McCain: Russia encroaches on international order

US Senator John McCain said that the collective weakness of the US and Europe provokes Russian aggression. He called on the US and Europe to "recognize the failure of the Minsk Agreement and respond with more than empty rhetoric "to the revanchist Russian aggression" in his article in The Washington Post.

McCain said that last week he and two other US senators met with volunteers from the Ukrainian battalion in Eastern Ukraine. "The Ukrainian volunteers' message was clear to me: The cease-fire with Russia is fiction, and U.S. assistance is vital to deterring further Russian aggression," RIA Novosti cited him as saying.

According to him, no one asked him about sending US troops to Ukraine during this trip. "Ukrainians only hope that the United States will once again open the arsenal of democracy that has allowed free people to defend themselves so many times before," he stressed.

In addition, he said that Obama has wrongly argued that "providing Ukraine with the assistance and equipment would only provoke Putin." The senator believes that the Russian president wasn't provoke by it, but by "the weakness of collective response" of the United States and Europe.

In his opinion, there is no military solution to the conflict in Ukraine, however, there is a military way to achieve a political solution. At the same time, he called Russia "a strong, militarily capable state" that is hostile to US interests and the international order that US leaders have sought to maintain since the Second World War.