People are minimizing this, based on the word "consultation". Don't be fooled, this is grave news, even though it is not Article 5. Article 5 invocation under these circumstances have substantial risk of full scale thermonuclear exchange.
Article 4 was done in 2014 too and it was hardly news while again in reaction to Ukraine which was experiencing its own civil war against a pro-Russian puppet leader that resulted in regime change aannnnnnd.... nothing else.
It's not a question of "possible". It's a question of "probable".
Me being old enough to buy lottery tickets means that me winning the lottery three times in a row is possible. The probability of that is very low.
There is nothing to suggest that the probability of a full-scale nuclear exchange is now higher than before. In fact, given that all major powers have already ruled out a military response, the probability might even be lower.
> You just need one crazy party.
No, you need an entire crazy command-and-control structure.
I fear that with missile defense and impending climate disruption models, the calculus of MAD may have been updated somewhat: no-one wants a starving population with a MAGA-level of understanding and education about their predicament roaming around the enclaves...
If you thought California's and Australia's fires were what climate impacts will look like, think again: a limited nuclear exchange will probably have about the same disruptive impact as a bad climate year in 2035 +/- 10 years. Tidsfrist!
A bad climate year will kill a handful of people, like California and Australia's fires did. (Humanity is getting richer and more capable faster than the climate is getting warmer.)
A limited nuclear exchange will likely kill millions of people.
A bad climate year in 2040 will kill millions of people. Mark my words. Climate disruption is only getting started we are on an exponential response function between average temp and effects with plenty of hysteresis to come ie. no way back, won't regrow, won't feed...
Yes, in the presence of rational actors this would be avoided, but here we are anyway. A single nuclear strike would be met with retaliation and it would escalate to mutually assured destruction like clockwork. A lot of optimists thought Putin would not invade Ukraine because of the risk and that he was posturing. It would be similarly optimistic to presume rational actor decision processes. That may be a strategy he is employing, but we will never know until the brink. We are on the knife's edge of disaster here.
Not even remotely true. Demonstrably. The worst thing on the table right now are economic sanctions. Putin knew these were going to happen, and evidently thought the trouble was worth it.
In fact, over the past few weeks, the major powers have confirmed over and over and over again that there would be no military response at all.
If Putin presses on toward Poland or threatens the Baltics, then we will be on a knife's edge. However, for now, Russia has only invaded Ukraine. It's a humanitarian disaster, but so far on the world stage it shows no sign it will escalate beyond new sanctions, export controls, and perhaps additional military support for NATO members in Eastern Europe.
> substantial risk of full scale thermonuclear exchange.
To what end?
If Russia wants more territory they presumably care about the future. Why conquer all this territory just to blow up the world? Sounds like a waste of time.
The scariest situation is one nuke. How do you respond? One nuke back or two? Then things escalate quickly.
But I don’t see either country launching their full nuke arsenal unprovoked with their homeland not under any immediate danger. That’s just a death wish. And at that point there’s no one left to brag to about how great your country is.
> But I don’t see either country launching their full nuke arsenal unprovoked with their homeland not under any immediate danger. That’s just a death wish. And at that point there’s no one left to brag to about how great your country is.
"I won" regardless of having someone to brag to, is still a motivating force I fear.
You’ve read too many Tom Clancy novels or something. People can declare whatever they want but unless there really is an attack on NATO, no one is talking about Article 5 and in such a circumstance it would be the attack itself and not the citation to a treaty that would be the issue.
Also, a “full scale thermonuclear exchange” isn’t what it used to be. Stockpiles are orders of magnitude smaller than in the past, and many aren’t “thermonuclear” at all, just fission bombs with higher yield and better targeting.
Reading any Tom Clancy novels is too many, so guilty as charged. I can't unread them.
Since this is a hot war waged by Russia that is neighboring 4 NATO members, it seems as though you are a bit more a casual than would be appropriate. Your comments about nuclear war are not comforting.
You...realize that all "thermonuclear" is is doping your bomb with tritium/a light fusion stage to generate more neutrons, for more complete fission of the fissile primary, right?
All nuclear weapons are fission. Only newer ones are fusion boosted fission devices.
I assure you, there is more than enough nuclear ordinance laying around to ensure WWIV is fought with sticks and stones.
Hard to do with cooked retinas, acute radiation poisoning, and the prospects of living beyond 20 cancer free are minimal.
Also, the world's a big place, even though the internet has made it seem small.
Yes, I understand it'd be nice to watch a good fee choice chunks burn... But I really don't think anyone is prepared for the hell on Earth of a full strategic nuclear exchange.
There exists bombs with > 4000x power of those dropped on Hiroshima.
Also Russia modernised their intercontinental missiles and now they are able to carry multiple warheads that split before impact.
Your next sentence started with, "Article 5 invocation under these circumstances" which gave me the impression you meant that article 5 could somehow be invoked here. Sorry for the misunderstanding.
Will be very disastrous for world economy, but in this case the NATO countries MUST implement a strong Cuba like Embargo vs Russia and Belorussian. “We will stand on principle or we will not stand at all.” M.T.
We stopped Nord Stream 2 in Germany, finally. The former GDR state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern was obviously hoping for much needed jobs and taxes, but we stopped it now.
It was always wrong to accept this pipeline, it was purely political.
Now I also hope the US will stop all oil imports from Russia as well if not already done so.
We need to cut off Russia from every single international penny and influence.
In Germany, we can substitute the gas pipeline with LNG terminals accepting gas from various countries, including the US. At least until we further increase energy independence. Only bureaucracy and politics are in the way. Get them out of the way.
Nord Stream 2 doesn't matter for Russia. There are several alternative options (e.g. Nord Stream 1). The main reason Russians built it is to spend government money on top officials development companies. If Europe closes NS2, it's even better, let's build it to New Zealand.
The whole Nord Stream 2 thing is pathetic. Ex-German chancellor Shroeder is on its board of directors. And Germany kinda plays on Russian side here a little, doing nothing but supportive words. If they agree with Russia to split Poland again, I wouldn't be surprised.
The biggest retaliation the West can make right now is a commitment to a rapid exit at unprecedented speed from the oil economy, in favor of renewables.
This is happening because the west has no leverage and asymmetrical priorities. Russia -really- cares that Ukraine stays out of NATO, probably to the point where they would scorched earth the country before it joined, and the west only kinda cares about Ukraine comparatively, as demonstrated in 2014 and 2008. If they actually really care, sanctions don't mean much.
Makes me wonder why the west thought the third time would be the charm in this case. A big difference may be domestic politics in the west, things are pretty tenuous both socially and economically, which could benefit from this grandstanding far from home.
Russian oligarchs care about borders, trade routes, and cargo ships. It's about money and power. Russia obviously doesn't give a rat's ass about democracy, they have their population locked up tight.
They expect to move in, battle, secure new territory, deal with stern blabber and a slap on the wrist, and it'll be back to business as usual, with slightly higher profit margins.
There is no a lot of democracy in UA. Literally all opposition were shut down or applied sanction. No media other then telegram can work free. There is a big corruption on every level.
I dont like Russia or want them been there. But there is no such thing as single united Ukraine. Saying this is literally a crime and "putin propaganda"
There is and there could have been democracy and prosperity like in ALL, ALL of ex-soviet states that joined NATO and EU. All of those countries make Russia look like a shithole.
That's what got Putin so enraged.
NATO is a security guarantee without which there can be no foreign investment in this part of the world.
No, they hate all the states that were under their influence and that later joined NATO and EU for leaving them in the dust.
Ukraine prospering would be too much for Putin, it would expose his crooked path that he steered Russia.
Russia would be way ahead of Poland had Putin not taken power and made Russia an mafia-oil state.
It was a Bush related joke. But regarding what you wrote, Ukraine prospering doesn't seem very likely, it's much more corrupt than even Russia. Their GDP per capita is a third of Russia's, despite also having a wealth of raw materials.
So that's not the issue. The Baltic states have prospered, and joined Nato for that matter.
The problem is that Ukraine is a huge country with a pretty large population, plus it has very deep historical ties with Russia, so it's probably a bit of that too, losing ones brother to the enemy would hurt.
In order to use nukes effectively, you need to have second strike capabilities. You know, the 'M' in 'MAD'.
Ukraine in NATO means US nukes on Russia border, tipping the balance. It would be similar to Russia placing their bases and weapons into Canada or Mexico.
> Ukraine in NATO means US nukes on Russia border, tipping the balance.
No, it does not. A number of Eastern European countries are in NATO and none of them have American nuclear weapons.
Where does this silly idea come that after joining NATO, American missiles somehow appear in the new member? Modern-day NATO is a cooperation platform for joint exercises etc, not some missile club that starts delivering ICBMs every month.
So do not spread that NATO is just a defensive agreement. Say the truth: that it is a military agreement that can act offensively and aggressively without UN support based on geopolitical interests after exaggerating the situation in the news. About this: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2000/aug/18/balkans3
You missed the entire Cuban crisis and how the world was seconds away from WW3? We all would not comment here if Cubans would take 'can place nukes where they want' literally.
> No, it does not. A number of Eastern Europe countries are in NATO and none of them have American nuclear weapons.
Yet. There were murmurs about moving them from Germany to Eastern Europe.
Additionally - US has DCAs (Defense Cooperation Agreement; straightly bilateral, nothing to do with NATO) with most EE countries. Nobody knows, what they brought there, US is certainly not telling anyone. The nukes might be already there.
There are no ICBMS in Germany only tactical bombs... these have no military value, there only value is to say that European countries have shared nuclear deterrence.
And Russia is big, they have an immense second strike capability from land and from the sea. Wladiwostok is 8000km away from Kiev.
It has no military value because it's unthinkable to use them. Unlike strategic weapons of deterrence which are exactly meant to prevent unthinkable scenarios. We have them so the other side won't use theirs.
Tactical weapons are not deterrence but actually meant to be used. Nobody will use a tactical nuke for the can of worms it represents. Whatever target can be found for a tactical weapon, it's not important enough to justify a nuke and basically start WW3.. They're a leftover of 50/60s doctrine.
Strictly speaking, US doesn't need ICBMs in Europe, would be ineffective there... just enough weaponry to prevent Russia to use theirs for retaliation.
> Where does this silly idea come that after joining NATO, American missiles somehow appear in the new member?
It is not silly idea, it is Russian misinformation. "The corrupt fascist gay West we are under constant attack by wants to put army on our borders," except in nicer words.
Not sure what you mean. I'm just saying that obviously if Ukraine joined Nato, they would get (even more) missiles. The US has been arming Ukraine for a long time already, to the tune of hundreds of millions every year.
Trump's first impeachment was related exactly to this.
I would go further and suggest Putin's latest move made deployment of ICBMs somewhere like Estonia (which could theoretically have hosted them since the 90s) more likely, not less.
> Russia is powerless to stop this, since any attack on a NATO country would likely trigger a counterattack.
This is a game of “who blinks first”. I doubt normally US would use nukes to defend a tiny unimportant country like Latvia or Slovenia, if under attack. Russia knows this too.
Nuclear submarines are there to launch from as close to the coasts of the enemy as possible. Land bases are nice to have but not so important for ICBMs.
Ukraine wasn't going to be accepted into NATO anyway. They asked. Weren't accepted. Ukraine knows this, Russia knows this, NATO countries know this. It's just Russian excuse for propaganda reasons.
The real reason is that Russians consider Ukrainians "the same nation" and if Ukrainians entered EU or some sort of association with it, and got richer than Russians like Poles, Slovaks, Czechs, Balts etc. - it would be very bad for Putin approval in Russia. Russians would start to think "it could be us", "it could work without the tyranny".
So Putin can't let westernized, wealthy Ukraine to exist. Same reason he helped Lukashenko to stop revolution in Belarus recently.
The rest ("history" lectures, "NATO is encroaching", "Ukrainians are nazis and bombard Russian speakers in Ukraine") - it's just bullshit excuses. Don'r repeat them, please. You are helping an aggressive nationalist dictatorship murder people by accepting their excuses.
I don't think it is either or, NATO is just a symbol for western alignment which reaches the same ends you describe. Beyond whatever foundational context, the three conflicts related the Ukraine and Georgia were precipitated by this (specifically most recently with the Brussels summit in 2021) which suggests it is a very definitive line in the sand, regardless of whether or not it is the actual reasoning. This is the third time the west has tested that line, it is the third time Russia has responded in this way, and it will most likely be the third time the West does nothing but implement sanctions because it isn't as important to them as it is to Russia.
This isn't a justification for actions, it is about understanding the situation through the chaos.
> The biggest retaliation the West can make right now is a commitment to a rapid exit at unprecedented speed from the oil economy, in favor of renewables.
You can't exit from the oil economy with renewable such as wind or solar due to their non-predictability.
If you want to stop importing Russian gaz, you need nuclear energy.
(all numbers for germany)
Only ~14% of gas used is used for electrical energy. About 50% of the gas we use is imported from russia. 77% of the gas is used by households for heating (and also cooking, but that's negliable) and industry
To not depend on russian gas by reducing gas usage, the gas heating systems need to be replaced with heat pumps or something else and industry needs to shift, presumably to electricity (since it's unlikely that we have enough green hydrogen that's not produced from fossil fuels without depending on russia). This isn't going to be easy and unlikely to happen at a large enough scale in the next 5 years.
And even if it was nuclear is not a viable response with new projects taking decades to develop. Todays nuclear industry is delivering warmed-up 1970s technology that is expensive, slow, and inflexible.
Solar/wind/batteries with a small amount of backup capacity from hydro, power-to-gas/fuel, biofuels, or new long-duration storage is cheaper and faster to deploy.
You seem to be disagreeing with our greens. Gas is offered as the only backup source at that scale and timeframe.
>Solar/wind/batteries with a small amount of backup capacity from hydro, power-to-gas/fuel, biofuels, or new long-duration storage is cheaper and faster to deploy.
Wrong. [1]Nuclear wins out when kept open a bit longer and that is without accounting for storage methods. To say "a small amount of backup capacity" is absolutely ridiculous. The amounts we need compared to what is available right now would be massive. Most European countries aren't norway with loads of hydro capacity either.
Also power to gas/fuel is a pipedream due to inherent costs and losses alone.
You're better off making more pumped storage power stations like in Coo but those don't fit anywhere and aren't magical either.
The technology/resources for the storage required woudvtske even longer but you're right, we don't need new technologies, we should be serial building proven designs like CANDUs until SMRs hit stride.
You can with storage systems albeit with lots of constraints. Having nuclear is important to guarantee baseload, but we can't rely on that solely either. With current gen nuclear tech, well also run out of fuel within a few generations.
> There is no such thing as storage systems at wide scale unfortunately
I can’t find actual current annual production, only estimates for now and actual values for a few years ago, but we produced somewhere between 0.5 (what we did recently) and 1.3 TWh (what some people a few years ago thought we’d be at now) of batteries in the last year.
Given the likely usage patterns, this is already on a relevant scale to all 50 or so nuclear reactors currently under construction, and the expectation is that battery production will approximate rapid positive exponential growth at least to the end of the decade.
AFAIK the running out of fuel would be a non-issue with breeder reactors, which are disliked for the proliferation risk they are. Well, trade-offs.
Also: currently, nuclear fuel cost is a small part of running a reactor. If nuclear fuel follows a similar cost/available quantity curve as other geologic resources, we should be able to find more once we start looking in earnest.
Like Russia cares. They have a growing, energy-hungering neighbor (China) buying their gas in the east, and a Europe committed to reduce their gas and oil usage in the next 10 years in the west.
It is important to note that the gas exported to China and Europe are exported from different fields, and are not connected with each other. As it stands right now, Russia cannot export the gas it produces for Europe to China.
Yes it can, it just takes longer to put it in ships or trains. Transport by ship from where NordStream would leave the land to China is becoming feasible now that the north pole is melting, and Russia is really interested in that. A good, seemingly unbiased video on the subject is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pvy9usF7ohE
I don't know about the trains but looking at shipping:
-Nordstream 2 has a capacity to transport 55 billion cubic meters per year[1]
-The biggest LNG transport ship "Mozah" built by Samsung Heavy Industries can transport a equivalent of ~162 million cubic meters in a single load
This leads to a ~339,5 full loads per year needed to replace the pipeline volume. Nordstream 2 probably wouldn't run at full capacity initially but even at 50% utilisation it would be nearly impossibe to replace it with shipping.
Putting gas on a ship where nordstream leaves land makes no sense at all if you want to ship to china. You’d have to navigate all of the Baltic Sea and then go all the way around either Scandinavia and Russia or via the Mediterranean. You’d also need to build a liquefaction plant to transport gas via train or ship efficiently. If you’d invest in that kind of infrastructure, build it somewhere more suitable.
They care deeply. China is >10x in pretty much everything. They don't to be a vassal state of China. Russia has lost the independence twice - threat from Asia and threat for united countries between Moscow and Berlin.
I'd speculate the whole action is to force the West to a new deal with Russia, so they can balance China.
> I'd speculate the whole action is to force the West to a new deal with Russia, so they can balance China.
I think any trust that Russia still enjoyed in the west is gone as of today. A few days ago the official Russian position was "Nobody is planning an invasion of Ukraine." Today, Russia has invaded Ukraine. This is not how you make deals.
If anything, I'd have thought it's likely to go the other way: China gets to play the relatively responsible global citizen that doesn't send in tanks to resolve its territorial claims. Also new potential export markets.
I thought Putin was doing the show of power for domestic consumption where he'd embarass the West by actually withdrawing the armies slightly after he promised and it'd all end in a summit with both sides claiming they 'won', but he's gone well beyond that now.
>I'd speculate the whole action is to force the West to a new deal with Russia, so they can balance China.
If they are serious about partnering with the west, they should have embraced reforms and become a member of NATO. The fact that they haven't is indicative of Putin's plan to counter the west. It's more likely they will partner with China just because Putin isn't thinking beyond that. He's 70 after all and they have no effective playbook against China (ala Foundation of Geopolitics against the west).
They tried that in the 90s. There are two problems. They don't want to be a colony for Western powers. Russia is a collection of a few different nations. You have to hold it by a strong hand, otherwise you have a civil war e.g. Chechnya.
So they want to do it now on partner relations with Europe. Russia will provide, natural resources, transportation link to Asia, you can relocate polluting factories to Siberia, you get access to our market and labor. Also, you we will provide security and balance China. You don't need those pesky Americans. In return Russia wants, capital, tech and modernisation of the country.
So Europeans, do you want EU from Lisbon to Vladivostok or war?
You don't partner with nations by forcing them into a corner. That's not partnership, that's conquest.
The USSR lost the cold war. The fact that they want to have their cake and eat it too is the root of the issue. The compromise to be admitted into the western system is actually pretty mild, and there are many strong nations within the western framework. Russia would have no problems operating on a similar level as Japan or France if they gave up their desire for geopolitical hegemony.
May be a large market for Russia, but China is completely invested in renewables. Just look at their pledged energy pipeline. No sane country builds new energy infrastructure not firmly anchored in renewables today.
And in the short and medium turn, Europe cannot get to renewables. Re-doing an continent's energy grid takes time. Also, remember that many water heaters and house heating systems run on gas. Switching these to electric will also take time.
There have been energy crisis in the past and most people survived it, albeit with major inconveniences. I would say that is a small price to pay for peaceful resolution.
Russia cares a lot about who its sells its energy to. China is a far worse trade partner than Europe.
Europe is easy to bully, it doesn't have a single voice and its pretty predictable which parts will have competing interests. China is not. Russia will lose a lot of its independence if it becomes beholden to China. That would be a bad endgame.
Europe is also beholden to public opinion that does not want increased energy prices. China doesn't care about that.
As a motivation that makes sense, but what alternative will Russia have? Do you think Russia is banking on Europe eventually lifting sanctions and purchasing gas again?
It's not a matter of "again". Gas purchases are not on the table as far as sanctions go. It's the other way around. The EU is afraid that if they impose serious sanctions Russia will cut off the gas supply. This will hurt the EU far more than it hurts Russia in the short term.
It is certainly a last resort option, but on the face of existential threat, denying Russia a major source of income to finance the war is a legitimate goal.
The major point of Nord Stream 2 was to remove this PoF.
That's the wrong perspective. You have to remember that even at the height of the cold war, the Soviet Union was still providing gas to Europe. This has always been the arrangement. Ukraine stopping gas is not denying Russia income. It's denying Europe a critical resource.
China will just press Russia into servitude by demanding lower prices (who else they gonna sell to). It's still going to ruin Russia and maybe China then remembers some of the ethnical-chinese regions of Russia that Putin just set a convenient precedent for.
They already have, Putin’s gas deals with China are ruinous for Russia, they even managed to sell it at a loss half the time. What a mastermind that guy is.
This is unfortunately highly unlikely. A lot of EU politics depends on the pockets of rich Russian oil firms.
Just look at Austria, very rich but obviously Russian run EU country. (latest prime minister got fired by Russians even though Russia cyberarmy helped him win the elections. They decided he was no longer as compliant, so they leaked data many years after elections, Russian scandals several years before that etc.). Raiffeisen bank in Austria, basically launders money for Russians over the last several decades, with no consequences to the chief officers.
Hungary is another good example.
Another Austrian neighbor, Croatia, not rich, and less influenced by Russians, had one of the biggest scandals ever when the biggest privately owned company in the Balkans (owned by a Croatian), that employs a massive amounts of Croatians, went bankrupt and could have been acquired by creditors (Sberbank and VTB Bank). I guess there was not enough Russian influence in politics and Croatian government put a new law immediately, so that this kind of takeover does not happen (Croatia nationalized the company).
> Just look at Austria, very rich but obviously Russian run EU country.
This is just nonsense. Austrian government is not by any means run "by the Russians". Russia has been trying to enlarge it's sphere of influence in the west for a while now (which is nothing exceptional geopolitically speaking) and has few retired politicians working in the Russian private sector (Schröder [DE], Schüssel [AT], Fillion [FR], etc.). But to say that Austria and others are "obviously run by the Kremlin" is a blatant lie.
Yes indeed, 'cleancoder0' seems to have gained their understanding of middle Europe from a Tom Clancy novel, or whatever.
For many of us in Europe, including Austria, peace with Russia is considered a very good thing, and a lot of us want it, having lived through the enmities of hate and spite that was hoisted upon us during the Cold War.
Imagine if, indeed, the economic powerhouse of Europe+Russia were allowed to happen. If only certain entities weren't so committed to profiting from the balkanization of everything, hmm...
All power blocks have large influences into each other. That is basically the definition of being powerful in international diplomacy. You just notice it less (or caring about it less) when it's your own block influencing someone else.
Kurz got booted because of run of the mill power politics and because his clique was arrogant, careless, not very effective and made more than enough enemies. No outside influence needed.
But its funny, russian propagandist standpoint is that he got ousted because he stood up to the EU:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oAhtC20nqjk
It is extremely amusing to consider that - from an American perspective - it takes "Russian Interference" for Austrian politics to be so screwed up.
Such naiveté begets the truth, which is that Americans falling for this trope really know nothing about Austrian political habits, whatsoever.
Kurz fell because Kurz was dumb and corrupt from the very beginning, and his party simply incompetent, and we are all glad to have seen him in the rear view mirror.
In fact, American agitprop'ers may not know this, but crediting Russia with Kurz' dismissal only makes us more willing to make deals with the Russkies.
> latest prime minister got fired by Russians even though Russia cyberarmy helped him win the elections.
Actual source? This "russian disinformation" and "russian election manipulation" has zero credibility if you read and listen to anything other than CNN at this point. Please send me actual proof before making claims like this.
It's basically a Mexican standoff, right? In the timeframe of months to years, Europe needs to buy Russian oil and gas as much as Russia needs to sell them. Neither side can unilaterally break off the relationship without suffering massive harm. Getting to full energy independence with renewables is a project that will take a decade or more, not something that you can do in the timeframe of the current conflict.
If they can make it through this winter, there may be time before next winter to ship LNG there from the US. I know the US is expanding their capability of LNG shipping, but I don't know how the capacity compares to the size of the need in Europe. I think the question will be if LNG exports from other countries can make up the difference in time.
Not that I'm against nuclear, but getting to full energy independence with nuclear seems like it would need several decades as well.
For example, the Blue Castle project in Utah (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Castle_Project) started on the drawing board in 2007, started looking for contractors in 2016, hopes to start construction in 2023 and hopes to be fully operational in 2030. That is if construction is not delayed in any way, which seems unlikely given the schedule so far tbh.
The US alone has over 200 coal plants operating today, so even if the new nuclear plant would be on average twice as large you would need more than a hundred new nuclear power plants. It seems wildly unlikely that they could be constructed within three decades.
Also that is in the US alone, a country with a relatively large knowledge base surrounding all things nuclear. Most of the rest of the world has no chance of replacing even a fraction of their power generation needs with nuclear, so for them renewables will be the way to go.
China needs five to six years from starting to build a nuclear reactor to making it operational. I don’t see why western countries should be inherently unable to do this. They currently don’t want to (because they don’t need to and people dislike nuclear power).
China is at ~1.4 billion people, not even close to "most of the rest of the world". There are about 7.9 billion people alive atm, so that would make more than 80% of the worlds' population being outside China.
It's not idiotic. They are just friends with Putin. Just see where their former top officials are employed, how they torpedoed the Norway-Poland pipeline and how they were pushing Nordstream 2 even though everyone told them it will destabilize safety of Baltic states. It's not incompetence, it's too consistent.
I am hopeful about sanctions but I am afraid Germans won't allow ones that actually work.
Shutting down their nuclear plants for no good reason was certainly not in Germany's best interests. They will now pay dearly for that boneheaded decision.
Fortunately we have a friendly neighbor with plenty of nuclear power which renders germany's anti-nuclear stance into a political play with a side dish of market consolidation.
Fission is obviously no clean energy. The previous posts claiming neutralizing nuclear wastes in 600 years was a solution was absurd. But yeah, completely decommission nuclear power plants now for sure would be controversial. But I'm in no position to judge that decision. It's all about trade off, but for what is a question.
Yeah, there are no guilt-free answers when it comes to base load generation, and fission is no exception.
But when the plants already exist and you shut them down because the Japanese decided to build one in a tsunami-prone seismic zone, hire a corrupt organization to operate it well beyond its intended service life, and install backup generators in the basement, or because the Soviets built one and operated it under the "Hold my vodka and watch THIS" school of engineering, well... those just aren't good reasons, and also not the kind of thinking I expect from the Germans.
France's modern plants should help, but they won't come online for years.
How do you do that? The reason europe needs russian gas is precisely because renewables are very intermittent, and they use gas to compensate. More renewable means more reliance on gas, unless you build nuclear plants. And if you do, you might as well not build renewables because the cost of nuclear is pretty much the same whether you use it or not.
The reason europe uses gas isn’t even electricity, it’s mostly heating and industrial.
For instance in france’s energy budget nat gas is almost as large as the entire electricity production. The policy over the last few decades has been to put everyone on gas distribution networks and encourage switching furnaces (from furnace oil, tbf).
For an other example, nat gas accounts for 13% of germany’s electric production (out of about 600TWh). In accounts for nearly 25% of the primary energy mix (out of about 3700TWh).
Even assuming all the gas plants are simple cycle peaking plants with horrid efficiency (say 20% which is extremely low even for peaking plants), electricity still would account for about 40% of germany’s nat gas consumption.
In reality, much as in france, the vast majority (~75%) of nat gas goes to heating.
Many countries could also source fossil fuels from friendly allies. But those allies would have to be interested in extracting it from their own sources.
From my stand point, and this will be very unpopular here, the push to rely on the unreliables (a better name for the renewables) has been toxic and is a destabilizing force in the world.
As is becoming painfully clear right now, relying on other countries for your energy needs is also unreliable. You just get unpredictable and large supply shocks every few years instead of smaller predictable ones every night.
Building out grid level energy storage looks like a way better solution than hoping the countries which are allies now will remain so indefinitely.
Many of the countries that can afford to do this already have fossil fuel reserves that they could use should they choose to. Even of the countries that could pay for this abusrdly expensive project - this will require mining rare earth elements that the green movement will never tolerate.
Did you know that the fossil energy sources are also intermittent? No energy plant is ever working 24x7x365. Stop with the fud already. There are real concerns with solar and wind that could be ameliorated with small scale storage, nuclear, geothermal and hydro. But to call them toxic and destabilizing is patently untrue, the destabilizing factor is not renewable energy.
The dream of any kind of small scale storage hinges on mining rare earth elements at a scale that no environmentalist will ever support. The greens will fully reverse course here once it becomes clear what kind of activity is required to make that possible.
I call them destablizing because the unjustified attacks on fossil fuels have delivered free countries into the economic hands of despotic regimes.
That the attacks are unjustified is arguable. The problem is not the attacks on them, but the politics. If Europe is still consuming fossil fuels they could still produce them and source it elsewhere and not buy it from Russia.
In addition, without renewables, the situation would be similar as Europe would still have near 100% fossil fuel energy production (except France).
Nuclear could potentially have changed things, but that's not related to the attack of fossil fuels. That's again politics and perception.
I agree than many times the "greens" cause more trouble than solutions, and that, again, is politics.
Well a car was less reliable than a horse. Cars were destabilizing. (No pun intended) but cars kinda worked out. Unreliables will get more reliable, these things take time.
> a rapid exit at unprecedented speed from the oil economy, in favor of renewables.
In the United States alone we would have to *sextuple* our renewable energy sources just to make up for our usage of fossil fuels. That is not something any country can do "rapidly", and even if it became a primary focus it would consume a significant portion of our GDP for years on end and be the largest infrastructure project the US has ever engaged in.
It seems almost ludicrous to categorize such a reaction as a "retaliation".
China benefits most from the electrical energy economy. Let that sink in. The reason why we arrived at today is people not thinking through the effects of their actions and desires.
China have invested strongly in electric tech for their own reasons - pollution and of course they also see climate change as a massive threat.
That the US in particular has been extremely late to the table is unfortunate but hey - what else do you expect when policy is bought and paid for by incumbents and one of the to political parties are 100% owned by Fossil interests.
Sanctions barely work on small countries. They're but a nuisance for mid-sized countries and do approximately nothing to big countries. Russian economy is mostly autarkic - consuming overwhelmingly goods and services produced within Russia. Their exports are energy commodities, not consumer goods - energy commodities are the bedrock of the modern world - they'll always find a buyer at market price or slightly below. Their national debt is negligible. China is not going to stop exporting their goods there, and I don't see corporations like Apple/Google/Volkswagen/Toyota giving up such a large market just to make a point. Token slaps on the wrist for the few selected oligarchs who haven't secured British citizenship yet are laughable
We should be honest to ourselves - short of Western citizens dying on the battlefield, there's nothing of consequence the West can do. Russia exploited our weaknesses really well - our irrational hesitance of nuclear energy, our greenwashing of natural gas, our love for petrol-guzzling SUVs, kowtowing of our financial system to ultra-rich, profit-uber-alles of our corporations, hypocrisy of our diplomacy, etc.
Not only that, US has been ripping off other countries using US$ for a very long time. And that why lots of countries now try to establish treaties of currency exchanging and reduce the usage of US$.
Do you think Putin did not take this into account? Europe has messed with herself and her dealings with Russia for so long that we are totally utterly self-screwed (renewables… tell that to the 400EU/MWh).
Like with China. Look: as a protest for the Uygurs, the US did not send… diplomats!
Urgent: If you know anyone near Kiev who can drive two elderly people plus one child to Romania, please contact me ASAP. (Note: Male drivers need to be under 18 or over 55, since they'll likely be stopped by law enforcement along the way.)
I know this sounds straight out of a novel, but I'm just doing whatever I can to help people. (I guess it shouldn't feel surprising that a lot of people want to leave all of a sudden...)
I can help cover travel expenses, though I'm not sure the best way to send money.
If we pool our resources, our collective odds go way up.
I can put you in touch with my dad (who knows a lot of people in Eastern Romania) to potentially help. We live in California, but are originally from Romania. Feel free to get in touch (email at the bottom of https://dvt.name/resume/).
(I'd prefer not to tweet this, since family members etc follow me there.)
If anyone knows a Ukrainian[0] woman that wants to flee and needs shelter / airfare I don't really need my room in Toronto since I'm traveling for work. There is a kind, hardworking woman in the other room, but the condo unit is a two bedroom, two bathroom and my room comes with its own washroom.
She can stay for as long as it takes to get refugee stuff figured out. Please respond here with contact details, sometimes I miss emails because of anti-spam. Or you can try me on Twitter via DM: @zachaysan
[0] Nationality, not ethnicity; ie, ethnic Russian or Uzbek is fine.
'NATO response: This latest escalation could see Article 4 invoked by NATO, which means alliance needs to mobilize and may increase its military presence in countries on Russia’s and Ukraine’s borders. We don’t dare guess where the risks lie here, but it heightens danger.' Saxo Bank
I've been thinking about what can the Russians do?
Seize a part of Ukraine and force the Ukrainian government into a peace treaty that hands over the territories. What those territories are is hard to predict.
Overthrow the government and put a puppet one in its place. This would require some sort of occupation to keep that puppet regime in power, and the Russian forces would be constantly harassed and attacked by guerrilla style tactics (as in Iraq but probably better trained and equipped).
Unless Russia has additional hundreds of thousands of troops they can't effectively occupy a country as big as the Ukraine. That leaves limited objectives.
They also have a limited timeframe before the ground thaws, limiting operational activities with heavy equipment to be along roads. The famous mud country side of eastern Europe is staring soon and will continue for some months making major tank manoeuvres more difficult.
If you are in the Ukraine.
- Ensure you have at least 1 week of food and water.
- Make a bug out bag if you need to leave at a moments notice (including basic medical supplies).
- Have an escape plan that DOES NOT include major roads to get out of the city.
- Cash is king and anything else of value you can trade for supplies.
- If you have a Dacha (or a friend has one) that might be a good place to wait it out if you have to get out of the city.
This reminds me of each time people criticises the European Union for "condemning" something. Big organizations do things step by step. First you talk, then you act. Even Russia prepared a prerecorded pantomime of a discussion before acting. This are the gears moving and is no small thing, it sends a message and prepares for the worse.
The problem is not condemning, the problem is just condemning and not taking the next step, or making it so weak it actually emboldens tbe agressor, who thinks "oh, that's all they got? Wasn't too bad, I guess I'll just keep on"
On the main, "voice of the state", the 1st channel of Russian TV they have just discussed that the West would introduce more sanctions, yet half a year down the road the West would just get used to the situation.
I wonder what that reflects. Sanctions would not be very popular among the Russian population, is this just the regime calming down the populace? Or does it genuinely reflect the calculus here?
All real opposition is imprisoned or killed. State controls all media and actively censor internet. You will get in trouble for organizing or even mentioning any kind of mass protest on social media. 60+ generation only watches TV and supports Putin, and for the rest he has massive amount on police and special forces if censorship and "regular" repressions didn't work. Many people leave the country b/c leading the revolution === getting killed regardless of outcome. Those who cannot leave are too weak, those who can but don't want to are trying to ignore all this shit and live their normal lives. The abundance of oil money helps Putin to keep most people barely above poverty level regardless of sanctions, and that's ok for many.
Realistically Russia can't occupy any significant part of Ukraine, nor Kiev in particular - tens of millions of pissed-off resisting Ukrainians with many taking up arms (on Ukrainian TV they said that they already give arms to such civilians as former police, and Zelenskiy said that they would give arms to all "willing and capable to defend the country") would shake off any army, and any such occupation attempt would be very unpopular in Russia too. Such scenario would be fiasco and catastrophe for Russia and especially for Putin's regime and would make sanctions issue a noise. On the other side if Putin goes "only" for enlarged Donbass zone - like making Donetsk unreachable for Ukraine artillery, etc. - and limits the all-Ukrainian strikes only to military objects as it was officially declared then such conflict will soon again go back to slow-burn/frozen state, and that as usual would take international attention away from it.
I don't think Russia is willing or able to occupy Ukraine. They most likely want to "poison" the region and make the country undesirable in NATO.
No superpower wants the enemy right at their border. The US didn't appreciate Russian missiles being put on Cuban land 60 years ago, Russia certainly doesn't want NATO forces and weaponry being put on Ukrainian land now.
It doesn't take a strategist to see that all superpowers want a buffer and if you take away that buffer spark will fly - whether a blockade or a full out war. I'm certain Europe (EU) saw this outcome the moment Ukraine was considered for joining any Western alliance or union. But different continents have different interests.
Former Warsaw Pact members, and former 'provinces' of the Soviet Union, want to get on with their lives. Russia is making it harder for them than the other way around IMHO.
Western governments made a good faith effort to support Russia (e.g., G8), and it was only after Putin got into power and started heading in his own direction that things started to sour.
Everyone who was abused by a superpower is nervous and would like the same help. What's the point in making that list to support your point if you're not going to paint the other half of the picture which is making the opposite point?
Cuba would have loved to not be cut off from the world for more than half a century for doing what the Ukraine was just enticed to do. Palestine could use some help in what has to be one of the most unbalanced displays of power in a conflict in recent memory. The Middle East or Western Asia would have looked decidedly different without the "explosive support system" they received over the decades. And the South China Sea countries could use a hand settling their territorial disputes.
If you can't see how Russia would like the West to stay away from their borders (Ukraine) just as much as the US wanted Russia to stay away from their borders (Cuba) then maybe it's a good moment to take a step back and look at this without thinking of the names. If you care more about allegiance then you can't care about objectivity or history.
Cuba became the enemy of the US the moment they showed any allegiance to Russia. Was there a doubt in anyone's mind that the exact same thing would happen again when the tables are turned? If you're not educated by mass-media then the outcome was obvious. And you are free to wonder why would anyone approach a an enemy superpower's neighbor for an alliance, knowing full well that probably without exception in the history of mankind this lead to war.
I am fairly certain the EU could live with Ukraine as a buffer zone if that means no conflict in Europe and not crippling them. There are forces far enough from Europe who have no such concern about poking a hornets' nest and sacrificing/destroying Ukraine in the process.
There's no NATO forces on Ukrainian land. But there are Russian ones. And they have already occupied large parts of Ukraine - and trying right now, right this very moment, to take more. So you can "think" whatever you want, but the facts are completely opposite to your claims.
I don't understand this claim. USA army occupied Afghanistan, organized corruption (oh sorry "privatization of public services") for years and paid masses of informants and mercenaries and still had to stop occupying Afghanistan. Just like France was kicked from Algeria over 50 years ago after countless massacres.
Not that i'm happy with the Taliban regime now that the USA are gone, but this wave of reaction is the logical aftermath of USA policy. Turns out not killing/oppressing millions of people and not destroying their public services could have a much better outcome in terms of "progressive politics".
It's not just Lukashenko though: Kadyrov is another example. It appears Putin has learnt from history of the Russian empire that it cannot survive with a single ruler doing ethnic cleansing from above (like the Empire did with the jews before 1917 or the USSR did with muslims).
So yes Putin has wet dreams about reuniting all territories from the ex-Empire or ex-USSR, but as you pointed out he certainly needs "local men" (strong/macho/authoritarian type) to rule the local communities before an uprising occurs as is the logical conclusion of any colonial occupation.
Ask Crimeans. Putin invested heavily in the region and he probably has many supporters now. Some separatists begged Putin to invade. Difficult to say how numerous they are.
Maybe we see a new iron curtain in the middle of Ukraine.
That's how it's been since 2014. And that's why Putin feels so bold - he's already been down this road, and he knows it's not as scary as they try to make it look like. To scare him off, something bigger would be required - but looks like there's not much. Even SWIFT restrictions are a no go. The most the West can do is slap some personal sanctions on a couple of billionaire oligarchs (which can very well sit it out in Russia) and on some Russian banks (which probably also can stomach it for years).
This is the biggest problem. I don't believe the sanctions imposed on Russia for the previous acts of aggression reached the level which Putin had already calculated into his plans.
I was really surprised at how lightweight the first wave of sanction was. They sanctioned some Russian politicians who were proud of it and the invaded areas only.
Depends. You could target Russian citizens with strong ties to Putin with asset seizures like Roman Abramovich. Seizing Chelsea F.C. and handing it over to fans would be quite popular.
What would this kind of sanction achieve? Do you expect that a friend of Putin will go to him and then ask him to stop a War? Right now in his own circle of friends, there is nobody more powerful than Putin and their money does not matter right now. The war will not be stopped because some friends will have their assets frozen or even lost. Global Power > Friends Money. To stop this war one has to show a bigger power. Some other type of sanctions needs to be considered.
Don't get fooled, they are only "friends" because they have common business and goals. Average Joe from the street is not going to be their "friend" because he would not bring anything to the table.
Friends money is part of that power, taking that money away makes whole group weaker, because it is not "evil villain in a cave", world does not work that way. It is connections and groups of people.
What would stop Russia to retaliate in that case? Every western company property in Russia would become a fair game, including e.g Bidens son and his property in Ukraine.
The west not having the stomach for any real sanctions that also hurt them in return is exactly why Putin was confident enough to start the invasion. The only way non-violent way to stop it (besides an internal uprising) is to make exactly to make it clear that Putin miscalculated.
Russia invaded Georgia in 2008 to "enforce peace". Same with Crimea in 2014. Then Luhansk and Donetsk a few days ago. Now the rest of Ukraine. Discussion with Putin is futile. When Russia started sending troops next to the Ukraine borders, NATO and especially USA should have responded by sending two thousands soldiers to Kiev. It's too late now.
>> NATO and especially USA should have responded by sending two thousands soldiers to Kiev
And when those American soldiers are killed by Russian missiles, do you then declare full on war on Russia, and we basically all die? Because like....there is no other good option out of this you know. By placing American(or NATO) troops and assets in the harms way, you need to be prepared for what you are going to do if those troops get attacked - and the current strategy is to attack back, which again = end of the world. Arming Ukraine to the teeth and letting them fight back was the second best option and that's exactly what the west has done.
Also, there was a meme recently - it's all fun and games being an expert on the internet, but then you remember you are an able bodied male who would absolutely be drafted in to actually fight. "West should do something" - great, you first. I have kids and family, as a Pole the risk of actually being involved in military operations is making me extremely uncomfortable right now.
>And when those American soldiers are killed by Russian missiles, do you then declare full on war on Russia, and we basically all die?
If we are going by the game theory, mutually assured destruction only works if both sides believe the other is willing to engage. If one side knows the other side will not engage, it becomes easy for the aggressive side to take advantage of the passive side.
Putin also doesn't want to die so the hope would have been that if the west was stronger and made it clear that an invasion would lead to war, there would be no invasion. Putin didn't see that commitment so he attacked.
Like I said above - Putin has literally made a career out of calling west's bluffs. Would he call that one? Would he literally attack American/NATO troops to see if we'll really end the world over it?
I really don't want to find out. It's one hell of a gamble.
>Putin has literally made a career out of calling west's bluffs. Would he call that one?
Well that is the point. As I said the west needs to make it clear that an invasion would lead to war. It can't be a bluff. But we all know the west wasn't willing to end civilization over this so here we are. Seems like Putin is going to keep prodding the west until he finds the line he is convinced we won't let him cross. That line was never going to be Georgia, Crimea, or the whole of Ukraine.
The Russian military doesn't have the resources for a prolonged guerilla conflict against a motivated resistance.
With the current actions, the Ukrainian population won't easily forget what Putin has done and even dictatorships need some level of approval from the population.
There is a reasonable chance that Putin excavated his own grave with his reprehensible actions.
A guerilla assumes that Russia occupies Ukraine. I think this is improbable, I do not think that Russia want to deal with guerilla warfare and probable terrorist attacks coming from extremists from there. The east part of Ukraine in Donbass, recognized as independent by them, is precisely the part of Ukraine with more ethnical Russians that is against the Ukrainian government and were de facto independent and more pro-russian since years ago during Ukrainian civil war. From there a guerilla would be improbable. This attacks probably are more to send a message against NATO expansion there and to defend Donbass independence, not an invasion for occupation.
I am not a native English speaker and may have badly expressed myself. I am not urging the "west" or "allieds" to intervene nor i am condemning them for not to. But if they were serious about stopping Putin, they would have sent troops weeks before the invasion. When Joseph Biden went everyday on television to warn that the invasion was imminent and that usa will not send troops but instead establish more economic sanctions, it was pretty clear to me that they already had accepted to abandon Ukraine to Russia.
They can send equipment because if equipment is lost it's no big deal.
If you send NATO troops and they are killed then all out war between NATO and Russia is inevitable and that could easily be world ending.
Essentially sending troops to Ukraine has a very poor risk/reward. If it works and Russia is discouraged from attacking then great, everyone goes home. If it doesn't work then it's WW3.
I don't understand. You're not urging the "west" or "allies" to intervene, but you want them to have sent troops to fight russian troops? In what world isn't that "intervening"?
My understanding of the comment in question is: "Sanctions are not an effective deterrent; if the West truly wanted to put a stop to this they should have sent troops because that's the only thing that Russia would listen to."
Debatable as to the truth of that sentiment, perhaps. And obviously ... NATO and Russia being at war would be incredibly disastrous. But, I do think it's possible to hold that sentiment in good faith - I feel something similar. I desperately do not want to be in a "hot" war with Russia, but at the same time I recognize that sanctions are ineffective.
The lesson here, perhaps, is that the options range from "bad" to "worse." :(
Are you truly comparing the "accidental" shooting down of a military plane to an actual boots on the ground invasion of a sovereign nation? These are so wastly different that mentioning apples and oranges doesn't even come close to it.
It was not accidental. A plane capable of caring nuclear bombs was in their airspace.
I'm not comparing anything - I was referring to "end of the world". According to Turkish strategist, nuclear weapon is not usable, so they have no problem to retaliate.
> And when those American soldiers are killed by Russian missiles, do you then declare full on war on Russia
You are assuming here that Russia would be willing to cause a World War by attacking those American soldiers.
> as a Pole the risk of actually being involved in military operations is making me extremely uncomfortable right now.
But the alternative, to let Russia have Ukraine, will become very uncomfortable in the long term. It's naïve to assume that by giving Putin what he wants he will be satisfied and not invade any other countries in the future.
The analogy with 1938 is striking.
I’m afraid while I support strong action against Russia, I think we should have kicked them off Swift in 2014, sending us troops to Ukraine wouldn’t achieve anything. The Russians would simply ignore them.
If they got hurt during the invasion, the Russians would just claim, possibly entirely legitimately, that they were in the wrong place at the wrong time and the US is using it as an excuse for escalation. Which in fact is exactly what you’re suggesting. It would be a serious misstep we can’t afford. We should have acted decisively sooner, but now we’re here we should act decisively now. Close the pipelines completely and shut off Russia from swift. Ban all foreign travel for any Russian government employees. We’re at war with this guy, we need to act like it.
>>You are assuming here that Russia would be willing to cause a World War by attacking those American soldiers.
I think Russia has been "calling the bluff" of the west for a long time. Attacking American soldiers on Ukrainian soil to send a message "look what I can do, you aren't going to attack me back because you know what it will cost you" would be entirely within the standard Russian strategy. And it would place US and NATO into an extremely uncomfortable position - attack back = world war 3, don't attack back = send a message that you can kill American troops without punishment. That's not a position anyone wants to be in.
>>It's naïve to assume that by giving Putin what he wants he will be satisfied and not invade any other countries in the future.
I don't think I'm naive, I fully realize that this is what will happen in the future. But again, there's having a nicely formed opinion on the internet, and then there's receiving a letter stating you are to report to your nearest military base for training and deployment. We should do something. I don't want to leave my wife and kid and go fight in Ukraine. Those aren't contradictory statements.
It's not NATO -> nuclear war, but it can head that way though. NATO is currently desperately trying to not get into a limited-scale shooting war with Russia, because that's an escalation game which then depends on the other side recognizing the scope of the conflict.
Look at the long history of authoritarian leaders thinking they could act without triggering escalation, e.g. Taliban, Saddam, and consider again if you want to take the risk that Putin will be rational enough to avoid further escalation and the consequences of doing so given the failure to defeat even the Taliban.
Yeah, and send a message that says "you can kill American troops without consequences"? And if that's your strategy - why send them there in the first place?
So.... Afghanistan? How many soldiers from several Western nations died there, and of the US in particular? Only to recently withdraw unconditionally and even hand over lots of military equipment to the enemy they had been fighting for decades?
...but how many of those were killed by Russian forces? If Russia attacked US troops in Afghanistan then yeah, that would have been a comparable situation. US isn't going to nuke Afganistan over killing American soldiers, because that's not the stated policy.
Nobody seemed willing to fight for the government and the taliban were hiding in pakistan waiting for the US to leave. Sometimes you just have to call it quits.
> shipping some people over to die and then walking away
Eh??? This is exactly what happened. Soldiers were sent to Afghanistan. Thousands died. The US left, and the enemy took over, both government and equipment.
Also, the parent had said
> Yeah, and send a message that says "you can kill American troops without consequences"?
and again this is what happened. No consequences for the Taliban for killing American soldiers, just as the parent wrote.
The nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed ~200k people. Any target worth nuking, (say Nato HQ) will result in millions of casualties. Urbanization & increased population density have many benefits, but they make for mind-bogglingly disastrous targets of nukes.
If there's a choice between nukes raining down and between Putin ruling the world, I'll happily choose the latter. No matter the cost, there cannot be a nuclear war.
"Although appeasement, which is conventionally defined as the act of satisfying grievances by concessions with the aim of avoiding war, was once regarded as an effective and even honourable strategy of foreign policy, the term has since the Munich Conference symbolised cowardice, failure and weakness. Winston Churchill described appeasement as "one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last".
If we're going to be quoting that page, we might as well do it right:
> But when Britain and France did go to war in 1939, they were still unable to save Poland from being conquered and occupied. Clearly, had they gone to war a year earlier, they would not have been able to save Czechoslovakia, either
Churchill is probably not someone we should ascribe too much wisdom to...
How is quoting one fragment of a quote appearing in the page (without an indication that it's a quote or by whom) more right than quoting a full paragraph?
Giving up everything trying to avoid a nuclear war is the surest way to get it. I know, it's counterintuitive, but if you want peace you must be willing to go to war.
> Giving up everything trying to avoid a nuclear war is the surest way to get it.
Nobody is giving up everything, what is given up at the moment is a strip of land in East Europe that could be claimed back via diplomatic arrangements as soon as Putin is gone.
The west has been giving up stuff since Putin gained power. Nothing has been claimed back yet. And he won’t be gone any time soon. He has plenty of targets after Ukraine too, for example Moldova which already has a separatist Russian mole region inside.
We are watching Hitler raising, not Stalin dying here.
I agree in a way, but I also think that in avoiding conflict, it is possible to see yourself pushed back into a corner to where a bigger conflict becomes necessary.
Unfortunately for people with your worldview, this isn't the way the world works. You're thinking under a framework that one set of actions will certainly prevent it, and the other is more likely to cause it.
At this point, neither intervention nor non-intervention is likely to prevent this. It's entirely likely that if Putin loses this assault, or faces an intractable insurgency, he could launch nukes out of a desperate attempt to save face. He's old — at this point, only the reputation he leaves behind is what matters to him, and it's clear that he wishes to be remembered as a fearful and powerful figure. What better way to do that than nuking someone?
Your attitude is the same entrapment that allows abusive spouses to hold their spouse in thrall. I've actually witnessed that backfire to its ultimate degree; in my hometown, a woman in an abusive relationship called her husband's bluff on his threats to kill her if she left, and he wasn't bluffing. Killed her in broad daylight at a local bank, and then killed himself.
The question you have to ask is whether you think her leaving him was the only thing that precipitated him killing her, or whether his killing her was because he realized she no longer loved him.
>>At this point, neither intervention nor non-intervention is likely to prevent this. It's entirely likely that if Putin loses this assault, or faces an intractable insurgency, he could launch nukes out of a desperate attempt to save face. He's old — at this point, only the reputation he leaves behind is what matters to him, and it's clear that he wishes to be remembered as a fearful and powerful figure. What better way to do that than nuking someone?
I do agree that if he's pushed against the wall he can nuke one Ukrainian city saying it was the hideout of the rebels or whatever, effectively sending a message that he's not afraid to use nuclear weapons, without directly attacking a NATO state. I can only assume that at that point whatever is left of Ukrainian government would voluntarily step down to prevent further destruction.
You're right that he's a madman, and any sort of logical strategy just doesn't apply here.
Many NATO members have strong enconomic links with Russia. For example Russia is building nuclear power plants in Turkey and Hungary, which are in very advanced state of construction for example.
Turkey is only in NATO as a legacy play. They gave up on EU membership a while ago, and have been mostly pushing their own agenda, stepping into the middle east power vacuums left empty by Syria and Iraq falling apart.
They'll lean on NATO when they need to, but they also live next to Russia and don't want to pick fights if they don't need to.
> Russia invaded Georgia in 2008 to "enforce peace". Same with Crimea in 2014. Then Luhansk and Donetsk a few days ago. Now the rest of Ukraine. Discussion with Putin is futile.
Just remember that the USA played the same kind of playbook (maybe worse) in Syria and Iraq. It's equally condamnable, but it can give you some perspective to see through media portrayal.
Kosovo is a more apt comparison. There's no way of condemning annexation of the breakaway regions, while defending doing the same with Kosovo - without coming out as a hypocrite who bends the facts to fit his needs
In a way the comparison is understandable, but in Kosovo and Bosnia there were systemic etnic persecution and genocide by the Serbian government.
A more similar comparison would be the US and USSR funding of factions in Italy during the Anni di Piombo. And then say US or USSR officialy arming and sponsoring Forza Nuova (or another militant organization) for indipendence of Padania.
> but in Kosovo and Bosnia there were systemic etnic persecution and genocide by the Serbian government.
Which turned to be false. The Racak massacre that provoked Bosnian intervention was a lie used to make a case for an invasion. Similar to mass weapons in Iraq that were never found. The same in Bosnia, where Markale incident used to accuse one side of war crimes later appeared to be organized by Muslim paramilitary to provoke military intervention and make a press.
The only thing Serbian side did wrong, is that it was ruled by socialist (ex-communist) party.
I’m glad you’re willing to play armchair general with other people’s blood.
I served, did you? I’m 100% disabled as a result.
If you didn’t wear the uniform, don’t be so quick to volunteer others for what you aren’t willing to do yourself.
> When Russia started sending troops next to the Ukraine borders, NATO and especially USA should have responded by sending two thousands soldiers to Kiev. It's too late now.
That would have escalated the situation further and would have helped Putin's narrative, like the Russian mobilisation in WWI which only pushed things over the edge.
Yes I can. A "modern military" isn't a guaranteed victory if your enemy is fighting in it's own turf in difficult terrain. The best armies in the world have failed to do this in Afghanistan (several times now).
Stalin also gutted the Soviet Army and Navy via The Purges before the Winter War, and the Army had attempted to impliment a lot of "New Soviet Man" style of changes that were detrimental.
The modern Russian army has experience in several different theaters, has experienced and professional leadership, and rocks a small but highly modernized kit backed by copious amounts of older Soviet-era gear.
The Ukranians just got slammed with huge cruse missile attacks -- how will the Fins neutralize that with conscripts carrying skis and rifles?
I respect their bravery, but boldness doesn't stop JDAMs -- they need NATO.
But also a country with a history of coming to terms with the USSR, and notably one that didn't receive a NATO membership invitation guarantee (working of Wikipedia). Ukraine and Georgia did, both also want to join NATO. Finland has no such plans (again, working of Wikipedia).
Having just watched the Finnish president and prime minister address the situation, the press' pressing questions about joining NATO were continually downplayed, as is customary.
Finland is almost militantly neutral, since that was the original condition to independence in the first place. On the other hand, Russia just voided the Minsk agreement with Ukraine to attack, so...
Imagine being Russia's border neighbor, man. It's seriously stressful.
But if any country is prepared for russian invasion, it's Finland.
> Finland is almost militantly neutral, since that was the original condition to independence in the first place.
Finland a long time ago voided/broke the Paris peace treaty on their own. Basically once the Germany unified in 1990 Finland went "nope we don't like this peace treaty anymore".
If Finland was still following the treaty we would not be allowed to have aircraft that can deploy bombs, mere than 60 planes (including civilian airfact registered to Finland), more than 34k total infantry+border guard, 10k tons total displacement of navy, no sea mines or torpedoes. Finland has gone way past these since.
The only part of the Paris peace treaty we still follow is the no nukes part and that due to signing a separate treaty about not getting nukes in the 70s.
Being a border nation with Russia now, without a staunch pro-Russian government, is pretty scary right now. Even if you are a NATO member, because I don't trust NATO to go to war with Russia.
Why do you think Russia would attack NATO member? War has its own costs, Russia probably has some calculation. I don't think we will see any combat from Russian sides, at least on NATO member.
At least Finland doesn't, to my knowledge, have a meaningful amount of Russian population to "liberate". Compared to countries that used to be soviet republics, I'd say they are relatively safe.
Why would Finland be the next? Because someone wants to scare them to join NATO?
Finland was already able to resist Russian aggression once not so long ago (by European standards), and Russia paid a dire price for attacking in man life. Later, Finland also paid its toll, but in territory.
Both sides learned their lesson. Finland is not going to provoke Russia, and Russia is not going to attach again without reason.
Germany and France have much better reason to actually defend Finland. The Euro.
Basically if a Euro country gets invaded and the other countries do nothing that crashes the value of the Euro which would destroy the economies of the other Euro countries. And the non-Euro EU countries have a good reason to follow the same logic as Euro crashing would also destroy their economies.
Also agree. It's also an alliance mostly built on trade and laws, with some intelligence thrown in if the parties feel like it. The EU has stayed away from military allegiance.
The EU itself has no military but its member states do and are obligated to help if a member is invaded
"If a Member State is the victim of armed aggression on its territory, the other Member States
shall have towards it an obligation of aid and assistance by all the means in their power"
This happened several times with Trump, who despite all his faults, was a master bullshitter and master at seeing through other bullshitters. A notable episode was an attack by Russian Wagner group on a small outpost held by 30-something US special forces soldiers guarding a gas plant in Syria. Signals intelligence was later able to capture a few phone calls of survivors describing what had happened[1]. Russians were used to fighting poorly trained rebels, but now fell under combined arms fire from a modern army and it was a total massacre. They got hit from drones, artillery, Apaches and F-22s. Russian casualties: some 300 dead out of 600, American losses: 0.
After that, Russians were much less eager to provoke the US. They test every president like this. Obama failed ("red lines" in Syria), Trump succeeded, Biden... depends on what he does next.
You're omitting a critical detail: Russia denied that those forces were Russian, effectively green lighting the US response. That's not a useful "test".
Denying involvement is their modus operandi, which backfired in this case. They obviously didn't expect one of the worst humiliations in modern military history.
Look, nobody has any doubt that USA is very powerful. But that doesn't mean they must annihilate the world.
And Russia is no slouch.
Diplomacy is the need of the hour.
As somebody who lives far far away from Europe and North America (in a country that's supposed to have no skin in this game), I don't want to get killed because Uncle Sam wants to show who's boss.
> Look, nobody has any doubt that USA is very powerful.
Russia obviously doubts. All that power is useless if you are afraid of using it. Russia conquered Crimea in 2014 without firing a single shot in the best spirit of Sun Tzu because everyone else was so deathly afraid of what might happen that it utterly paralyzed them.
Congratz on being far away. I live next to a strategically important rail bridge that will get hit by a missile in the next round if Putin is not stopped in Ukraine. I don't think appeasement is going to achieve that.
You still don't get it. Do you doubt that Russia is powerful? Hence, the diplomacy.
> strategically important rail bridge
That's kind of the problem isn't it? Strategic assets near Russia (I think it's safe to assume the aforementioned bridge isn't in Albuquerque, New Mexico) is concerning to them.
Every country involved is protecting their own interests.
I have no sympathy for any of the governments involved. On any side.
However, I hope that you and your family would be safe.
There was no diplomacy because the position of Russia was completely ignored. Surprisingly China stated openly that it was the fault of the west. That is ridiculous because they are not the people to invade here, but at no point was there effective diplomacy. On the contrary, everyone called Putins hand and now he put it on the table.
It failed because the US diplomats were too ignorant to take Putin's "red line" demands (Ukraine never getting into NATO) seriously and they discarded any possibility for immediate negotiations on that matter too eagerly.
Not so sure if Trump succeeded. All Trump did was tell Putin "do whatever you want with whomever, as long as you leave my interests alone" (as in my personal interests). Did you forget the Helsinki summit, the one without interpreter? Or the Russian bounty on US troops in Afghanistan?
It was the only way to tell Putin to stop and to prevent an invasion; you send troops at the border, we will do the same on our side and they will stay as long as yours stay there.
In 2009 Ukraine was under the control of Yanukovych, a Russian stooge installed through repression and rigged elections. He was Putin’s pawn and his posturing against NATO or Romania can hardly be used as criticism of the current Ukrainian government or the will of the Ukrainian people.
You’re implying that Ukraine didn’t try to make any friends before the 2014 Russian invasion of Crimea. In fact it was Ukraines improving relationship with the west (including Eastern Europe, so not really even ‘the west’ anymore, really just Non-Russia and China the axis of autocracy) that lead to the Russian annexation.
Even if you are right about that, right now it doesn’t matter. I don’t think it’s possible to argue now that the Ukrainian people are pro Russian or anti EU and NATO. It’s entirely legitimate if they changed their mind about Russia given what’s happened since 2014. After all Ukraine is a big country and ‘they’ have a huge variety of opinions. The democratic will of the people now is what matters, and whether the rest of the world is prepared to defend their right to self determination.
Except for Ukraine (East Slavic, formerly part of the Soviet power structures), Belarus (also East Slavic, also formerly part of the Soviet power structures) and Moldova, (who doesn't know what they want to do...) everyone else turned West ASAP.
How come:
Estonia (ex-USSR)
Lithuania (ex-USSR)
Latvia (ex-USSR)
Poland
Hungary
Romania
Bulgaria
Czechia
Slovakia
didn't also have rigged election results? Well, most likely because their people wouldn't allow them. The popular consensus was that turning West was the only option and even populists and wannabe dictators didn't dare go against the people.
My opinions are crude and ghastly and I'm a jerk. But I'm also right.
Would be interesting to hear from any russians in here, because i can't help to think that large majority of russians are complicit to what seems to be a dictator going mad as much as the dictators in his neighborhood (aliyev, khomeini, taliban etc)
Both articles take words from my mouth. In last couple of days I've converted all my savings into foreign currencies and am looking to change the job if my current employer (US based) does not fix the wage to USD or EUR. Since this morning, I have hard time thinking about anything but the war. The whole Ukraine situation and other occupied territories is repulsive, but the actual full-scale war was not what I expected. This should not have happened, period. My heart is wholly with Ukrainians. My mother's family comes from there to, so I'm half-ukranainian. As an RF citizen, I feel ashamed, sorry and helpless, even though regular people never had sufficient amount of political leverage during last two decades or even more. Russians will have to work hard to internalize the putin's rule when (if) he and his cronies go away, same as what people of Germany did after WWII.
You are right about large majority of Russians being complicit, and right when saying "what seems to be a dictator going mad". Because it's not a dictator going mad, in fact Putin has quite clear goals and is quite predictable. He repeatedly was warning the West about the balance of power being skewed in their favor and Russia's interests being neglected since 2007.
I'm not going to get into much details, and I feel I will be downvoted no matter how I try to reason Putin's behavior, but there are clear reasons behind it. I think with right political moves Russia could achieve the same goals, however looks like Russian diplomacy is in much worse shape than the army, thus there's this conflict going into hot phase.
Western media again as always are portraying Putin as a crazy dictator who just needs more blood, however I hope YCombinator folks being critical thinking and curious enough will dig a bit more into the history of this conflict and try to understand the motives of each side. As usual in this world there's no bad guys vs good guys, there's hundreds shades of grey that are actually interesting to research if you wish to.
Similar problem is Taiwan by the way.
I 'm watching RT to try to understand the russian propaganda, and it seems even the reporters are caught by surprise by the scale of the invasion. What you said does not justify launching a full scale attack against the entirety of ukraine. It does seem like a madman doing mad things thinking this is the 1930s again. As if occupying ukraine would solve the problem you re mentioning...
This doesn't look much different from the US attacking Iraq or Yugoslavia. All these attacks have serious reasons behind them (and those reasons are not protecting poor children as mass media would tell you).
Iraq was quite questionable. The motive, oil/currency, was understandable though reprehensible. The terrorists weren't from Iraq, but Afghanistan/SA; GWB's decision to attack, and destabilize both a country and international order (as we're now experiencing) is his legacy.
The difference here is that Ukraine did their best to appease Russia, including promising to never join the EU/Nato for promises of security. It seems like Ukraine was ready to give everything for independence, but their independence was unacceptable.
What does RF have to gain from this? Most publications say very little. What are they missing?
Ukraine did not appease Russia, that's the problem. If you look up the news 2 weeks ago you'll see that Putin sent a note to NATO demanding guarantees that Ukraine will never join that organization. West told Putin to mind his own business. This war wouldn't happen if the response was different.
"Our state has given up its share of the Soviet nuclear arsenal - the third largest in the world - and in return has received assurances, including from Russia, that our borders and our security will be respected. All this did not happen. So it is strange to hear the Russian side asking for any guarantees when so many promises have already been broken by the Russian side itself," Zelensky said when asked about Ukraine's possible refusal to join NATO in exchange for a guaranteed withdrawal of Russian troops from the border.
i just dont get this mindset in which people draw up ahistorical parallels to make up excuses for something. You stated that the invasion has something to do with geopolitical danger for russia, and was not in retaliation for what US did in Iraq. Is it nationalism? Sense of isolation? Feeling of being denigrated/humiliated by the west? Just blatant personal cult?
My point is that in all of those cases there were reasons behind the attacks. You are not calling Bush or Clinton crazy for what they did right? Same for Russians.
> "You are right about large majority of Russians being complicit"
Honest question. How do you know a large majority of Russian citizens are being complicit in supporting these acts of war? This is such a broad, generalizing statement. It's not like they were asked to vote on it?
> He repeatedly was warning the West about the balance of power being skewed in their favor
He had the previous US president wrapped around his finger, and he was able to take Crimea with barely any effort. How is the balance of power skewed in favor of the West?
I have the secondhand POV of a middle class Russian friend who grew up in Moscow and went to US for university, and keeps very up to date with domestic politics and economy. Did not expect full-scale invasion, has many generalized and specific concerns about what comes next.
Believes that Putin does not care about the opinion of the well-to-do Russian diaspora, even if they have fiscal or monetary connections to Russia. Very concerned, at the personal level, about the impact of broader sanctions that threaten to isolate the Russian economy like the Iranian economy. Views Putin as responsible for provoking these sanctions. However, he believes that the general Russian public is generally supportive of Putin's actions.
Can you elaborate, in material terms, what does russia win by invading and occupying ukraine? What do you imagine the economy of ukrainian people will be after this?
Sometimes, compromise and diplomacy are a wonderful thing. But sometimes, there is no real compromise and the can just gets kicked down the road with what feels like compromise but really is just festering. I’ve seen many a historian posit that the 3/5 compromise was a compromise that ultimately germinated the civil war. They kicked the can down the road til its very rotten contents spilled over.
Part of me wonders if we’re not approaching that moment with Russia on the world stage. This sense of aggravation has been going on since Stalin, and while the 90s were a nice respite, it honestly just begins to feel like there is no win win compromise between Russia and the western world.
Maybe this is just the heat of the moment talking, and this’ll just be another uncomfortable “border skirmish” in a year from now. Anxiously frustrated and angry.
Some of my favorite programmer friends are ex pat Russians. They have great culture, art, science.
Russia is the last colonial empire and as such under constant threat of disintegration by the spread of outside political ideologies like ethno-nationalism, liberal democracy or communism (whose introduction by Germany did a pretty "big number" on Russia until Communist Russia eventually faced the same geostrategic power struggle the Tsarist Empire faced).
So when speaking of "aggrevation" always factor in the perspective of the "Empire".
PS: The concept of buffer countries as a peace keeper has been helpful in the past (e.g. Belgium kinda, Austria). I guess Ukraine's role will have to be that of such a buffer.
In any mechanical system, if your design is “lets give one part of the system all the stress” but said component is not proportionately strengthened or incentivized, it fails eventually, bringing the rest of the system down with it.
Well it's a starting point at least (see Austria or Belgium). You would then have to build more peace-keeping infra on top of it (see EU). Which highlights why it was an error to de-buffer Ukraine (also the CIS states surrounding Russia serve more or less this role, although "vassal" would be more appropriate).
Speaking of a mecanical system: In the hiearchy of sovereignity, apart from US, RU and CN all countries are somewhat buffers.
I had a look at the size of the armies in Baltic countries. According to [1][2], they have no tanks or fighter aircrafts. That can't be right? If it is true, then no wonder they are worried.
- Article 4: The Parties will consult together whenever, in the opinion of any of them, the territorial integrity, political independence or security of any of the Parties is threatened.
- Article 5: The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all and consequently they agree that, if such an armed attack occurs, each of them [...] will assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith [...] such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area.
The Parties will consult together whenever, in the opinion of any of them, the territorial integrity, political independence or security of any of the Parties is threatened.
Article 5
The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all and consequently they agree that, if such an armed attack occurs, each of them, in exercise of the right of individual or collective self-defence recognised by Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations, will assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area.
Any such armed attack and all measures taken as a result thereof shall immediately be reported to the Security Council. Such measures shall be terminated when the Security Council has taken the measures necessary to restore and maintain international peace and security .
Except it’s just Russia (and Russian puppet state Belarus) vs. NATO.
I don’t see why China would jump in over Russia’s European adventures. If they do then yeah that drags in all of Asia (and maybe Africa due to large Chinese and European influence).
I guess South and Central America could escape it though.
The consultation is what triggering article 4 means. Article 5 is collective defense.
Article 4
The Parties will consult together whenever, in the opinion of any of them, the territorial integrity, political independence or security of any of the Parties is threatened.
Talking before this; hey what's our plan if Russia invades? Ok, what about if Russia does a "small" invasion? Etc. "Informal" in that they're not producing anything that requires a vote or action from member parties - it's meeting of established joint committees, distribution of memoranda, back and forth on policy.
Talking now: which of the plans we have discussed before are we going to enact? Formal meeting, in that a member state has declared it's intent to bring a topic to the table and that the body is obligated to discuss and determine a course of action - which is allowed to be "no action".
Basically, before now everyone figured out what to do on paper, now the Treaty Organization has to make a decision about next steps.
Yes, but where did I say it would trigger worse things than NATO article 4?
That is, NATO article 5.
This is just in your head, not mine.
For me, it's all about the sheer fun of the coming horror and dangers of foreseeable Russian hybrid warfare without any caution or limitations. That nobody has expected to ever return to Europe.
I've grew up near Russia, and I can describe you their mindset: all "agreements", "sanctions", "borders" etc don't matter. They are just distractions to prepare positions and advance their military. All that matters is force.
There's a Russian proverb: "All territories are ours, it's just someone temporary occupied them".
They also think in terms of territories (not people or economy) and victories. If they start losing a war, they start questioning their government.
So Estonia is doubly right to be worried, as, even if they actually manage to invade Ukraine, I see no reason they are going to stop at Ukrainian border. So the most logical step for Estonia is to help Ukraine as much as possible.
There is a significant Russian minority in Estonia (as in other Baltics) who after de-russification remain "second class" citizens (without the right to vote for example).
That is Russian propaganda, Estonian citizens all have the right to vote. There is a minority of Russians here who do not want to learn the language and become citizens, hence they can't vote. They have the attitude that we (Estonians) are occupying their land... it's crazy. Younger generation of Russians who are born here are mostly not like that though
*edit
Even non-citizen Russians have the right to vote in local elections, just not in nation wide elections.
Estonia is NATO since 2004. If Russia attacks Estonia ICBMs are launched and all wars are over for a long time.
I expect that in the next days some member of the US government, maybe the President, will publicly remember that Mutual Assured Destruction is what kept the world mostly at peace since the 50s, except small scale wars by proxy or with only one of the USA and SSSR directly involved.
So Russia won't invade, ICBMs won't fly and Ukraine becomes the next Afghanistan for Russia. Fast forward 20 years, Putin is in Lenin's Mausoleum and the new Iron Curtain could start to be lifted.
What if some small Estonian county says that they are majority Russians and want to do a referendum? Just like Scotland did (but didn't succeed). Just like Transnistria did. Just like South Osetia did. Just like Crimea did. Just like Donetsk did in 2014.
And then Russia wants to help them. Hey, our fellow comrades are under oppression from Estonian government!
There can be many different recipes, but it's never a 1-day process. The current war with Russia is ongoing since 2014. First it's separatists (mostly really residents of those territories, supported by Russia), then it's some unknown bands of criminals. And very strong propaganda, that persuades everyone and their parliaments that those peoples' voices must be heard, etc.
No ICBMs won't fly in that case, because it's always "not such a big deal for ICBMs". Are you going to start World War 3 if some small Estonian territory really wants to secede?
This is constantly questioned by Americans, including the former president. It commonly goes like this: "I like $balticCountry, but are we really going to send nukes if $balticCountry is invaded?"
It might go down like WW2 when countries reacted only when large countries were invaded (Poland).
MAD works because the two parties do their best to convince the other party that they'd launch the missiles as soon as any of their allies or controlled territories are touched. If there is a crack in their resolve the other party can take a bite, then another one and then the alliance crumbles. Or they launch their missiles hoping for no retaliation.
Yes. Americans cannot find Estonia on the map, why starting World War 3 for it? Especially if it's not really clear there was an invasion, maybe there are real citizens that have some demands from their government, or some other shady things not clearly seen from afar?
Why does Putin try to invade parts of Ukraine ? What's its interest ? Is it economical ? is it for interior politics ? is it to destabilize Europe ? does someone can conjecture a bit ?
A Russian-speaking democracy on their border is unacceptable to them. It will serve to help Russia itself to become a democracy which again is unacceptable to them.
That, plus the giant hubris of the 'Empire' mindset that he has, and frankly exists in Russian culture and there you have it.
Russian Imperialism is of the fairly classical kind. 'We are Great, and Strong, Superior, and those around us are lesser, weaker, and naturally our vassals' kind of thing.
It's entirely fair to be cynical about the West, and to use some degree of moral relativism, but in reality, it's very different in North America / Angloshphere + Europe than in Russia. And China.
If we don't 'do something' then we can assume Taiwan is next for much the same reason.
I usually avoid posting here as I see far more intelligent people on this forum. Since you asked for conjecture...
I'd recommend Caspian Report's video [1] first. Secondly, if we look at Cuban missile crisis, US had a strong reaction to missiles around them. I see the Russian reaction pretty similar. They do not want NATO expansion and they do not want missiles in Poland.
- Ukraine is the entry door to the russian heartland, and as such has always held central importance to the russian military doctrine.
- Russia still has the internal view of a superpower, but they aren't anymore, Putin wants to reclaim lost glory.
- Ukraine becoming a successful democracy right next to Russia would further delegitimize his own regime.
- There's a grain of truth in the lie that russian Ukranians are discriminated against. Ukraine is very regionally divided on wether to have a pro-western or pro-russian government. [0] The pro-russian rebels are certainly supported and probably also instigated by Russia, but they do hold support among the local population in the far east.
This is also my expectation of how the conflict will play out: Russia will bomb Ukraine, invade from all sides in a limited capacity, but with the strategic goal of crippling Ukraine and conquering the whole regions of Donetsk and Luhansk. When those two regions are secured, I suspect a ceasefire wille be reached. That said, I've been wrong before, I truly did not expect Russia to just brazenly invade like this.
Cultural encroachment (think monroe doctrine), nato encroachment (think Cuban missile crisis). Less important but probably considered: geopolitically Russia needs buffer states in the east because there's no natural defenses/borders. It's an easy invasion from that direction.
Key quote: “Russia is always anxious about foreign penetration – not only in terms of military involvement and political engagement but also in cultural terms,” Fasola told FRANCE 24. He pointed to the so-called “colour revolutions” that brought pro-Western governments to power in Georgia (2003) and Ukraine (2004) – and which the Kremlin perceived as “instruments of the West to drive those countries away from Russia”.
Also Ukraine has massive coal reserves (that's where the name Donbas comes from) and some of the richest agricultural land in the world.
This assumes that Russia tries to capture and hold ground though and we've seen how insurgency wars have worked out for the Russians and Americans for the last 3 decades.
Putin's opinion is that the eastern regions of Ukraine that have been controlled by Russian troops for years now and have separatists there vying for annexation by Russia belong to Russia, not Ukraine (after all, they once did).
Ukraine doesn't agree. It's also widely theorized (basically fact) that Putin has fomented revolution and supports separatist movements to gin up trouble and incite problems in those areas to further make his case.
It's a land grab, and possibly a precursor to something much more. But only time will tell.
It was originally part of the USSR. Putin has said many times he thinks breaking up the USSR was a huge mistake and wants to re-acquire those territories.
But yeah why does anyone start a war? Power, control, money, distraction, madness, idealism, etc. Probably a little of everything.
Putin said in his recent speech that he thinks Lenin made a mistake in breaking up the Russian Empire into independent nations (that then joined the USSR). I think Putin is more after restoring the old Russian Empire than restoring the USSR.
Lots of different takes on this, but I don't think Putin is as imperialistic or "crazy" as he's made out to be. Much of the problem is that the US promised Ukraine (and Georgia) that they could become a NATO member. From Putin's point of view that's the US expanding their influence right up to Russian's doorstep. While the cold war is over, it's not like "the west" (broadly speaking) and Russia ever really become allies.
In a perfect world Ukraine should of course have the freedom to join NATO; but it's not a perfect world and we can't wish Putin or general Russian attitudes away. All of this could have been avoided if we just rescinded the NATO invitation (or better yet, never made it in the first place) and have Ukraine remain a neutral "border state".
I don't like Putin or Russia's attitude one bit by the way; but when the stakes are this high you really have to deal with reality as it is, not as you want it to be. Ukraine not joining NATO would have been a minor inconvenience at best; Ukraine at war is a much bigger deal, especially for the Ukrainian people. We kinda screwed them over in a game of international politics.
Ukraine could not not join NATO after Crimea and Donbass war in 2014.
Before 2014, less than 70% of Ukrainians supported joining NATO, according to polls. About 30% supported actually joining Russia, and 60% supported a union with Russia.
Everything changed in 2014, when Russia unilaterally invaded Ukraine. Less than 3% support joining Russia, and about 70% support joining NATO. After 2014, they realized Russia will never stop, so NATO was their only option (it's actually NATO that didn't want to accept them, as they worry about safety of all its members).
"President Bush also assured Gorbachev during their meeting in Malta in December, 1989, that if the countries of Eastern Europe were allowed to choose their future orientation by democratic processes, the United States would not “take advantage” of that process. (Obviously, bringing countries into NATO that were then in the Warsaw Pact would be “taking advantage.”) The following year, Gorbachev was assured, though not in a formal treaty, that if a unified Germany was allowed to remain in NATO, there would be no movement of NATO jurisdiction to the east, “not one inch.”"
IMO (I’m no expert by any means): I think this is about Putin wanting to leave a legacy. He’s getting long in the tooth now, and wants to be remembered for reshaping Russia’s borders.
The problem with this analysis is that it's not 24 hours ago any more and Russia has started shelling Kyiv, which only makes sense if Russia is planning to take control of the entire country.
Also let's drop the propaganda line of "protection". Luhansk and Donetsk may have declared independence but we generally don't tend to recognize such claims unless they are affirmed by the host nation. It's also an open secret that the separatists include a significant presence of Russian soldiers posing as Ukrainian "volunteers".
Would you be okay with France attacking Spain to "protect" Catalonia? Ireland invading the UK to "protect" Scotland? A shared language and culture does not grant the right to annexation either, or are you arguing Germany and Austria should reunite and annex parts of Switzerland?
Not approving any of this, from the recognition of the republics to the further attacks and yeah he's obviously gone beyond that protecting the people and is striking Ukraine's army too.
I hope that it doesnt lead to a more widespread war.
It already is a more widespread war. Putin has launched a full-scale aggressive war against Ukraine from 3 sides (Donbas, Belarus, Crimea) + amphibious landing forces.
You should look up sometimes the types of characters, e.g. Pushilin for instance, that Russia installed to govern those territories. They are murderous sociopathic criminals, comparisons with territories ruled by cartel gangs are appropriate. It isn’t governments - its no-limit gangs, supported by Russia.
"#Estonia unequivocally condemns #Russia's military attack on #Ukraine and we have decided to launch #NATO consultations under Article 4 of the North Atlantic Treaty with Latvia, Lithuania, Poland and other Allies."
That's rather hyperbolic. Article 4 has been invoked six times since 2003 (including in response to the Crimean invasion.) None of those cases triggered World War III.
I agree, Article 4 is nothing more than a consultation request. The real big thing is Article 5, which means if any ally is attacked, the others will help. Blinken confirmed US commitment to this is "ironclad".
I don't know a lot about these issues, but here's the way I see it.
Ukraine isn't part of NATO, and Estonia hasn't been attacked, so Article 5 can't be invoked. Therefore, this is roughly the maximally aggressive possible response from Estonia.
Of course the US Secretary of State says US commitment to Article 5 is "ironclad"; if he doesn't say that, NATO basically stops existing, and with it much of the US's influence in the world. Therefore the fact that he says this conveys almost zero information.
I'll believe the US "ironclad" commitment to Article 5 when they build an air base and a naval base in the Baltics.
Because if Putin was to attack the Baltics tomorrow, they would cease to exist before any NATO ally would manage to get their warships past the Kaliningrad Oblast in the Baltic Sea.
Many historical analysis of the start of WW1 highlight the slow communication and mobilization processes as the main cause of why European military leaders thought they had to move first, just in case the other side had already started and they hadn't heard... Another way to see it is that oligarchies of the time thought it expedient to have yet another 19th century war, and didn't factor in advances in technology: machine guns, artillery, chemical warfare...
A bit like with drones and AI now: the outcome and shape of the Ukraine conflict wil inform us all of the specific bloody taste of 21st century resource wars. To anyone reading this in countries dependent on Ukrainian wheat imports (eg. North-Africa) Stock up on the pasta!
"a guy" to describe the future emperor of the Austria-Hungary is an understatement.
It's like saying that the world was shocked because in 1963 a guy was shot. Yes, technically true, but...
OP's point is that an act can seem small on the surface ("a guy got assassinated") but triggered a larger war because there are greater tensions and forces at play ("Austria-Hungary had been thinking about invading Serbia for decades").
The original "world war", the Seven Years War, started over some useless land in North America and then became global over Silesia, both of which are rather small things.
WWI started over an assassination that barely happened, and WWII over a city ( Danzig, although it's fairly certain Hitler wouldn't have stopped there, like WWI would have happened anyways).
WW1 was a war everyone wanted (partially due to the dismantling of Bismarck's complex systems of alliances). Austria-Hungary wanted Serbia (and looked for an excuse), Prussia thought war against Russia was inevitable (no idea if that's true or not) and that such a war couldn't be won by Prussia once Russia started to modernize (kind of true, as Prussia utterly defeated Russia in WW1 and Germany was utterly defeated by Russia in WW2) and thus wanted a war against Russia now. Some French wanted revanche for the war 1870. Italy had some territorial interests against Austria-Hungary. And everyone came from a world were those wars were normal (as bad as the Napoleonic wars were, they were mostly fought between armies and less severe on civilians, and decided by decisive battles with treaties after those). Everyone thought they could easily win, and fast. The trope "it's over by Christmas" comes from that period.
WW2 so, was different. That was, from the beginning, Hitler's idea. He wanted it, he took what he could without a war, and then with a war. All with the goal of defeating Russia and exterminate the Jews (and all other undesirables). Everything else was just excuses, and thinly vailed ones at that.
It's not hyperbole. There were plenty of political assassinations in the years before 01914 that didn't trigger World War I, too. Hopefully this is another time Article 4 is invoked without triggering World War III. But it may not be.
Previous World Wars were not one-sided. Pretty much the majority of the developed world (probably all of the developed world?) is against Russia right now.
I think China is still pretty neutral about the whole thing. Putin payed respects to China (e.g. at the Olympiads), while (at least afaik) no western nation tried to get China onboard with sanctions -- or at the very least, they didn't send their presidents over to talk to Xi.
Gotta hand that small remark to Putin, he upheld the tradition of no war during Olympics.
Olympics were actually created to act as a pressure release valve in ancient Greece, which constantly fought wars between the Greeks, Spartans and Persians.
> Gotta hand that small remark to Putin, he upheld the tradition of no war during Olympics
Putin hardly cares about that tradition.
"In 2008, Russia launched a military intervention into disputed regions of Georgia in eastern Europe. The conflict unfolded at the same time as the opening ceremonies at the summer Olympic games in Beijing—with Putin, then prime minister and Russia’s leader in all but name, in attendance alongside US president George W. Bush, who did not look pleased. Six years later, Putin had an opportunity to repeat the trick, during the 2014 Winter Olympics hosted by Russia. At the time, the pro-Russian government of Ukraine was collapsing, with protestors demonstrating against Ukraine’s withdrawal from ties with the European Union. The night before the games’ closing ceremony, Putin took part in a lengthy meeting with his security team to plan an intervention in Ukraine."
Am I correct in saying that Estonia is categorizing this as a threat to their security therefore requesting the rest of Nato to consider this an attack on a member?
They consider their security to be threatened, and requested NATO to discuss it. Officially. Which is kind of a big deal.
Article 5 can be invoked once, intentionally or by accident, e.g. a NATO plane is attacked over Ukraine. This whole thing is a mess. Despite history since the end of the cold war (which makes some of Russia's positions somewhat understandable, and the fact that NATO didn't do anything different in Iraq and Afghanistan), if Western-style democracies don't want to loose their freedoms they have to act. Appeasement usually doesn't work with expansionist powers.
> Despite history since the end of the cold war (which makes some of Russia's positions somewhat understandable, and the fact that NATO didn't do anything different in Iraq and Afghanistan)
Can you expand on this? I'm entirely unable to understand why Russia after the cold war didn't become like any other European country and aimed to join the EU etc.
It actually did consider joining the EU, and even NATO at one point, but it wasn't taken seriously by either. The NATO intervention in Kosovo was also a major stumbling block.
Internally, democratic reforms in the 90s became associated with 1) corruption far worse than Soviets had, and 2) right-wing economic measures ("liberalization") that messed up the economy and created a lot of hardship for the population at the time. The very words "democrat" and "liberal" became profanities for some.
So when Putin appeared, the popular sentiment in the country already in favor of a "strong hand" for a while. He only needed to fit the image, which he did quite easily with his KGB background. After that, he gradually deconstructed the civil society, starting with free press.
Russia could have been Germany-fied with a friendlier and supportive hand. Instead it was handed over to evangelical neoliberals, whose imposed economics guaranteed that only the most feral opportunists and violent gangsters would thrive.
Russia could have become a modern social democracy, but now it's a crumbling militaristic dictatorship state run by a raging senile paranoiac with delusions of empire.
It's one of the worst foreign policy failures in all of history.
Ukraine will not be the end of it. If the invasion succeeds Russia will demand a slice of Lithuania to reunite Kalingrad with Belarus. That has huge implications for all Baltic-adjacent states.
But worse, Putin has claimed the RF has a number of nuclear superweapons, including a strategic nuclear-tipped torpedo and smart hypersonic warhead delivery systems. He also completely renovated Moscow's civil defences.
The US has failed to keep pace, and its weapons systems are either old and outdated or over-designed, high maintenance, and relatively fragile.
Putin also been running a very successful program of subversion and political interference. And building up cyberwarfare capabilities.
Even allowing for hyperbole the worry is that Russia is capable of a zero-warning decapitation strike, combined with remote mass infrastructure attacks and internal terrorism. Any response would be relatively ineffective.
This completely undermines MAD as a doctrine.
No mistake - the US is in very, very serious danger now, from both internal and external threats.
> Even allowing for hyperbole the worry is that Russia is capable of a zero-warning decapitation strike, combined with remote mass infrastructure attacks and internal terrorism. Any response would be relatively ineffective.
Does this hypothetical Tom Clancy scenario also plan how to deal with all the silo's the US has with missiles in them and the ballistic missile submarines which exist exactly as a hedge against these kinds of wild scenario's.
Considering the EU currently includes at least one literal dictatorship and NATO includes Turkey, I think pretending this has anything to do with morals and shared values is a bit dishonest.
> They... requested NATO to discuss it. Officially. Which is kind of a big deal.
I'm totally ignorant on NATO procedures, so forgive me that I don't understand the Big Deal here. Obviously, NATO nations will discuss this. They didn't need Estonia to draw attention to what Russia is doing.
So this seems to me a bit like: The exact thing that obviously would happen next (NATO nations discussing) will still happen, but now it's dressed up in a formalism?
NATO, like every other organisation, is discussing things all the time. Article 4 is the equivalent of not just inviting to a meeting about about a topic but raising a formal JIRA ticket and invoking a formal process involving senior management to discuss the severity (and not the mere existence) of that ticket. So yeah, invoking an official article is a big deal, because it forces the whole of NATO to formally address this issue. No NATO member nation can easily weasel out of this now.
The formality had to be done. But the Article 4 invocation is not (I claim) itself a significant event.
To extend your analogy, this is like creating a JIRA ticket when your website with 100 million daily users suddenly goes offline. The shit has already hit the fan and it’s already all hands on deck.
Ukraine is in the middle of two "powers" and the proper role would be one of buffer. They could even benefit from that. Unfortunately, the Russian and the USA have both tried to take that part of the board for them and the Ukrainian population is split on their loyalties.
Russian, simply can't allow more of the board, specially one part so close, to be dominated by the opponent.
Anyone that think this conflict in terms of "good" or "bad" have been drinking the kool-aid.
My prediction: A repetition of Crimea. The Donbas will be incorporate to the Russian area of influence, but not the rest of Ukraine, some noises will be done by the West about sanctions or whatever and in five years nobody will remember.
Hope to be right, because other scenarios are really scary.
One country is attacked by neighborhooding country with history of expanding into neighborhooding countries.
> Russian, simply can't allow more of the board, specially one part so close, to be dominated by the opponent.
Russian in fact could allow that. Whether Ukraine joins Nato should be between Ukraine internal debate and Nato internal debate. That Ukraine has both opinions present does not excuse nor explain Russian war.
That's all very nice, but, unfortunately is not how the world works.
What about the Donbas region, do they have the right to decide in an internal debate?
Instead of trying to be pro-Russian or pro-West, Ukraine have lost a chance of become Switzerland and make a live getting presents from both sides. Now, I think, it's going to be split.
> Instead of trying to be pro-Russian or pro-West, Ukraine have lost a chance of become Switzerland and make a live getting presents from both sides. Now, I think, it's going to be split.
Bullshit. And yes, I am anti-Russian expansion. This is a threat to myself, my family, my friends and my kids, actually. I am very pro-western and very happy my home country managed to be nato member.
Stop paining equivalence between Russia and Nato now.
> Ukraine is in the middle of two "powers" and the proper role would be one of buffer
You are aware that Ukraine was the buffer between nato and Russia, because the two actually touch in other places quite a lot? Also, "buffer" is not predestined mandatory role for any country. Buffer is not necessary at all.
There are so many levels of wrong with what you wrote here ...
> My prediction: A repetition of Crimea. The Donbas will be incorporate to the Russian area of influence, but not the rest of Ukraine, some noises will be done by the West about sanctions or whatever and in five years nobody will remember.
And in six years Putin will grab more land again, knowing that nobody will do more than "condemn" it because everyone is afraid of the other scenarios.
You are absolutely right. However, consider now that USA invades Canada as a result of this. This is infinity worse and always unacceptable. Nobody—not even American citizens—would tolerate that.
The last time USA invaded a foreign country under a false pretense we saw the biggest protests in US history. But then I do have to admit that Bush was reelected in the next election, so perhaps you are right and I am wrong.
Given what we have seen American citizens tolerate in the past, I expect public opinion not only to support such an invasion, but for Americans to enthusiastically participate.
In fact, some redneck militia trying to invade Canada is a common trope in US entertainment (from South Park over to The West Wing, even a whole movie exists), implying that it would be pretty easy. It's played for laughs, but it adds to the desensitisation of the public opinion about such an endeavour. Consent is manufactured.
The position is understandable because Russia is playing a Grand Strategy Game in the past, and doesn't want the enemy ( NATO) to be at all their borders. Justified? Right? Humane? Absolutely not.
That is not understandable. "I don't like nato at the border, therefore I will push my border toward nato". Russian "nato is ennemy" exists, because Russia wants nato be ennemy. It prevents further expansion.
Of those two, Russia and NATO, the only expansion since the end of the cold war and the fall of the USSR was done by NATO. That's just a historical fact. Which doesn't justify anything, but explains a lot.
All that is purely academic now so, with people in Ukraine dying over this shit.
And Nato expansion was done by allowing coutries who wanted to do join Nato to go in. Yes, some of their motivation was to prevent Russia to attempt to expand again into their borders.
> All that is purely academic now so, with people in Ukraine dying over this shit.
That is not purely academic. Framing what Russia is doing now as kinda similar to Czech voluntary joining Nato is word class propaganda. It is in fact a lie.
Not sure where I compared the NATO expansion, a peaceful one, to Russia's invasions of Georgia and Ukraine. All I'm saying is that Russia, pretty much since German reunification, worried about NATO expansion to the East. And personally, I get that. After all, NATO and the USSR (along the Warsaw Pact) used to be sworn enemies for decades by then.
This escalation started decades ago, and was totally foreseeable. And yes, the discussion about the root causes, what-ifs and past errors becomes pointless once bullets fly and people start to die.
> After all, NATO and the USSR (along the Warsaw Pact) used to be sworn enemies for decades by then.
USSR was literally Russia + occupied countries. Saying it is understandable is like saying it would be understandable for Germany to attack Poland and France again, because Third Reich went that far too.
Part of the reason why the German (traditionally Prussian) military elite supported the Nazis was exactly that, the loss of previously Prussian (or German) territory. And not territory that was invaded but couldn't be held. Again, I am not defending Putin or Russia here.
Not sure where I compared the NATO expansion, a peaceful one, to Russia's invasions of Georgia and Ukraine.
Perhaps it was when you said, "Of those two, Russia and NATO, the only expansion since the end of the cold war and the fall of the USSR was done by NATO."
Some question that nobody is asking is, "what's the role of NATO?"
The historical original reason for its existence have disappeared, so what is it for now?
Putin already believes he shares a border with NATO. Ukraine is not independent in his mind. Foundations of Geopolitics explains in depth what modern Russian foreign policy is aiming for.
That would be correct belief. Russia shares border with Estonia and Latvia. If he manage to occupy whole of Ukraine, he will share border with Poland, Slovakia and Romania too.
Then invading Ukraine wouldn't make Russia getting more borders with more NATO members whose now would be very angry about russia and will do whatever they could to make things difficult?
Yes, but it wouldn't be Russian territory would it? Despite all of Putin's talk about Ukraine being Russian (bullshit by the way even if some Eastern portions seem to be more pro-Russia the Ukraine's west), I doubt Putin would make it formally part of Russia. But even if he did, the new NATO-Russia border would be further West.
I think I am well versed in European history, thank you for your snarky comment. There's no reason to believe some local conflict will undermine "democracies" all over Europe, notwithstanding the media that is always preying on people's fears.
The difference between now and WW2 is that all of Europe west of Ukraine ( excluding Switzerland), and most of it north, are in a single military alliance, which has nuclear weapons ( and France also does, not under the NATO chain of command).
Sure. That military alliance was just recently kicked out out Afghanistan, in a very embarrassing way. That Alliance's most powerful member, the US, aren't as strong as they were in the past neither for various reasons. And Putin, it seems, wants to find out when that block is willing to go to war against a peer (or near-peer) aggressor. Because I wouldn't take it for granted that NATO would actually start a shooting war with Russia over the almost indefensible Baltics (beyond some honor saving measures) or that the US would actually got to war with China over Taiwan. What prevented those scenarios was, IMHO, the perception of the Wests power, and the real soft power backing that perception up. Now a lot of that soft power is gone, and the perceived power decreased considerably. At the same time the perceived, and soft, power of countries like Russia and China increased a lot. The balance changed, and naturally people want to gauge, actively, by how much exactly that balance changed. Ukraine will just be the beginning if it isn't stopped.
You seems to see Russia as expanding, they perception, I think, it's exactly the opposite. Putin is not thinking in expanding is thinking in making an stand.
Everything is a question of perspective, isn't it? You managed to put my thoughts into one sentence, thanks for that. Because I think Putin is exactly thinking like that. Let's hope all he wants is to make a stand, and not revenge.
France as well. Poland was never a intended to stay local by the Nazis, it was the beginning. Not that France and Britain did a lot between the invasions of Poland and the low countries / France so.
If you are referring to Germany 1936, it did not resembled modern western democracies at all. It was not established democracy at all prior. It was forced into democracy it never wanted after loosing war. Prior, it was heavily militarized some-constitutional monarchy. Their democracy was failing mess the whole time.
If you are referring to something else, be concrete.
I'm comparing Germanys "helpful" occupations of neighboring countries "to help the poor Germans there against abuse" inhabitants to Putin's attempt to occupy Ukraine "to protect all the poor Russians there against genocide."
Well, there were Danzig (a free city state) and Königsberg. Not that I would consider that being a reason to invade anyone so. Unless you are a crazed war monger in search of an excuse.
Tho, Germans did tried to create local nazi guerillas in northern countries that would support them from inside. It did not really worked out, they never got numbers.
In all fairness, unlike Poland in 1939, Ukraine is not a country that managed to wage war against almost every single of their neighbours in the 20 years before the bigger fish came taking a bite.
That doesn't make Hitler any less a criminal - it just explains how his casus belli sounded more believable back in the day.
If we are comparing history, let's get the whole picture.
Hitler was actually quite open about his "conquest for living space" project and goals. It was believable only if you wanted to believe and afaik, they did not believed him at the time.
They mostly thought they are not ready for the full scale war yet, but that is different calculation.
Pretty funny how open people sometimes are about intentions and goals, and still nobody believes them. Personally, I think people like Xi and Putin can be taken, when it comes to strategic goals, taken by their word. Which is scary in itself, also scary that nobody seems to do exactly that.
Hitler's casus belli was already bullshit back the day. And the whole East of Europe, from the eastern border of Germany to the Russian pacific coast was at war following WW1. With quite a lot of external intervention I might add.
> I assure all the people of Estonia that there is no direct military threat to Estonia and that the situation in Estonia and at our external border is calm," Kallas [Estonias PM] emphasised.
"showing force" is such a light way to describe it, this is full scale invasion into Europe, with the target to annihilate whole country while impotent civilized west watches it unfold in the fears that they may be next.
Dutch national news channel NOS had a historian and journalist called Hubert Smeets on. I'm Dutch, and will paraphrase what he said:
Interviewer: "What can the west do, what can the NATO do? It's said that military action is not going to happen, why?"
Smeets: "Very little. The consequences would be very large. This night, in his speech, Putin insinuated how Russia is a global nuclear superpower, and he said that the unthinkable could become thinkable. So that's off the table. All we can do is take economic and political measures; sanctioning, even if we don't know what the effect of these sanctions will be. And turning him into a political pariah, even China said Putin should not pull through on this evasion."
What’s strange to me is that Putin is behaving a lot like Saddam did when he invaded Kuwait. So he either must really fear regime change of some sort will happen soon, or thinks the West is OK with this.
The ferocity, speed and coordination of the invasion suggest it's not just Putin - this is exactly how a unanimous agreement of all political and military elites look like. Judging from history - we won't hear about the true reasoning behind the invasion and the events preceding it for another 30 years at least
I would think so, Russian geopolitical textbooks have been saying for a long time
that an "independent Ukraine doesn't make sense".
Read here the excerpts what it says about UK, and US. Makes an interesting read.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundations_of_Geopolitics
In the UK there's been much discussion of Russia's role in Brexit.
i.e. Aaron Banks, the man who funded the Leave.EU campaign, was aledgidly backed by Russian "business partners".
The Boris Johnson's Conservative government have said in the last 2 hours that they're going to keep £1.93 of Russian linked donations they've received since 2019.
So in 2008 when he attacked Georgia back then Polish president Lech told such thing: "first Georgia, then Ukraine then baltic states, then maybe our country". Maybe he read it right and in 2010 it was assassination like some suspect and not "an accident".
IMO lots of EU parties are in Russian pocket and this is nothing good.
This is dark scenario but if they got deal with China, we are all fucked. They will make mess in EU so they can focus on East Asia/Middle East. US is overleveraged and once oil != $ is done.
It would have changed the course but not the objective.
The Kremlin apologists in American politics are really disturbing.
Putin's objective is to re-integrate Ukraine into the 'Russian Empire', he's taking the 500-year view and so 'Nord Stream 2' is irrelevant.
NATO acquiescence to his demands would have just changed maybe the nature of Putins' actions, or not but he would have continued.
The big issue is obviously now Taiwan.
In hindsight, I actually kind of blame the Germans a lot for this. Germany has been very successfully sucking in business and talent from the rest of Europe, building their economy while completely avoiding the 'responsibility' that comes along with that power. Partly military, but definitely geostrategic issues of security.
Their, and European energy dependence on Europe is a giant lever that Russia has - we are talking about nulling 'Nord Stream 2' - it means nothing in the big picture. Laughably, nobody is even talking about Nord Stream 1 - i.e. the pipeline already in place.
If Merkel were to have re-invigorated in Nuclear investment with a strong commitment to both reducing dependence on Russia and ironically CO2 at the same time, and, made serious improvements to military capabilities with a keen eye to the kinds of activities necessary to actually support fledgeling Belarus, Georgia, and Ukraine, and possibly better more serious coordination with UK, France, Sweden etc. then we may not be in this situation.
Ukraine may have regiments of UK, French and Germany units 'training' there at any given time, with support from the US, which really changes the equation a lot.
Putin pretty much telegraphed all of his moves years in advanced. Nobody did anything about it. The US could have done more, but this is more directly a European issue and there's a serious lack of leadership over there as well.
> In hindsight, I actually kind of blame the Germans a lot for this. Germany has been very successfully sucking in business and talent from the rest of Europe, building their economy while completely avoiding the 'responsibility' that comes along with that power. Partly military, but definitely geostrategic issues of security.
The complete lack of historical awareness is impressive.
Lazy ad hominem with total lack of rhetoric or reason is 'impressive' by HN standards.
In the meantime, here are some more actual facts:
German/European dependence on Russian Energy [1]
'Foreign Policy' articulation of the problem, with specific reference to Germany, and their intransigence on supporting sanctions directly as a result of their energy policy [2]
Germany Energy Mix, 1990-2020 [3] which decisively illustrates that if Germany had continued it's Nuclear program - without even expanding it - it could be entirely independent of Russian (and other) imports.
Germany's continued disregard TO NATO agreements with respect to military spending [4] and some of the political causes.
All the while [5] Germany grows into EU's hegemon (due to favourable Euro policy, weak France, absent UK et. al.)
Here is exactly the argument that I am making in academic terms [6]
"There is no disputing Germany’s dominant economic role within the eurozone (EZ) and the broader European Union (EU). Its GDP represented 29 percent of total EZ GDP in 2016 and, as of 2015, it was the top intra-EU trade partner for 18 out of 28 countries ... for reasons it is largely responsible for, the growth of exports to the ROW has been growing faster. The German trade surplus, however, is larger with the ROW than it is with other EU nations.
Economic leadership in the world or in a region, however, entails responsibilities, especially in a world system of monetary production economies that compete with each other according to political and economic interests."
Poland, Slovakia, Hungary and Romania are all NATO members. If Putin takes Ukraine, and redraws his borders, he's just adding 4 NATO members. Wouldn't make much sense.
> I'm curious, do folks here think Putin would have still invaded if Ukraine didn't consider joining NATO?
Yes. The trigger for current events was the possibility of closer cooperation with the EU, not anything NATO-related. Putin can't have a successful alternative to his regime. He can write off Finns and Lithuanians as being of different culture, but if their ethnic brothers Ukrainians built a successful country with wages multiple times higher than in Russia, then it would fatally undermine Putin's legitimacy. He doesn't want to end up like Saddam or Gaddafi.
Yes, countries prefer weak neighbors. A powerful alliance on your border is a potential threat (or deterrent to expansion).
No in the sense that the US only has 90k troops in NATO countries, or about 10% of Russia’s standing military. So it’s not like troops are messing at their border or enough to threaten an invasion. It’s very much a deterrent.
Also no in that the US, Russia and China are nuclear powers. The US should have little concern of a Chinese ground assault from Mexico as it could trigger a large scale nuclear war, defeating the purpose of the invasion. Similarly with Russia, their nuke arsenal means that no one will consider attacking them or invading their borders.
Yea, but you have to factor into your analysis the fact that at the time Soviet nuclear weapon design was leaning more towards inaccurate but with enough boom it doesn’t matter, so their weapons were on average larger and this limited their effective ballistic missile ranges. So Cuba, while a provocative encroachment, was from the Soviet side a necessary escalation of their military forces to counter things like the deployment of intermediate range ballistic missiles, such as the Jupiter, in Turkey and Italy.
Also … While the “Cuban” part of the crisis can be viewed as instigated by the Soviets, it would be awfully foolish to ignore the fact that they were reacting to the US/NATO moves to deploy missile forces in Europe… by accepting the request from Cuba for nuclear weapons to defend their country from America, which they only asked for after the failed invasion effort in the Bay of Pigs.
True. Also interesting that part of the de-escalation was the quiet withdrawal of US missiles from Turkey. More often than not, there is no side starting something (WW2 is one example). The whole cold war was, it seems, a tit for tat between two nuclear powers, sometimes led by old seniles and drunks, over ideological differences. There was no Good vs. Evil.
NATO is a defensive alliance made up of many independent sovereign nations, all of whom freely asked for and were granted membership. Don't want conflict with NATO? Easy, don't attack any of their members. Seems simple enough.
Cuba was a Soviet client state, and installing missiles there was clearly an offensive act.
Well, not that Germany had much to say when the US stationed patriot missiles. That's a tangent so. Don't forget the fact that, before the USSR sent missiles to Cuba the US had mid-range missiles in Turkey. And those were, by the way, closer to the USSR than the missiles in Cuba were to the US.
Reality isn't easily divided into good guys and bad guys...
Oh, it does a lot. The closer you are the less time your enemy has to react. ICBM launches are detected, buying at least enough time to shoot at least back.
No. NATO is a defensive alliance. Easter European countries are in NATO specifically to protect against the kind of aggression you're seeing in Ukraine now.
Russia used to regularly invade neighbors: Poland 1939, Romania, Baltic countries, Finland 1940, Everywhere 1944, Hungary 1956, Czechoslovakia 1968. None have been invaded since joining NATO.
NATO expansion is removing threats, not creating them.
The context for Ukraine wanting to be in NATO is that everyone in the region has been under constant thread by hostile nation looking to rebuild its empire.
If US attacked and annexed several Central American nations over last two decades, except the ones who are part of pre-existing "defense against the US" alliance, Mexico wanting to be in it would be perfectly rational and normal.
An above comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30452129) seems to rebuke this: "Poland, Slovakia, Hungary and Romania are all NATO members. If Putin takes Ukraine, and redraws his borders, he's just adding 4 NATO members. Wouldn't make much sense."
NATO is not organised well enough to conduct offensive operations on that scale, moreover, there is no state on earth, including US and China that could take parts of Russia and hold for long.
But that aside, the very real political and economic situation in the world would make it unfathomable. There's basically no 'strategy game' where the West would have the intent let alone ability to truly invaded Russia.
The 'NATO' issue is almost entirely a canard, a very easy argument that Putin uses to cause confusion, allow other supporters (i.e. China) to make empty arguments at the UN etc.
Putin is literally using the 'UN Charter' to as cover to legitimise his invasion of Ukraine.
Putin has used the term 'genocide' constantly in the last decade to refer to what is happening in Donbass even though this is obviously not the case.
Putin's implication that 'he's invading Ukraine to stop fascist country, to protect Russian speakers and to 'keep peace'' is basically rubbish, as are his arguments with respect to NATO.
There's a grain of truth in it, of course there is violence in Donbas, but amplifying the issue is the very obvious ruse.
Their playbook is wide open - we know their doctrine, we know how they use misinformation, we know how they argue, we know their intentions. It looks pretty bad on us to allow any of this to happen.
FYI - Western Media has been making a lot of money arguing in public lately, and it's appalling what we're seeing on some of the news outlets, and some of the statements by US public officials. Some people are 'taking a stake' in the situation as they would any other news item, i.e. 'jockeying for position' on the issue. It's disgusting.
> There's a grain of truth in it, of course there is violence in Donbas, but amplifying the issue is the very obvious ruse.
The only reason there is violence in Donbas is because of the previous undeclared Russian invasion of that territory as well as fomenting unrest there and elsewhere in Ukraine. Not to mention shooting down a commercial airliner.
It's about as truthful as Hitler arguing there is violence in the West of Poland in October 1939.
I feel like its a lot to ask when the people of the U.S. can't even see through propaganda about what is happening in our own backyard. Why would you expect the average american to understand Putin is lying about genocide when half the country believes a caravan of invading Mexicans is attacking the country anytime an orange moron says it?
Neighbors of Russia joining an alliance to defend themselves is no more a threat to Russia than Russia defending themselves is a threat to their neighbors. One the one hand, the (comparatively) small European countries clearly need that defense because otherwise Russia is big enough -- and willing -- to invade.
I think the real problem is that NATO is a threat to Putin's imperialistic dreams.
"From Putins interview he does explicitly say that he wouldn't be in this position if the NATO didn't push for Ukraine, as simple as that."
No, it's definitely not that. Taking Putin's word at face value is completely irrational.
His actions and other policy objectives have made it clear that he and the Russian State do not view Ukraine as a legit country and have literally been invading it for the last decade wile the West twiddled their thumbs.
Taking Ukraine is a primary objective of the Russian State under Putin - that's the more 'simple' thing to understand.
Anything he says on the news is a 'game'. It's not even really a complicated game, we have all of their books, their doctrine, we know exactly how they think it's just a matter of applying it.
In hindsight it will be hard for anyone to fathom how we didn't see all of this coming. We're literally watching it happen in real-time, from a very well established playbook.
FYI have a read [1]
This is Putin's grand thesis. He basically narrates a history in which Ukraine is just part of Russia.
Putin basically made himself the dictator of a country, where political opposition and free journalism is repressed. Where a big % of the GDP is spent on military rather than on the social, economical issues the population suffers from.
I don't trust a thing he says, he is a psychopath driven by a massive ego and an bottomless hunger for power.
Let's hope that everyone will just accept facts as they are and not further escalate. What Estonia is doing here is just that, an escalation. Instead of implementing the Minsk agreement, Ukraine decided to pursue a military solution of “cleaning” Donetsk region. Now they have a military solution.
Now it's time for diplomacy. Just accept the fact that the majority of Donetsk and Lugansk want to be an independent state and negotiate the borders in peace, instead of trying to further escalate.
There was already a precedent in Kosovo, where one-sidedly proclaimed independence was accepted, and a sovereign country that tried to prevent it was crushed by NATO military until they had to accept “the new reality”.
And now let someone tell me what is the difference between Ukraine-Donbas-Russia and Serbia-Kosovo-NATO situation? Except the facts that NATO now sides with the sovereign state instead with the separatists, and that Russia is an enemy of NATO.
> In 1996, the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) began attacking federal security forces. The conflict escalated until Kosovo was on the verge of all-out war by the end of 1998. In January 1999, NATO warned that it would intervene militarily against Yugoslavia if it did not agree to the introduction of an international peacekeeping force and the establishment of local government in Kosovo. Subsequent peace talks failed and from 24 March to 11 June 1999, NATO carried out an extensive bombing campaign against FR Yugoslavia including targets in Kosovo itself. The war ended with Milošević agreeing to allow peacekeepers into Kosovo and withdrawing all security forces so as to transfer governance to the United Nations.
People are minimizing this, based on the word "consultation". Don't be fooled, this is grave news, even though it is not Article 5. Article 5 invocation under these circumstances have substantial risk of full scale thermonuclear exchange.