Biden Continues His March Toward Nuclear War. Here’s The Latest.

The War in Ukraine has many facets.

At the most basic level is the war on the ground. That’s the war that Ukraine is losing decisively. The Ukrainian counteroffensive was annihilated in the south in the opening days and is in retreat in the north.

Casualties have been high, and the Russians have destroyed an estimated 1/3^rd of the Bradley Fighting Vehicles supplied by the U.S. German Leopard tanks have been left burning on the ground. The British have insisted that their Challenger tanks not be used in the front lines in order to avoid images of Challengers burning as well.

Ukraine is almost out of ammunition and the U.S. has depleted its stores of regular 155mm shells. The U.S. has now resorted to supplying Ukraine with 155mm cluster munitions that are known to kill and maim children (because dud bomblets left scattered on the ground are handled by children after the fighting has stopped).

The second facet is the global economic and financial war that the U.S. has waged against Russia. The U.S. is losing that war badly.

The Russian ruble has declined only slightly since the war began and that decline is recent and mostly attributable to lower oil prices, not to sanctions. The Russian economy is now projected to grow at 2.1% in 2023, which is three times the 0.7% growth forecast issued by the World Bank at the beginning of the year.

Russian oil not exported to Europe is being readily purchased by India, China, and other Asian buyers. The biggest victim of the U.S. sanctions is … the U.S.

But there’s a third facet that is far more dangerous than the first two and that is being pushed by the U.S. This is the threat of nuclear war.

A prominent neocon warmonger named Michael Rubin has written an article calling on the U.S. to supply tactical nuclear weapons to Ukraine. Ostensibly, this is a deterrent to Russia’s use of nuclear weapons (which has never been threatened except in the case of a first strike by Ukraine or NATO). But does anyone doubt Ukraine will use them once they are facing a final defeat by the Russians?

Equally dangerous is Biden’s plan to supply Ukraine with F-16 fighter jets as reported here. F-16s are fully nuclear-capable. There’s no way for an opponent to tell if an F-16 is carrying nuclear weapons or not.

The Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has made it clear that Ukrainian use of F-16s may have to be stopped by Russia using extreme measures because of the possibility that they could be delivering nuclear weapons to attack Russia across the Ukraine-Russia border. That’s how close to nuclear war Biden’s escalation in Ukraine has now taken us.

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