Britain calls Putin's invasion of Ukraine a major ‘strategic error’

The A news reported, the British foreign minister for Europe and North America said in Chicago this week that Russian President Vladimir Putin committed a major "strategic error" in believing his invasion of Ukraine would fragment Western democracies.

Instead, Foreign Office Minister James Cleverly said, Putin saw the NATO alliance and allied countries unite against Russian aggression in a sign of democracy's resilience.

"Democracy is messy. Democracy is untidy, and to an autocratic leader like Putin, it probably always looks as if it's on the verge of collapse," Cleverly, the British equivalent of U.S. secretary of state, said in an interview in Chicago with the Tribune on Wednesday (Apr 13).

"I think Putin read all the wrong lessons from the natural processes that liberal democracies go through — the elections, the criticism," Cleverly said. "He was clearly not listening to the people who should know better or didn't know better and pursued this ego-driven attack on Ukraine. And then, when the messy, untidy democracies of the liberal world saw what happened, instead of falling apart like he thought we would, we pull together because that's what we do."

Vladimir Putin committed a major "strategic error" in believing his invasion of Ukraine would fragment Western democracies, says British Foreign Minister for Europe and North America (File photo: Facebook)

Cleverly's visit to Chicago was part of a tour, which that also included stops in Washington, D.C., Missouri and Minnesota, aimed at solidifying the United Kingdom's preexisting relationships in an "really scary time" amid a backdrop of pandemic and war.

As to whether allied nations are doing enough to help Ukraine, Cleverly said, "We need to give the Ukrainians the tools to push back and push back hard against the Russian invasion so that Putin is forced to engage properly with peace talks in a way that at this moment, up until this point, he hasn't been."

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At the same time, Cleverly said, it was "incumbent upon us all to highlight to the Russian people the horrors that are being perpetrated in their name, that they don't know about, and they currently are being lied to systematically by their own national leadership."

"How this is resolved, ultimately, must be guided heavily by the Ukrainians. This is their nation. They are the ones who will decide when they would accept a peace settlement ... and what the terms are. They're the ones that will have to live with it," he said. "Zelensky is not going to roll over. He's not going to take a bad deal. We need to make sure, again echoing Winston Churchill, we need to give him the tools to get the job done."

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Cleverly said, but as the war in Ukraine continues, there also will be a price paid by the citizens of Western democracies over trying to rein in Russian aggression.

He said: "I think we need to recognize that there is a bill to be paid and we are seeing this across the Western world — food prices going up, gas prices are going up — and those increases are a direct result of Putin's invasion of Ukraine."

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He said: "Now, both in Washington and Westminster and in capital cities around the world, we're going to have to do whatever we can to try and mitigate those pressures to try and help people get to work and fill their shopping trolleys and that's not going to be easy. But the simple truth is that these pressures became inevitable the day that that war started."

Source: anews