The Week World War III Was Avoided

For a long moment, on Nov. 15, the landing of a “Russian made” missile on the territory of NATO member Poland threatened to lead to an all-out direct war between Russia and NATO. Some officials, including an unhinged President Zelensky, immediately called on the western military alliance to invoke its collective security provisions. Fortunately, saner voices prevailed, including, to his credit, that of President Biden, who was attending the G20 meeting in Bali, Indonesia. The incident, it was later acknowledged, had been “accidentally” caused by a Ukrainian-fired missile, a fact which NATO must have known, given how closely they monitor the skies over Ukraine.

This incident occurred in the context of a still timid, but growing, sentiment in the West in favor of seeking an end to the war, if only for economic reasons – and it was then exploited to sabotage any shift in that direction. Thus, more such provocations and/or incidents are to be expected.

That growing sentiment had been expressed by U.S. General Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who suggested on Nov. 9 that a military victory by Ukraine might not be achievable, and that negotiations could be envisaged (cf. SAS 46/22). Despite the storm of protest those remarks kicked up, he repeated on Nov. 16 that the probability of a victory “defined as kicking the Russians out of all of Ukraine” anytime soon, “is not high”. But “there may be a political solution” involving withdrawal, he added.

From London, which has pushed the hardest for confrontation with Moscow, the response came from The Economist, the mouthpiece of the City of London, which accused Gen. Milley of losing his nerve, and demanded much greater supplies of arms and equipment be sent from the West, in particular from Europe.

So, it’s not surprising that it was to London that Kiev sent its Deputy Defense Minister Volodymyr Havrylov on Nov. 19 to receive marching orders, where he insisted that nothing but a full military victory is acceptable. “There is a decision inside the society in Ukraine that we are going up to the end”, no matter what, he said. President Zelensky himself stressed again that no negotiations are possible until Russia has completely withdrawn from all of Ukraine and Crimea is reconquered. And in another sign of the government’s intransigence, Andriy Melnyk was just promoted to the post of deputy foreign minister, after being fired from his post as ambassador to Germany, for publicly praising Stepan Bandera, a well-known collaborator of Hitler in Ukraine, and denying Bandera’s role in in mass murders of Russians, Jews, Poles, during WWII. Apparently, those leaders have not yet understood that Ukraine is being instrumentalized by NATO to wage a proxy war against Russia – or they are wittingly complicit.

Finally, we note that the escalation toward nuclear annihilation was avoided just as the collapse of the West’s “rules based order” was being confirmed in a series of important meetings involving representatives of the Global South. That was clear at the G20 summit in Indonesia, which was preceded by the annual ASEAN meeting, and followed by the APEC summit in Thailand, as well as at the COP27 event on an even larger scale (cf. below).