Russia

[manxman1980]

2 hours ago, La_Dolce_Vita said:

Someone else has mentioned trust and I don't really see how trust is so important in this and in this arena.   Shouldn't it be a matter of simply expecting that statesmen will act rationally?  Trusting them sounds odd.  Trust them to adhere to what they said they were going to do?  Just seems a bit foolish that.

Yes, you can appease.  It is an option.   I would think it the best one here. 

Is Putin acting rationally?  Would you believe that he would remain true to any peace treaty?

2 hours ago, La_Dolce_Vita said:

Russia would like regime change.  That isn't going to happen.  And Russia has paid a big price for war (and its economic and non-economic costs will carry on for a long while).

It's the Crimea that's the problem.  The Ukraine staying neutral is agreeable to all.  The Donbas situation is

Russia is not like the Soviet Union immediately after WW2, it wouldn't have the ability to occupy or absorb any but the smallest of nations or countries. 

 

The population of Ukraine seemed to be increasingly in favour of NATO or EU membership prior to this conflict.  What do you think their views will be now?

Crimea was Putin testing the waters and he got away with it.  

Donbas I don't really know much about but it sounds comparable to Northern Ireland with split loyalties and therefore not straightforward.

[manxman1980]

1 hour ago, P.K. said:

The buffer states as were - Bulgaria, Czecho, East Germany, Hungary, Poland and Romania are now all NATO members and no doubt stuffed with tripwire troops currently carrying out combined nation manoeuvres on their various borders.

So it just left Ukraine and Moldova for Putin to have his nasty little war in.

Sorry, that was my fault for using generic terms.

I was thinking more along the lines of Finland, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia and Moldova.  You could maybe throw in Georgia as well even if that isn't a direct access point to Western Europe.  These, maybe with the exception of Finland, would be countries that Putin may have been tempted to invade if his campaign in Ukraine had gone to plan and did not result in NATO getting involved.

 

[Chinahand]

I tend to be sceptical of Daily Mail stories, but the Wall Street Journal is the US Newspaper of power:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/roman-abramovich-and-ukrainian-peace-negotiators-suffer-symptoms-of-suspected-poisoning-11648480493

Which I don't subscribe to!

[La_Dolce_Vita]

2 hours ago, manxman1980 said:

Is Putin acting rationally?  Would you believe that he would remain true to any peace treaty?

The population of Ukraine seemed to be increasingly in favour of NATO or EU membership prior to this conflict.  What do you think their views will be now?

Crimea was Putin testing the waters and he got away with it.  

Donbas I don't really know much about but it sounds comparable to Northern Ireland with split loyalties and therefore not straightforward.

He seems to be acting rationally..his actions are not those of someone who is deranged or mad.  It seems to point more to a miscalculation of the opponent militarily. I say this assuming the war aims are to remove the current Ukrainian regime, reinforce the autonomy of the Donbas by military occupation and to consolidate Russian control of the Crimea and to do all this by getting control of all major cities in east and south Ukraine to force Ukraine to come to its terms on these matters.

The Ukraine has not capitulated so Russia has miscalculated. But Russia has forced Zelensky to openly recognise that it can't join NATO and it now has troops north of Crimea and more in the Donbas.

I imagine the Ukrainians will be even more eager to join NATO. But their wishes shouldn't be granted just because it is what they want. Why should they?

Anyway, the possibility of joining has been taken away for the foreseeable now anyway.  

Remaining true to a peace is all dowe to whether Russia achieves its aims.

[TheTeapot]

30 minutes ago, La_Dolce_Vita said:

He seems to be acting rationally..his actions are not those of someone who is deranged or mad. 

He voluntarily launched a land war for no reason. I don't consider that acting rationally, those are the actions of a man who is deranged or mad.

[La_Dolce_Vita]

I don't know if you're being serious? Of course there are reasons. Where have you  picked up that there are none?

[TheTeapot]

There is no reason or combination of reasons strong enough to go to war. None of it, nothing at all about the russian 'case' stacks up.

He has voluntarily started a completely unnecessary and unjustifiable war. 

He's not sane.

[Chinahand]

1 hour ago, La_Dolce_Vita said:

 

 

1 hour ago, La_Dolce_Vita said:

 

I imagine the Ukrainians will be even more eager to join NATO. But their wishes shouldn't be granted just because it is what they want. Why should they?

Yeah, those unworthy Ukrainians why should their agency and desire for self determination have any value. They should just suck it up and understand their next door neighbour is a tyrant who gets to terrorise them if they aspire to things he doesn't like. That's the rational way to analyse this situation. 

LDV, you can be quite strange sometimes. 

[manxman1980]

2 hours ago, La_Dolce_Vita said:

I don't know if you're being serious? Of course there are reasons. Where have you  picked up that there are none?

Ever heard of diplomacy?  If Russia really had evidence of the allegations it has made why did it not bring pressure via the UN? 

This war is all about Putins legacy and desire to re-establish Russian control and authority in the ex-ussr countries.

[La_Dolce_Vita]

18 hours ago, TheTeapot said:

There is no reason or combination of reasons strong enough to go to war. None of it, nothing at all about the russian 'case' stacks up.

He has voluntarily started a completely unnecessary and unjustifiable war. 

He's not sane.

Justification for war and having reasons for going to war are not the same, as you know.  And war can be and have been justified in different ways depending on what morals and ethics are applied.

Was Hitler justified in attacking Poland?  No.  But were there reasons for it?  Obviously.  And Hitler wasn't insane. 

What about the appalling British adventure to the Suez in 1956? In many ways it is similar to what is going on now with the Ukraine and Russia. 

Do you think Anthony Eden was insane?

He had reasons for the invasion and he thought he was right to take military action. 

The Americans put a stop to it all in 1956 and the British had to go home humiliated.  All things being equal, if the events happened fifty years earlier, Britain would have continued with the plan...because it would have had the economic power to do so. 

I don't think you think that Putin just decided to invade Ukraine just for the hell of it.  I wonder from your mention of justification that you're really saying that his war is unjust.  It doesn't make him insane to wage it though. 

And, as an aside, the current Ukrainian war is a crime but British and American talk of self-determination and marking Russia as behaving in a manner completely unlike other countries is just hypocritical and rather amusing.  Suez isn't that long ago.  Neither is Kosovo and Iraq (and Afghanistan) and plenty of other European and US adventures to control, influence and wreak destruction in varying ways and to different degrees.

The United States has a fair bit of responsibility for how things have played out here and it should be getting more involved.  France has done far better to try to organise negotiations.  Up until the present, the US and UK government seem to be fanning the flames more than helping the Ukrainians.  Just giving the Ukrainians weapons and only hypocritically marking Russia as an evil state and regime isn't going to help the Ukrainians.

But I do wonder whether all of this is part of the new plan for the US.  The US is doing well out of this conflict.  It doesn't really have much interest in having this end (soon).  Only the possibility of escalation is the problem for the US, everything else is a gift that has fallen into its lap.

[Chinahand]

Goodness the Russians piss me off:

Alexander Fomin Russia's Deputy Defence Minister

Due to the fact that negotiations over an agreement on Ukraine’s neutrality and non-nuclear status and security guarantees (for Ukraine) are moving into a practical stage, and taking into consideration the principles discussed during today’s meeting, the Ministry of Defence of the Russian Federation has taken the decision to drastically reduce combat operations in the Kyiv and Chernihiv areas in order to boost mutual trust and create the necessary conditions for further negotiations and for the signing of the aforementioned agreement.

What this really means is:

We'll drastically reduce, but not stop, killing people and destroying things in Kyiv and Chernihiv, but will carry on as before in the Donbas and creating a landbridge to the Crimea.

You, Ukrainians, won't be able to trust us and so won't be able to reduce defences in Kyiv and Chernihiv, because bet your bottom dollar, if we thought you had stood down we would blast our way into Kyiv in a second.

So you won't be able to reinforce your beleaguered Southern and Eastern fronts, where we'll keep on going gangbusters irrespective of the civilian casualties and destruction of infrastructure. 

Isn't this a nice gesture from us. Thank you. 

PS It is all Ukraine's fault.

Fuck em. But sadly cold reality is looking pretty bleak for Ukraine at the moment.  Not given the resources to win, given enough not to lose the only alternative to endless killing is "compromising" with the utterly unreasonable demands of the Bear. 

[La_Dolce_Vita]

20 hours ago, Chinahand said:

Yeah, those unworthy Ukrainians why should their agency and desire for self determination have any value. They should just suck it up and understand their next door neighbour is a tyrant who gets to terrorise them if they aspire to things he doesn't like. That's the rational way to analyse this situation. 

LDV, you can be quite strange sometimes. 

Their agency and self-determination has value but to think that should mean that the Ukraine should have been brought into NATO or should be in the future because the population wants that can only make me think that you don't see the Russian point of view of Russia being less well off strategically by having another nation on its borders joining an alliance set up against it.  It's an existential threat and at the least limits the scope of Russian military options in the future.  It's not going like that.  Russia still has a big military (and, most importantly, nuclear weapons).  What Russia could do with that military is very important. 

If the Ukraine was neutralised and the situation with the Donbas resolved, and assurances are given by Russia not to interfere in the Ukraine what's so bad about that?  Now there is no guarantee of the future and whether Russia would

And what about the population of the other members of NATO and their self-determination. If the path was one where the safety of Europe was made less likely and that was made plain to them then they wouldn't want such a change to NATO.  And that's why Ukraine hasn't joined yet, why there were no fixed plans for it to join in the near future, and why when the matter has been part of the casus belli the Western Powers have sensibly backed off. 

What about Ukrainian self-determination in wanting the West to challenge Russian command of the skies with Western european and American help?  A lot of Ukrainians seems to really want it and even the President does it did. 

Yeah, I wouldn't want to put too much value on fulfilling that request.

[Chinahand]

2 hours ago, La_Dolce_Vita said:

Their agency and self-determination has value but to think that should mean that the Ukraine should have been brought into NATO or should be in the future because the population wants that can only make me think that you don't see the Russian point of view of Russia being less well off strategically by having another nation on its borders joining an alliance set up against it. 

My view is that the UK is not threatened by France's nuclear weapons not because of any proximity issues, but due to France being a reasonable actor in the international field.  Ditto Sweden not being concerned about the UK's arsenal.  NATO is only a strategic threat to Russia if it is a bad actor on the international stage. 

It's an existential threat and at the least limits the scope of Russian military options in the future.  It's not going like that.  Russia still has a big military (and, most importantly, nuclear weapons).  What Russia could do with that military is very important. 

It is only an existential threat if Russia itself acts threateningly - and even that isn't really true - NATO is not acting towards Russia at the moment even though it is acting threateningly, not because of NATO's lack of proximity to Russia - it has plenty of stand-off weapons it could bring to bear if it wanted - but rather because NATO is a rules based organisation and Russia hasn't, yet, breached NATO's rules.

LDV do you really think an international order where the anarchy of the international environment is encouraged and sovereign states can use aggressive war against each other, is of equal value to a rules based system?  Why do you continually seem to say Russia has a right to be aggressive?

If the Ukraine was neutralised and the situation with the Donbas resolved, and assurances are given by Russia not to interfere in the Ukraine what's so bad about that?  Now there is no guarantee of the future and whether Russia would

This is begging the question a bit - if peace ruled, why wouldn't Ukraine want peace. Sure, but the question is how can Ukraine get peace.  What I find so sad about all this is in my view Ukraine was improving and becoming a society capable of peacefully resolving the tensions between its Russian and Ukrainian speaking peoples.  The trouble was though that it was also re-arming and reforming its army, and as far as I understand it Putin saw a genuine risk that Ukraine would attempt to retake the Donbas militarily, and so struck.  I think this was the immediate casus belli far more than NATO.  Putin couldn't tolerate what he saw as a military threat to his statelets.  The threat to Russian Peoples also fed into his ethno-nationalist dreams of a greater Russia and his delusion his troops would be met with flowers, balalaika and Russian dancing.

I always find the issue of NATO to be a bit of a strange one - there is no way Ukraine would be admitted to NATO if it has unresolved military issues over its borders with Russia.  The protocols for joining are all about ensuring there are effective political and geopolitical mechanisms to solve disputes so there isn't a risk of a military clash.  By lacking that Ukraine was simply not suitable for joining and everyone - sotto voce - knew it.  Hence the endless fudges on it, and Georgia, joining.

And what about the population of the other members of NATO and their self-determination. If the path was one where the safety of Europe was made less likely and that was made plain to them then they wouldn't want such a change to NATO.  And that's why Ukraine hasn't joined yet, why there were no fixed plans for it to join in the near future, and why when the matter has been part of the casus belli the Western Powers have sensibly backed off.  

We agree, see above.

What about Ukrainian self-determination in wanting the West to challenge Russian command of the skies with Western european and American help?  A lot of Ukrainians seems to really want it and even the President does it did.  

Ukraine was not going to join NATO in the near future.  It isn't the casus belli. Ukraine is being rightfully supported to defeat an aggressive act against it.  Prior to the war Russia was rightly warned by the West of the deterrent threat it would face, and the West made efforts to increase that deterrence, but deterrence  failed - mainly in my view because Putin deluded himself that the Ukrainian army would rebel against what he saw as the Kiev Junta and because the Western reaction to his recognising the Donbas statelets was far too muted - that gave Putin the confidence to go.

I'll agree with you the Ukrainians created a security dilemma as they re-mobilised and this has been catastrophic for all concerned. But that in no way justifies Russia's actions.

Ukraine should have put a lot more effort into finding peaceful solutions to the Donbas, but that was almost impossible to do with Putin encouraging, financing and arming separatists - in my view Putins actions are a reasonable explanation as to why peace efforts failed  - and puts the blame on Russia not Ukraine

The West saw the Donbas conflict as simply another frozen conflict - Putin has created multiple such conflicts in his near-abroad and wrongly didn't think it would escalate.  

Putin saw a more competent military developing and felt he had to act.  He also has no respect for the political process which was also showing progress and felt justified in destroying it.

Yeah, I wouldn't want to put too much value on fulfilling that request.

How this is going to end, goodness knows.  Sadly I think it'll be a reduced Ukraine and a new cold war, but the political instability that will put Russia under is going to have big consequences.

Ethno-nationalism is on the rise in Russia and this grudge is going to be nursed by its failure in Ukraine and its pauperisation by sanctions. Also Ukraine is unlikely to be able to continue its reforms.  The destruction the war has wrought will cripple its political process for a generation and issues left unresolved or compromised under the barrel of a gun will fester.  Not an optimistic situation at all.

 

[wrighty]

I can’t remember if I saw it here or elsewhere, but the Donbas situation has been compared to Northern Ireland. What I don’t understand is, is Putin equivalent to Gerry Adams or Margaret Thatcher?

[Chinahand]

Ha, wasn't an Irish Taioshioc or however it is spelt prosecuted for gun running into the North.