NATO Sliding Towards War Against Russia in Ukraine

• NATO Sliding Towards War Against Russia in Ukraine
  by Finian Cunningham, https://www.strategic-culture.org/
  As far as Ukraine goes, Ankara seems to be setting the pace for NATO’s deepening involvement in the country’s war.
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  Russia is investigating reports of Turkish attack drones being deployed for the first time in Ukraine’s eight-year civil war. The Ukrainian Armed Forces (UAF) under the command of the Kiev regime claimed that the drones were used earlier this week in combat against ethnic Russian rebels.
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  This is a potentially dramatic escalation in the smoldering war. For it marks the direct involvement of NATO member Turkey in the conflict. Up to now, the United States and other NATO states have been supplying lethal weaponry to the Kiev regime to prosecute its war against the breakaway self-declared republics of Donetsk and Luhansk.
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  American, British and Canadian military advisors are also known to have carried out training missions with UAF combat units. Britain is in negotiations to sell Brimstone missiles to the Ukrainian navy.
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  But the apparent deployment of Turkish attack drones is a potential game-changer. Russia’s foreign minister Sergei Lavrov hinted at the graveness when he announced Wednesday that Moscow was carrying out urgent investigations about the purported participation of Turk-made Bayraktar TB2 Unmanned Aerial Vehicles.
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  Previously, Lavrov rebuked Turkey to stay out of the conflict and to not feed Ukrainian hostilities. Last week, Russian President Vladimir Putin warned that NATO’s support to the Kiev regime was posing a direct threat to Russia’s national security. The Kremlin’s assessment can only be more alarmed on the back of NATO member Turkey being now implicated as one of the war’s protagonists. In all likelihood, Turkish military personnel would be required to assist in operating the drone flights.
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  The war in the Eastern Ukraine region known as Donbass has persisted for nearly eight years. It was triggered after a NATO-backed coup d’état in Kiev in February 2014 against an elected government that had been aligned with Russia. The new regime was characterized by anti-Russian politics and Neo-Nazi ideology. The ethnic Russian population of Donbass rejected the Western-backed regime, leading to a war. The ethnic Russian people of Crimea likewise voted in a referendum in March 2014 to secede from Ukraine and to join the Russian Federation with which it has centuries of shared history. Kiev’s forces are accused of aggression and potential war crimes from shelling civilian homes and infrastructure. This week an oil depot in Donetsk was bombed by a drone. It is not clear if the drone was one of the Turkish weapons.
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  Western governments and NATO accuse Russia of invading Eastern Ukraine and of annexing Crimea. Moscow rejects that as an absurd distortion of reality. Such vilification is no doubt partly why Russia cut off diplomatic links last week with NATO.
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