Posted on 01/22/2022 9:48:00 PM PST by Nextrush
Germany's top naval boss has resigned after being discredited by statements about Vladimir Putin and Ukraine. Kay-Achim Schonbach had said in a video that the Russian leader deserves respect and that Ukraine will never get back the Crimean peninsula that Russia has annexed...
Schonbach also dismissed the Russian attack plans as 'nonsense'.
(Excerpt) Read more at nos.nl ...
In other words this whole Russia is going to attack Ukraine drama is 'fake news'.
That was pushed back to the last sentence of this story which comes with a translation prompt when you hit the link.
That will turn the story from Dutch into English.
Now he’ll have more time for blogging.
“Ukraine will never get back the Crimean peninsula”
This sort of thing shows the difference between the military and politics. In the armed forces you are trained to tell the honest truth. In politics it is more complicated.
Everyone knows Crimea is not going back to Ukraine, but acknowledging that gives up a major bargaining chip.
I think you have a case where various German leadership figures (intellectual types from both the political and military sides) have watched German public TV news to some extent and bought into the propaganda side....so there’s disbelief that any incursion will occur.
The natural gas side of this discussion? This probably has shocked German leaders the most. Nord Stream is not going to be turned on (some of this is the application process being screwed-up). Flow from the old pipeline? Dwindling in the past weeks, with Germany having marginal reserves. Everything that Trump said in 2019 over this pipeline has come true.
It’s possible that the SPD-Green-FDP coalition government might fall apart...if the gov’t advocates zero participation in NATO reactions.
Ever since the Mongol invasions, followed 500-600 years by Napoleon’s invasion of Russia (1812), followed by Russia’s two contests with Germany in WWI and WWII, Russia has maintained something of an inferiority complex needing to be bolstered by a demanding sense of national self not given the respect it deserves. Its a cultural thing, not a necessarily Marxist thing but one all Russian leaders, including the Soviets exploited, for what power they believed they could (and sometimes did) gain from it.
If Putin had his way, the whole land of the Kievan Rus, divided up - into Ukriane, Belarus and Grand Duchy of Moscow, following the Mongal invasion of the 13th century, would be united again under him. He sees himself as a sort of all-Russian messianic figure.
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