reporter would do .... actually go to the border region and see if the Russians are mobilizing their military to launch an incursion into Ukraine. Not surprising ... he saw nothing .... but in all fairness .... the Ukraine - Russian border is long and the region is vast .... to cover all of it would take a long long long time and a lot of traveling (I should know .... I did it once but not on the Russian Ukraine border ..... I did the Volgograd/Stalingrad to Minsk route).
In closing .... after reading this news report I called my cousin who is in the reserves (Russia). He told me that there is a buildup but nowhere what the U.S. government/Ukraine government/Western press have been saying. He would not answer my question on how long would it take for the Russian military to build up sufficient force on the Ukraine border to launch a military incursion if Putin gives the order .... but Jim Maceda's estimate of a few days is probably accurate.
The NATO propaganda is now more or less identical to Hitler`s propaganda before he launched Barbarossa. He too railed about how the Russians were preparing to invade Germany and that the Wehrmacht had to attack immediately to preempt this.
ReplyDeleteYou would hope we had moved past this type of barbarism but apparently not. NATO just needs to be instantly dismantled. It hasn`t had a function since 1991.