It is / was folly. Russia, other than hard firepower, does not have influence or economic heft to drive anything.
All this has done has been to antagonize others and consolidate rivals --I mean, even Maduro, maybe Cuba, are going against him, traditional "allies". His only "allies" now are other pariah nations/tyrants.
One day I'd like to find out what the calculus was.
At least with the Gulf War I, II and Afghanistan we kind of had parallel objectives, one economic and one for hegemony but lots of countries benefited and not just the US --and even then arguably the US lost (credibility among other things).
So this is just odd.
I think they may have had the opposite effect in almost every realm they wanted to play in.
They have shown they are not a military power other than nukes, they have pushed nations into fast tracking NATO and EU memberships, They have weakened the interest in turning the blind eye and buying their oil. There will certainly be countries that will buy out of necessity but I expect that to become increasingly unpopular as this goes on.
Even if they take Ukraine for oil, I do not expect them to make back even close to what it cost them, both politically and financially.
That didn't go down as planned. The current plan is Grozny 2.0. Demolish cities with artillery and then capture the ruins.
Russia maybe was making a grab for the natural gas fields in Ukraine. Maybe they already saw Europe's gas business as a lost cause, and with the new pipeline to China, saw aggression towards Europe as worth the risk of losing the business.
Vietnam
The Philippines
Japan
Taiwan
Malaysia
India
In addition they ignore UN sanctions and have issues with Tibet (Annexation), among other things.
Then the West, which is weak in Putin's worldview, would drop some of the more disastrous sanctions cause Western politicians need to get re-elected and recessions are bad for their prospects. Putin would continue buying up Western elites, fostering divisions, and in 1-2 election cycles everyone would forget about Russia or Ukraine, stretch goal is the disintegration of NATO by American withdrawal.
So in a decade there would be no sanctions and Ukrainian territory would belong to Putin. Speed of Western abandonment of Ukraine would decide how soon Putin attacks other countries.
Obviously Russian people would suffer in between but 1) Putin doesn't care about them 2) They would be cheering anyway.
They are just doubling down on this because they left themselves no out for failure.
My best guess is that he wants to leave a legacy of expanding Russia's geographic influence. I.e., it was a gamble based on a successful invasion of Ukraine.
My Hollywood-style conspiracy theory (which I very much doubt) is that Russia and China are secretly collaborating. The plan would be for Russia to draw NATO / U.S. forces into eastern Europe, leaving Taiwan under-defended. And then China would invade Taiwan.
Joe Biden said, in 1997, that the only thing that could provoke a "vigorous and hostile" Russian response would be if NATO expanded as far as the Baltic states. That was several years before Putin became president. https://twitter.com/ImReadinHere/status/1500782351831662592
He also said "good luck" to Russia when told that they may have to look to China as an alternative if NATO keeps expanding. In 1997. https://twitter.com/ImReadinHere/status/1500784522023034882
We knew how Russia would react, with or without Putin. But it is now folly?
Russia knows the hyperpower is China now and is acting accordingly. China encourages Russia to oppose NATO in Europe, preventing the US from focusing fully on Asia, forcing the EU to become more independent and weakening the US' influence on the world stage. And Europe pretends to want to become independent from Russia but that requires an full transition to non-carbon energy – and this won't happen anytime soon (since Europe is still following a neoliberal playbook that make such transition a "folly" in the leaders' eye). Russia knows the West's weak points and understand that now is the right time to exploit them. The West continues to believe it's Putin's folly but they're the one losing a critical ally to China. I'm sorry to war victims, but this is far more important than negotiating Ukraine's neutrality. Too bad we had to let Putin go to war as NATO and the EU could have a agreed to this and avoid a war (that weakens both Europe and Russia in the short term, and the West in the long term).
It is also worth noting that NATO does not expand by invasion or recruitment. Member nations all have to apply to join and be democracies, meaning that at least notionally their people have to want to be in NATO. And why would former Soviet Republic want to be in NATO? Most of them say it's because they're afraid of Russian invasion. It's worth noting that Russia has recently invaded Chechnya, Georgia, and Ukraine. Those fears don't spring from a place of pure paranoia.
It also seems unrealistic that there will be long term alignment between Russia and China, they're natural rivals. Russia still holds contested territory that used to be part of China. Even under the Soviet system they tolerated each other at best, and entered into armed conflict in 1969. China officially calls that conflict an act of Russian aggression, even after hammering out a deal with Lavrov in 2008.
So you have a big countries that, for various reasons (WWII and Cold War, for one) fear about its security. They said repeatedly that they'll act if the US continues to expand NATO further onto Russia's borders. Russia intervenes so countries close to Russia fear they might be invade.
I fully understand the legitimate fear of these countries but why NATO wants to continue to expand when the US/EU knows perfectly that this only makes Russia more aggressive. We (the West) knew that Russia would act (military if need be https://twitter.com/RnaudBertrand/status/1498491107902062592 but because we refuses to tell Ukraine that NATO is full, we have Russia invading Ukraine and we refuse to defend them military. How is this positive for Ukrainians? They won't join NATO (because the West doesn't want to go to war with Russia directly) but they'll be ruined by a tragic war. Only China is winning here.
This seems ridiculous to me. Russia has been aggressive to its neighbors for a hundred years.
> They won't join NATO (because the West doesn't want to go to war with Russia directly) but they'll be ruined by a tragic war.
They couldn't join because the second Viktor Yanukovych was gone, Russia invaded the east and took Crimea. You can't join NATO while in an active conflict. People seem to be forgetting that the very second his henchman got tossed out he invaded. The precipitating event was a trade deal with the EU, not a bid to enter NATO.
https://twitter.com/RnaudBertrand/status/1498491107902062592
That cannot be a distraction. You speak about the rambling speech but what about his 2007 speech? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Munich_speech_of_Vladimir_Puti...
Putin's earlier speeches essentially boil down to a threat that he'll invade any neighbors who try to join a defense pact designed to protect them from Russian invasion. You could call that realpolitik, but it looks an awful lot like revanchism.
I would also point out that NATO has never attacked Russia, but Russia has attacked a bunch of places that aren't part of NATO. Defending Eastern Europe from Russian invasion isn't aggression against Russia.
I actually don't even like NATO or think the US should be part of it, but all Putin is doing here is using it as a pretext to capture territory. He made that perfectly clear on the eve of the invasion.
And Joe Biden is guilty of bravado… but Russia going in like that makes no sense whatsoever. They are antagonizing everyone but a handful of countries and it’s resulting in galvanized opposition to him —even internally.
To use an overwrought phrase the invasion was a huge foot-gun.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_and_soil
Also > "...solution of the Ukrainian question..." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Final_Solution
The US had plenty of "military operations"/"special operations" and "solutions" for Iraq and Afghanistan, they killed plenty of civilians yet they're no Nazi and the president isn't Hitler.
This is hardly unprecedented in Russian-Ukrainian relations, even in the last century; in a 1953 speech, Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term "genocide" and foundationally established international law against it, called the Holodomor and post-Holodomor Soviet control of Ukraine "the classic example of Soviet genocide ... the destruction of the Ukrainian nation. [I]f the Soviet program succeeds completely, if the intelligentsia, the priests, and the peasants can be eliminated, Ukraine will be as dead as if every Ukrainian were killed, for it will have lost that part of it ... which, in short, made it a nation rather than a mass of people."
There was the bombing of the children's hospital, which may turn out to be a war crime, but I don't see how anyone can know whether it was intentional. And if collateral civilian deaths are equated with genocide, then what should we call the US wars in the middle east?
They haven't setup the gas chambers, I give you that, but the future of Ukrainian identity if Russia prevails is grim.
They pound the cities until there is nothing left: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Grozny_(1994–1995)
What's happening in Ukraines right now is nothing in comparison, and even the Grozny siege isn't considered a genocide.
afaik Kharkiv is the most badly bombed city right now and it's nowhere close to Grozny (yet?)
I know everyone is emotional and outraged, it's not an outrage competition though, using big (and invalid) words doesn't help
Kharkiv itself: https://tinyurl.com/nh4kwymp. It is way larger than Grozny so there is more buildings left to pound.
almost there keep going.
From that perspective it seems apt. Also, unless OP edited their post, you're the only one to bring up genocide or the comparison to Hitler.
I put it in parenthesis because of that, but I've seen both the Hitler comparison and genocide accusation popping up hundreds of times in the last few days, usually by the same people.
We get it, Putin is bad, and Hitler is the baddest of the bad guys, but still, it doesn't make any sense whatsoever. We can call him Putinéon or Putin Khan while we're at it
That's the History of Europe since there are people in Europe though. I don't get why people get so fixated on Hitler to be honest. The Russians fought him in ww2 do you think they identify as him ? Why not compare Putin to Stalin ? Soviets also invaded Ukraine.
I think the comparison is much dumber than that. People think Putin is bad, they also think Hitler is the badest of the bad, and that's enough for them to start calling him "Putler". Meanwhile you have literal neo nazis fighting for Ukraine against Russians right now, ironic.
- no opposition parties at home
- few leaders that oppose him get killed
- all protests are quickly ended by the police (brown shirts)
- uses fascism to expand his country: outside threat, we must defend ourselves, focus is on the nation, not the individuals
- uses rich private businessmen to further his goals, when this fails he just nationalizes what he needs
- boosts military spending and might
- keep expanding territory and keeps expanding control
He is different than from the previous, communist dictators in that he is alone at the levers. The high ranking commies were able to remove insane autocrats (Khrushchev), nobody in Russia can remove Putin now.
Putin also seems to be bent on returning to a former empire (see Third Reich comparisons).
Edit: People on this thread seem very confused as to what the word 'genocide' means. Here is the definition from un.org.
In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
- Killing members of the group;
- Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
- Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
- Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
- Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group
The point when it enters the definition of the word....
> the deliberate killing of a large number of people from a particular nation or ethnic group with the aim of destroying that nation or group.
We're not talking about a few hundred or thousands civilians hit by bombs, we're talking organised and methodical wiping of entire villages/cities/regions
The jewish holocaust was a genocide, the Khmer Rouge were conducting a genocide, the Turkish committed a genocide against Armenians, &c. The scale and goals are completely different, what's happening in Ukraine is a war, it's ugly, it's revolting, it's disgusting, it's still "just" a war.
There is no evidence of that happening. Yes, Russia has been committing atrocities. Not all atrocities are genocide.
I think the definition of genocide is very clear and after watching the daily footage from Ukraine, it's quite difficult to make the argument that there isn't intent to wipe out a large portion of the population systematically. Yeah, their names aren't in a spreadsheet maybe, yet, but this is just beginning.
Putin invasion is illegal, many war crimes were committed, but it's nowhere close to a genocide. What word will you use for real genocides ?
> and after watching the daily footage from Ukraine
That's the main issue with this war, people are fed clips after clips of bombings videos, crying civilians, dead soldiers in blood pools &c. It's an information war just as much as it is a regular war
If we had the same level of publicity for the invasion or Irak or Afghanistan would you have condemned the US of genocide ? Many more civilians died. Would we have banned the US of swift ?
What about the siege of Sarajevo ? genocide committed by nato ?
It's a war, did people forget about them ? Civilians always suffer, either directly or indirectly (starvation, exposure, &c.)
Unplug, stop watching war porn, read experts reports if you want to keep up to date, don't fall for the news cycle/social media bait. There are 30 or 40 other wars going on in the world right now, all with civilians getting killed, if you want to be outraged every single second of your life feel free to look them up. There even is a real genocide going on for the last 10 years or so in Darfur, have you heard of it ? it's not making the news, 100k to 400k people were killed though
> I think the definition of genocide is very clear
It is, and no serious source calls this a genocide...
Again, incorrect. The Ukrainian government has called this genocide. Are they not a serious source? The UN has also had at least one hearing so far to determine if there is genocide happening in Ukraine right now, which, I'll note, the Russians did not show up for. [0]
I'm going to go ahead and stop replying to you at this point. You've made a number of assumptions about my level of engagement and education on the topic that are incorrect, and I don't feel like we are going to get anywhere.
At any rate, insisting that the systematic carpet bombing of cities and murder of fleeing civilians _isn't_ genocide, seems like a questionable hill to die on.
[0] - https://www.dw.com/en/russia-refuses-to-attend-un-court-hear...
And Russia says there is no war... don't you think Ukraine and Russia stances might be slightly biased ? If we're arguing with that level of bad faith I agree that it won't go anywhere.
> insisting that the systematic carpet bombing of cities and murder of fleeing civilians _isn't_ genocide, seems like a questionable hill to die on.
It's a warcrime, it's not a genocide, I'll die on that hill, words have meaning. Otherwise every single conflict is a genocide, but then the word loses its meaning entirely so why not stop using it ?
Again, it's a question of scale and intent. Putting every single jew you find in trains for death camps is a genocide, killing every single Vietnamese you find is a genocide, killing a few civilians while bombing a city at war is a war crime.