'Nato must react'

Defense Min. Jana Černochová of ODS said on CNN Prima News last night with regard to the 10-point war scale of Army Chief of Staff Karel Řehka that the situation is of course very serious. Nobody wants escalation, she said, but Russia is escalating things. During the recent Russian-Belarusian military exercises, she added, part of the exercise was the use of tactical nuclear weapons, and Nato must react appropriately to this, not just with words, but also with action. Russia acts with force, she said, and we must react with force as well. Just before he left the White House earlier this year, Joe Biden said that he had two jobs when Vladimir Putin launched his invasion: "One, to rally the world to defend Ukraine, and the other is to avoid war between two nuclear powers. We did both those things." The Fiala government played a small but important role in implementing this policy. It more or less accepted for three years that the U.S. wasn't going to allow Nato to get directly involved. Donald Trump's policy is even more cautious in this respect. But for some reason, Černochová now thinks that she can tell the U.S. what to do.