Newfie wrote:What scares me about Ukraine is that the whole mess makes no sense from a Russian view point, but knucklehead went forward anyway.
When you say that I think you are not looking at it from the viewpoint of Russia at all. This was not something that just blew up overnight, there is a very long and tortured history behind the invasion. For one thing before the current leadership came in there was a coupe de tet in 2014 encouraged by the USA/NATO which in turn led to revolts in Crimea and further revolts in the eastern provinces which have a Russian ethnic majority population. Just because the western media more or less either ignored or justified the Coup leadership and their activities doesn't mean Russia or the population doing the revolting and being harshly suppressed were happy go lucky over events. Russia and the eastern provinces argue that during the USSR days the redrawing of the borders of Russia and Ukraine was done to bolster Ukraine influence. These borders are much like the borders the UK&France drew when they split up the Ottoman Empire and Austro-Hungarian Empire in the post WW I chaos. Iraq, Kuwait, Jordan, Palestine (Israel), Syria, Lebanon were all carved out of the Ottoman Empire in totally arbitrary ways to serve the wishes of the British and French governments of the 1920's. In a similar fashion when the USSR fell apart in the 1990's the NATO/USA diplomats offered financial help only so long as the borders they liked were followed and Russia was in bad enough condition they agreed despite losing significant ethnic Russian populations in the process. This was a bad idea in 1918-1939 and it was still a bad idea in 1989-2001 when Russia was in bad economic condition. These kind of top down outside imposed borders are historically never a stable solution unless there is a thorough case of ethnic cleansing done to change the population dynamics of the resulting area of potential conflict. This can be done by deportations or murder on a mass scale. The USA did our version of it to the native inhabitants many times over the 1607-1945 period of our history and Canada did its own version under UK influence right up through the internal wars against the natives that lasted into the 20th century. Hitler tried the mass murder version of the ethnic cleansing while Stalin used the deportation and slave gulag labor version and neither were fully successful. However by the time the USSR fell apart the populations of the Baltic states had been significantly shifted to have large Russian minorities. If the process had continued another century the Baltic states would have been almost completely Russian by background. In all fairness the Teutonic Knights of the Middle Ages Period had been the reverse with Germans moving in and displacing the local Slavic population from the Brandenburg region all the way up the Baltic coast. Prussia was originally a Slavic populated area, the knights conquered their way around the coast enslaving and slaughtering the local population until it became a Germanic ethnic area from 1150-1750, Stalin was just reversing the process by shifting Slavic people in and Germanic people out.
Borders area great deal more flexible than most people seem to think, different governments have been shifting them back and forth all through human history. Pretending any political border is sacrosanct is being blind to historical reality.
Also on Putin, if Z had accepted the USA offer of asylum back in February as expected the whole war would have been over in a couple weeks and new borders would have been drawn and for the most part internationally accepted. Even today China doesn't give a hoot about the Ukraine conflict accept for the fact that it made trade with Russia even more important to Russia giving them more leverage in trade negotiations for raw materials and petroleum/natural gas.
Posted: Tue 27 Dec 2022, 15:09:31