Posted on 02/26/2022 12:39:36 PM PST by RandFan
I could not believe Putin really would invade Ukraine, because I could see no sensible outcome for him. I still cannot. Initiating a war on this scale has no legal justification, and no moral justification either. Russian troops are in areas which have no wish to be ruled by Russia.
Those of us who opposed the illegal invasion of Iraq must also oppose the illegal invasion of Ukraine. Whether the Ukrainian government is obnoxious or not is as irrelevant now, as the obnoxiousness of Saddam Hussein was irrelevant then. I am as fed up now with being asked if I support Ukrainian Nazis as I was then with being asked if I supported Saddam Hussein.
It is simply illegal to wage a war for regime change, without the endorsement of the UN security council.
I have great sympathy for Russian security concerns about encirclement by NATO and forward missile deployments. But seeking regime change by invasion in Ukraine could not possibly be the answer. I still have not the slightest idea what Putin seeks to achieve. It is simply impossible – and has been since the annexation of Crimea – that a democratic Ukraine is voluntarily going to elect a pro-Russian government. After this invasion, the only way a pro-Putin regime could be maintained in Ukraine would be by extreme authoritarianism, going well beyond the prevailing system in Russia itself.
Let me put it starkly. This can only finish with a government in Kiev which absolutely hates Putin as now do the Ukrainian people, or with Russia maintaining a puppet regime by extreme repression. There isn’t an a way out with a peaceful, neutral Ukraine. Once you try to resolve matters by pure force, you lose that option. If I were Ukrainian, there is no way now I would be agreeing to the demilitarisation of my country.
As for denazification – which certainly is needed in Ukraine – Putin has given the “heroic anti-Russian nationalist” meme of the Ukrainian nazi groups a massive boost. While labeling the entire nation and government as Nazi is just wrong.
I did not think Putin would invade, for all those reasons. I did not even think he would acknowledge moving troops into the Donbass. I was unsure what to argue about that if he did. The Kosovo parallel with the newly acknowledged Donetsk and Lughansk republics is arguable. As a supporter of Scottish Independence, I am open to arguments from self-determination, and you can read Murder in Samarkand on the capriciousness of former internal Soviet borders. But this has gone far beyond that.
Yet we have seen nothing like the simply massive civilian casualties the West inflicted on Libya, Iraq or Afghanistan. Not anything like the same order of magnitude. In the town of Sirte, Libya alone NATO bombing killed 15,000 people. Casualty figures being given for the whole of the Ukraine so far are still in the hundreds, and thank God for that.
Either Putin has not entirely willed the means, or his armed forces are resisting obeying his wishes. Russia has not unleashed anything like the kind of firepower that would need to be unleashed to subdue Ukraine. Western media has gone into full war porn mode, but the extent of real fighting is uncertain. There seems to be a great deal of shadow boxing.
I do not know the explanation for this. It seems very possible Putin has underestimated Ukrainian morale, and really believed Ukraine would crumble. In fact, Zelensky is playing a blinder in terms of maintaining morale, however staged his photo-ops. The more pressing question is whether Putin overestimated the willingness of his own military to kill Ukrainians, or whether Putin himself lacks the will. In Grozny, he was directly responsible for civilian casualties on a truly terrible scale, but is he like the West in putting much less value on Muslim lives?
To date, Kiev has faced nothing like what Sirte faced from NATO or Grozny faced from Russia – but not because Russia lacks the capacity to do it.
If Putin is himself ready for massive Ukrainian deaths, is his military pulling its punches? I am reminded of the War of Slovenian Independence, where the soldiers of the massively superior Yugoslav army just refused to kill Slovenes. In that case, many of the Yugoslav troops were initially told it was just a live fire exercise, which lends credibility to the idea the same is happening with Russian troops here.
Putin has not improved his negotiating position. My own friends and allies on the left are suggesting that the answer is for there to be a ceasefire and Western agreement to no further expansion of NATO, and a new arms control treaty governing missile deployments. That would certainly be ideal but it is not going to happen.
You have to understand the realpolitik of the Western elite. They will never damage their own interests. That is why the sanctions that would really hurt Putin, targeting companies like BP and Shell over their Russian interests or the real oligarchs like Usmanov, Deripaska and Abramovic, will never happen because they would damage the interests of the British elite. It is why the UK government fly Ukrainian flags but will not let Ukrainians come without visas. They don’t really care about the ordinary people at all.
The NATO leadership now see Putin in a position where he either has to back down and retreat, or inflict massive casualties on the Ukraine and get bogged down there for decades. If they wanted to save the Ukrainian people, this would indeed be the time for West to negotiate. But the lives of ordinary Ukrainians mean nothing to them.
So rather than find Putin a ladder to climb down, they will strike heroic poses, wave Ukrainian flags and send more weapons. I fear Putin will go for the mass deaths scenario. Macho is his entire brand, and his speech last Sunday was worryingly fundamentalist. I do wonder if he is losing the room at home – he spoke of the end of the Soviet Union as a calamity, but Russians under forty cannot even remember the Soviet Union at all. Nobody under 50 can remember it in any kind of functioning order.
One final thought for now. I applaud those brave people in Russia who have demonstrated for peace. Almost 2,000 have been arrested. But remember this – under the Tory government’s new policing bill, taking part in a demonstration in England and Wales not approved in advance by the police could bring up to ten years in prison. Just one example of the rife hypocrisy submerging us all at present.
Craig Murray is a former British diplomat
FOABs on Kiev.
I hear from a woman from Moldova that criminals from all over Europe are flocking into Ukraine to get the weapons being handed out and are using them to terrorize the civilian population, stealing anything of value and raping women. Also that the casualties on both sides are far higher than either side is admitting.
Translation from British English (spoken by 55 million odd inhabitants of the British Isles) into "real" English (spoken by more than a third of a billion people): "Showing amazing skill."
Regards,
Russia will leave with a knife in their necks with a profuse amount of bleeding going on.
This is just getting started, Ukrainians have a large proportion of their population that will hide rusty razor blades under their eyelids to kill you.
Moldovan women are notoriously unreliable sources of military intelligence.
Tell her to go back to pounding her mamaliga!
Regards,
“It is simply illegal to wage a war for regime change, without the endorsement of the UN security council.”
“Oy, you got a loisence for that war, mate?” How British can someone be?
Its going to end as soon as Putin’s military kill the neo Nazis they are looking for. Then there will likely be an agreement with Zelensky and Putin will go home.
The war will end after all the Loose Ends of Hunter Biden’s business dealings in the Ukraine are destroyed. The Russians are there to destroy everything having to do with the crime families activities in the region.
Fanning flames of the mantras of “it’s all Trump’s fault” is already started in the hope that those efforts further camouflages what the purpose of this Mission really is.
Putin does not operate in a political or cultural vacuum. This analysis fails to analyze political realities within Russia. Traditionally the Russian people have become accustomed to autocratic rulers. They accept that rule but in their own way can and do become dissatisfied. Then abrupt change is often sudden. Putin has made the worse, catastrophic decision imaginable. The Russian people are very unhappy to be isolated and to be at war. They do not want their young people dying and maimed. Their politicians realize that things must change. Within the military morale is low and there is consternation throughout the ranks up to and including senior officers. Putin’s acolytes are now avoiding eye contact with him and are no doubt talking among themselves. In a way or manner never fully understood by outsiders, IMHO Putin will be deposed within months.
The only meaningful true statement in the article “ As for denazification – which certainly is needed in Ukraine –“. At least someone has bothered to visit and take notes.
“I hear from a woman from Moldova...”
Link?
Heh, just kidding. Gotta love war “NEWS”.
Exactly, here is a few month old required reading for the ignorant, much info., Neonazis, energy transit fees, etc….
https://www.peoplesworld.org/article/neo-nazis-active-in-ukraine-as-white-house-adds-3000-troops/
“The war will end after all the Loose Ends of Hunter Biden’s business dealings in the Ukraine are destroyed. “
That makes no sense considering the records are already safe under the current regime. If not that sh!t would have beeen released years ago.
“ Its going to end as soon as Putin’s military kill the neo Nazis they are looking for.”
***********
Who are these neo Nazis? And, what are they about?
How does it end?
1. More arms into the hands of the Ukrainian forces ASAP
2. SWIFT cut-off, Europe urgently finds alternative energy sources
3. Every non-Russia major country lobbies China not to support Putin
4. Breakthroughs in the Putin propaganda control of Russian news media and social media so all the Russian people learn what is really happening in their name against Ukraine
5. Mass protests in Russian cities, millions are ready to be arrested for peace
6. Opposition in the Duma grows and goes public
7. Putin tries floating Plan B, well what about East Ukraine and West Ukraine like North Korea and South Korea
8. Behind the scenes other party leaders of United Russia try to find a face-saving way out of the Putin autocracy
9. The security and intelligence and military services agree on what is best for Russia
10. It is announced that the honorable great Russian leader Putin has died of complications related to COVID-19 and that Russia will enter into a grand negotiation with the West. Also the Russian Constitution will be changed back to imposing term limits.
11. A swap: The historic Russian territory of Crimea is recognized as Russian, and in return the Russian occupation of the historically non-Russian territory of Kaliningrad is ended and it becomes administered by Poland and Lithuania as a part of the EU with final status to be determined in a longer political process.
12. Russian forces withdraw from all of Ukraine except Crimea
13. Lukashenko finds his balls and announces he will no longer agree to host Russian military forces
14. The area of LPR/DPR is demilitarized and and an international force of peacekeepers is placed there for years to come. Feelings of hatred here by the two sides will never completely go away and will take years to subside. What ultimately happens there will depend not on military force but peaceful political processes.
15. Ukraine joins the EU and joins Poland and Hungary in pushing back against globo-homo influences in the EU
How will the war in the Ukraine end? In a word, badly. Putin decided he could fight a war “on the cheap”, and it becoming anything but. While there are concentrations of ethnic Russians in many pockets throughout the Ukraine, in only a few places are they in a majority.
The Russians will be mired in a guerilla war, much like they faced in Afghanistan, faced with a defiant population that just is not all that much in love with the idea of Russian domination.
It all stops when Putin runs out of other people’s money.
-PJ
Ukraine: How Can the War End?
—
when the Ukrainian army takes Moskva
Pretty easy actually.
Just release the Tide machine.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.