Joes said:
I see. So the offensive did actually happen, I hadn't heard one way or another.
It's bizarre, I'm a lifelong history nut and in particular miliary history. I could tell you about every detail of the eastern front of WW2 for example down to many specific units off the top of my head, and I even spent two weeks in September 2018 in Russia on a river cruise from Moscow to St Peterburg (crewed by Ukrainians). We were the first Americans to ever make that trip. So I feel both a personal and abstract connection to that area.
And yet I can't even bring myself to invest any time keeping up with this. I know FAR more about the fighting in these exact spaces 80 years ago than I know about this. And the lack of any meaningful change I guess is part of that. Plus, I guess I'm just jaded about how our country is going and don't care much what our strategic interests are any more, if there even are any there.
But thanks for the update.
Great post. There are lots of folks both on here and in your daily lives that have paid zero attention to history, much less have an interest in studying it, learning from it, and in particularly as it pertains to the last couple hundred years of stronger countries deciding rather haphazardly (and in their own interests) which "sovereign countries" could exist, what they are to be called, whom they will house and where their borders are drawn.
Looking at Poland in the late 1700's gives good insight to this when Russia and friends carved it up in several iterations. Further done so following WWII, then Nazi Germany took a turn, then the Russians rand it until the end of the Soviet Union (or really just before).
The Pols are an independent and proud people like the Ukes, but have a similar history of either hitching itself to another's teats or by being essentially managed by a bigger country / organization.
