Yugoslavia / Serbia / Kosovo, for example. Kosovo, we took out of Serbia by force.
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Posted on 05/20/2022 4:41:44 AM PDT by Kaslin
"The demise of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century," said Russia's new ruler Vladimir Putin in his 2005 state of the nation address.
"As for the Russian people," Putin went on, "it became a genuine tragedy. Tens of millions of our fellow citizens and countrymen found themselves beyond the fringes of Russian territory."
From Putin's standpoint, the statement was then and remains today understandable.
Consider. When Putin entered his country's secret service, Berlin was 110 miles deep inside a Soviet-occupied East Germany. Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria were member states of the Warsaw Pact.
Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia were republics of the USSR. Ukraine was the most populous and ethnically closest of the Soviet republics to Russia itself.
And today? Berlin is the capital of a united, free and democratic Germany, a member of NATO, that is beginning a rearmament campaign triggered by Putin's invasion of Ukraine.
Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria are members of the U.S.-led North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
Former Soviet republics Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia are also members of that Western alliance established to contain Russia.
Sweden and Finland, neutral through the Cold War, are applying for membership in NATO.
Ukraine, backed by the U.S. and NATO, is fighting a war to push the Russian army out of its territory, a war that has the support of almost every country on the continent of Europe.
Even the falls of the British and French empires at the end of World War II do not match as geo-strategic disasters the collapse of the Soviet Empire and breakup of the Soviet Union since the end of the Cold War.
How goes the Russian war in Ukraine launched on Feb. 24?
Russia has enlarged the territory it controls in Crimea and its Luhansk and Donetsk enclaves in the Donbas. And now, with the fall of Mariupol, Moscow controls the entire Sea of Azov and has completed its land bridge from Russia to Crimea.
But Russia has failed to capture and been forced by the Ukrainian army to retreat from Kyiv and Kharkiv, the largest cities in Ukraine, and Putin has seen his forces humiliated again and again.
Yet, withal, Russia today remains a great power.
The largest nation on earth with twice the territory of the U.S., Russia has the world's largest nuclear arsenal and exceeds the U.S. and China in tactical nuclear weapons. It has vast tracks of land and sits on huge deposits of minerals, coal, oil and gas.
But Russia also has glaring weaknesses and growing vulnerabilities.
While Putin has built up impressive forces in the Arctic, the Baltic Sea, with Finland and Sweden joining the Western alliance, is becoming a NATO lake. Russian warships sailing out of St. Petersburg to the Atlantic have to traverse the coastal defenses of 11 present or future NATO nations: Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Sweden, Poland, Germany, Denmark, Norway, Britain and France.
Among the questions that Russia, shrunken in so many ways from the great U.S. rival of the Cold War it once was, must answer is, "Quo Vadis?"
Where does Mother Russia go from here?
Bitter at their losses in the Cold War and post-Cold War years, many Russian nationalists are urging the regime to align with today's great power antagonist of the United States, Xi Jinping's China.
This is a recipe for a Second Cold War, but how would that war avail the Russian nation and its people?
In any Russia-China alliance, there is no doubt who will be senior partner. And it is not the U.S. that covets and wishes one day to control the resources of Russia from Novosibirsk to the Bering Sea.
China's population of 1.4 billion people is 10 times Russia's. East of the Urals, China's population is 50 to 100 times the size of Russia's in Siberia and the Far East.
What of a U.S.-Russia detente as Moscow's future rather than Cold War II?
During some of the coldest days of the Cold War, U.S. presidents like Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan sought to find common ground on which to stand with Russia to avoid conflict.
Ike invited the "Butcher of Budapest," Nikita Khrushchev, for a 12-day U.S. visit in 1959. Nixon initiated a "detente" with Leonid Brezhnev, who had ordered the Warsaw Pact to crush the "Prague Spring" in 1968. Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev negotiated the dismantling of an entire class of nuclear weapons in the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces treaty.
Given the hostility Putin has generated by his invasion of Ukraine, Western leaders may be unable to bring Russia in from the cold. But if we isolate Russia, push it out of the West, Moscow has only one direction in which to go -- east, to China.
In 230 years, the United States has never gone to war with Russia. Not with the Romanovs nor with the Stalinists, not with the Cold War Communists nor with the Putinists.
U.S. vital interests dictate that we maintain that tradition.
Quo Vadis means: Where are you going?
no lo contendre
Melita, domi adsum
Yugoslavia / Serbia / Kosovo, for example. Kosovo, we took out of Serbia by force.
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I had high hopes for Russia in the 90s and thought Putin might be OK. I should have paid more heed to him being a former KGB officer.
I’m afraid he is a closet communist.
Who cares if he’s a closet communist? We have plenty of open, unapologetic communists right here in Washington, DC.
Stupid as usual, I don't see Poland either, so Poland should not exist?
Interesting about Ukraine, but Finland strike me more interesting. I read an article several years back that studied genomes and it came to the conclusion that Fins are the most ethnically distinct in Europe. I may be phrasing that wrong using the word distinct. The article contended they were the least muddied, I guess is another way to put it.
So even if Finland was apart of Russia for a long time, is it bad that they want national autonomy?
Actually, I think I know the answer to that, since I presume that are light skinned, it’s not politically correct to say that. Nevermind. /s
Wesley Clark gave it his best shot.
I’m not intending to suggest by posting that 1914 map that Finland be incorporated into a new Russian Empire, only that European national borders have appeared, shifted, and disappeared over and over for a thousand years (at least).
America never threatened nuclear world war over any of the other dozen or so “forced border adjustments” that have happened just since the end of WW2.
In fact, we were the cause of forcing one of them, creating Kosovo out of Serbia, after a NATO bombing campaign.
European borders have been shifting like sandbars forever.
You miss the point, again, moron.
See my post above. Same comment applies to your comment, but with derision instead of respect.
Russia has been a tragedy for centuries either through internal or external forces and their leadership throughout the centuries has ranged from bad to horrific. Unless something fundamental changes in the Russian national psyche then Russia and her leaders will continue to be a never ending cavalcade of tragedy and horror.
"In contrast, Russian elections are rigged. Political opponents are imprisoned or otherwise eliminated from participating in the electoral process. The result is an absence of checks and balances in Russia and the decision of one man to launch a wholly unjustified and brutal invasion of Iraq. I mean of Ukraine." (Laughter)
I actually agree with you Travis. Like tlozo posted above, where is Poland> While poles existed as a part of an ethnic enclave in various geographical locations (this is my recollection) a good part of what is now northern Poland was for a long time known as Prussia.
It’s right next to Poland - which also doesn’t appear. And Croatia, and Slovenia, and Czechia (for lack of better name), and Slovakia.
No rational person doubts these are all real nations. Ukraine is too. Russia is making that so.
Now post a map of North America in 1775 and ask where the United States is. See how that doesn’t mean anything?
You’ve been schooled.
I used to think you were an intelligent guy and liked some of your written pieces. But on this you’re kind of a doofus.
Putin himself says Finland and Sweden joining NATO is not a threat to Russia, putting a lie to Ukraine is a threat.
Putin says Russia has ‘no problems’ with Finland, Sweden in NATO
Russian President Vladimir Putin said Finland and Sweden’s bids to join NATO posed no direct threat to Russia, but warned the Western military alliance against moving weapons into the two countries’ territories.
https://www.politico.eu/article/putin-russia-no-problem-finland-sweden-join-nato/
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Your posts raise the question. Was the European nobility that fragmented Europe actually the evolutionary result of ancient tribalism?
Is the geographical change to which you refer the modern application of that tribalism filtered through kings and princes and dukes and lords and chiefs?
25+ million dead at Nazi hands in "The Great Patriotic War" says otherwise. Americans have never experienced anything remotely comparable, except perhaps Georgia during Sherman's march to the sea, 160 years ago, outside of living memory.
Ukraine under Banderista Azovite Neo-Nazi control, with NATO Article 5 guarantees, and NATO tanks, troops and missiles pre-positioned, was a "cause of war" red line that the Russians have been warning about for over a decade.
At least the German Nazis (with their Scandinavian SS, French SS, Spanish Condor Legion, Romanian Nazis, Italian allies etc) had to fight through Poland to get to Ukraine, to almost defeat the USSR by reaching the Caspian oil fields.
This time, Russia is being asked to just let such a force occupy Ukraine in advance...Really?
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