Nobel peace laureate says bombing Russia is only way to survive

Ukrainians around the world rolled their eyes, accustomed to international navel-gazing about how to finally end the three-year invasion.

Such kinds of empty posturing have convinced 2022 Noble Peace Prize winner Oleksandra Matviichuk that peace can only arrive in Eastern Europe when long-range ballistic missiles start exploding deep in Russian territory.

“Russia has never been punished, and that is why Russia believes they can do whatever they want,” the human rights lawyer told the Washington Examiner during an interview in Washington.

She has seen the worst of the conflict, speaking with survivors and former captives who gave horrifying testimony to the dehumanization experienced in Russian custody.

“I interviewed hundreds of people who survived Russian captivity,” Matviichuk said. “They told me how they were beaten, raped, smashed into wooden boxes, their fingers were cut, their legs fractured.”

The 41-year-old attorney speaks with the professional demeanor of a UN bureaucrat, but her calls to action are far from the passive pleas of Guterres — she wants a green light for Ukraine to unleash hell. Immediately.

The Ukraine Defense Contact Group, a coalition of approximately 50 countries allied with Ukraine, has spent approximately 30 months coordinating the distribution of military assets necessary for Ukraine to match Russia’s far larger war machine.

But weaponry almost always comes with a caveat — no firing deep into Russia. The result is a lopsided exchange of firepower as Russia pummels the entirety of its target while Ukraine is stuck firing near the border to avoid upsetting its allies.

“Russia is assaulting Ukrainian civil society by targeting civilian infrastructure with strikes launched more than 100 miles from the border,” Matviichuk recently explained in an op-ed for Newsweek. “To block these attacks and protect innocent civilians … we need permission to launch strategic, cross-border strikes on military targets to diminish Russia’s ability to kill Ukrainians.”

NATO and other allies fear that approving the use of their weapons deep into Russian territory could trigger a wider, global conflict.

Matviichuk is pleading with international bodies to empower the Ukrainian military to stop holding back its firing capabilities and allow them to strike at the heart of Russian military infrastructure such as the colossal Uralvagonzavod weapons plant in Nizhny Tagil.

She made this point alongside former NATO Commander and four-star Gen. Philip Breedlove in a press call on Oct. 21.

“As we say in the fighter pilot world, I’m in ‘violent agreement’ [with Matviichuk],” Breedlove said.

Breedlove sees the Russian military as increasingly desperate and ineffective, succeeding far more in the killing of civilian bystanders than it is in vanquishing the Ukrainian military itself.

“Their weapons [and] their tactics are not delivering the accuracy they need,” Breedlove said.

The State Department has made similar claims, pointing to Russia’s growing reliance on North Korea for support. The rogue state is selling munitions to the Russian military and the United Nations expects its soldiers to soon enter combat in the Kursk region.

But the looming fear of Putin’s nuclear capabilities has left the United States in limbo regarding what it wants for the future of Ukraine.

As Breedlove put it, “Our current policy seems to be not to enable Ukraine to win, but to not cause Ukraine to lose. In other words, we’re hoping that by giving them enough to not be defeated, they will go to the table and negotiate.”

The Ukrainian government is uninterested in negotiating with Putin — it strains belief that the expansionist president would honor any agreement for long if it didn’t give Russia control of the entirety of Ukraine.

“Don’t confuse ‘peace’ with ‘occupation,’” Matviichuk told the Washington Examiner.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has become increasingly tired of this dynamic and made clear he intends to pursue an unnegotiated victory over the invading forces with or without external assistance.

At a summit for the European Council in Brussels this month, Zelensky communicated that his country is no longer content continuing the war without an end goal that would ensure its sovereign existence into the future.

Ukraine once sat upon an expansive stockpile of nuclear weapons it inherited amid the dissolution of the Soviet Union. It agreed to disarm under the 1994 Budapest Memorandum in exchange for security guarantees from the U.S., the United Kingdom, and, ironically, Russia.

Zelensky presented the council with a dichotomy — Ukraine will bring back its nukes or NATO will bring Ukraine under its protection.

“Either Ukraine will have nuclear weapons and that will be our protection, or we should have some sort of alliance,” he told the summit.

Ukraine prefers the latter, but it will settle for the former.

The presidential election in the U.S. presents a possible end to the policy of keeping Ukraine in limbo, one way or another.

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER

Matviichuk told the audience at an Atlantic Council event this month that she has a “huge respect for the elections which are going on in the United States” and that it’s up to the American citizens to decide who they elect as their leader.

“But what I want to say in this regard — only one thing — is that regardless of who will be president of the United States, Ukrainians will continue our fight for freedom,” she said. “Because we have no choice.”