A year after Russia began its "invasion" of Ukraine, a former US national security adviser has warned that flattering NATO that it has won victories in Ukraine is still premature.

John Bolton, the former US national security director, stressed, in an article in the British Daily Telegraph newspaper, in the first place that America and its NATO allies failed to deter the Russian attack.

On several occasions, President Biden has said that he does not really believe that deterrence is possible, but rather that it is possible only to punish Russia for aggression after the fact.

For example, says Bolton, a month after the invasion, Biden said, "Let's put things back together. Remember, if you've been watching me right from the start, I didn't say sanctions would deter him. In fact, sanctions never deter."

Biden's statements encouraged Russia

Bolton said that Biden's "reckless" statements, which were downplaying the possibilities of an "invasion" and underestimating the seriousness of what would happen after it, encouraged Russia to "invade", and that the failure to deter the Kremlin was the result of much more than Biden's fickle geostrategic thinking and reckless statements. , noting that NATO's disinterested response to Russia's first invasion in 2014 laid the groundwork for what appears to be a sequel to that "invasion".

Then came the routine Western sanctions.


He explained that the West generally stood idly by when Russian forces intervened in the Donbass and seized Crimea, as it imposed only routine sanctions on Russia, after which the embarrassing and biased Minsk agreements took place.

For many years, he said, America had done nothing significant to provide anything close to satisfactory levels of military assistance and training to Ukrainian forces.

Biden's "disastrous" decision in 2021 to withdraw from Afghanistan and his modest meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Vienna in June of that year were also important factors.

NATO prepared for defeat, not for victory

Bolton stressed that the West was not helpless, and the United States and its allies could have provided training for the Ukrainians to show Western determination, and severe economic sanctions could have been imposed on Russia for its "aggression" in 2014.

Instead of developing a strategy for victory against the Russians and defeating them, Bolton went on, NATO had settled on a strategy of aiding the guerrilla war after defeat, driving Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and other Ukrainian officials out of the country.

When Western expectations were reversed and the startlingly poor performance of Russian forces emerged, and Ukraine stood its ground, NATO had no Plan B, nor was it ready for success.

The former US official urged Western intelligence to urgently correct its past mistakes regarding both Russian and Ukrainian combat weapons, "so that we do not surprise China and others by underestimating our enemy's capabilities rather than overestimating them."

He concluded that almost a year later, NATO does not have a strategy for victory, stressing that the West is in a world war in Ukraine.