Friday, March 29

A no-fly zone in Ukraine is a way to bring the world closer to a nuclear war

The Ukrainian president asks NATO countries for specific military aid with which to deal with Russian air attacks. The problem is that it would mean an intervention that would put the world on the brink of a war that could be nuclear. At a press conference, Volodymyr Zelensky insisted Thursday on calling for NATO to impose a no-fly zone over Ukraine. “How long do they need? How many arms, legs and heads would need to be cut off for them to understand? If they don’t have the strength to facilitate a no-fly zone, give us planes. Wouldn’t that be fair?”

This is a military escalation at the highest level that Europe and the US are not in a position to subscribe to due to the risks involved. NATO’s secretary general responded to that request on Friday. “We are not going to enter Ukraine, either by land or through its airspace,” said Jens Stoltenberg. “We understand the desperation, but we also believe that we would end up with something that could be an all-out war in Europe involving multiple countries.”

Stoltenberg admitted that the matter had been discussed at the last NATO meeting, but that “the allies agreed that there should be no NATO aircraft in Ukrainian airspace.”

A no-fly zone is not simply a ban on planes or helicopters flying over an area. It supposes a direct military intervention that forces to patrol its skies and shoot down any device that disobeys orders to immediately leave that space. Almost inevitably, it would carry the risk of confrontation between Russian and American planes.

NATO aircraft should be located in the countries bordering Ukraine, for example Poland, to be able to take off from there and fulfill their mission. Those airports would therefore be a clear target for Russian counterattacks. It is naive or unrealistic to assume that the Russian Air Force would not respond to the decision with offensive measures.

Western countries have imposed no-fly zones in several wars, always with the intention of preventing the victory of one of the opposing sides. This was the case in Bosnia between 1993 and 1995, Iraq after the 1991 war, and Libya in 2011. In the first and third cases, a UN Security Council resolution covered the decision. In none of them did the adversary have sufficient force to contest that decision, nor did they evidently have nuclear weapons in his arsenal.

“It is equivalent to (declaring) a war,” said US General Philip Breedlove, commander of NATO’s Supreme Command between 2013 and 2016. “If we are going to declare a no-fly zone, we will have to eliminate the fire capacity of the enemy that could affect our no-fly zone”.

The debate frustrated from the start by its chilling consequences helps to better understand Vladimir Putin’s decision to put his nuclear forces on alert a few days ago, albeit in a deliberately ambiguous way. It does not mean that the use of these weapons is really being considered by Moscow, but rather that it is about making clear something that Europe and the US are very aware of. Any confrontation between Russian and NATO military forces has the potential to escalate into a nuclear war.



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