Russians and ethnic Russians inside Ukraine and other eastern European countries. Also it’s the Russian “who, us?” MO. They don’t care that the west doesn’t believe their excuses. Remember when the UK identified the two Russia GRU operatives responsible for poisoning Sergei and Yulia Skripal? These two military aged men went onto TV to say they had taken a one day trip all the way to the UK to look at the spire on Salisbury Cathedral. It was obviously ridiculous and they were openly trolling the west.
Meanwhile in Russia:
The results of the survey published by the independent Levada Center pollster [in October 2018] say that 28 percent of Russians believe that British intelligence services were behind Skripals’ poisoning, with only 3 percent saying they believe their own intelligence officers carried out the attack. Another 56 percent said that “it could have been anyone”.
This is incorrect. China, for one, would need some sort of pretext if they are going to give even tacit support to Russia. Of course, that can be a pretty threadbare pretext, but they will need something better than just because Putin wants it. You are correct that those opposing Putin aren’t going to believe it, but that has a lot to do with how the US and the west have been dealing with this by sharing intelligence data. I’ve seen a lot of criticism of this, a lot of folks saying that clearly the US is warmongering or our intelligence sucks, etc etc, but, frankly, I think it’s been the best course (of all bad ones) we could have taken, given that we aren’t going to go to war over this. We’ve been shining a spotlight on what Putin et al have been doing, making sure that if he does invade everyone has seen it coming, and showing how when Moscow says one thing (such as they are pulling out troops) but does another (such as pulling out a few troops while putting more in than were pulled out) it really changes their narrative.
Exactly wrt the intended audience. It’s really hard to gauge how well Putin et al have done wrt their own people’s thoughts on this whole adventure, or the ethnic Russians outside of Russia. But that’s certainly who he’s targeting as his intended audience.
For some reason, I just feel like this is mostly sabre rattling. I hope I’m right. Right now, I’d still put my money on nothing happening in the next month.
It sounds wrong to me to add the definite article for no reason.
We add the definite article when a country’s name represents a collective, as in “the United Kingdom” or “the United States”. Ukraine is not such an entity. I rather suspect that the initial “Uk” letters of the name may have led to a conflation with “the UK”.
Article from a former US Army colonel who argues that the U.S. military got sidetracked by the War on Terror and other things and failed to develop or maintain the necessary ground forces to go against Russia in a European war (he’s not advocating that the U.S. go fight for Ukraine, he’s just pointing out that U.S. Army ground power has greatly diminished, even if his tone is a wee bit polemic.)
Unless there are enormous concessions from Ukraine (turning it into a de facto Russian satellite), I can’t see Putin deciding against invasion. It would look to the world like he’s backing down in the face of Western pressure.
Here’s a question: If a state actor wanted to, how hard would it be to sabotage NordStream 2? It seems like it would be fairly vulnerable to any navy, which would make the question of sanctioning it moot, no?
And well, realistically, does anyone think he’d be more likely to back down if the west didn’t apply pressure?
If one honestly didn’t intend to invade in the first place, turning around and deciding you were going to invade because someone else said you were going to do it seems to be a broken, deranged logic to follow.
It’s not “no reason.” The reason is that when I learned to speak English as a child, this was the standard. At the time, I didn’t have the linguistic or analytical skills to question it. But maybe it’s time for me to change. Okay.
Grammatical games (which you can play in Slavic as well) notwithstanding, [in my head at least] I always want to call it “Ukraina”. Are English speakers really not expected to be able to pronounce that?