Nord Stream entered service in 2011, 3 years after Russia invaded Georgia. Everyone except Merkel knew that Russia would eventually be a problem for eastern europe.
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Merkel had her way 16 years, her politics are exactly what got us here. This is a ridiculous statement.
Merkels and Schröders are how we got here. German military is now planning for missile attacks against their infrastructure: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/nato-russia-missile-strik...
Russia attacking the rest of Europe is just fear mongering.
Except perhaps for:
Livonian War The Polish-Russian War of the 1600s The Great Northern War The Russo-Turkish Wars The Partitions of Poland The Crimean War The Winter War The Invasion of Czechoslovakia or some other
Unfortunately this absolutely not the case, as applies to the Baltics and Moldova. The threat to those countries is very real.
Basically Putin's whole idea is that any place the Russian Empire (or its temporary proxy, the Soviet Union) sat on at one point or another in the past 350 years is fair game for re-occupation, vassalization and/or intimidation of some sort today.
Sabotage in Czech Republic, the Vrbětice explosion? They blew up the ammunition stockpile of some weapons trader that intended to sell them to Ukraine. That does not seem directed at the Czech Republic.
Maybe I am missing something, but the history of Transnistria sound not unlike many other civil wars to me.
And just to be clear, I am not supporting Russia, but we have to be real and stick to the facts. False judgments - no matter whether it is making Russia more or less evil than it is - can lead to bad decisions. In my opinion a random assortment of incidents like the ones you named are hardly enough to draw the conclusion that Putin wants to reestablish the Soviet Union.
If you look at Transnistria, it's definitely not a random civil war, but very much a proxy conflict (like breakaway republics in Georgia, or what Russia was doing in Eastern Ukraine 2014-2022).
In my opinion a random assortment of incidents like the ones you named are hardly enough to draw the conclusion that Putin wants to reestablish the Soviet Union
The Soviet Union, no. But what he does want is as much re-establishment as possible of Russia's historical "sphere of influence", and in Putin's mind, of Russia's role as the protector of Slavic culture and Eastern Orthodox values.
There are plenty of statements in support of this, all over the place, and very easy to find.
And maybe to add to the first point, sure, Russia certainly wants as much influence as it can get, but that is no different than every other country. There is of course a wide spectrum of means to achieve this, from economical cooperation, to supporting a coup d'état, to starting a war and a million things in between. Some we would consider legitimate, some not. That Russia would immediately jump to one of the most expensive options requiring a commitment for decades to succeed, that needs some pretty good evidence in my opinion.
That they have done so already in Ukraine is all the evidence we need, in my opinion.
The entire country, no.
By all indications, they only wanted to annex about 60 percent of it -- including of course the capital, the entire Black Sea coast, and likely a good chunk of buffer territory. The remaining regions, being almost entirely non-Russian speaking, would have been left as battered rump state, to be perhaps dealt with later.
The goal was clearly and unambiguously to wipe independent Ukraine off the map, and to eliminate as many of the intelligentsia on its kill lists as it could find. The remaining population was to be forcibly expelled or assimilated, as has already happened in the occupied regions.
All of which, by their planning, would have been basically cakewalk, and over and done in a matter of weeks.
Whether they wanted to properly annex 60 percent or 100 percent of Ukrainian territory is irrelevant in this context - and basically amounts to splitting hairs.
Their reasons were only economical, this wasn't really a plan to prevent Russia from threatening their closest neighbours.
Tatcher, Merkel, Putin - if they would have a 10 year limit, things would be much better.
Putin being the prime example.