FACT: the end of this war must be positive for the Russian people, no matter whether Russia loses or wins the military operation. Putin came to power because the West didnt help the former Soviet republics. If Russia is left alone humiliated again then we will have the next anti-western system in 10 years.
Caution is certainly warranted but it doesn't seem productive to reward Russia for invading another country.
What is your proposal to how not humiliate Russia? Russia already humiliated themselves by not wining this conflict for so long. In their book anything less than total conquest of Ukraine is humiliation.
In fact, the Republicans under Henry Cabot Lodge wanted exactly that, Germany had to be defeated and invaded. It was the only way to get lasting peace in Europe. And of course many in France like Foch wanted the same thing.
The mistake was corrected after WWII by splitting the country into occupation zones. That is the only way to deal with Russia too. Pushing out of Ukraine isn't enough. Russia has to be demilitarized, most importantly - denuclearized, it should lose its place in UN Security Council. It also should be denazified - the current fascist regime must be totally dismantled, and the country must be split to avoid such regime coming back again.
>Putin came to power because the West didnt help the former Soviet republics.
Putin came to power because the "system", ie. KGB in particular wasn't dismantled, and because the further splitting up of the country was prevented. Whole world, including US, was afraid of appearance of several new smaller states, instead of just one big Russia, possessing nukes. Now, one can expect everybody learnt from that mistake made 30 years ago - this time the nukes need to be taken away completely and the country split.
> the end of this war must be positive for the Russian people
No. Only crushing humiliating defeat with the split of the country can reach into Russian brain and cure it from the "Great Russia chauvinism". Without such a process of cure, the monster will soon be back.
However, it could happen naturally. If the Putin regime collapses it is quite likely that a clear successor widely seen as legitimate doesn't materialize. If so, the many autonomous regions of Russia with regional identity could declare independence and make it stick.
>The west does not have anywhere near the manpower necessary to make this happen.
One of the biggest occupying/controlling power for the biggest piece of territory - Far East and East Siberia - is China. And there is no need to actually occupy whole Russia. Only in Moscow and a bit of force (more like credible threat of it), and that is work for the West and Turkey, to make sure that nobody would prevent those autonomous regions going their own independent way (which in many cases would be just naturally falling into orbit of a near by big country like Turkey, Kazakhstan, China, Ukraine or a block like EU)
Unless they're invited there as peacekeepers by a new government. But even a pro-US government is unlikely to invite US peacekeepers. Maybe Canadian ones.
Reading this would have been funnier had it not been for the behaviour we’ve seen this year.
>Reading this would have been funnier had it not been for the behaviour we’ve seen this year.
until this year i've never wrote nor even thought this way. Until Feb 24 i still believed in my Old Country having a chance at playing great positive role in the world - i still thought that the harsh authoritarianism of Putin regime is a phase that will pass with minimal damage say once he dies. I hadn't noticed how instead it became Russian Nazism, "Rashizm" as its known, though all the signs have clearly been there at least during recent few years. It became clear on the Feb 24 though, and the 7 months since then have been showing it more and more, that the Russian society deeply poisoned by Rashizm has lost its ability to even minimally responsibly manage the great power stemming from such a large country and nukes in particular, and thus they lost any right to such a power, and became a menace to the world that must be taken care about.
The denazification wasn’t a moral duty. But a smart thing to do, to defang your enemy when they were defeated. Americans thought they were de-baathifying Iraq. When that blew up in their face, they unanimously agreed that it was a mistake, even though the Baath party actions were quite evil.
Europeans have a cultural tendency to create moralistic almost religious justification for war and conquest. Whether it is the white man’s burden, or now denazification. It is used to squash internal dissent. And that’s fine. You need to whip up your peasants into joining your crusade, in one way or another. But the story crumbles when it’s exported across the world.
The rest of the world has no reason to sympathise with actions that might trigger a nuclear war in Europe. I used to think that European leaders understand that and it’s OK for Ukrainians to idly dream of wrecking great vengeance on Russia. But now, I’m not so sure.
The hate isn't on Russians as the carriers of Russian ethnicity. Such hate would be racist, i agree. The hate you see is on the carriers of Russian Nazism who openly espouses and propagandizes it. For example, many prominent targets of such a hate like those especially rabid Rashists propagandists on Russian TV are visibly not of Russian ethnicity. As another example - i'm a Russian and hasn't experienced any such hate even from Ukrainians i met here in teh last few months. I'm pretty sure though that if i were a Rashist and put the Russian Nazism Z-swastika on my car i'd become a target of such hate without people even bothering to check whether i'm of Russian, Jewish or Chinese ethnicity.
It is a trick that Russian propaganda actively using now - present legitimate hate against Russian Nazism as a racist hate against Russians. Don't fall for it :)
>Europeans have a cultural tendency to create moralistic almost religious justification for war and conquest. Whether it is the white man’s burden, or now denazification.
The main point of denazification isn't moralistic. It is a matter of survival. A nazism is "more" than just a fascism. The key foundation of nazist state is the "master-race/nation" ideology, and as a result one of the key characteristic of nazism is Lebensraum - "living space" for the "master-race/nation". While a plain fascist state, like Franco's Spain, can peacefully co-exist with its neighbors, it isn't an option in case of a nazist state like Germany back then or Russia today. Without denazification of Russia there is going to be no peace in the region, and with Russia being nuclear state it means that without denazification Russian presents a real nuclear threat to the world.
>The rest of the world has no reason to sympathise with actions that might trigger a nuclear war in Europe.
Of course nobody in the world is expected to sympathize with the Russian actions, and in particular with their intentional dragging of the world toward nuclear war. To avoid nuclear war Russia has to be stopped and the force is the only option for now.
> I used to think that European leaders understand that and it’s OK for Ukrainians to idly dream of wrecking great vengeance on Russia.
As far as i see, Ukrainians dream not about vengeance, they dream about Russia leaving them alone, something like having a kilometer high wall on the border with Russia. Unfortunately, without demilitarization, denuclearization and denazification of Russia the peace in the region isn't possible. In particular Russia wouldn't leave Ukrainians alone, and thus Ukrainians and the rest of the world have actually no choice wrt. what to do with Russia.
I can see a plausible end that avoids ridicule on either side:
- West will maintain that Putin meant to destroy Ukraine. So, limiting him to the new status-quo for Luhansk and Donetsk (whatever that would be) is a success.
- Putin will claim that the target of the "military operation" was to make Luhansk and Donetsk safe for the Russian-speaking population there. The new status-quo provides for that. So the operation was a success.
(but this an international phenomena, so yeah, agreed.)
But they still want revanchism and imperialism in the 21st c.?
They were not. The reality is that if you put all post-sovit countries on a graph and look at those that actually did neoliberal policies correctly, those are now the nations that are by far the most successful.
Its not the fault of the West that the Russian elites were totally an completely corrupt and had no interest in real reform. Russia actually resisted many reforms and the elites simply put themselves in a position to take advantage. To just blame all of that on the West is nonsense.
> Oh yeah, super good idea. We had fantastic experience with humiliated nations before. It worked so well for Germany after WW1 /s
Germany was not humiliated. The terms imposed on Germany were not actually as bad, the idea that these were some horrible terms come from a few British intellectuals and German Foreign office.
Germany was treated with gloves of silk compared to how Germany treated France and Russia. But the fragile German ego couldn't handle it.
And of those terms imposed at Versailles Germany never even remotely payed any of it. I fact Germany took in more foreign loans then they ever paid back.
In the 20s Germany basically managed to negotiate all those debts away and before they even paid the little they had left, they stopped paying.
What was done to Germany after WW1 was NOT HARSH ENOUGH, and even what was agree on, was not enforced.
> Putin came to power because the West didnt help the former Soviet republics
Ask Estonia about how that.
> If Russia is left alone humiliated again then we will have the next anti-western system in 10 years.
They had an anti-western system for the waste majority of the last 300 years. If paying for their crimes with the London flats of of Russian oil millionaires then they will have to live with it.