Yep , it's that article in a nutshell . After the end of the cold war NATO promised to not go east . Ever since it's all they ve done culminating in the coup attempt 2013/14 in Ukraine . I'm sure we all remember citizens in Kiev waiving their EU flags but that was never going to wash in eastern Ukraine . I have heard that should any efforts by Western forces be made in the Donbass then China has agreed with Russia to move on taiwan . We are entering a bi polar world with Russia / China / Iran one side ( maybe India ) and the traditional Western powers on the other .
Yes. Security. Putin's playbook is based on the Soviet one. Once a KGB man always a KGB man. It’s always about security and they play a long game. As for lost lands… In 2008 Putin suggested to Donald Tusk of Poland that they partition the Ukraine. He went on to say Ukraine is an artificial country and that Lwow is a Polish city so why don’t they just sort it out together? When this interview was published in 2014, a Kremlin spokesman described it as “a fairy tale.” Stalin dismissed rumours of mass starvation in Ukraine caused by his policies in the 1930s where 6 million starved to death as "fairy tales" as well.
If you’re Poland, what you gonna do? Ask to join NATO- you can say the west is provoking Russia, but you can hardly blame them when countries who’ve historically been sh4t on from a great height by the Russians wants to join the other side.
I think we all see this from a western perspective. I highly recommend ‘In Wartime – Stories from the Ukraine’ by Tim Judah. 2013. Pengiuin Books. Judah is a journalist who reports on the region for The New Your Times. It’s very well written and based on his experiences getting to know real people on the ground. You get to see how complex and tragic the whole situation is from the human perspective.
Agree . There's a great deal of mistrust on both sides , something we don't really understand in the safe confines of western Europe . Poland I guess was a no brainer regards NATO alongside the Baltic States . This helped create a buffer between Germany and Russia , something that suited the Germans . Likewise Ukraine was Russia's buffer to the EU then 2014 happened . No way was Russia going to let the Crimea fall into EU hands so we are where we are , tit for tat . There's talk of US nukes been moved to Poland so more than likely russia will move theirs to Belarus . Expect that type of thing moving forwards . As for Ukraine , I'd say that's a lost cause with no way back .
More ‘Western hypocrisy’. I’m sure the US would be quite alright if Mexico decided it wanted to align itself with the Russian Federation. One of Trump’s many failures was his inability to kick NATO into touch. Good riddance to bad rubbish.
Probably more a multipolar world that will ultimately be defined by the relations between U.S and China. So, I'm presuming you'd be happy for us to go to war with Russia over Ukraine? Western exceptionalism at it's finest. Tell me, how many times has Russia been invaded in the past 500 years? How many millions has Russia lost in continental wars in the last century? It's very easy to scoff at other powers' security concerns when you live on an island that hasn't been invaded for a thousand years.
Not at all. That would be like Britain declaring war on Germany in order to defend Poland in 1939. We were incapable of doing anything to save Poland. The same would happen in Ukraine. Security concerns. Russia is one of the largest land masses on earth. Siberia itself is the size of Australia and Brazil put together. Yet throughout their history they have been concerned with security and ‘encirclement.’ Yes, Russia has been invaded a few times. They’ve done a fair bit of invading in their time as well although it’s always positioned as ‘liberation’ and ‘freeing’ ethnic Russians or Soviet citizens. Yes, I live on a small island. My family did not. They experienced Soviet liberation when the Soviet army, in accordance with the agreement they made with their Nazi allies, invaded/liberated Eastern Poland. Naturally the Soviets were concerned with their security. As they were a year later when they liberated/invaded Finland and the Baltic states. I would have liked to have asked my grandfather about this but he and his family were woken one winter morning, charged with being ‘enemies of the people’ and loaded onto cattle wagons and deported to the Siberian gulag. This was the fate of around 1.5 million Pole, Ukrainians and Jew in Eastern Poland. Their crime was being Polish, Ukrainian or Jewish. Only one of his sons escaped that morning. He would become my father. When posting about this before I’ve been accused of playing ‘the personal card.’ Not at all. I’m just pointing out that what happened to my family. If I said the Nazis had deported my family to Auschwitz, I’d get nothing but sympathy and agreement. Yet accuse the Russians of comparable crimes and somehow that’s not on. Probably because history had to rewritten in 1941. And then rewritten again in 1946 when it became clear our glorious Soviet allies weren’t everything western propaganda had made them out to be. How many millions has Russia lost in war? Well, the Soviet Union lost 25 million Soviet citizens in WW2. But they weren’t all Russians. Again, my family must be counted in that figure as, after the Soviets ‘liberated’ Eastern Poland, they immediately held elections and found 95% of people in those land voted to become Soviet. Everyone became a Soviet citizen and the land they lived on was renamed Western Ukraine and Western Belarus. Naturally with such popular support, the beatings, interrogations, torture, killings, imprisonment and deportations seem a reasonable way to remove or ‘recycle’ anyone suspected of not agreeing to the new regime. (95% is a popular percentage in Soviet or Russian elections – Crimea in 2014 returned 95.5% in favour of joining the Russian Federation) The war in Ukraine has claimed 14,000 lives already. Not that there has been a war going on in Ukraine that involves Russia. It’s Ukrainian separatists - of course it is. But the Russians might, understandably, have to move in to protect their brothers. Then they might have an election. I wonder what the result will be?
Well, I appreciate your post. I would say, though, the Soviet Union is no more. As for today's security concerns: Russia is a large landmass. But 95% of its population is based in its western third. It has no access to any warm water ports, aside from the Black Sea, hence why Crimea is so vital to it (and also why it's involved in Syria). It's heavily reliant on natural resource exports, which run through Ukraine. It's got a history of being invaded. It was promised NATO would not expand an inch past West Germany. It's now encircled. In short, it has strategic interests like any other great power. Thus it behaves in ways that are not always palatable, but ways it considers vital. Read that article I posted.
Thank you. As I said way back in a post – or just implied – the Soviets are no more. But Putin headed up the KGB and a leopard doesn’t change its spots. His playbook is based very much on the Soviet one. It has to be. And given my family history I’m no believer in western exceptionalism. I tend more to western betrayal.
