JJxvi said:
NATO really only matters insofar as membership would shut the door on Russia ability to annex Ukraine without going to war with the world at once.
Again, y'all can keep baldly asserting things, but that's not what the
5, 10, 30, 100, or 1,0000 year history of Russian attitudes about
foreign encroachments says.
Quote:
According to Stephen Kotkin, a professor of Russian history at Princeton University, Putin believes that Russia rightfully deserves a sphere of influence in its "near abroad." To Putin, Ukraine is not a state because it is not sovereign. Small or weak states are only instruments in the hands of the great powers. Where we see Russian aggression, Putin sees defense. If Russia cannot control Ukraine, then the West will. Thus, countries like Ukraine become platforms for invasion. And then the West will dismember Russia as the USSR was dismembered.
This way of thinking in Russia of course goes back to the tsars. Russia has no natural borders on its periphery. Stalin believed that he needed hegemony in Eastern Europe because otherwise he would be subject to infiltration and subversion. But the peoples of Eastern European did not want to be forced to live under communism, creating the very hostility Stalin feared.
Again, the
1,000 year lament by Putin was not a solitary belief of his;
Quote:
When Vladimir Putin called the collapse of the Soviet Union 'a major geopolitical disaster of the century' he wasn't channelling his inner Marxist-Leninist. Russia's leader is not interested in remaking the Soviet empire, which finally fell apart 30 years ago today, on Boxing Day 1991. But he does want to roll back the losses of the post Cold War era, expand Russia's sphere of influence, and build a buffer zone around the homeland. It's this that explains Russian aggression on the borders of Ukraine. While western observers might like to paint this as mindless sabre-rattling, the reality is that this massing of troops is driven by fear and the memories of past encroachments onto Russian soil.
Understanding this is key to realising what Putin is up to. Russia's leader is a politician whose nationalism has been on display in every foreign policy move throughout his time in power. During the 1999 Kosovo War it's thought he was one of the foreign policy hawks successfully urging president Yeltsin to send an armoured column to Pristina Air Base ahead of Nato troops arriving. That was a watershed moment, the signal sent to Nato was: 'This far and no further'. It was ignored.
Russian thinking is dominated by its geography and history. It has been invaded via the flat land to its west by Sweden, Poland, the Lithuanian Empire, the French, and the Germans (twice). The Russians don't want to defend along a 1,000-mile-long flat frontier, their reflex is to try to push up to the 300-mile gap between the Baltic Sea and the Carpathians and plug it. Unfortunately that space is better known by another name: Poland.
Moscow is trying to take advantage of the melting ice by establishing the Northern Sea route along its coastline as a major trade corridor between Europe and Asia by 2035
The Russians also want, at the least, a pro-Moscow government in Ukraine to guarantee Nato troops will not be on the border with short supply lines. So when Ukraine flipped, Putin engineered the uprising in the Donbass region (creating a mini buffer zone) and annexed Crimea.
Moscow's 2008 military intervention in Georgia is also linked to the fear of Nato advancing ever closer.
The former Warsaw Pact members Hungary, Poland, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Albania, GDR (East Germany) and the Czech Republic/Slovakia are all now in Nato. It is also why Russia keep 2,000 troops in the Moldavian breakaway republic of Transnistria.
Much of its Arctic policy is derived from the same impulse. Russia's submarine-based nuclear second-strike ability is on the Kola Peninsula adjoining Finland. Putin has made it a priority that Russia's economic interests in the Arctic will be protected by its military. Vast untapped reserves of oil and gas have been found, some in waters with overlapping sovereignty claims. Moscow staked its claim on most of the Arctic in 2007 by planting a Russian flag on the seabed at the North Pole. Russia also expects to increase its share of fish in the ocean as warming waters push fish northwards.
Yes, Putin is a bit of a madman, and emphatically yes, the Russians are committing terrible atrocities in this war (as in most of their wars), but just waltzing it up the escalation ladder is silly, at best, and more likely willfully ignorant, when it involves claiming that Nato expansion has nothing to do with any of this.
