Ukraine is not a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. The United States has no treaty obligations — and neither does NATO — to come to Kiev’s aid in times of war.

The irresponsible, tasteless and plain obscene action of U.S. Defense Attache to Kiev Colonel Brittany Stewart in publicly wearing a Ukrainian armed forces death’s head insignia in her visit to the Donbass war zone in a time of deadly escalating tensions on April 9 defies belief. Her action suggests that under President Joe Biden and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin the Pentagon has fallen into the hands of deadly dangerous sloppy idiots.

Ukraine’s Joint Forces Operation command said Stewart had traveled to Donbass to assess the situation on the ground. In photos taken during her visit, Stewart is seen wearing on her shoulder sleeve a “Ukraine or death” skull insignia, which is the patch of the 72nd Mechanized Infantry Brigade.

When I first saw the reports — and photographs — of Stewart’s action — I automatically assumed that she must be an ignorant, impressionable amateur catapulted into a situation way out of her depth.

Out of her depth, Stewart certainly is, but lack of experience should be no excuse for it. She is a presumably seasoned U.S. Air Force officer who previously served as Air Attaché with the U.S. Defense Attaché Office at the U.S. Embassy in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, another former Soviet republic. So this is not her first such quasi-political appointment. She should certainly have known what she was doing.

What she was doing was unprecedented. No servicing U.S. armed services officer is ever permitted to wear the insignia of any other nation, however innocuous, without receiving the prior approval of the Departments of the Army, the Navy or the Air Force.

The only known exception to this rule — and it is a revealing one — was when Colonel Clare Chennault at a time when the United States was still at peace and neutral in World War II, flew his Flying Tigers group of P-40 combat aircraft against the Japanese in support of the Kuomintang regime in China. Even that was only done by the express personal approval of President Franklin Roosevelt himself. And within months, Japan had attacked the United States, sinking all its Pacific Fleet battleships at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.

Chennault’s Flying Tigers helped convince Japan’s war planners in Tokyo that the United States was already their inveterate enemy set on their destruction and therefore in order to survive, Japan needed to attack the U.S. first. Is that really the lesson Biden and Austin want to send to the government of Russia?

Ukraine is not a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. The United States has no treaty obligations — and neither does NATO — to come to Kiev’s aid in times of war.

Yet President Donald Trump approved — and Biden now continues — the open supply of Javelin anti-armor missiles whose clear and obvious purpose, denied by no one, is to kill ethnic Russian militia forces fighting for their freedom in the two secessionist provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk in the Donbass region of eastern Ukraine.

Stewart not only openly displayed partiality for the crushing of the secessionist provinces, she did so in a way guaranteed to enrage all Russian and Ukrainians whose grandparents and great-grandparents fought — and all too often were mercilessly killed — by thr Nazis and their collaborationist allies during World War II.

For the death’s head was the insignia of the SS, the most murderous, racist and infamous murder force of barbarians in recorded human history. The current regime in Ukraine claims to be democratic. But it has always been ferociously anti-Russian: It came into existence in 2014 by toppling democratically-elected President Viktor Yanukovych in a violent, bloody coup openly and shamelessly supported by the U.S. government — including then Vice President Joe Biden and Biden’s current Under Secretary of State for Policy Victoria Nuland. Nuland even handed out cookies to the violent rioters and revolutionaries storming through the streets of Kiev at the time.

The death’s head insignia adopted by the current armed forces of Ukraine therefore has truly horrific connotations of hatred, genocide and the merciless waging of a world war dedicated to the enslavement of the Slav peoples, including Ukrainians as well as Russians.

You do not need to be a professor of European history to know that: And since the U.S. military repeatedly boasts of the “professionalism” and exceptionally high standards of all its senior officers, Stewart in particular should have known that. Or maybe she did — and she just didn’t care.

In any case, her action was disgusting, shameful and stupid and senior retired U.S. officers are already publicly saying so.

Retired U.S. Army Colonel Doug Macgregor, a senior Pentagon adviser during the Trump administration, told the Sputnik News Agency that Stewart’s action was virtually without precedent in the history of the U.S. Army and armed forces.

In any competent military, Stewart would be ignominiously kicked out. Instead, judging by recent patterns, she’ll be promoted to three star general and given the Congressional Medal of Honor.

Stewart’s move comes amid an escalation in tensions in Donbass and between Ukraine and Russia. On Wednesday, the head of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic, Denis Pushilin, said the situation at the contact line was deteriorating.

Sputnik reported that the Kremlin described the situation on Russia’s border with Ukraine as “frightening” and vowed to bolster security in response to the increased NATO presence. Also on April 9, the Pentagon refused to comment on reports from Turkey’s Foreign Ministry that the U.S. was deploying two warships to the Black Sea.

The Pentagon under both the Obama and Trump administration’s recklessly approved the deployment of U.S. attaches and liaison officers to the Ukrainian armed forces who were exceptionally partisan and who often openly expressed their loathing of Russia. Instead of sending firefighters to quench the dangerous flames of hatred and craving for war in Ukraine, the U.S. government persisted in sending arsonists to pour gasoline on the flames. And they should have known full well that those flames would not stay chemical and local, they could far too easily go nuclear and engulf the entire world.

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Strategic Culture Foundation