"Reality Check: A “no-fly zone” over Ukraine means WAR" by

 

Reality Check: A “no-fly zone” over Ukraine means WAR

Western pundits and journalists are all in a flutter over Ukraine. They think it’s terribly exciting, and want to be seen to be tough and decisive. Their internal monologues probably feature the word “Churchillian” quite a lot.

Naturally, that means a lot of them are saying some really stupid things.

This includes widespread calls for a NATO-imposed “No-Fly Zone” over Ukrainian airspace. This proposal is all over the media, even coming out of the porcine mouth of Sir Keir Starmer, the leader of the UK’s Labour party:

A dip through the #NoFlyZone hashtag on Twitter will introduce you to hundreds and hundreds of people, many of them probably NATO shill accounts, all ramping of the calls for a no-fly zone.

It will also demonstrate that huge numbers of these people have no idea what a “no-fly zone” actually is or how it works.

We encountered this same issue in Syria a few years ago. After the Russians entered the war at the invitation of Bashar al Assad, Western journalists got all jingoistic and started calling for no-fly zones. We had to explain how they worked back then, too.

As we recently of our editors summarised on Twitter…

A no-fly zone is not a magic dome of cosy protection put in place with a snap of the fingers and enforced without a shot being fired.

A no-fly zone is a declaration of war. It does NOT save lives. That’s a lie to trick stupid people into calling for escalation.

A no-fly zone will require NATO to shoot down any Russian aircraft that enter the airspace.

It will lead to inevitable retaliation from the Russians who will shoot down NATO aircraft & attack NATO anti-aircraft batteries. Thousands more will die immediately.

And since Russia already has its nuclear weapons on high alert any imposition of a no-fly zone Ukraine has a very high chance of immediate escalation to nuclear war.

And no, that would NOT be an exchange of tactical battlefield nukes. It would be strategic ICBMs.

Thousands of kilotons of nuclear weapons unleashed on every major city in the Northern hemisphere from San Diego to Moscow.

The war would suddenly be a mushroom cloud in YOUR backyard.

This is why even the Pentagon won’t contemplate a no-fly zone Ukraine. It’s global suicide.

No-fly zones do not save lives, they are not designed to. They are designed to escalate.

To all the people out there happily sharing the #NoFlyZoneinUkraineNow hashtag: If you really want to save lives get educated about what’s actually going on in Ukraine. Stop being a manipulated war-puppet spewing hashtags you don’t understand.

Source: OffGuardian