Nothing like a bit of bothsidesism. Or is that a tu quoque fallicy?
Motivation matters. The earlier US invasion of Iraq was done in concert with a number of other nations to get Iraq out of Kuwait, an invasion to counteract another invasion. The more recent one was wrong through-and-through based on falsified intelligence.
Putin claiming that Ukraine is a “threat” to Russia is bullshit.
Russia apparently pulled back a few tanks and troops, so it’s “true” in that sense, but also apparently the vast majority of the assembled men and material moved into different positions that would favor the start of an invasion.
It’s entirely possible the average Russian hears little to nothing about all this. News converage varies a lot by country and in a country where the government imposes controls and censorship there’s a choice between “tell them nothing” and “tell them what we want them to hear”.
It’s a way to capture Ukraine one slice at a time, death by a thousand cuts.
The end goal here is for Ukraine to become entirely subsumed into Russia and cease to exist as a nation.
Every time I open this thread I dread to see the words “IT’S ON”…
I’d wish someone could do the math on this, because I suspect that it would be enormously less expensive if Russian and Ukraine could agree to keep their existing borders, and to allow disaffected citizens to emigrate/immigrate to their preferred country - even if they had to build new cities and GIVE them housing.
Maybe not - the exodus from Russia would probably be overwhelming.
In that scenario presumably any people moving to Ukraine would be coming only from the now Russian controlled parts of Ukraine, rather than from Russia proper.
I agree. And it wasn’t ‘bothsidesism’, it was to show that there is and was precedent for countries on the UNSC who invaded another country yet there wasn’t even a ripple about it in the UN, especially with respect to being tossed out of the UNSC.
Motivations do matter, but that has nothing to do with the point I was making.
Again, I agree…which was what I was getting at with the Ukrainians being skeptical.
True, and it’s also a way to attack Ukraine without a shot being fired. Also, if you dig a bit deeper, Putin has started to really push the ‘genocide’ button wrt the region. I figure this was (perhaps still is) going to be his premise to have to rush into southeastern Ukraine to save the ethnic Russians from all the ‘genocide’ going on.
Or, at least part of it. It’s hard to say what his goals were or are at this point.
It really has nothing to do with allowing ‘disaffected citizens to emigrate/immigrate to their preferred country’, however. This is about Putin and Russia being nervous about NATO expansion (if one is to believe the Russian side) and about the survival of Ukraine as a sovereign nation not under Russian control and about Ukraine’s right to decide its own alliances and course on the other.
While I wouldn’t want to be overly optimistic, it does seem to be winding down…for now. At least wrt a full on military invasion.
I think the signs of “winding down” are being misinterpreted. Russia moved some units from Belarus “back to their bases”, but those bases are still near in the southern military district. So in other words, moved from one part of Ukraine’s border to a different part of Ukraine’s border, following the military doctrine of concentrating forces at the decisive point (the element of mass).
NATO and US brass are both reporting the same, that essentially nothing has changed in the situation. The only reason it feels like a de-escalation is that Zelensky said he was told it was to start on Wednesday, but it turns out that he was using some manner of sarcasm. Jens Stoltenberg and Anthony Blinken are still saying the situation is threatening and dire. There are mass reports of cyberattacks on comms and infrastructure across Ukraine overnight.
So we’re back to a situation with massive numbers of Russian maneuver units on the border, Olympics ending on Sunday, and Russia adopting a “who, us?” posture, while simultaneously repeating its demand that Ukraine never be admitted to NATO. It seems they are striving to preserve some element of surprise. We’re at essentially the same point as several days ago, exactly like the earlier invasions of Georgia and Crimea. The only difference is that an invasion of western Ukraine from Belarus seems less likely (for now). The only real question is whether they’ll attempt to preserve that element of surprise by attacking around the end of the Olympics, breaking their historical pattern of waiting until after.
All good points. What I meant was that the Russian military was clearly in its jump-off positions, and they SEEM to be pulling back from that somewhat. This doesn’t preclude them from being able to deploy back to that, and frankly, not all of its forces have pulled back from their jumpoff positions in any case, but it appears that they have, at least for the time being, taken their finger off the trigger.
Everyone’s talking about Russian tanks, but no-one’s talking about Russian jets. Any invasion will likely be preceded by several days of bombing at least, leaving more than enough time for the tanks to get in position.
I was actually thinking more about troops and APCs which had been staging into jumpoff positions, but I take your meaning. Certainly, the air element will be huge, and Russia outnumbers Ukraine in air assets by something like 10 or more to 1 depending on what type we are talking about…and in terms of capabilities, it’s a lot more than that, unfortunately for the Ukrainians. Planes are harder to quantify wrt being ready for an invasion, however, since they can be deployed from further out and don’t need to be staged in certain places to start an invasion.
I’m genuinely asking here, as I’m not up on Russian military doctrine on this issue, nor do I have enough background knowledge of the Russo-Georgia war of 2008 to really guess whether that war’s lessons are a good analogue for Ukraine 2022.
The US likes to fight with complete air superiority, and will start things with a long air campaign to assure that superiority, as in the first Gulf war. I’m not sure that Russia will do the same; they may figure that their 10+:1 advantage is sufficient and that maintaining surprise is more important to their military and political ends.
Because why not? If you’re unchallenged in the air, why not use your air force to blow up as much as possible, and then send the ground forces in to mop up?
It opens up a can of worms if the pilot is American, British, French, Australian, Canadian, etc. If the pilot is Russian, Putin will probably just pretend they died and give them some “posthumous” honors and use their “death” as a reason to take revenge against the Ukrainians.
Putin is using the “genocide” card because he’s seen that’s something the West reacts to. He knows damn well that there’s no genocide of ethnic Russians in the Ukraine (at this point in time).
I see no reason why Putin would stop at a part of the Ukraine if he thought he could get all of it.
Right. The more nations that join NATO the smaller Russia’s sphere of influence. The more nations that join with Russia (whether voluntarily or by force) the greater the Russia sphere of influence. This isn’t about shuffling people around, it’s about power.
For darn sure, if it HAD been Wednesday as soon as Zelensky opened his mouth the date would have been changed.
And that is yet another reason why I don’t think this problem is “winding down”. Cyber attacks are just another way of poking at a nation, hoping for a reaction that gives an excuse to move militarily. Or softening them up. Or both.
I’m going to nitpick that a bit - it’s going to start with several days of cyber attacks, which we are already seeing, THEN the jets will start flying over, then the tanks and troops.
It’s a matter of cost to benefit. Certainly, if Ukraine collapses as some in this thread predict, then he could go for the whole enchilada. But, realistically, the further west he goes the harder it’s going to be…and the more losses he will take. And today, the Russian people aren’t, IMHO, willing to take huge losses in their sons and daughters for the motherland. Also, there is no real reason why he’d need to get it all this time around. This could be part of a salami-slicing exercise on his part…cut a piece off here, a piece off there, and eventually, you have the whole thing. If he were to basically go into southeastern Ukraine and ‘free’ all those poor ethnic Russians from the ongoing ‘genocide’ going on by those nasty Ukrainians, and he can do that for a minimum amount of Russian lives lost and equipment destroyed, I think that’s what he will do. If he starts in and Ukraine basically collapses then there is always the possibility of pushing forward. He will certainly have the forces there to do so.
One big, big difference - Georgia is very mountainous, Ukraine is very flat. Very flat. It’s mostly steppe/plain country (the exception since the loss of Crimea being a slice of the Eastern Carpathians in the far West) and rather less than 20% is forested, mostly closer to the Russian border. The only really major natural barriers are river crossings and those obviously are more useful East/West than they are North/South. That and it is a relatively large country by European standards ( equal to about California + maybe 2/3 of Oregon).
Unfortunately for the Ukrainians it is largely excellent terrain for both armored/mechanized penetrations (traditionally the core offensive doctrine of the old Soviet military) and for the use of close air support where Russia has a massive advantage. Geography isn’t destiny, but it also isn’t a friend to Ukraine if the Russians go all out.
This is pertinent. The argument against NATO being a purely defensive organisation is undermined by its actions in Bosnia and Herzegovina and in Kosovo. Those were both conducted to prevent genocide but were demonstrably not defensive. Obviously I’m not saying there shouldn’t have been an intervention, but Putin can claim that NATO does not conduct purely defensive actions and at the same time use “genocide” as a pretext for invasion.
That is exactly the argument he’s been using in fact. I will say that in neither case (i.e. Bosnia or Kosovo) was it a NATO conquest, which patently it would be in the case of a Russian invasion of Ukraine, but it certainly demonstrated, to Russia at least, that NATO wasn’t purely defensive. Or, at least, they can use it as an example of NATO being non-defensive when they argue for how scared they are of NATO expanding into all of those poor, defenseless eastern European countries or former Soviet states.
As for the ‘genocide’, I think that has a lot to do with the US calling out China for it’s actual genocide and perhaps Putin is trying to get in on the action, knowing that the west will be much more affected by that than China obviously has been.