Where thou diest, will I die, and there will I be buried: the Lord do so to me, and more also, if ought but death part thee and me. Ruth 1:16-17
Secretaries Blinken and Austin, after traveling to Kyiv and meeting President Zelensky, concluded consultations with 40 allies in Germany who agreed to provide long-term war materiel to Ukraine. ...Germany said it would send dozens of armored antiaircraft vehicles. It was a major policy shift for a country that had wavered over fear of provoking Russia.
This is consistent with Western leaders' trips to Kyiv, with Austin's statement yesterday that it is only confident in eventual Ukirainian victory but wants to see the Russian military degraded. It also shines a different light on Russian threats. Yesterday, the Russian embassy in Washington delivered to the State Department another of those seemingly anodyne diplomatic notes stating Russian "concerns" over Western military aid to Ukraine. In the lingua franca of diplomacy those notes are taken ominously. And today Lap Dog Lavrov blew the nuclear whistle again. In the past the West was positively panicked when Putin or a top Kremlin spokesman dog whistled nukes. They're not panicked anymore. The West is confident either that the Kremlin is crying Wolf or it has taken stock of Russian military capabilities, including wmd, and concluded that Russia is going to be defeated in Ukraine and will be defeated in a head-on war, even a nuclear war, with the West. The statements, the tone, the actions, are just completely different from what they were just a few weeks ago.
