Russia’s Lavrov Says U.S. Is the “Steamroller”

There is much diplomatic effort going on right now about Putin’s War in Ukraine. Even Ukraine President Zelenskyy is sounding a bit optimistic about it. Yet in his virtual speech to the U.S. Congress today, he called on U.S. President Biden to be a “leader of peace” while also pleading again for the West, led by the U.S., to create a no-fly zone over Ukraine.

The U.S. creating a no-fly zone over Ukraine in this war would effectively be widening the conflict by creating a war between the two most nuclear powered countries: the U.S. and Russia. They have 11,000+ of the world’s entire 12,000+ nuclear arsenal. To have a no-fly zone, the U.S. would have to shoot down Russian warplanes over Ukraine. That would bring to the two nations into an unprecedented war that could involve nuclear weapons. U.S. President Joe Biden is trying to walk a tightrope in helping to arm Ukraine to defend itself and also avoid World War III.

But Russia Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, in a lengthy interview today, said about Russia’s armed conflict in Ukraine that it is “not as much about Ukraine as it is about the legal world order. The U.S. has steamrolled all of Europe.”

What! The U.S. is merely one of the thirty members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). (Only the U.S. and Canada are not in Europe.) It was formed after WWII, in 1949, in order to establish a military alliance that would protect mostly European countries from being overtaken by the Soviet Union.

The Soviets responded to NATO by forming the Warsaw Pact in 1955. Then the Soviet Union began militarily entering and taking over eastern European countries, usually against the will of the people. Thus, it was the Soviet Union that “steamrolled” Eastern Europe. That never happened with NATO. All those countries that became members of NATO–which eventually included former Eastern European countries that had been in the Warsaw Pact after the Soviet collapse in 1991–did so by asking to join NATO.

Russia is the only nation that is doing any steamrolling, meaning against the will of the Ukraine people, and I believe the result will be just as my grandfather Zarley once told me, “You Can’t Trust the Russians.” (President Putin constantly lied by saying he would not invade Ukraine with his amassed troops on the Ukraine-Russian border.) Sadly, if the populace of Russia knew what was happening with Putin’s War in Ukraine, the majority of Russian people likely would be very much against Putin’s War.