This Is Why Ukraine Matters...
- Thread starter SmoothSeas
- Start date
Lara
Friend of the Arts
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic Coast
I posted this in another Ukraine Invasion SF thread (there are 3 going on so far) but may be more relevant in this one:
There is a bigger concern Putin has that overshadows any punishments from multiple countries via sanctions he may have to deal with against him. Putin's invasion of Ukraine was driven by an obsession to restore Russia to national greatness by dragging everyone around Russia down.
His obsession goes back to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991which Putin saw as a disaster. And what Putin has been driven by since that time to restore.
You're seeing this sustained campaign against any of the former territories of the Soviet Union. Putin wants to restore Russian influence. And nothing is going to stop him now. Former negotiations kept him at bay but now he sees Europe and the US as weak for many reasons, which are political so I won't go into (hint: lack of leadership). That's why he's striking now...despite threats of sanctions from US and Europe.
Don't get me wrong. Sanctions will hurt Russia but Putin is keeping his eye on the prize. He's a sly fox to put it mildly.
There is a bigger concern Putin has that overshadows any punishments from multiple countries via sanctions he may have to deal with against him. Putin's invasion of Ukraine was driven by an obsession to restore Russia to national greatness by dragging everyone around Russia down.
His obsession goes back to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991which Putin saw as a disaster. And what Putin has been driven by since that time to restore.
You're seeing this sustained campaign against any of the former territories of the Soviet Union. Putin wants to restore Russian influence. And nothing is going to stop him now. Former negotiations kept him at bay but now he sees Europe and the US as weak for many reasons, which are political so I won't go into (hint: lack of leadership). That's why he's striking now...despite threats of sanctions from US and Europe.
Don't get me wrong. Sanctions will hurt Russia but Putin is keeping his eye on the prize. He's a sly fox to put it mildly.
Don M.
SF VIP
- Location
- central Missouri
I just listened to Biden's news conference where he outlined his plans to sanction Putin. It will be interesting to see if any of this works....I doubt that Putin has any fear of the Russian economy suffering a setback.
One thing I find disturbing is that it appears we are importing a substantial amount of oil from Russia....WHY is that? Has our government slowing down things like fracking, and the Keystone Pipeline created a need to import oil???
I don't expect this Russian invasion to have any major effect on the U.S., but the nations of Europe may be hit hard in coming weeks, and our ties to NATO may be tested substantially.
One thing I find disturbing is that it appears we are importing a substantial amount of oil from Russia....WHY is that? Has our government slowing down things like fracking, and the Keystone Pipeline created a need to import oil???
I don't expect this Russian invasion to have any major effect on the U.S., but the nations of Europe may be hit hard in coming weeks, and our ties to NATO may be tested substantially.
mellowyellow
Well-known Member
David777
Well-known Member
- Location
- Silicon Valley
As someone coming from ignorance, am continuing to get a handle on what these conflicts are about while greatly distrusting much from news media on all sides. The first 2 sentences are at the crux of the Ukraine <> Russia matter:
https://www.vox.com/22900113/nato-ukraine-russia-crisis-clinton-expansion
snippets:
When tens of thousands of Russian troops started moving toward the Ukrainian border late last year, Russian President Vladimir Putin effectively issued an ultimatum: They won’t go home until he had “concrete agreements prohibiting any further eastward expansion of NATO.”
This week, as the US and Russia exchange formal diplomatic letters, Secretary of State Antony Blinken emphasized that “NATO’s door is open, remains open, and that is our commitment.”...
---------------------------
That makes this person that for years has tended to ignore US and world politics, that is just now coming up to speed on these matters, to keep wondering, why didn't the Western nations and NATO simply give Russia assurances they would leave Ukraine neutral and not give a dangerous former KGB hardliner in control of 6000 nukes an understandable from their perspective legitimate reason excuse to invade? Something didn't add up from the dominant news media narrative.
The prospect of Ukraine and Georgia joining NATO has antagonized Putin at least since President George W. Bush expressed support for the idea in 2008. “That was a real mistake,” said Steven Pifer, who from 1998 to 2000 was ambassador to Ukraine under President Bill Clinton. “It drove the Russians nuts. It created expectations in Ukraine and Georgia, which then were never met. And so that just made that whole issue of [NATO] enlargement a complicated one.”...
No country can join the alliance without the unanimous buy-in of all 30 member countries, and many have opposed Ukraine’s membership, in part because it doesn’t meet the conditions to join. All of this has put Ukraine in an untenable position: an applicant for an alliance that wasn’t going to accept it, while irritating a potential opponent next door, without having any degree of NATO protection...
“The open-door policy [countries are free to join NATO] is the one that maximizes friction with Russia, which has culminated in the crisis we have now,” said Mary Sarotte, a historian of international relations at Johns Hopkins University...
---------------------------
Ok, a minority of politicians and experts have been warning about eastward NATO expansion for decades. One might expect that NATO militarists including weapons corps welcomed heating up the situation.
In the early ’90s, that generation of [USA] national security operatives weren’t prepared to forfeit leverage in Europe. “NATO had to find something to do or go out of business, and these people who grew up all their lives alongside it would not let it go out of business,” said Barry Posen, a political scientist at MIT...
That pushed Clinton to embrace NATO further. “Our inaction was making NATO look weak and irrelevant,” said Walker, who went on to serve as ambassador to the Czech Republic from 1995 to 1998. “And the line in the halls of power in Washington was, ‘We have to enlarge NATO to save it, to make it look as though it were dynamic and on the move and not stagnant.’”
---------------------------
Below is a different USA political motivation of pushing NATO into Ukraine but for the sake of those non-militarists pushing democracy and its social ideals. Motivations that tend to apparently not care if that causes regional instability much like is the case here in the USA for those short sightedly pushing social agendas with little consideration of societal disruption but also backed by Wall Street and Western corps always eager for larger markets.
https://www.aol.com/news/why-ukraine-hope-nato-membership-024207800.html
snippets:
“The crisis that Putin has created here is not about NATO. It’s all about crushing Ukrainian democracy,” said Paul Massaro, a senior policy adviser at the U.S. Helsinki Commission, a congressional panel that works on Russia-related matters.
Massaro said that Putin views Ukraine as a threat not only because it has sought to orient itself with the West but because its experiment with democracy could seem increasingly attractive to Russians who have grown weary of living under autocracy.
---------------------------
https://www.rt.com/russia/538174-nato-membershi-for-ukraine-dream/
More answers a few months ago from a Russian news media corp about the game USA strategists have been playing in keeping Ukraine dreaming about NATO inclusion despite that arguably being impossible. This also explains why they won't simply commit to formalizing it as Putin demands.
...And that explains Austin’s remarks. From an American point of view, it’s important to keep Ukraine oriented firmly against Russia. There’s a danger that once the authorities in Kiev realize they’ve been had, and that they’ll never get what they want out of the US and its European allies, their enthusiasm for European integration will fade. And when that happens, they might begin to drift back towards Russia...
---------------------------
Putin also rants against [NAZI] right wing Ukraine elements. An excellent read on what that is about reflects a sadly agonizing political past with many atrocities, leaving manipulated ordinary citizens forever in a fog.
https://newcoldwar.org/the-history-of-right-wing-nationalism-in-ukraine/
https://www.vox.com/22900113/nato-ukraine-russia-crisis-clinton-expansion
snippets:
When tens of thousands of Russian troops started moving toward the Ukrainian border late last year, Russian President Vladimir Putin effectively issued an ultimatum: They won’t go home until he had “concrete agreements prohibiting any further eastward expansion of NATO.”
This week, as the US and Russia exchange formal diplomatic letters, Secretary of State Antony Blinken emphasized that “NATO’s door is open, remains open, and that is our commitment.”...
---------------------------
That makes this person that for years has tended to ignore US and world politics, that is just now coming up to speed on these matters, to keep wondering, why didn't the Western nations and NATO simply give Russia assurances they would leave Ukraine neutral and not give a dangerous former KGB hardliner in control of 6000 nukes an understandable from their perspective legitimate reason excuse to invade? Something didn't add up from the dominant news media narrative.
The prospect of Ukraine and Georgia joining NATO has antagonized Putin at least since President George W. Bush expressed support for the idea in 2008. “That was a real mistake,” said Steven Pifer, who from 1998 to 2000 was ambassador to Ukraine under President Bill Clinton. “It drove the Russians nuts. It created expectations in Ukraine and Georgia, which then were never met. And so that just made that whole issue of [NATO] enlargement a complicated one.”...
No country can join the alliance without the unanimous buy-in of all 30 member countries, and many have opposed Ukraine’s membership, in part because it doesn’t meet the conditions to join. All of this has put Ukraine in an untenable position: an applicant for an alliance that wasn’t going to accept it, while irritating a potential opponent next door, without having any degree of NATO protection...
“The open-door policy [countries are free to join NATO] is the one that maximizes friction with Russia, which has culminated in the crisis we have now,” said Mary Sarotte, a historian of international relations at Johns Hopkins University...
---------------------------
Ok, a minority of politicians and experts have been warning about eastward NATO expansion for decades. One might expect that NATO militarists including weapons corps welcomed heating up the situation.
In the early ’90s, that generation of [USA] national security operatives weren’t prepared to forfeit leverage in Europe. “NATO had to find something to do or go out of business, and these people who grew up all their lives alongside it would not let it go out of business,” said Barry Posen, a political scientist at MIT...
That pushed Clinton to embrace NATO further. “Our inaction was making NATO look weak and irrelevant,” said Walker, who went on to serve as ambassador to the Czech Republic from 1995 to 1998. “And the line in the halls of power in Washington was, ‘We have to enlarge NATO to save it, to make it look as though it were dynamic and on the move and not stagnant.’”
---------------------------
Below is a different USA political motivation of pushing NATO into Ukraine but for the sake of those non-militarists pushing democracy and its social ideals. Motivations that tend to apparently not care if that causes regional instability much like is the case here in the USA for those short sightedly pushing social agendas with little consideration of societal disruption but also backed by Wall Street and Western corps always eager for larger markets.
https://www.aol.com/news/why-ukraine-hope-nato-membership-024207800.html
snippets:
“The crisis that Putin has created here is not about NATO. It’s all about crushing Ukrainian democracy,” said Paul Massaro, a senior policy adviser at the U.S. Helsinki Commission, a congressional panel that works on Russia-related matters.
Massaro said that Putin views Ukraine as a threat not only because it has sought to orient itself with the West but because its experiment with democracy could seem increasingly attractive to Russians who have grown weary of living under autocracy.
---------------------------
https://www.rt.com/russia/538174-nato-membershi-for-ukraine-dream/
More answers a few months ago from a Russian news media corp about the game USA strategists have been playing in keeping Ukraine dreaming about NATO inclusion despite that arguably being impossible. This also explains why they won't simply commit to formalizing it as Putin demands.
...And that explains Austin’s remarks. From an American point of view, it’s important to keep Ukraine oriented firmly against Russia. There’s a danger that once the authorities in Kiev realize they’ve been had, and that they’ll never get what they want out of the US and its European allies, their enthusiasm for European integration will fade. And when that happens, they might begin to drift back towards Russia...
---------------------------
Putin also rants against [NAZI] right wing Ukraine elements. An excellent read on what that is about reflects a sadly agonizing political past with many atrocities, leaving manipulated ordinary citizens forever in a fog.
https://newcoldwar.org/the-history-of-right-wing-nationalism-in-ukraine/
Last edited:
David777
Well-known Member
- Location
- Silicon Valley
Growing minority news commentary on the West and NATOs flawed narratives.
https://www.firstpost.com/world/bla...or-precipitating-ukraine-crisis-10406861.html
Despite intelligence sources predicting such a possibility, months of massive Russian troop deployment along Ukrainian borders, and even while watching tanks rolling in and missiles landing in several Ukrainian cities, the US-led West still cannot quite believe that Putin has really attacked Ukraine, and wars of yore are indeed possible in a 21st century ‘globalised, borderless’ world — let alone the heart of Europe...
The trajectory and consequences of this war, as always, is impossible to predict. And yet, regardless of how this ends, Putin has already carried out a violent reordering of the entire security architecture of Europe and inflicted a crushing ideological defeat on post-Cold War liberal triumphalism when the roots of this crisis were sown.
It wasn’t meant to be this way. We were told that realism is dead. The collapse of USSR marked the end of great power conflict and the beginning of a time when states — democratic, liberal and free — will make an inevitable march towards progressivism led by the leader of the free world [USA]...
Turns out that the celebration was premature. In the hubris that victory begets, the NATO made a series of expansions in the east at a time when the US was punch drunk in its moment in history and Russia at its weakest, the guarantees on NATO’s eastward expansion that Moscow thought were ironclad later turned out to be ‘verbal, not written agreements’.
It seems specious to argue — at a time when the Russian troops are inside Ukraine and shells are flattening its cities — that NATO’s unbridled expansion has something to do with this crisis instead of pinning the blame entirely on a madman called Putin, the agent of evil solely responsible for the turn of events in Europe.
As The New York Times editorial board writes, “Putin’s attack is not primarily about NATO or security. It’s all about his xenophobic, imperial and misguided notion that Ukraine was inherently an appendage of Russia.” Or as NATO states, that “Russia’s horrifying attack on Ukraine… is entirely unjustified and unprovoked.”
Horrifying, certainly. But unprovoked? Does the turn of events since the Cold War has absolutely nothing to do with the crisis that is unfolding before our eyes? Does the present reside on its own, in medias res, disconnected from the past? To dismiss these questions as “Russian apologism” or “Putin’s narrative”, that western commentators are prone to do, is precisely the combination of moral certitude and reckless arrogance that is partly responsible for this predicament...
Rodric Braithwaite, who was British ambassador to Moscow when the Soviet Union collapsed, tells Wall Street Journal that “what Putin says about the humiliation of the Soviet collapse, the enlargement of NATO, and the intimate historical link between Russian and Ukrainian history is not his own idea… Millions of Russians think and feel just like he does.”
https://www.firstpost.com/world/bla...or-precipitating-ukraine-crisis-10406861.html
Despite intelligence sources predicting such a possibility, months of massive Russian troop deployment along Ukrainian borders, and even while watching tanks rolling in and missiles landing in several Ukrainian cities, the US-led West still cannot quite believe that Putin has really attacked Ukraine, and wars of yore are indeed possible in a 21st century ‘globalised, borderless’ world — let alone the heart of Europe...
The trajectory and consequences of this war, as always, is impossible to predict. And yet, regardless of how this ends, Putin has already carried out a violent reordering of the entire security architecture of Europe and inflicted a crushing ideological defeat on post-Cold War liberal triumphalism when the roots of this crisis were sown.
It wasn’t meant to be this way. We were told that realism is dead. The collapse of USSR marked the end of great power conflict and the beginning of a time when states — democratic, liberal and free — will make an inevitable march towards progressivism led by the leader of the free world [USA]...
Turns out that the celebration was premature. In the hubris that victory begets, the NATO made a series of expansions in the east at a time when the US was punch drunk in its moment in history and Russia at its weakest, the guarantees on NATO’s eastward expansion that Moscow thought were ironclad later turned out to be ‘verbal, not written agreements’.
It seems specious to argue — at a time when the Russian troops are inside Ukraine and shells are flattening its cities — that NATO’s unbridled expansion has something to do with this crisis instead of pinning the blame entirely on a madman called Putin, the agent of evil solely responsible for the turn of events in Europe.
As The New York Times editorial board writes, “Putin’s attack is not primarily about NATO or security. It’s all about his xenophobic, imperial and misguided notion that Ukraine was inherently an appendage of Russia.” Or as NATO states, that “Russia’s horrifying attack on Ukraine… is entirely unjustified and unprovoked.”
Horrifying, certainly. But unprovoked? Does the turn of events since the Cold War has absolutely nothing to do with the crisis that is unfolding before our eyes? Does the present reside on its own, in medias res, disconnected from the past? To dismiss these questions as “Russian apologism” or “Putin’s narrative”, that western commentators are prone to do, is precisely the combination of moral certitude and reckless arrogance that is partly responsible for this predicament...
Rodric Braithwaite, who was British ambassador to Moscow when the Soviet Union collapsed, tells Wall Street Journal that “what Putin says about the humiliation of the Soviet collapse, the enlargement of NATO, and the intimate historical link between Russian and Ukrainian history is not his own idea… Millions of Russians think and feel just like he does.”
dseag2
Dallas, TX
- Location
- Dallas, TX
