Formalize spheres of influence? Seems we had that for most of the last 70 years. Welcome back to the Iron Curtain.
Brics block wants to give terms.
Isn’t that the UN?
Putin needs to stop his war. Then he can talk about his pipe dreams.
This would just mean a switch by Russia from open war back to hybrid war. The West would take its obligations not to act seriously or as an excuse to do nothing while Russia would pursue a campaign of bribery, intimidation and subversion over its “sphere of influence” until the states affected are ready for re-incorporation into the neo-Russian Empire like Belarus.
As Russia fades from importance, Putin is hoping to make it a bigger player than it really is.
The same sorts of things that preceded WWI and WWII and did not work.
I’m hoping for something totally Trump.
Out of the box.
About the author:
Nikolas Kirrill Gvosdev is a Russian–American international relations scholar. He is currently professor of national security studies at the U.S. Naval War College and the former Editor of the bi-monthly foreign policy journal, The National Interest.
Dissolve NATO.
Euro-Atlantic Expansion? Where?
What putin wants is the USSR back just like it was. For that he will not rest until he is dead or gets what he wants, whichever comes first.
Sounds like my wife, can’t settle one thing without starting something else. Expansive negotiation with no intention of settling anything. Why bother to settle when you are winning and damn the cost?
If there was a modicum of truth to the Russian narrative then Russia wouldn’t have parked nukes and several hundred thousand troops in Belarus while constantly talking about creating a unified state... And then having the brass neck to complain about not being able to veto NATO exercises inside NATO countries.
Russia has already pushed its nukes all the way to the NATO borders and pointed those nukes at European cities. Even now, no European nukes are programmed to fire at Russia. Russia isn’t being threatened; Russia is feeling threatened because Putin’s whipping up a fantasy.
Europe has not threatened to invade Russia since Uncle Joe and Molotov’s deal with Hitler / Rippentropp fell through. Putin conveniently forgets that without the UK and USA hitting the Nazis from the west, Stalingrad and Moscow would’ve fallen.
Europe has had absolutely zero interest in invading Russia for over eighty years. For my entire lifetime - and I’m in my fifties now - the Iron Curtain only ever existed at the insistence of the USSR to stop desperate Soviet citizens seeking a better life in the west; its existence had bugger all to do with a nonexistent ambition in the West to occupy Russia.
Putin’s fantasies about US NATO aggression are because the Able Archer 1983 near miss still live rent free in his retard taxi driver head, but he doesn’t acknowledge it was Soviet paranoia and Soviet refusal to listen to anything other than its own propaganda that nearly started a nuclear war. They were told repeatedly that Able Archer was just an exercise; the Party apparatchiks just didn’t want to believe it and the commanding officers were not allowed to think it.
And Putin’s solution to everything is to party like it’s 1983.
So what if Ukraine was being an EU NATO partner for peace? SO WAS RUSSIA!!!
(Putin always leaves that bit out.)
The USSR did that at the height of the Cold War.