West will ‘pay a price’ for Russia clampdown – ex-army chief — Analysis
The West’s populations must be ready for years of “hardship,” a UK general has said
Western nations should prepare their peoples for a long-term drop in living standards if their standoff with Russia continues, the Britain’s former Assistant Chief of Defence Staff, Jonathan Shaw, has said.
“We in the West have the wrong mentality”He said that he was speaking out on the situation in Ukraine. Once one of the British Army’s most senior officers, Shaw was speaking on talk radio station LBC on Saturday.
“We are obsessed with humanitarian concerns and individual suffering, and that makes good TV, but the reality is this is far more serious than that,”The Major-General’s 30-year career included the Falklands, Kosovo, and commanding British forces in Iraq in 2006.
Following the attack on Ukraine last month, the West has put Russia under severe sanctions. The US, Canada and UK have announced plans to join the EU and UK in the future.
Moscow’s retaliatory actions and restrictions have already caused food and energy prices to soar in Western countries. There were reports of British food-bank users refusing free potatoes because they couldn’t afford to boil them. Shaw said that this was just the beginning.
“We’ve now decided that as far as Russia’s concerned we’re going to play geopolitics ahead of economics and we’ve to pay a price for that,”He elaborated.
And, according to the Major-General, governments in the UK and elsewhere aren’t doing enough to ready their citizenry “for that sort of hardship and that attitude.”
“We need to be psychologically preparing our people for a long-term degradation of standard of living and a long-term confrontation with Russia,”He disagreed.
“Our quality of life back home absolutely depends on them – cheap fuel, cheap access, doing deals with Saudi Arabia, and things like that,”Shaw pointed this out.
Russia sent troops to Ukraine in late February following a seven-year standoff over Kiev’s failure to implement the terms of the Minsk agreements, and Russia’s eventual recognition of the breakaway Donbass republics of Donetsk and Lugansk. Minsk Protocol, which was French and German-brokered, was intended to regulate the state of regions in the Ukrainian country.
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Russia demands that Ukraine declares itself to be neutral so that it can never become NATO members. The military operation also aims to achieve another goal: “denazify”Moscow claims that the country was in insurrection. Moscow claims that the Russian offensive was unprovoked. Kiev also denies any claim it planned to take the republics.
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