I’m sorry - how can anyone who’s looked at Ukraine at all not understand that it was going to blow, with or without “the West” being involved in Maidan?
Putin’s stooge Yanukovych was running the show in Ukraine for Putin, and turning, or should I say returning, Ukraine back into a Russian vassal state. Yanukovych botched it totally, but then again, he’d raped the country so badly, the only real question was when the uprising would begin. While I agree Putin very likely did not somehow direct that protesters be shot, I disagree that the shootings triggered all that followed. The protests were already huge, Yanukovych’ power doomed, and an opposition ill-prepared to take power about to get it.
Now, did outside players try to take advantage, to ride the wave and try to direct it? Sure. But their “success” was very limited and spotty. Putin, on the other hand, still got what he thought he wanted anyway: Crimea, and part of Eastern Ukraine.
However, Putin had realized a good part of his goals by means that the West could then use to justify overt “help” against Putin. The interesting and tragic thing is that the West does not provide Ukraine with means to push Putin out, they provide just enough aid to prolong the war indefinitely. At first I thought this was incompetence or weakness, but now it appears to be by design.
Maybe that works for guys like John McCain, who worked as a liaison to Congress during his last years in uniform, helping to sell new weapons systems that would profit defense contractors.
One problem we need to understand is that fighting wars to decisively defeat enemies isn’t the game plan in our New World Order.
Its all about limited military action to “police” a situation and its been that way since Korea for the United States.
It has been official bipartisan policy to deal with military situations in a limited way to avoid something more serious like nukes coming into play
Tough talk aside that’s the way Republican foreign policy leaders ultimately saw and see things from John Foster Dulles for Eisenhower to John Bolton for Jeb Bush.