There are two major imperialist powers in the world today. Of them is Russia. The other one is Russia’s increasingly senior partner, China.
Putin has said that the dissolution of the USSR was a great tragedy. He seeks to reclaim as much of the old Soviet territories as he can.
Many years ago, Solzhenitsyn wrote of the deep connections between Russia and Ukraine, how it would be impossible to separate them. Putin would have agreed with that assessment.
But, by his unwise and clumsy invasion, After all the bombings and deaths, Mr. Putin has created a hard separation between the Slavs of Russia and those of Ukraine.
I can see a truce Agreement at some point, but it’s hard to foresee any true peace Any century soon. Putin has divided these Slavic peoples as they have never been divided before.
4 comments:
It's a dire situation; Russia simply has more resources - men, energy sources, funds and military hardware - than Ukr has, and it's prepared to hurl them into the cauldron en masse come what may. That's what dictators do. Also, the vastness of its territory makes it very difficult for an enemy to hit back effectively. This combination of factors, including the casual willingness of its leaders to sacrifice hundreds of thousands of soldiers' lives, is what helped them beat Napoleon, stop the advance of the Whites after the revolution in 1917 and later ultimately defeat the Germans in WW2.
Ukraine and its people are in the terrible position of seeing parts of their country occupied by the armies of this tyranny while at the same time knowing what continued resistance costs them in terms of deaths. The first makes it want to keep on fighting, while the second makes it long for peace, and together they are tearing the country apart. Ukr doesn't hide its casualty figures like Putin's compliant media does, and the Ukrainians are desperately aware of every loss of a young life in this defensive war. It's heartbreaking to watch it.
Ukraine is a victim of Obama's foreign policy. We broke it, and we're paying for it, and will pay to rebuild a lot of it.
The U.S. is responsible for what Russia has become. A Thugacracy under the reigns of a cold war warlord. Putin said it himself. That this was not the way it was supposed to go.
What was supposed to happen when the Soviet Union collapsed was that Russia would be welcomed by and even partnered with the U.S. , but that didn't happen happen due to internal politics here in the U.S.
They were still cut off like the enemies and evolved into what the are now to compete with no cooperation. It didn't have to be what it is.
It is however what it is... and it has to be dealt with without firing a shot. I'm not even going into the gap of hypersonic nukes that now exist, or why. Half of Ukraine will go to Russia, and we will rebuild Ukraine.
NATO needs to back off. (or raise their own funds and army) we violated our deal with the Russians at the collapse by allowing the last two nations into NATO. They stay but we have to put the end in writing there.
The only way the U.S. wins is free global trade on an even table. That has to be the goal internally and externally.
I think that Russia believed that they had an understanding with the US that NATO would not expand eastward if Germany was allowed to unite. They believed James Baker.
But the peoples Of the former Warsaw Pact countries strongly supported their entry into NATO. And I believe that they still support NATO strongly.
The single biggest expansion of NATO was in 2004, when seven Eastern countries joined the western alliance, including the three vulnerable Baltic nations, Three small countries that had been part of the USSR. This expansion happened under the Republican presidency of GW Bush.
Both sides of the aisle are guilty of it. In my the view the entire stance of all the NATO countries has been wrong. When the wall fell The West and the East needed to set up an exchange of sorts and a set of direct goals of integrating Russia into a full capitalist's based exchange between all of the NATO nations led by the US.
Instead every nation turned inward. In one form or another we all isolated and focused inward. It was worse in the former Soviet bloc than anywhere else, but we all just left Russia hanging to develop under the power brokers that were left internally with basically no outside influence or interaction.
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