Sure. Yes.

Intervija ar ASV ģenerāli Martinu Dempsiju Štābu priekšnieku komitejas priekšsēdētāju

[…]General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs (varabungas – 🙂 , šeit un zemāk izcēlumi mani), thank you very much for talking with us.

GEN. MARTIN DEMPSEY, Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff: Well, I’m excited to be here today.

JUDY WOODRUFF: The United States is sending more military material, forces into Eastern Europe, F-15s into the Baltics, F-16s to Poland, another warship into the Black Sea. What message is the U.S. trying to send to Russia right now?

GEN. MARTIN DEMPSEY: We’re clearly trying to send a message to Russia, almost exclusively through diplomatic channels, so that I do have an open line with my Russian counterpart that I have used twice the last two days.

But we’re trying to tell them not to escalate this thing further into Eastern Ukraine and allow the conditions to be set for some kind of resolution in the Crimea. But the message we are sending militarily is to our NATO allies.

So, one of our responsibilities at times like this is to reassure our allies. And so the deployments you mentioned into the Baltic air policing mission, into the aviation detachment in Poland, the deployment of the ship, are really intended to reassure our allies.

JUDY WOODRUFF: So, the U.S. is saying to the allies, if this were to come to some sort of military conflict, the U.S. would back up NATO?

GEN. MARTIN DEMPSEY: Well, don’t forget, we have — actually, we have NATO treaty obligations under Article 5 for collective defense.

And, so, when they ask us for reassurance or they ask us to — for contingency planning, we respond, and we do have obligations with NATO.

JUDY WOODRUFF: But, if there were to be a misunderstanding of some sort, if there were to be an accident that were to lead to something bigger, has the administration thought through the consequences of what that means, the two countries that are the greatest armed powers on the planet involved?

GEN. MARTIN DEMPSEY: Well, that’s why we’re seeking aggressively to resolve this diplomatically, before we would reach the point where there could be a miscalculation.

It’s probably worth mentioning why this is so unsettling to the Eastern Europeans. You know, we live here in America and sometimes don’t understand the realities of geography and demographics in Eastern Europe.

There are — if Russia is allowed to do this, which is to say move into a sovereign country under the guise of protecting ethnic Russians in Ukraine, it exposes Eastern Europe to some significant risk, because there are ethnic enclaves all over Eastern Europe and the Balkans.

I will give you one example. There are 400,000 ethnic Romanians living in Ukraine. So this is enormously unsettling.

JUDY WOODRUFF: But you know what the Russians are saying is that they have an historic relationship with — with Crimea, and they’re saying the Crimean legislature has voted now to have a referendum, and they’re saying what the government in Kiev did was illegal.

GEN. MARTIN DEMPSEY: Of course they are. And they’re trying to roll back to the February 21 agreement, and we’re trying to suggest that, really, the clock started on February 24.

Those are matters of diplomacy. Our role, as the military, is to seek ways to influence this without it being escalatory. And, by the way, I do have this open line with my Russian counterpart. So, everything that we have done, I tell him, here’s what we’re doing. Here’s why we’re doing it. We disagree fundamentally about your claim of legitimacy, but, as militaries, let’s try to avoid escalating this thing.

JUDY WOODRUFF: But there is a chance it could escalate?

GEN. MARTIN DEMPSEY: Of course there is.

JUDY WOODRUFF: There is a chance of military conflict?

GEN. MARTIN DEMPSEY: Sure. Yes.

JUDY WOODRUFF: And is the U.S. prepared if that happened?

GEN. MARTIN DEMPSEY: Well, that’s a question that I think deserves to be assessed and reassessed and refreshed as this thing evolves.

But, remember, we do have treaty obligations with our NATO allies. And I have assured them that, if that treaty obligation is triggered, we would respond.[…]