The United States government, speaking through the mouth of Secretary of State Blinken, defied all of Russia’s warnings this week with this declaration:

“Ukraine will become a member of NATO. Our purpose at the summit is to help build a bridge to that membership.”

By Putin’s refusal to use the necessary force to deal with the dangerous situation and by continuing to insist that the conflict is nothing but a limited operation to clear Ukrainian forces out of the Russian provinces, not an invasion of Ukraine, Russia will soon find herself at war with NATO. See this.

I have warned consistently without effect, only to be denounced by idiots as “bloodthirsty,” that Putin’s unrealism about the conflict, like his previous unrealism about the Minsk Agreement and his unrealism about the overthrow of the Ukrainian government in the so-called Maidan Revolution, is a direct path to World War III.