Leadership Quote by Bob Schaffer

The sentence does a politician's favorite trick: it names a danger while declining to own it. "Growing division" and "as to loyalty" frame Ukraine's military not as an institution under siege, but as a potentially unreliable actor in its own revolution. That's a powerful shift in blame. Instead of centering why soldiers might fracture under pressure - corruption, coercion, foreign meddling, or competing chains of command - the phrasing nudges the reader toward suspicion: if violence comes, it will be because the ranks couldn't stay faithful.

Schaffer's language is also strategically passive. "Possibility of violence looms" conjures an atmospheric threat, like weather rolling in, rather than decisions made by identifiable people. Violence isn't something someone does; it's something that "looms". That rhetorical fog is useful in policy debates, where warning can function as permission. If the situation is portrayed as inherently unstable, tougher stances, security aid, or distancing gestures can be justified as prudence rather than escalation.

"Over the entire situation" widens the blast radius. It implies that even nonviolent political action is contaminated by the chance of force, priming audiences to see revolution as chaos by default. In the post-Cold War, post-9/11 American political register, that framing often carries an unstated lesson: democratic uprisings are inspiring until they look messy, and "messy" becomes a reason to prefer stability over agency.

The intent, then, reads less like on-the-ground reportage than agenda-setting: plant doubt about cohesion, forecast disorder, and make any subsequent hardline response feel like the responsible adult in the room.