Bringing the 101st Airborne Home

by Renee Parsons

With the potential of over 500,000 Russian troops on the border awaiting the green light from Russian President Vladimir Putin to launch its much awaited offensive, what exactly will be the role of the Second Brigade Combat Team’s approximately 4,700 members which have been training Ukraine’s army since May, 2019?     

As an integral part of the famed 101st Airborne Division, will the elite Brigade be moved onto the Ukraine border to go eyeball-to-eyeball with the Russians or will the Biden Administration and Congress decide that no Americans will directly participate in what promises to be a massive slaughter of America’s finest.  I don’t know the answer to that question but I do not choose to remain silent prior to such a potentially horrific demise of sitting ducks that will totally outrage the American public. 

Once the offensive begins, the Russians will not stop for identification; they will continue to roll over everything in their path. 

The first contingent of the historic 101st Airborne arrived in support of NATO’s response to the war in Ukraine as part of the Multi Joint Training Group (MJTG) which is tasked with training and equipping Ukraine forces as the dominant provider of defense assistance to Ukraine.  The Brigade was Deployed to the International Center for Peacekeeping and Security in Lviv Oblast in western Ukraine and may currently be stationed along the Romanian border.   

Established as an airborne unit one minute after midnight on August 16 1942, the 101st Airborne paratroopers are well known as the “Screaming Eagles” who were promised it would soon have a “rendezvous with destiny.” As a division, the 101st has never failed that prophecy as it participated in the landing at Normandy on D Day, followed by the liberation of the Netherlands and the Battle of the Bulge in France against the German Nazis.  If called to combat, today’s 101st will be fighting on behalf of Ukrainian Nazis.         

To digress, it may come as no surprise to those who have been paying attention that all the bravado that NATO, the EU and the United States have been spouting for the last year; predicting the defeat of Russia militarily, anticipating its economic collapse and the imminent ouster of Vladimir Putin as President of Russia have all failed to materialize.  

Since those faded days of western hubris with NATO’s unilateral expansion on Russia’s border seen as an existential threat to its sovereignty, the Biden Administration led its EU allies into an ill-considered overreach of multiple sanctions meant to terminate all things Russian.  Those sanctions reverberated almost immediately to bite all its purveyors in their collective ass with a vengeance. 

While sputtering frantic demands to provide Ukraine with sophisticated weaponry as quickly as possible as well as massive unconditional financial largesse failed to improve Ukraine’s battlefield performance or its willingness to negotiate, the full extent of Russia’s military dominance and its economic sustainability has only recently come to their attention as an unacknowledged reality.

In addition, while the US and NATO are the war’s major aggressors, threatening Russia with the biggest and the most lethal of weaponry, the quiet truth is that both are sitting on a modest stockpile of artillery, ammunition and air defenses weaponry with limited capability to support a long war. 

While the obtuse Biden Administration was quietly contemplating an escape hatch from the bloody carnage in Ukraine that they themselves initiated via NATO, it sicced the equally obtuse Secretary of State Antony Blinken onto the Washington Post’s favorite messenger to introduce the foreign concept of diplomacy.  Reporter David Ignatius was charged with conducting an interview with Blinken featured in “Blinken Ponders the Post Ukraine War Order.”   

Hardly an objective source on Russia or any other foreign policy fiasco, Ignatius reports

“He (Blinken) also underlined President’s determination to avoid direct military conflict with Russia, “even as US weapons helped pulverize Putin’s invasion force” and that “Biden has always been emphatic that one of his requirements in Ukraine is that there be no World War III.”   

Ignatius continues “Crimea is a particular point of discussion.  There is a widespread view in Washington and Kyiv that regaining Crimea by military force may be impossible.   

There is the verification that the American Empire and NATO have been highly covetous of Russia’s state-of- the-art nuclear naval facility in Sevastopol along the coast of the Black Sea.   While  the majority of Crimean residents are ethnic Russians voted overwhelmingly in 2014 to secede from Ukraine in annexation to Russia, Putin confirmed it will fight to the death to preserve Crimea’s devout connection as a center for spiritual unity which began in the 10th Century as the basis for what became the Russian nation.  Catherine the Great returned Crimea to its rightful owner in 1783.  At that time, Russia began construction of its critically important Black Sea Fleet into what became its only warm water port.   

 It is unclear exactly how Blinken ‘ponders’ that which he has insignificant influence to affect, yet per his instructions, he publicly introduced alternatives as if the Administration’s neo con globalists are in a position to dictate ‘concessions’.   Ignatius’ report is stunning in its revelation of a world where perception is shaped by a lack of moral standards and where exposure to truth does not matter.  Blinken’s inability to grasp the paradox of  offering terms of territorial concessions to Russia’s security objectives’ including  a demilitarized zone which identifies ‘historical territories’ already acknowledged as belonging to Russia while daring to suggest that weaponry like the HIMARS, the Leopard and Abrams tanks would be geographically limited so they might ‘maneuvre as a deterrent against future Russian attacks.” 

At the same time the Biden globalists are seeking a convenient, comfortable exit strategy, the latest US military aid to Ukraine includes longer range missiles  with an operational range of up to 93 miles.  Able to reach deep within Russian territory, the ground-based missiles are seen by Russia as a deliberate provocation.  To date, US authorized arms transfers to Ukraine have been valued at $30 Billion.  

At this stage in the conflict, given the recent revelation that the 2015 Minsk Agreement was little more than a stall for time so that NATO and the US could train the Ukraine Army, there is little to no chance that Putin and the Russian Federation’s Security Council have any level of trust to enter into a negotiated treaty with the same evil doers who deceived them on the true purpose of Minsk.


Renee Parsons served on the ACLU’s Florida State Board of Directors and as president of the ACLU Treasure Coast Chapter. She has been an elected public official in Colorado, staff in the Office of the Colorado State Public Defender, an environmental lobbyist for Friends of the Earth and a staff member of the US House of Representatives in Washington DC.

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