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
EU is being destabilized and maybe torn down.
Have i ever told you I like the way you think?
5.56mm
“IMHO Putin will be deposed within months.”
Is his successor likely to be better or worse?
Illegal invasion of Iraq.
Stopped reading.
Putin put himself at enormous personal risk with a guarantee of greater loss than gain.
“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.”
—
The one that gets most people is when someone’s “taking the piss”. And saying a girl fell on her fanny means something a bit different in UK-land, too.
In late 2001 the US requested that Afghanistan hand over Osama Bin Laden.
He was not handed over.
The US went into Afghanistan....
In early 2022 the Russian Federation requested....
I'm probably wrong about most of that, but something resembling it could happen even if Kiev falls. Prayers up for the innocent.
War is the natural state for man. Peace is an aberration.
At the end of WWII the United States was the lone superpower. Unusual in a way that the US was not interested in conquering other nations but instead used the blood and gold of her citizens to protect Europe and guarantee peace.
Did the rest of the world appreciate the sacrifice of Americans? No. They have spent the last 70 years scheming and working against America.
I would go as far as claiming that the Europeans (mainly the UK) knew the whole Russia attacks against President Trump was a lie but did they do anything to stop it or support Trump?
So the Europeans got what they always wanted a weaken America with a senile old man in the White House.
Russia (and perhaps China) see an opportunity.
My fear is that not one world leader really understands what is going on and each is working at their own agenda...
World War I comes to mind. None of the leaders at the time believed their action would lead to the death of millions while at the same time redrawing the map of the world.
Is this how WWIII begins?
Putin expects to create an accomplished fact. He will occupy Ukraine to whatever extent necessary to destabilize the government and create a federalized state where every individual state or county in Ukraine is an independent country. This assures that no Ukrainian government can ever threaten Russia or make a deal with NATO. Putin expects to be cut off from the West and has already started gathering a cadre of allied states which will trade among themselves and be immune to Western influence. These will be warlord states and Putin expects to be the leading warlord. (Iran, Syria, Yemen, Pakistan, the stan countries, China, Turkey, some of the former Soviet empire.)
This will doom the Russian people and the citizens of the allied warlord autocracies to a poorer existence but it’s not the elites who will suffer. I gather some sixty percent of Americans believe Putin wouldn’t have done this if Trump were president. I don’t know if that’s the case. Putin felt he had to do something to regain control as the threat of having for real NATO forces three hundred miles from Moscow must have caused him enough sleepless nights that he’s issuing military threats to Finland and Sweeden, two countries who have bent over backwards not to appear threatening. In doing so, he revealed the depths to which he feels threatened. I think in some sense this move was going to occur anyway and the only variable would be the number of deaths that would occur along with it and how fast it proceeded.
The Ukranian invasion is the period at the end of the globalization sentence. Globalization is well and truly over.
“.....
World War I comes to mind.
......
1914
Are we Imperial Russia or Austro-Hungary?
I look at Biden and I torn between the two!
Says here the Ukrainians have 300 Aircraft. If that isn’t false maybe they make a run at something significant on Russian soil?
How about a death run with remaining Aircraft? Heard they have jets but can’t find any news on where they are, what happened to them, do they have them??
Who wants victory more? Right now, the Ukrainian people are willing to fight in the streets, much as the people of Stalingrad in WWII. The Ukraine will receive massive arm shipments and outlast Russia.
“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. “
This is a good observation. Putin has launched a war where no outcome where he wins is possible.
There is one way for the Russians to win, and that means dumping Putin. After that Russia and Ukraine can have friendly relations again.
Or the Ottoman Empire (I hope not).
How?
You’re something else!
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