Posted on 02/10/2022 1:14:56 PM PST by whyilovetexas111
Afirst-time visitor to Lviv in Western Ukraine, knowing nothing of national borders or the city’s history, might be forgiven for thinking he was still in Poland. From the elaborately coiffed opera house to the open-air cafes to the cobblestoned market square, the city’s charming downtown is a pastiche of Mitteleuropa influences. At least superficially, Lviv has far more in common with Krakow or Budapest than Moscow or even Kyiv.
(Excerpt) Read more at theamericanconservative.com ...
Their army?.....................
Russia does not want the Ukraine.
Russia wants to splinter NATO.
That is all.
They want to ensure Ukraine is not a real country. Why Russia was not made the first nation to join NATO after the USSR died really bothers me.
Russia wants to forget about Ukraine for good. Biden and Johnson want Russia to destroy Ukraine. Ukrainian leadership is undecided, waiting for the proper golden bailout tickets to be offered.
Agree...
Right, this isn’t about Ukraine. This is about Russia
telling NATO who it can’t have as members.
Telling NATO where it can place it’s defenses.
If Russia ingests Ukraine it will then share a border
with Poland. Are the Poles to disarm next?
“Why Russia was not made the first nation to join NATO after the USSR died really bothers me.”
LOL! Let’s just let Nazis join the Jewish Defense League while we’re at it.
I have no problem with Ukraine as another new “Finland” in this era - a “neutral”.
Unfortunately I do not believe that alone is acceptable to Putin or that he would respect it.
On Russia-EU intercourse Putin is a hypocrite. He has no problem with a Russian-nationalist energy policy that wants strong economic ties to the rest of Europe but he wants Ukraine to not have such independent thinking for itself. He wants Ukraine to defer to Russian-nationalist interests. That would not be a neutral Ukriane.
We don’t need NATO anymore. The Eurotrash don’t want to pay their share of the cost and Frau Merkel, a previous employee of the East German Stasi, has as PM positioned Germany much closer to Russia than to the US. In fact she’s made Germany completely dependent upon Russia for all Germany’s energy needs. Lets get the hell out of NATO asap.
This is the same reason many "sages" gave for not encouraging the Poles in 1980.
The real international reality is that Russia has the GDP of Spain. If the Europeans and the US simply twitched a muscle towards a military buildup Putin would fall quickly behind. The current state is simply a reflection of the complete lack of seriousness of Western governments who are more bothered that the imposition of their fantasies of medical tyranny and green fascism on their own populations is being interrupted by Putin than by any genuine interest in Ukraine.
Lastly, the Ukrainians are not any more likely to surrender to "the realities of international politics" now any more than the Poles were.
First of all, I don’t think “Finlandization” is desired by the Ukrainians, so what we or the Russians may want may not matter that much in the end.
Cause Putin wants it all back. Also nobody is gonna do anything about it.
“I have no problem with Ukraine as another new “Finland” in this era - a “neutral”.”
Soon you will hear that you are a deep state neocon...
As far as what Ukrainians want, I think we get different answers from different Ukrainians, but at a minimum I think most want political independence neither shackled to Russian interests nor overly dependent on “the west”. I Ukraine politics that was neutral on cultural interests would leave cultural interests to independent individual decisions made in the Liberty of the people’s lives. Some would keep strong ties to Russian “culture” while others would renew or make ties with countries in the EU. It does not have to pull the nation apart politically unless political factions don’t want the people to have that cultural freedom in their lives.
At Yalta, FDR tried to get Lvov (Lemberg) included in Poland but Stalin refused. Lvov was on the Ukrainian side of the Curzon Line and Stalin had troops on the ground there—the Western Allies didn’t. Probably the main reason FDR made the effort was he was thinking about the Polish-American vote in future elections.
Finlandization was also always a fiction. Finland is part of the EU. Even if it is not written down, there is no chance that the NATO wouldn’t intervene if Russia sent troops into Finland.
Summed up, brilliantly, in one pithy graphic. Thanks, Matt!
They were offered this. Russia declined and instead asked to be put in charge of NATO.
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