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Thucydides's avatar

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Russians wanted to enter normal relations with the Western nations and even join NATO, but were rebuffed. An enemy was needed to keep the grift going. While Russia was too weak to do anything about it, NATO, contrary to promises made to get Moscow to pull out of East Germany, expanded up to Russia's borders in the Baltics, but the subsequent threat of Ukraine in NATO, only 200 miles from Moscow was a step too far. Our senior statesmen including Kennan and Kissinger warned against this gross provocation, but neocon greed for "defense" grift prevailed, and the eventual result was the Russian invasion, which we were repeatedly told was "unprovoked." To paraphrase Bismarck, one can't believe anything until its opposite is asserted in the media. Whatever happened to the notion of national self-determination? I guess it has been superseded by Globalism and the laughably misnamed "rules based international order." Under self-determination, the Russian ethnic and speaking portions of Ukraine, including the Donbas and Odessa, would be a separate self-governing nation or might choose to join Russia. It is interesting to note that when the Soviet Union broke up, it was not under people asserting their individual rights, but rather their national identities. President Putin has said, and this is believable, that Russia doesn't want additional territory; they already have plenty. The idea that they want to occupy western Ukraine or even invade other countries is not credible, and their difficulties in Ukraine to date show this to be only a grifter fantasy.

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Slaw's avatar

Putin and Russia probably do not have the military/logistic/economic capability to conquer and hold the entirety of Ukraine. Robert Wright at Nonzero postulated that an eventual peace could see Russia holding the Russian speaking enclaves of Ukraine while the Ukrainian speaking districts formed a rump state.

For Russia trying to take and hold that rump state, even if it was achievable, could easily result in a prolonged campaign of guerilla warfare, targeted assassinations of Russian troops and Ukrainian collaborators, bombings in Russia proper, etc. Plus it's not really necessary for Putin's primary goal of securing Crimea.

I doubt that the West will commit boots on the ground to enforce a ceasefire given the long history of tit for tat provocations between Ukraine and Russia over the last few years--an artillery strike here, an armed skirmish there, some dam building thrown in for flavor. There is simply too much potential for something that escalates into direct conflict between Russian and NATO forces. The Ukrainian rump state will be an economic basket case anyway--one of my dinner partners likes to say that it will be a client state completely dependent on Western charity whose primary export back to its benefactors will be crime and instability. At that point the West will de facto be responsible for Ukraine's defense anyway in the form of military aid, training, and weapons shipments even if actual troops are verboten.

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