Sources inside Russia claim that even the military and intelligence service didn't see the war coming, and they certainly performed like it. Maybe a few days before it started, but certainly not for weeks or years.
They were running the war in Ukraine since 2014.
And also, as for mass murder, knowing enough about Russia army behavior in past conflicts, it is not like it would be reasonable to expect them to not commit at least some mass murders.
Military not knowing as in "some low level unit" being clueless is perfectly plausible. Military as in "no one in leadership had any idea" is not really.
Why? because as parent comment have already explained, Russia was massing troops on the border.
How the military and intelligence services of the Russian state could not have seen this coming is beyond the credible for anyone that has paid attention to anything for the last 30 years.
Not that it would have really made any significant difference that there were only verbal agreements, since America’s track record and credibility of keeping treaties is approaching zero, but it was agreed following and as an negotiated component of the unraveling of the Soviet Union that NATO would not expand east.
It genuinely baffles me that so many in the general low information public are frequently just sucked in by the very same vortex of manipulation by the US government in particular, regardless of their formal education level. It’s just one “unforeseeable” event after another, and yet it’s always preceded by people loudly trying to warn against it.
What concerns me, as someone who is involved in having an interest in knowing what is actually going on in the world regardless of the propaganda of any interested party and who has a very good track record of accuracy over decades; is that this is all being orchestrated and a consequence of intensely irrational and emotionally disturbed people having taken over in the west in general.
Forget climate change, kids, if you survive the fallout at all, the climate warming will be the least of your problems the way things are going and are being pushed right now. All it takes is a single miscalculation on the part of the western central planners and the west has proven itself singularly competent at miscalculations; even if they are often deliberate and intentional, the most obvious examples of course being Iraq and Libya.
Let me put it this way, folks, things are way more of the rails than people think, and not in a good way, regardless of all the “mean girl” empire propaganda about how the Russian military and intelligence services didn’t see it coming, that is more about filling a competency and intelligence gap through projection. The Russian military has wie literally been preparing for the confrontation of the belligerent USA and those who control it for decades now and they’ve been talking about it for decades now. Just because people haven’t paid attention or want to ignore that, doesn’t change reality.
America is the belligerent in this over many decades now and they forced Russia’s hand in order to claim victim/self-defense status. A phrase describing extreme manipulative and abusive behavior while decrying the consequences of one’s actions comes to mind.
It’s been Americas MO for many decades now because another unspoken pillar of American might and even global financial control, is the ruse of American benevolence and morality, when in reality it is a very psychopathic, manipulative, and abusive national psychiatric profile that has dominated America for many decades, way before anyone alive today.
Just look at American history, America keeps oddly finding itself being victimized into reluctant warfare? Poor little America, always seemingly finding itself being pressed into war where after the fact there is always at best the strong indication that something is extremely not right.
We, all of humanity, are dealing with a psychosis of National Münchhausen Syndrome to garner the attention that feeds the American machine of manipulation. It is actually a very run of the mill toxic and abusive relationship the current form of America has with humanity. However, as with all toxic and abusive relationships, the people in such relationships have an extremely difficult time recognizing it, let alone escaping it.
I will not spend extra time explaining to you why those points are just Russian propaganda.
Relativism can be handy, helping you see biases and assumptions of your native culture, but you always needs to keep it subordinate to actual reality. The reality here is that Russia has aggressed beyond its borders [1] and is unequivocally committing genocide, at which point I have a hard time being concerned about the ways the West may have effectively hurt Russia's feelings and "made" them lash out. There is indeed a geopolitical game of economic empire that the US/EU have been succeeding at, but that does not justify Russia's flipping the table and reverting to early 20th century style mechanized slaughter.
[0] In fact continuing the tangent, the memetic points of the original article are quite applicable to Iraq. Basically USG forcibly spreading the memes of "democracy", "corporate sanctity", and of course "USD as world reserve currency". Witness the overwhelming popular support for attacking Iraq in 2003 that has now been seemingly memory-holed by its one-time supporters. In 2003, the need to attack Iraq was manifestly implicit based on everpresent memes, which have now been de-emphasized.
[1] We can examine the modern notion of the nation-state with fixed borders as itself being a modern-Western invention, but it's likely better described as a quality of the "centralized state" of the article. And pragmatically the concept seems to function as a reasonable Schelling point.
You can not legitimately analyze a any state or group of people without engaging with those.
> that does not justify Russia's flipping the table and reverting to early 20th century style mechanized slaughter.
The "some truth" part in it is true only to the level of "yes, west done bad thing there". The claim that Russia would somehow behave much differently had Iraque not been invaded is not convincing at all. It is not just missing justifying power. It does not have explanatory power at all. It does not explain Russian return into authoritarian state over last 20 years.
It is talking point targeted at people who do know American history and who do criticize those actions as bad - but who never really cared about Russian or Easter European history at all.
Guilty as charged. I've never particularly focused on understanding Russia, apart from family stories about Russian occupation after WWII before they got out of East Germany to the West and ultimately the US (watching The Lives of Others is like the life I missed). So that talking point is targeted at people like me. And the points do resonate with me somewhat, since I do consider USG an empire. An economic empire that mostly keeps its territories in line through market effects and treaties, fundamentally nicer than an army-first directly-commanded empire of old, but still an empire.
> You can not legitimately analyze a any state or group of people without engaging with those.
I don't disagree, however earnestly engaging with those is a lot of work to sift through various opinions. What we're dealing with here is an ongoing torrent of superficial analysis that destroys consensus truth. So while I think most experts on Russia would seemingly agree with your analysis, a propagandist can stand up an equally-plausible expert that says the exact opposite. Without any social proof (eg in-depth study of Russia in school or independently), there's little way for an individual to sort through that muck. Enter relativism.
> It is fundamentally absurd way to interpret Russia even in theoretical alternate reality where Russia did not tried to commit genocide in Ukraine
Sure, but that wouldn't stop such analysis from carrying the day with many people. In order to eliminate relativism, one either needs to become an expert in the field (what I described above, impractical for most), or one needs to find objective points that can't be relativized away in our postmodern media environment. The blatant mass slaughter of civilians is such a touchstone - it puts all of Russia's countervailing narratives in stark relief.
Disinformation, american "бдительный гражданин" (do look up the meaning, it might widen your horizons), is to speak of "genocide" perpetrated by russians in Ukraine.
As for your words regarding Dutch collaborateurs during WWII, yes, we had those, and we dealt with them, but you weren't there (and neither was I) so I don't see why you would even bring it up.
FWIW: I actually like lots of Russian people, but the way you guys govern your country really has to improve, this won't end well. Already you have moved yourself to 'pariah' status and I'm pretty sure it's possible to go lower still but why would you?
Yes, the talk about NATO expansion was bullshit all the time. Neither Georgia nor Ukraine were going to be admitted, and all that Putin achieved was forcing at least Finland and Sweden to actually join NATO and the rest of NATO to continue to outspend Russia on military hardware...
That's an absurd re-writing and re-ordering of events. In 1990 the US secretary of state and the USSR foreign minister agreed to allow NATO troops to be stationed in East Germany but no further east. This was a verbal understanding. At the time the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact still existed and it was in that context.
Once the Soviet Union dissolved and the former eastern bloc countries applied to join, that discussion was irrelevant. It was never a treaty, just an agreement based on the situation at the time in the context of German unification. As a matter of policy NATO has always had an open door and has a standing set of criteria for any nation to join that chooses to apply. That was in force then and is in force now. In fact in 2000 Putin suggested Russia join NATO, apparently not as a joke.
If Russia's treatment of Georgia and Ukraine isn't enough to fully and completely justify and vindicate Eastern European nations joining NATO, I don't know what does. Fortunately it seems Finland and Sweden have also woken up to what Russia has become.