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Putin Has Already Won.

If we are to salvage any remnant of western democracy, we must be willing to sacrifice more than we’ve lost in every war we’ve ever fought. And we are not willing.

Peter Graves Roberts
4 min readMar 6, 2022
Photo by Oscar Ävalos on Unsplash

Night after night I watch the talking heads of the western alliance proclaim that we’re doing all we can, and will continue to do so to stop the Russian invasion of free Ukraine. And it’s just not true.

This opinion will be short and bitter. It is time to address the elephant in the room: The threat of nuclear war has paralyzed the United States, Europe, and NATO. The reality that effectively countering Putin’s aggression militarily will almost certainly cost the nations of the free world hundreds of thousands, if not millions of lives has bound our hearts and hands.

The United States guaranteed this outcome when it dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki three quarters of a century ago, igniting a nuclear arms race between the west and Russia. Though fears I lived with in grade school of a fiery Armageddon were pushed aside when the Iron Curtain fell, the weapons of earth’s destruction were not.

As Russia’s resurgent KGB era despot pushes ahead with escalatory nuclear saber rattling, his western counterparts prepare speeches to honor the lives of the…

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Peter Graves Roberts
Peter Graves Roberts

Written by Peter Graves Roberts

Pete Roberts is a poet, punk writer, backseat journalist and objector. Born and broken in Portsmouth, VA, he now works from the Outer Banks of North Carolina.

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