Is their any explanation for Russia's recent actions? Why restart the Cold War?

In My Humble Opinion
1

Russia had come such a long way since the fall of the Berlin wall and the end of the Soviet block.

They had become a full trading partner in the world economy. Membership in the G8. A partner in the International space station. Russia had become a very respected nation. They were still rebuilding their economy but that would improve over time.

Why become a pariah nation? They’ve been kicked out of the G8. NASA is pulling back cooperation with the Russian Space agency. I’m sure international investments in Russian companies will stop.

What the hell are they doing? :confused: What benefit is it to restart the Cold War? It’ such a drastic step backwards.

They’ve been down this road before. Diverting all their resources into their military and letting the consumer economy stagnate. It didn’t work. That is the best possible future.

Being a child of the Cold War this frustrates me. I really wanted to see Russia as a full partner in NATO and the European markets.

2

" That is the best possible future." goes with my last sentence.

Stinking board edit time out bit me on the ass. I tried to rush my last sentence and typed it in the wrong place.

3

I sure don’t get it. The Cold War should have taught everybody the lesson – and China’s recent rise to great economic wealth and power should have sealed it. If you want to be rich, get into manufacturing and trading! If you want to starve (North Korea) then retreat to militaristic isolation.

Russia cannot use its army to make itself rich. That stopped working a while ago. The British Empire was about the last to do it at all well, and they got out of the game. It does not pay.

4

It depends on who you read. One area of thought is that Putin has proved it’s not about the economy but about power…HIS power.
A second thought is that he’s trying to distract from the corruption that has been registering more and more public unrest.

5

Many times you start an aggressive foreign policy when you wish to divert the public from problems at home. If that is not a large part of Putin’s reasoning, I will eat my hat.

6

Crimea has been a part of the Russian Empire since the 18th century. It was only given to Ukraine because Yeltsin the drunk didn’t want to deal with it at the time.

7

Why restart the Cold War? Because Putin is a dick!

8

Hyperbolic OP aside, someone, somewhere is making some serious bank.

9

The irony is the US has a large Russian/Ukrainian immigrant population. A lot of Slavic people immigrated here in the 1890’s - 1920’s. They worked in many of our biggest industries, Steel, Cars, and Ship building.

It seems inevitable that Russia and the US should be allies and trading partners. A close partnership would strengthen both countries. It seemed like we were on that path until Putin regained power.

10

In a word: fear. The Russians have a historical and well-justified fear of being invaded, overrun, or dominated by other nations. Putin is, of course, feeding off of this to fuel his megalomanical desire for power (and also to help all of his corrupt cronies filtch Russia and surrounding nations for every natural resource they can sell) and the Russian people, surrounded by nations which are now becoming part of the US/UK/Germany dominated NATO and joining the European Economic Community.

It doesn’t help that the US has been talking about building a “missile shield” in Poland, the Czech Republic, Romania, and Turkey for about the last decade, ostensibly to protect Europe and North America from Iranian missiles that the Iranians don’t actually have, but from the standpoint of the Russians also threatens their strategic capability against the NATO powers, all notwithstanding that the missile system is probably completely ineffective against Russian missiles with sophisticated countermeasures and therefore represents bare-assed posturing on both sides over a practical non-issue. More recently, Congress has been pushing to put a third GMD site in Eastern North America (probably Maine) to protect against “European and Middle East threats” which is transparently Russia, despite the fact that the operational GMD system has consistently failed tests since 2007 and neither the Department of Defense or the Missile Defense Agency actually wants to support a third East Coast site.

Wrap all of this up in the economic problems which have plagued post-Soviet Russia, the loss of territory and prestige, and general second rate status by which Russia is held on the international stage akin to what Russia faced in the colonial expansion and Industrial Revolutions which so enriched Europe and the United States, and yes, the Russian people (who are a proud and surprisingly well-educated but culturally insecure society) are willing to support a nice juicy Cold War. As for the wars in Chechnya, Georgia, the Crimea, and the forethcoming (predicting) attempt to annex Moldova, which would give the Russian Federation an additional buffer zone against Romania, which again, is planning to play host to the NATO SM-3 ABM site, and it is kind of a no-brainer that Russia is interested in expanding both their influence and reach rather than become a patsy to Germany, Poland, or the US.

We (US and NATO planners) have never really appreciate the fact that the Russians are not European in outlook, that they hate and are hated by the surrounding ethnic groups, and that they desperately want to be the kind of world power that the Soviet Union was, even at the cost of constant conflict and authoritarian governance. The Russians have never really known democracy per se except as a thin veil to cover the overt corruption and robber-baroning after the fall of the Soviet Union, and everybody wants a buffer zone to prevent the next Batu Khan, Napoleon Boneparte, or Adolf Hitler from marching on Moscow and St. Petersburg.

We had the chance at the time of the fall of the Soviet Union to offer financial aid and encourage the fledgling democracy under the leadership of Gorbechev and Ryzhkov, instead tentively preferring to sit back and see how things developed. The mercurial and uncertain leadership of Yeltsin–who may have sincerely wanted to bring the remaining Soviet states into a modern economy but lacked the wherewithal and support to make it happen, and had also aligned himself with the Putin-led power block which stealing the Russian Federation blind–resulted in Putin coming into effectively authoritarian control over Russia. We blew it by sitting around, dick in hand, and letting Russia go to the dogs even as we courted the client states that the RSFSR used to buffer itself against threats from the West.

And the rest, including that to come, is history. As the adage goes, those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it, and neither we nor the [DEL]Soviets[/DEL]Russians appear to have learned a damned thing. Welcome to the new world; same as the old, except with better television.

Stranger

11

Obviously, Putin hasn’t seen The Princess Bride.

Never get involved in a land war in Asia

12

So how does that factor into the US and China meddling in politics all over the globe? Russia may want influence in eastern europe, but do you see the US, Russia & China forming a 3 way competition for influence in Africa, Latin America, southeast Asia, etc? Is Russia going to become like China wrt North Korea (being very pro-North)? Also, do you see Russia doing more to support socialist movements in Latin America, steering them in anti-US directions? At the end of the day Russia’s economy is about 1/5 the size of Chinas and about 1/7 the size of the US. I don’t know how much influence they would have in global events. Brazil has a bigger GDP.

I read an article recently about someone (forget who) making political predictions for 2014. He predicted (before all this started) to expect the unexpected from Putin this year, in part because of stagnation in Russia and his support level dropping.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/mar/31/vladimir-putin-wants-reclaim-finland-russia-former/

Finland isn’t part of NATO, but it is a wealthy western liberal democracy.

13

Yes, if only they would do exactly what the United States would like, like good little whipped puppies. :rolleyes: :proper rolleyes:

The explanation is that Russia is scared. Unlike the complacent United States, Russia has been invaded repeatedly from the the west in recent history, with millions of its people slain, the last time within living memory. Having a huge buffer zone (much of which is called Ukraine) between the Russian heartland and likely enemies has saved Russia more than once. Otherwise, they would most likely have been completely subjugated by Napoleon, or by Hitler, to name but two. They are most comfortable controlling Ukraine, as they have for most of their history (Ukraine has virtually no history as an independent nation), but having it as a friendly state was acceptable. Having it become a Western ally, especially with control of their strategic ports in the Crimea, is something that absolutely terrifies the Russians. They are not going to let it happen.

They also feel some responsibility and kinship for the safety of the very large proportion of eh population of Ukraine who are ethnically and culturally Russian. With the democratically elected pro-Russian government of Ukraine overthrown by Western-backed street riots, they have every reason to be afraid of what might happen both at the global-strategic and at the local-ethnic level.

If anyone is trying to restart the Cold War here, it is the Western interests who backed the anti-government demonstrators in Kiev.

14

None of this is happening is Asia. Both Ukraine and the Russian heartland are in Europe.

And if what you think this means is “Don’t try and invade Russia,” that was good military advice only when Ukraine was either friendly towards Russia, or effectively a part of it (as, indeed, it has been for nearly all of its history).

15

I’m pretty sure the idea is based on Risk - which I believe puts all of the Russias in Asia - and the failed invasions into Russia by Napoleon and the Nazis. I don’t know of any other land wars that the joke would have been based on.

16

It has been part of the Russian state at some time and after the second world war they did take a large amount of Finland back. There is also talk in Finland that we should claim Karelia back but as most native Finns have been forced out and it is largely populated by Russian speakers it aint gunna happen.

17

To take that further, the US started the Cold War-esque rhetoric by establishing the need to invade nations under transparent excuses of the War on Terror (Afghanistan) and preventing nuclear proliferation (Iraq). The September 11, 2001 attacks were this generation’s Tonkin Gulf–an incident, while real and destructive, did not represent a threat proportional with the wholesale invasion and occupation of another nation, and was pandered under the premise of installing a government in the model of “Western democracy and freedom”. Surrounding Russia by turning the former client states to allies, NATO air and intelligence support for the Kosovo War (as well as probably covert arms supply to the Kosovo Liberation Army, an organization formerly branded as terrorist by the West), and all the talk about establishing ballistic missile defense radars and complexes in nations of Eastern Europe were frankly provocational acts that served to amplify the native (if historically validated) paranoia of Russia.

This is not in any way to justify Russia’s almost unilateral aggression and annexation of other soverign nations and the increasingly repressive actions of the Russian government, but this hardly comes out of nowhere, and the US and NATO are far from blameless in engendering this conflict.

Stranger

18

Doesn’t this also have a lot to do with the state of Russia’s economy and fuel concerns?

19

Sure, it is a great opportunity for Putin to distract from his utter mismanagement/theft and expendature on defense spending with no perceivable need. But this didn’t come out of a vacuum. Putin has all of the excuse he needs to make the Russian public feel threatened and surrounded, and he’s using working this excuse all the way to the hilt. The opportunity to make a true ally out of Russia (if that was ever really in the cards) has long past, and was mismanged by Bush, Clinton, and Bush.

Stranger

20

Not to get too pedantic here, but this really is only the case depending on how you define Russia. If we’re talking the empire as established as a title by Peter the Great, that is sorta roughly the case ( they held the Eastern Ukraine by then and got all the rest within 70 years after the Second Partition of Poland ). But if we go back to someone like the Ivan III ( greatly expanded the principality of Moscow mid-15th century ) or even Ivan IV, ( mid-16th, the first to take to title of Tsar of Russia ) it’s not. Ukraine was part of either Poland, Lithuania or Poland-Lithuania ( it all comes to roughly the same thing, though there is some nuance between the three ) from the mid-14th to late 17th century ( all of it ) and western Ukraine was still a possession until the late 18th as above.

That’s the reason you had a wealthy Polish noble-class minority that dominated areas like Kiev into the mid-19th century and a large ethnic Polish presence in the western Ukraine until the 1940’s.