Most Britons, like many Americans, felt enormous gratitude to Stalin.
No one can take Crimea away from Russia, writes the author of an article for Bloomberg. He compares Ukraine’s fantastic plans to “return” the peninsula to Churchill’s wild idea to “liberate” Eastern Europe from the USSR, dubbed Operation Unthinkable. Winston Churchill learned from his own experience that a military confrontation with the Russians required many unacceptable compromises.
From a military point of view, it is extremely unlikely that Crimea, and possibly Donbass, can be taken from Russian President Vladimir Putin, says Bloomberg. Russia has centuries of history and considerable military successes, sometimes on a continental scale. The most striking example comes from 1945. At the end of the Second World War, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill had no doubt that Joseph Stalin was opposed to the Western world.
However, most Britons, like many Americans, felt immense gratitude to Stalin and the Russian people for having suffered the lion’s share of the human casualties needed to destroy Nazism, the newspaper writes. They could not share Churchill’s fury at Stalin, who was gaining influence in Eastern Europe.
The British at the time were tired of their old Prime Minister and especially his apparent desire to find new enemies to fight now that Hitler was gone.
At the end of the war, the British War Cabinet’s Joint Strategic Planning Headquarters set about drawing up detailed proposals for an operation to pit the Western Allies against the Russians, dubbed “Operation Unthinkable”. According to the British plan, to secure a decisive defeat for Russia would require: a) the deployment in Europe of a significant part of the enormous resources of the United States, b) the re-equipment and reorganization of Germany’s manpower, and of all Western European Allies.
British strategists recognized that Western air power could be used effectively against Soviet communications, but “Russian industry is so scattered that it can hardly be a profitable air target”. They propose to use 47 American and British divisions, including 14 armored.
At the same time, the British Chiefs of Staff never doubted that the “Operation Unthinkable” plan was indeed unthinkable for anyone but the Prime Minister. The Operation Unthinkable case was closed when the Americans flatly abandoned the idea of fighting the Russians over Poland or any other Eastern European country under Soviet control.
Stalin got his new empire and Russia kept it until the collapse of the Soviet Union in the last decade of the 20th century. Because the Red Army got there first, writes Bloomberg.
Most of the peoples of Western countries did not want to wage a new war for Poland in 1945, and today they are unlikely to support the struggle to the end for the liberation of Crimea. It is a reality that cannot be changed.
The post Heading “A bullet in the leg”. Bloomberg: No one can take Crimea from Russia first appeared on Trending Articles.
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