France's leader calls for a "new balance" to protect European states while affording Russia respect.
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The important point here is the deployment map.
Flipping Belarus appears to have won Putin Ukraine sooner or later, whether or not he goes in now. There's no way they can stop a drive on Kyiv from that direction, because he can hit them quickly from both sides of the Dnieper. Hitler had parity on the ground and the Luftwaffe. He was able to drive the BEF out in eighteen days and take Paris in a month. This is kitten vs. mastiff over half the distance across much easier dirt. That token blocking force on Poland's border is also important. They're there so that if there's an incident, Moscow can put the question to us of whether we'd like to escalate in a lost situation or retreat behind the Poland/Baltic border.
That is an utterly miserable border that both NATO and the EU will potentially have to defend. The EU can't defend its Scandinavian members without the US and UK. I can't see EU repudiating the mutual defense clause they added in Lisbon. I can see Putin having a blast shuffling forces around to widen existing political divisions within the EU and NATO.
Macron might be right. Putin doesn't have to move now. He can simply wait. Adding Ukraine to NATO makes matters worse, because it requires doing something about Crimea and worsens the tactical situation. That isn't happening, so he can simply apply pressure and money over time to get what he wants.
Thinking of NATO as a political entity in the decade following the Cold War, and turning the EU into a mutual defense entity, appears to have been an enormous mistake.
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