Agree that China is a winner of it all simply by virtue of not being mad, but as they like to say in Russia — it's not the evening yet.
Agree that China is a winner of it all simply by virtue of not being mad, but as they like to say in Russia — it's not the evening yet.
“We had to support those rebel Ukrainian states so Ukrainians fight them, not us.” “We had to preemptively disarm Ukraine, or we’d be fighting Ukrainians inside Russia within five years.”
As for China — surely they’d be nervous if Taiwan was one-third of their population and shared a land border.
Ukraine isn’t just a border state, it’s alt-Russia, as Taiwan is alt-China (and so was Hong-Kong). A competing civilizational project trying to jump off the imperial train and build a Polish-style normal nation-state — and that makes it an existential threat. Not because Ukraine is strong, but because it offers Russians a dangerous glimpse of an alternative path — a Russian identity without the empire.
Except Ukrainians ask the West for support to fight for themselves, so the West is given a rarest opportunity to do a morally right thing while furthering its own interests.