I mean, there were plenty of sanctions imposed on Russia after its annexation of Crimea, including suspending it from the G8, but nothing compared to the grand scale we’ve seen during the current full-on invasion.
If we had imposed crippling sanctions on Russia in '14, to the extent that a company like Shell can’t even buy Russian oil without us looking at them askance, would Putin have felt less emboldened to invade Ukraine in '22?
A clash of this type was always going to come sooner or later.
Had the world reacted more strongly in 2014 then I very much doubt that Putin would have taken this exact course of action that’s happening now.
Thing is, we don’t know what he would’ve done instead, if anything. We can’t even say that what we are doing now will stop him as we are not even at the end of the beginning of this.
I actually think Ukraine is in part to blame for not reacting to the invasion of Crimea.
If you let another country seize territory of yours without firing so much as one shot in resistance, of course they’re going to think about taking more.
What the West should have done is immediately let Ukraine become a member of NATO. Instead it followed the worst of all possible options: it put Ukraine on a partnership path to NATO. This informed Russia that they needed to invade Ukraine very soon–before it became a member–so it did. [Conversely if NATO had stated that it would never accept Ukraine as a member then Russia would probably have let the status quo remain indefinitely.]
Well, that’s a bit rich, even for mindlessly repeating talking points from Fox News. Some history:
Prior to 2014, Ukraine had joint operating agreements with the Russian Federation (in lieu of being a member of NATO or any other alliance). One doesn’t generally expect to be attacked by the country you have joint agreements with, and it would be difficult to be ‘prepared’ for such, notwithstanding the low level of funding for the Ukrainian military. From 2010 to 2014 Viktor Yanukovych was the President of Ukraine despite being widely regarded as a Russian stooge who unilaterally rejected trade agreements with the European Union in favor of taking loans from Russia; he arguably pursued policies that make Ukraine weaker, both militarily and in agreements with Europe, such that it was highly vulnerable to annexation of Crimea, which Russia instigated virtually the moment that Yanukovych took flight. And of course, Ukraine gave up all nuclear weapons and weapon materials per the Budapest Memoranda, which makes it utterly vulnerable to a Russian threat of use of nuclear weapons for pacification. And no, Ukraine did not secret away a bunch of battlefield nukes that it might use to threaten Russia.
Regardless of what you think about NATO ‘surrounding’ Russia and what impetus that might have had in the recent unpleasantness, Russia invaded a non-threatening sovereign nation, is blasting away indiscriminately at cities that have no real military or strategic value beyond silencing Ukrainian media, have directly attacked civilians, have agreed to multiple ‘cease fires’ to allow for humanitarian assistance and the flight of non-combatants only to break agreements and attack non-combatants with direct force, and whose leader is now making thinly-veiled threats to the world over even the imposition of sanctions. Blaming Ukraine for the illegal Russian seizure of Crimea is like blaming a battered spouse for not standing up to her abuser, even if he had a gun to her head and controlled all of the finances.
Let’s please stop with echoing of Fox News talking points literally transposed from RT News and TASS.
Stranger
This is a wrong depiction of what happened since 2014. In fact, the resistance Ukraine has organized is one of the reasons they can hold on against Russian troops now. Ukrainians have a better training and more combat experience that the Russian average soldier in Ukraine has or wants to have (the Russians have some special OP troops too and veterans from Syria, but for most Ukraine is their batism of fire). If I was Ukrainian I would feel insulted by your remark.
Here is a timeline of the fights in Ukraine 2013-2014:
Please search yourself for the events since 2014, I am not in the mood to fight this level of ignorance today.
Concerning the OP: with hindsight I believe that Putin would not have invaded Ukraine if he had known that the response would be so robust, and the West could possibly have shown how robust the response would be if they had shown more resolve in 2014. He would also probably not have invaded if the West had not shown how gullible (see the post I replied to, for instance) we can be, or that we don’t care if our presidents/prime ministers are morons as long as we have a good time in facebook, or if the far right (!) in Europe had not accepted his money to divide our society further, or the far left (sigh…) were not such a lot of deluded ignorants.
The thing is: I believe now is not the time for lamentations, now is the time to react correctly. We can settle scores (with Trump, Le Pen, Salvini, Orban, you name it) afterwards. And we should. But now the important thing is to help Ukrainians and to stop Putin.
There was also the war in Georgia in 2008, which has many similarities to what’s happening now. Perhaps if there was a stronger push-back then, the Crimea situation would not have happened as it did…
The failure of the Western security organisations to react swiftly to Russia’s attempt to violently revise the borders of an OSCE country revealed its deficiencies. The division between Western European and Eastern European states also became apparent over the relationship with Russia. Ukraine and other ex-Soviet countries received a clear message from the Russian leadership that the possible accession to NATO would cause a foreign incursion and the break-up of the country.
The war eliminated Georgia’s prospects for joining NATO. Russian President Dmitry Medvedev stated in November 2011 that NATO would have accepted former Soviet republics if Russia had not attacked Georgia. “If you … had faltered back in 2008, the geopolitical situation would be different now,” Medvedev told the officers of a Vladikavkaz military base.
The May 2015 report by the Committee on Foreign Affairs of the European Parliament stated that “the reaction of the EU to Russia’s aggression towards, and violation of the territorial integrity of, Georgia in 2008 may have encouraged Russia to act in a similar way in Ukraine.”
The whole NATO excuse has been debunked, by Russia themselves nearly a week ago:
Not a single bit of the rhetoric about NATO being a threat is in there. Putin has been planning all his life to try and “reunite” Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine under the Russian banner, and planned it to make a big claim on the world stage.
Sure, we can argue that Ukraine joining NATO would have stopped this, due to the deterrent effect. But it not even going partway would not have stopped Putin, any more than it stopped him in Belarus.