RAPA would accelerate the "implementation of phase three of the European Phased Adaptive Approach for Europe-based missile defense . . . by no later than the end of calendar year 2016." In 2012, Russia's highest ranking military officer stated that Russia might consider a pre-emptive strike against such BMD deployments "when the situation gets harder."
RAPA "Directs DOD [US Department of Defense] to assess the capabilities and needs of the Ukrainian armed forces" and "Authorizes the President, upon completion of such assessment, to provide specified military assistance to Ukraine." RAPA would have the US quickly supply Ukraine with $100 million worth of weapons and equipment, including anti-tank and anti-aircraft weapons, crew weapons, grenade launchers, machine guns, ammunition, and Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles.
RAPA requires the Obama administration to "use all appropriate elements of United States national power...to protect the independence, sovereignty, and territorial and economic integrity of Ukraine and other sovereign nations in Europe and Eurasia from Russian aggression." This includes "substantially increasing United States and NATO support for the armed forces of the Republics of Poland, Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia," and "substantially increasing the complement of forward-based NATO forces in those states."
Consequently, RAPA would produce significant buildups of US/NATO forces into Poland and the Baltic States, accelerate the construction of US BMD systems in Eastern Europe, and authorize substantial U.S. intelligence and military aid for Ukrainian military forces that continue to lay siege to the largest cities in Eastern Ukraine. If RAPA did not result in the deployment of US forces to Ukraine, it would certainly position them for rapid deployment there, in the event that the Ukrainian civil war escalates into a Ukrainian-Russian conflict.
RAPA intensifies support for ethnic cleansing in Eastern Ukraine
In Russia, Putin now is under intense domestic political pressure to send Russian forces into Eastern Ukraine, in order to stop the attacks by the Ukrainian military on the cities there, which were once part of the Soviet Union.These attacks have created an absolute humanitarian catastrophe.
On August 5, 2014, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees reported that 740,000 Eastern Ukrainians had fled to Russia. They go there because Russia is close, and because most of the refugees are ethnic Russians, a fact that explains why the Russophobes in Kiev have been quite willing to indiscriminately bombard their cities. What is taking place in Eastern Ukraine amounts to "ethnic cleansing," the forced removal of ethnic Russians from Eastern Ukraine. This is a process that is fully supported by the US; RAPA would greatly enhance this support.
Ukrainian military forces have surrounded Donetsk -- a city of almost one million people -- and have for weeks conducted daily attacks against it using inaccurate multiple-launch rockets, heavy artillery fire, ballistic missiles carrying warheads with up to 1000 pounds of high explosive, and aerial bombardments. Water supplies, power plants, train stations, airports, bridges, highways, and schools have all been targeted, along with the general population. In Lugansk, a city of more than 440,000 people, a humanitarian crisis has been declared by its mayor, because the siege of the city has left it with little medicine, no fuel,intermittent power, and no water since August 3 (three weeks at the time of this writing).
After the separatists of Eastern Ukraine demanded autonomy from Kiev, and then reunion with Russia, the government in Kiev branded them as "terrorists," and sent its military forces against them in what they euphemistically call an "anti-terrorist operation." Framing the conflict this way makes it politically acceptable to refuse to negotiate with the separatists, and easier to justify in the US and Europe, which have grown accustomed to "the War on Terrorism." However, the thousands of Ukrainians being killed and hundreds of thousands of being driven from their homes are just ordinary people, trying to live ordinary lives.
The New York Times reports the Ukrainian military strategy has been to bombard separatist-held cities and then send paramilitary forces to carry out "chaotic, violent assaults" against them. Many of the Ukrainian paramilitary forces were recruited from ultra-nationalist, neo-Nazi political parties; the Azov battalion flies the "Wolfs Hook" flag of Hitler's SS divisions. Considering that more than 20 million Russians died fighting the Nazis during World War II, the presence of openly Nazi militias attacking ethnic Russians in Ukraine creates extreme anger in Russia.
RAPA supports plans in Kiev for an attack on Crimea
The Russian Aggression Prevention Act demands that Russia "withdraw from the eastern border of Ukraine," which is by definition, the Russian border. In other words, RAPA provocatively demands that Russia remove its own military forces away from its own borders, while Ukrainian military forces are meanwhile massed on the other side, attacking predominantly Russian cities.
RAPA also demands that "Russian forces must have withdrawn from Crimea within seven days of the enactment of the Act." Not likely to happen, given that...
(1) Crimea was part of the Russian empire from 1783 until 1954,(2) withdrawal from Crimea would require Russia to abandon its only warm water port at Sevastopol, where Russian forces have been based, by internationally recognized treaty, since 1997, and
(3) more than three-quarters of all Crimeans voted "yes" to reunify with Russia, a vote which Russia accepted by its subsequent annexation of Crimea.
Thus, in the eyes of Russia, the requirement to "withdraw from Crimea" amounts to a US demand that Russia surrender Russian territory. Putin has just taken the entire Russian Duma (the Russian House of Representatives) to Crimea, to address them there and strongly make the point that there will be no withdrawal from Crimea.
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