Current Affairs Ukraine

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Not surprised they did the same thing in the Ukraine, anyone with any sense would leave if they could. Who wants to be playing Call of Duty up close and personal?

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www.washingtonpost.com
 
davids said:
Not surprised they did the same thing in the Ukraine, anyone with any sense would leave if they could. Who wants to be playing Call of Duty up close and personal?

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www.washingtonpost.com
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Yes we get it Mr. Whataboutery. Of course some Ukrainian men were gonna flee, it’s human nature. I suspect they still have a lot more willing participants.
 
davids said:
All very worrying.

The conjunction of increasingly direct US involvement in the war and increasing evidence that the US is preventing a negotiated end to the war, seems now to have led Russia to the conclusion that Ukraine and the West will never agree to a diplomatic settlement that is acceptable to Russia.

That conclusion entails the realization that Russia will never receive guarantees either that there will be no Ukraine in NATO or that there will be no NATO in Ukraine. Following the Ukrainian counteroffensive, Russia has now likely realized the reality of NATO in Ukraine.

And that crystallizes Ukraine as a security threat to Russia. Even if Ukraine never joins NATO, NATO has taken up house in Ukraine.

In the early stages of the war, Ukraine and Russia were both open to a diplomatic settlement that would create an independent Donbass with a neutral Ukraine outside NATO and NATO outside Ukraine. With the US and NATO contributing more advanced long-range weaponry, training and intelligence to a war that they are becoming increasingly directly involved in while increasingly preventing a negotiated cessation to the hostilities, Russia likely no longer sees that as a possibility. The "fundamental problem" that Russia now sees, according to Dmitri Tremin, is "Russia having to live side-by-side with a state that will constantly seek revenge and will be used by the United States, which arms and directs it, in its effort to threaten and weaken Russia."

The problem, then, has become a much bigger problem. Russia no longer sees the war as a regional war with Ukraine with a reachable diplomatic solution, but as a wider war being fought in Ukraine with the US and NATO with a diplomatic solution having been prohibited.

Ted Snider has a graduate degree in philosophy and writes on analyzing patterns in US foreign policy and history.
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The big problem with this analysis is that it is precisely these annexations / "independence movements" that is what is demographically pushing Ukraine away from Russia.

Prior to 2014 things were reasonably balanced between the pro-Russian and Ukrainian nationalist fringes and so the mass of the people in the middle could vote for leaders based on the usual political criteria (with occasional interference from outside players of course). Take a big chunk of the pro-Russian electorate away (as they did in 2014) and you obviously are going to upset that balance because they are not going to be voting. Take another bit of it away now and just doing that will mean that the remaining pro-Russian part of the Ukrainian electorate will shrink to insignificance, even without taking into account the impact of the SMO on them.

The same logic applies to NATO presence in Ukraine - the longer this goes on, the more dependent Ukraine will be on NATO and the more likely it is that the only acceptable security guarantees they would accept for a peace deal would be from NATO. Had 2014 and the long buildup to Feb 2022 not happened, they would not be dependent on NATO.
 
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