In what sense? And it was the S-400 that only entered active service in 2007, not the somewhat older S-300. The US concerns, which were somewhat paranoid but perhaps not unreasonably so, was that Turkey with both in their possession (and perhaps Russian trainers/support on the ground) could work out F-35 vulnerabilities to the S-400 that could get leaked back to Russia. Quoth the White House in 2019 “The F-35 cannot coexist with a Russian intelligence collection platform that will be used to learn about its advanced capabilities.”
It’s pretty straightforward. The S-400 IS a very good system, one not directly emulated in the West (which relies far more on superior aircraft than missile systems). Erdogan wanted something that can shoot down Western aircraft after the 2016 coup attempt when he had rebel F-16s shadowing him in the air. So he got stubborn and everything got bollixed up. I think he was foolish, but paranoia can be a hard habit to shake.
While I guess it’s technically true that this “Doubles” the border shared by NATO and Russia, some border is more important than other. Most of the Finnish-Russian border is of little to no military concern.
Good news for Sweden is that even if Turkey blocks it indefinitely, it’s still just about as protected against Russia as a NATO-nation would be anyway. Sweden is now surrounded by NATO on all sides and has the EU defense pact going for it too. Only problem would be if Russia is dumb enough to go after Gotland but why would it ever.
800 more miles for those heathen Western bootlickers to sneak across and do harm in Rodina. I hope Vlad went to bed last night but couldn’t sleep because his brain kept looping, “Oh, fuck… oh, fuck…”
There were no problems, but there will be now. That’s because we are going to create the Leningrad Military District and concentrate certain military formations there.
I’d love to see some pushback from countries like Azerbaijan, Georgia and Kazakhstan so they can take back some territory from Russia. Now would be a good time for them to assert some independence.
Neither Azerbaijan nor Kazakhstan have any real outstanding border disputes with Russia.
Azerbaijan is vastly more concerned about hostilities with neighboring Armenia and would probably never dare get involved in a potential two-front war for that reason. Moreover Russia did not intervene on Armenia’s side during the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh war, but rather maintained carefully cordial relations with Azerbaijan (Russian relations with Armenia started going south in 2018 after the Armenia revoution). That’s paid off politically in the aftermath - Ukraine has accused Azerbaijan of dodging international sanctions. At least for now Azerbaijan is loosely in Russia’s column.
Kazakhstan has also traditionally enjoyed cordial relations with Russia. This has cooled a lot since the war - there is a substantial ethnic Russian minority of ~15-16%, heavily concentrated in one border province in the north. Though never articulated by Russia as such, this is a potential draw for Russian ethno-national irredentist aggression, much like in Ukraine. Kazakhstan has in fact sent humanitarian aid to Ukraine as a result. However unlike Ukraine, as noted Russia has never really bothered sniffing around Kazakhstan. Among other things it is a vastly less strategic potential acquisition and Russia has had much bigger fish to fry. As long as the government was friendly/compliant there was no need for Russia to be anything but diplomatically friendly. Absent any history of Russian aggression, given past cordial relations and lacking a clear border dispute to resolve, Kazakhstan has nothing in particular to gain and everything to lose by attacking Russia.
Georgia of course DOES have abundant motivations for attacking Russia. However I think it would take a lot more degradation of Russia’s military for an attack to ever become really viable. Like, y’know, a general collapse. Georgia is just way too small and isolated and the terrain way too difficult to defend for Georgia to present much of a threat all by its lonesome.
I’m going to go with NO. Not in sufficient quantities to matter, anyway. Especially not with resources already stretching to support Ukraine.
I don’t know how Russian or Putin assumption-thinking works, but it seems to be utterly incapable of projecting or assessing how people behave.
The Russian logic seemed to be: If I invade Ukraine, I’ll somehow…make nations like Sweden and Finland less likely to want to join NATO.
Which is about as sensible as saying, “If I break into this house, it’ll make the neighbors less likely to want to install burglar alarms and tougher door locks.”
That was almost certainly not their opinion. Rather it was far more likely some variant of -“We’ll essentially knock out Ukraine in a week and it will be all over except for the shouting in two. Then no one regionally will dare challenger us.”
Which might well have been accurate if it had worked, but the whole knock-Ukraine-out-quickly thing didn’t quite materialize.
I mean, even if they had successfully conquered all of Ukraine in 1 week, that wouldn’t reduce the local European nations’ desire to join NATO. Any invasion of Ukraine, regardless of outcome, would intensify the desire of those nations to join.
For a guy who had a long career in the KGB, Putin seems to struggle with basic psychology.
Not if he didn’t actually believe Sweden and Finland wouldn’t want to join NATO after. The logic was that conquering Ukraine would be worth it. Since NATO isn’t an offensive threat to Russia, that probably wouldn’t have been the worst trade if the war went how he thought.