Like in Syria and Saudi Arabia, troops have been sent to train and advise
And presumably nobody will see them for dust if Putin invades.
Also important to not forget that there is already a war going on in Ukraine. The question is how much further NATO decides to involve itself. I can’t see how it could possibly be in their interests to voluntarily extend that to active military engagement. As is often the case though the danger comes from the inherent risk that comes from adding to the armament of the region in general. It increases the consequences of miscalculation and miscommunication which are the most likely triggers for further action.
Also isn’t the issue for NATO that there are member states who have pretty good historic reasons to fear Russian expansionism?
Is there any indication of any Russian activity that might suggest a threat to the Baltic states, just out of interest? Seems to me inconceivable that Putin could consider that he could execute a manoeuvre like that without provoking direct military conflict with all the NATO allies.
It seems NATO’s only concern is with preventing a war inside Ukraine from spilling out of its borders. When you read between the lines of Western statements, and look at where NATO is deploying forces. You can view the shipments of lethal aid to Ukraine as signs of firm commitment to back them in a military confrontation, or as a pat on the back, go get em tiger type gesture. I lean towards the latter. Russia appears to have correctly calculated that Ukraine is completely on its own because nobody wants WW3 over this. Interesting that a new briefing is suddenly doing the rounds:
I would expect the threat level to get walked back another two or three times before this is over. Somehow this won’t be portrayed as the west backing down, even though it is actually. Then we might ask what the purpose of the recent scaremongering was.
If we consider that major players in Russia own virtually everybody in the current UK conservative government, huge swathes of the City rely on Russian money, and 40% of EU gas is Russian, a climbdown was inevitable. But that makes the ratcheting up of tension even harder to fathom, frankly.
yup
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I’m not really following what’s being climbed down from here. The only actor threatening any action is Putin. As you rightly point out NATO will happily hang Ukraine out to dry as long as it doesn’t spread elsewhere, indeed they already have been for years. Putin additionally won’t go near any operation that would involve significant Russian casualties so the obvious tactic from the NATO side was to convince him that would be on the table if he acted. Pretty basic strategy, hopefully it works for now.
The kleptocracy thing is completely separate, basically just the us saying “hey guys it’d be a bit embarrassing for you if we end up in conflict with the people who own you wouldn’t it, so perhaps you might want to look into that a bit just in case.”
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Then again here’s a 3d chess take that I do not feel qualified to argue against.
Let’s just hope people manage to stay alive through all this.
To be specific, it’s the west and Putin threatening that Putin is going to invade, and additionally the west threatening first “severe consequences”, stepping down to “severe consequences for a major incursion”, stepping down again to a “package of sanctions”, and now finally admitting what has been known by officials in Ukraine and Russia for two months, which is that 120000 troops is not enough to invade Ukraine. That is a huge climbdown from seven days ago, when they very much wanted us to believe that world war 3 was imminent. So the question is…why did we go so hard and heavy on it? why did our media once again subordinate itself to publishing what amount to intelligence-written press releases? The answers ought to include looking at what the point of NATO even is and why we persist with it in a world without communism/USSR.
This is obviously not true at all. Kleptocracy is a huge part of what brought us to this point. The economics of this are incredibly important. The dirty finances of all the main countries involved are extremely relevant. The US is as dirty as anyone else in this. It also helps us understand the history of this whole thing too. Putin isn’t some comic book villain who is doing this on a whim, this didn’t start happening two months ago, it’s part of a huge chain of cause and effect stretching back decades. Very weird people are pretending this is sui generis.
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Defence Minister Reznikov basically restated this on Friday, although he noted the Russia-Belarus military drill that is happening next month, and this seems to be the new public line from the government. The front is one for fiscal stability; a war also means declaring a state of emergency/martial law - the minute that happens, the IMF tap is turned off and the country will be broke. It’s also undercut as a message by the amount of pre-emptive resources being sent out to people right now telling them where their nearest bomb shelter is, which definitely wasn’t happening this time last year.
Russia’s mere presence on the border makes it very difficult for Ukrainian businesses to find insurance. Russia can just keep building up troops and equipment, doing drills, generally make it look like they’re going to invade and scare away all the underwriters until Ukraine’s economy collapses. All without stepping foot on Ukrainian territory.
I don’t know if this is a new form of warfare or if it’s happened elsewhere before but it seems to be guiding the Russian strategy here.
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Not too dissimilar to what the US has been practicing versus Venezuela and Iran is it? Or Russia itself, ironically. If you’re big enough you can just inflict human misery via economic suppression indefinitely without having to risk a single drone.
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For anyone keeping track, the military units on the border are building up and the general mood on the ground in Ukraine is grim. Expectations in Kyiv are for some form of invasion in the next 2-3 weeks, whatever diplomatic moves are made. My wife’s got friends who came to the capital from Donetsk, and they are pretty blasé on the possibility of having to leave their homes again.
Eight years late. One speaker from Ukraine (after initially announcing this without any). A poster with a map not recognising Crimea. Andrew fucking Murray.
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That man should be beyond reproach (as far as I know - don’t know his opinions eg. Yalta).
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Not informed enough to read this with any form of critical analysis but I thought an interesting read.
https://community.drownedinsound.com/t/feb-2022-uk-politics-thread/64112/449?u=tiergarten
In other news, the Russian Federation is planning to evacuate staff from their embassy in Kyiv and there’s a blockade of the Sea of Azov from the 13th due to naval exercises.
Usually have a lot of time for TrueAnon but their double-ep on this and it was largely… not good. Interesting to listen to a perspective that’s entirely different to the mainstream liberal media and discussed some interesting historical angles with a guest that is evidently more knowledgeable about Ukraine than the average pundit.
Have personally had to wrestle with some uncomfortable truths about Ukraine’s history, and it’s funny to think that my parents, and more generally members of the diaspora I grew up with, would be absolutely horrified by me listening to something like that with their perspective. There’s obviously issues with the far right in Ukraine, especially in areas of the west and many of those that volunteered to fight in Donbass, but generally find the way ‘the left’ talks about Ukraine to be really weird and not rooted in reality - characterised as being this entirely neo-nazi republic whereby anyone that looks more towards Europe than Russia is some skinhead hooligan.
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