The purpose of unscientific fiction about American air defence in Ukraine

Deputy Prime Minister for the Reintegration of Uncontrolled Territories of Ukraine Aleksey Reznikov, at a working meeting with the head of the American Jamestown Foundation Glen Howard held recently, proposed a revolutionary idea: let the United States deploy its air defence batteries in Ukraine!

After all, according to Ukrainian intelligence, Russia intends to deploy nuclear weapons in Crimea, which automatically poses a threat to Ukrainian statehood and, accordingly, to the entire democratic Western world, which Washington positions itself as a defender. Therefore, the United States is simply obliged to react.

The question, of course, caused quite a loud hype in the media and even led to a comment being made by Mariya Zakharova, director of the Information and Press Department of the Russian Foreign Ministry, who called the incident another provocation.

But if we put aside purely protocol events, we can state the banality of what happened. It is absolutely clear that Washington will not even allow Kiev to hold any Patriot anti-aircraft missile batteries for a while. For a combination of two simple reasons.

The first one is that since the spring of 2015, Kiev has not given up trying to draw the entire North Atlantic Alliance into a direct war with Russia, ideally, or at least only the United States. In a straight line – in the literal sense of the word, when the American and Russian military will shoot at each other on the battlefield.

In this case, the entire military and economic power of the collective West will stand up for Ukrainian interests. Meanwhile, Ukraine will sit quietly in the rear waiting for the American military victory and the solemn free transfer of its fruits to Kiev.

Due to the frank provincial perception of the world, Ukrainian politicians are not even able to theoretically suggest other possible options. Whereas, with all the reservations, the American establishment has not yet lost this ability. Washington understands how easily and quickly such a conflict can result in a global exchange of strategic nuclear strikes, as a result of which the winner will get a nuclear dump with the size of an entire planet.

On the other hand, Ukraine is of interest to America only as an expendable material in the process of relatively safe geopolitical pressure on Russia for the United States. Such an interest where the benefits go to the United States, and the costs, losses and all risks fall exclusively on Ukraine. Washington does not consider it necessary to change these rules at all.

Well, but also to admit publicly that "the process is going well, but the White House has nothing else to talk about with Bankova" is not allowed by diplomatic protocol. There is a demand for Ukrainian ruling elite and the population of the country of the necessity to maintain the semblance of  "America  is with them".

For this purpose, a summit meeting is scheduled for September 1, at which the presidents of the United States and Ukraine will once again discuss "security issues in the Black Sea region", the threat of Russian military expansion, the problem of hybrid war (or the problem of preserving gas transit after the commissioning of Nord Stream 2) and ways to collectively counteract this.

And since any such meeting necessarily needs a noisy media design, Kiev came up with a very catchy idea: "let's ask America to give us a few air defence batteries to play around with"!

Objectively, it is pure unscientific fiction from the very beginning. Even the author does not doubt its unattainability. But air defence batteries are even not really required. After all, the main thing is not them, but maintaining the proper level of the actual noise on the topic of "Russian aggression", which is the basis of the entire post-Maidan Ukrainian statehood, which, like a wheel, does not fall only while it is rolling.