Ukraine crisis can cause military confrontation between US and Russia

Jatras, a former Senate foreign policy adviser in Washington, made the remarks while commenting on the Pentagon’s claim of carrying out an "extraordinary” observation flight "to reaffirm US commitment to Ukraine" amid Russia-Ukraine tensions.

The flight was conducted under the Open Skies treaty on Thursday by a US Air Force OC-135 observation aircraft, the Pentagon said in a statement issued on Thursday.

Pentagon spokesman Eric Pahon told CNN that the “timing of this flight is intended to reaffirm US commitment to Ukraine and other partner nations.”

"Russia's unprovoked attack on Ukrainian naval vessels in the Black Sea near the Kerch Strait is a dangerous escalation in a pattern of increasingly provocative and threatening activity," he added.

Jatras said, “It’s hard to describe all of the things that are wrong with conducting the so-called extraordinary flight over Ukraine. To start with, Ukraine is not an ally of the United States. We have no commitments to Ukraine. Ukraine is not a member of NATO. We already had one American pilot killed in a training exercise in Ukraine.”

“The rhetoric accompanying this is extremely dangerous regarding these so-called unprovoked attacks on the Ukrainian vessels in the Kerch Strait. It was not an unprovoked attack,” he added.

“These vessels were trying to provoke an incident and that’s exactly what they have accomplished.  And now of course Russia is being blamed for that. Rather than ratcheting up the tensions which runs for a serious risk of a military confrontation between the United States and Russia and Ukraine and even the possibility of a nuclear war, somebody with  some common sense to take a step back from this and look at what the interests of the United States are,” he stated.

“I voted for ‘America First’, I did not vote for ‘America Last,’ and ‘Ukraine First’ or any these other confrontations that has nothing to do with the safety and welfare of the people of the United States,” he concluded.

Tensions over Ukraine escalated on November 25, when Russian border patrols fired at three Ukrainian ships and then seized them along with their sailors because of illegal entry into Russian waters in the Kerch Strait, which connects the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov.

The incident took place near Crimea, a former Ukrainian territory on the Black Sea that joined Russia in a referendum in March 2014.

The seizure of the Ukrainian ships sparked a fresh row between Moscow and Washington and prompted US President Donald Trump to cancel a planned meeting with his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, on the sidelines of the G20 summit in Argentina.