Posted on 06/24/2022 2:20:16 PM PDT by SES1066
At a ceremony honoring young geographers in 2016, President Vladimir Putin asked one boy about the capital of Burkina Faso and then quizzed another about where Russia’s borders end.
“At the Bering Strait with the United States,” the 9-year-old boy ventured hesitantly. Mr. Putin, who chairs the board of the Russian Geographic Society, contradicted the boy to triumphant applause. “The borders of Russia,” he pronounced, “never end.”
(Excerpt) Read more at wsj.com ...
In that light, is this Ukraine adventure an analog to; 1) reoccupation of the neutralized Rhineland in 1936, or 2) the 'Anschluss' takeover of Austria in 1938, or the Sudetenland partition of Czechoslovakia that followed the Anschluss of 1938? Each success by Hitler encouraged his further greed to TAKE ADVANTAGE of the weakness of his opponents. Does this same apply to Putin; Georgia in 2008, Crimea in 2014?
Autocrats are not known for internal restraints! They need an external restraint to be applied in an unmistakable action that burns their fingers! We in the 21st Century bemoan the FACT that the Rhineland was NOT opposed except by words! Will those that write history in the 22nd Century look upon this with the same distain?!
This is a poor case. It's like Mississipi splitting off from the US and joining France and then the US retaking it. Mississippi has been part of the US for a long long time. Crimea has been part of Russia for as long as we have been an independent nation.
So when Turkey invaded Northern Cyprus in 1974, did people express those same fears about Turkey?
The strength of Russia now vs Europe/NATO isn’t remotely close to Germany vs Europe.
If Germany stayed out of Russia, they would have won.
One country against all of Europe...
I’m kinda hoping the answer is Berlin...Europe needs a new daddy.
Russia’s economy and culture is too corrupt to do anything but beat up its smaller neighbors. They even need help to do that. The EU and China are happy to use Russia as a gas station because they know it will never be a peer threat.
If Putin negotiated at this point to simply hold control of the Donbas, the Crimean peninsula and the “bridge” territory to the latter, while allowing the rest of Ukraine to remain under a puppet regime of the Western elites, it would represent substantially less control than he had prior to 2014.
In other words, we can’t say he’s even being aggressive until pushing beyond the borders of Ukraine. So far he is simply trying to take back a portion of what was strategically lost in the 2014 Maidan coup.
Hi.
Off topic somewhat...
Vlad, you should have been in Kyiv and Odessa in the first two weeks. Maybe three tops.
Time for Ivan to go home and work this situation out peacefully.
5.56mm
Though I support Ukraine in the current war, I saw the Crimea issue as you do, it was historically Russian, going back three hundred years. I wasn’t surprised when Putin took it back, I was only surprised that Russia ever let it go in the first place.
Now, if Ukraine were to claim it as reparations for the war, it wouldn’t upset me. But I suspect that is a bridge too far. Russia will never give it up.
Russian supporting morons can't understand why free people would want to join EU and its standard of living vs some pathetic Russian-Stan (CISFTA) economic bloc.
Now I got that Rick Astley song in my head.
I feel sorry for the position that Ukraine is in, but that is the fault of the western led globalists who thought Ukraine was on the route to breaking up, dismembering and gorging themselves on the remains of the Russian Federation. Putin warned the West over and over again that that wasn’t going to happen. Ukraine chose poorly and got wrecked for it. But it is the West who enticed the Ukrainians with visions of sybaritic pleasures if they just played along. Anyone taken in by the creepy mug of Schwab and the WEF is doomed to a period in purgatory.
I see rule from Brussels as something to run from, but then I’m sitting behind a keyboard in the US. For someone sitting in any country bordering Russia, the EU looks pretty good.
I always saw a Russia standing outside the globalist system as a good thing, and a band of countries (like Ukraine) attached to neither Moscow nor Brussels as also a good thing. Feb 23 changed that calculation. Ukraine sees its destiny among the western nations and events have shown that with Russia next door they need to join the club formally.
You breezily disenfranchise all of Russia’s neighbors while failing to notice that it is the “globalist” EU that is busy pumping fascist Russia with money to fund its war economy. The reality is this has nothing to do with anybody but Ukraine and Russia. Russia wants an empire. Ukrainians don’t want to be slaves in the Russian world and fight Russia as its neighbors have for hundreds of years.
Putin proved that Ukraine needs allies, and was right to seek them.
I didn't disenfranchise them. It's the geostrategic situation that disenfranchises them. Russia is here to stay. Our little war will only reinforce their view - that they had anyway since the time of the Mongols - that they need to maintain their ability to make war on whichever of their miscreant neighbors they need to make war on. Reality is a b!tsch. And it turns out while we were sending our supply chain overseas or just abandoning it altogether, the Russians are maintaining theirs and can produce a prodigious quantity of stuff to blow up places that they have a design on.
Pretending it isn't so and encouraging folks to take suicidal paths is not actually the moral path.
And I am not arguing for
Good post. Both countries have their good and bad points, but it’s a mistake to just identify Ukraine with Soros and homosexuality. They, like other countries of the region, are struggling to find a way between East and West, and now, seeing what Putin wants, they are more likely to cling to the West.
The farther, the better. He’s fighting Soros, Schwab & Satan.
Bogeyman alert! Run for your lives!
;>)
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