The Los Angeles Times quotes VP and Brent Scowcroft Center Director Barry Pavel on NATO’s readiness for conflict in Ukraine:
“This is a very precarious situation,” said Barry Pavel, a former official at the Pentagon and National Security Council now at the Atlantic Council, a Washington think tank. “We are a shooting incident away from a civil war in Ukraine, and then we’re in a new security environment.”
Officials in Washington, Berlin and London fear that any move to arm Ukraine’s ill-equipped military or a movement of major forces to Eastern Europe could lead to a further escalation from Russian President Vladimir Putin, who has justified his military moves in Crimea as a response to Western encroachment.