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Vladophilia
From the head of a think-tank, recent thoughts on Ukraine’s disinclination to be absorbed:
This is not an uncommon view, also expressed the other day by Noam Chomsky: it was unwise for Ukraine to resist invasion. If Russia wants your territory, you assume a supine position while gesturing broadly towards everything that was once yours, and is now theirs to control. If Russia is required to kill your people and level your neighborhoods to get what it believes is theirs, that’s on you.
Freedom is nice and all that I guess, but economic growth is the true metric of a society’s health. Really, those idiots in the tractors, do they care who the boss is? The tech sector of Ukraine – does it matter if they’re making West-facing consumer products, or working for the FSB? What counts is the end-of-the-year balance sheet.
Previously from the same account:
The means by which you add those 44 million are irrelevant. What counts is the world historical accomplishment.
The population of France in 1940 was 41 million, and I suppose absorbing it into the Reich was a world historical accomplishment, but history doesn’t seem to regard it with any particular affection. On the other hand, France did surrender, and while that made things difficult for the eventual defeat of the militaristic statists in Berlin, France was spared additional physical trauma. Except for the Jews, of course, but (bored continental hand-waving gesture)
Another earlier sentiment:
Men of a certain age of Ricochet: did you find a spring in your step after the invasion? Perhaps a sudden urge to make changes, act boldly? Did you feel a strange charge in the older-dude zeitgeist, as though men around the world about to walk over the border of 70 suddenly felt empowered and revivified?
Perhaps, because that Putin guy is a strong leader, and cares for his nation, unlike our guys. Granted, he’s presided over the wholesale transfer of wealth from his people to a select group of elites, and the craptacular state of his military suggests that he was either ignorant of the true state of his capabilities or uninterested in the human cost of shoving his shambolic forces into the meat grinder, and hey maybe the Defender of Christendom shouldn’t have lost a purported piece of the True Cross because his flagship wasn’t refitted because they were broke but the oligarch’s yachts had 5G and Roombas in the master suite. But at least he’s not woke. And it’s ridiculous to think he’s not strong. Just you wait. He’s going to kill a lot of people.
That’s what leaders do.
Published in General
Who’s this “we” and what do you imagine as the means to accomplish it? More to the point, what might be the (dire) unintended consequences of waging a proxy war with Russia under the maladministration of the Biden ministers and advisers or any Obama-Democrat cabinet for that matter?
I feel bad for Ukrainians and I pray a decade of the Rosary for them and for the conversion of Russia. But, I don’t think our involvement is worth WWIII or the second use of nuclear weapons in history. Tragedies happen. I just don’t want to expend material and human resources to contribute to the cause of one.
Ha- I have voted against Biden multiple times- almost certainly more than you have since I was once a Delaware resident. Additionally, a sibling was on the staff of the William Roth. Your attempts at ad hominem are as weak as your claims we provoked Russia.
Don’t care. Russia invaded. Nothing they say, think, or do carries any moral weight with me. The only Russian “considerations” that matter to me are the implications for the US. My chips are all on the Ukraine side except where in conflict with US interests.
Russkie na khui.
Everybody else has to get used to the way things change over time — particularly those who lose wars about it. I’d prefer that the Ukrainians not lose, and the damned Russians adjust. This is consistent with Russia accepting the consequences of losing the Cold War. Poland and Ukraine seem to have made the turn just fine, and Russia the King of Losers just cannot bear it.
Well Screw Russia.
I agree that we are in a cyber warm conflict, while I of course dispute a “direct military” war footing with Russia. That one’s obvious. I take “direct” to mean overt and kinetic. If it’s not overt, it’s not direct, or direct has no meaning.
“We” the civilized world of western democracies acting in unison.
^ King of ad hominems has things to say.
We western democracies can’t throw the sacrificial Ukrainian people at the Putin monster and hope he will be satisfied and not come after us.
We shouldn’t be using them in that manner anyway.
We are not using them-we are meeting their valid requests for assistance – which you would reject.
I think there are moments in history that are turning points with no return. I think Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is one of them. Others would be the American victory in the Revolutionary War, the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in September 2001.
At times like this, events light up the dark corners of human existence. We need good leaders. I very much like the prime minister of Estonia, Kaja Kallas (introduced to me by fellow Ricochet member Manny). In this March 11 interview, she reminds the interviewer that she was born in the Soviet Union and she knows what it’s like to live under government oppression.
I’d add… The 2020 election, the withdrawal from Afghanistan, the 2016 election. Covid 19 hysteria…
Turning points are coming up fast!
We won’t ever get good leaders until our despicable corporate press and networks are purged of most or all of their nefarious operatives and perverse incentives.
And the corporate press and networks have been infiltrated by our intelligence agencies, so purging them is going to be difficult.
Basically, it’s all Pravda on the Potomac now. Alternative media is samizdat, and our intelligence agencies are trying to wipe out all disagreement or get it tagged as “disinformation.”
It’s a cult. Don’t join cults. Don’t argue with a cultist.
I’m beginning to see how they got you to pay for two decades of Afghan occupation and nation building.
WW3 already happened. It was called the Cold War and we won.
We are debating WWIV.
That is ok, since you pay for concentration camps. Who knows how long that will last.
Russian state controlled media is already talking about war against “Europe and the world- -their will be no mercy” clearly talks about civilians as targets and frankly states Russia will have to act “more harshly”- ie commit more war crimes.
If you think this is only about Ukraine, you are gravely mistaken:
It’s always ‘interesting’ to interact with people who are convinced they know more (long distance) about your country than you do. Must be some addictive alternative facts which convince people that (just for eg) they know better than Claire Berlinski re no go zones in Paris even if they’ve never been and she lives there. I want what he’s on please.
Carl Bildt (a former Prime Minister of Sweden) is really good on some of these east European topics involving Ukraine. I watched all 40 minutes of this video:
Synopsis please?
Thank you for agreeing with my warnings. Maybe you neocons could stop escalating.
I don’t know that I’d call it a synopsis, but here are some points I jotted down while rewatching the video.
Bildt begins his lecture with Vladimir the Great and his baptism in 988. This Vladimir had nothing to do with Russia (a point I’ve learned about in other sources, too) though Putin invokes his name when speaking of the source of everything Russian. [This is in part why some Ukrainians say, “Russia stole our history.”]
Bildt then quickly skips over a lot of history and then goes to the breakup of the Soviet Union, of which the breakup with Ukraine was the key feature.
Ukraine has internal differences between east and west, which is not so different from other countries such as Norway and Germany, which also have internal regional differences, but despite these differences, in the 1991 referendum even in Crimea there was overwhelming support for independence from the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union lasted only two weeks longer after the independence agreement was reached.
But breaking up is difficult. Even today (2018) Russia has difficulty managing without some of the “high tech” products that have long been produced in Ukraine — shipbuilding, gas turbine engines for aircraft. The gas issue continues to be the most difficult.
Victor Yankovich started out as a small-scale criminal in Donetsk. (“You have to start somewhere in politics.”) There was an ongoing battle between the charismatic Yulia Tymoshenko (who has an “unrivaled talent” for populism) and Yankovich. Yankovich lost the 2004 election (at the time of the Orange Revolution) despite support from Putin.
In 2009 there was a gas contract in which Bildt himself had to be involved. Yankovich returned as president in 2010. There were at this time talks about an association between Ukraine and the European Union. There was support for this from ex-Soviet gas industry leaders, who were concerned with business, not ideology. Yankovich (“one of the most corrupt creatures that has been seen on the European continent”) initially went along with this move toward the west, but also had some of his own private empire-building issues. This made for great disarray in Ukraine.
In 2012 Putin returned as President, and his Eurasian union project that he now embarked on wouldn’t have amounted to much without Ukraine. Since 2013 the thrust of Putin’s policies has been to bring Ukraine back into the Russian fold in some form. Yankovich’s problems made him easy prey for Putin’s plan. He identified the 2009 gas agreement as the main enemy to his survival. He had already in 2011 arrested Tymoshenko for the gas agreement. (Bildt describes how he had to spend many hours listening to Yankovich rant about the evils of Tymoshenko and the gas agreement.) Putin was also turning the screws at this time to get Ukraine to do away with any European agreement. He was offering some help for Ukraine’s financial problems, but the price was extremely high, including an abandonment of the agreement with EU. Yankovich was in a desperate struggle for survival, and Maidan followed. Bildt describes saying goodbye to Yankovich as he was heading back to Kiev from Vilnius to deal with it, saying you could see that Yankovich was “dead scared” because he knew things were going to be different.
The conflict led to the collapse of Yankovich’s government. Putin started to panic, and started the sequence of events that led to the takeover of Crimea. There were some Ukrainians who aided Putin in this effort. Putin’s success at that takeover led him to go further and initiate a takeover of southern Ukraine (under the name “New Russia”) and reduce the rest of Ukraine to a “Greater Galicia” or something like that. “That did not happen, because Ukraine miraculously bounced back.” It held elections, which Poroshenko won with support from every region. Ukraine started a “highly incompetent” operation to retake territory. But even this was on the verge of complete success, so Putin escalated and sent in the regular army. Ukraine was not able to resist that, and that is where the situation between Russia and the west is “stuck today” (in 2018).
Ukraine could have collapsed in 2014, but has made an impressive comeback. Ukraine has done away with a lot of the massive corruption involving gas subsidies, though there is still much to be done. “When the history books are written, Mr. Putin’s greatest achievement might be that he lost Ukraine.”
That takes me only about 3/4 of the way through the talk, but I’ll stop there.
No comment regarding claims of concentration camps in… Australia, I assume?… about which I’ve paid no attention.
But it’s amusing to mention Claire Berlinski as a counter-example of a detached observer, given that she writes about the United States from abroad. I don’t know what she says about Zones Urbaines Sensibles, but I’m confident they exist, despite efforts to euphemistically define them away.
Claire, incidentally, is right about the Democratic Party, in my opinion, to the extent that she thinks it should return to something like traditional liberalism and not the whack-a-mole nuttiness that defines today’s progressives. But she’s become a part — albeit an urbane and sophisticated part — of that nuttiness herself.
No, your views effectively require surrender in order to appease Putin- but since even that would not suffice in his eyes we would still face having to oppose him-but from a more vulnerable position.
You haven’t a [redacted] clue about my views, and I’ll thank you to shut the [redacted] up. Continuning to call me a Putin-lover, Putin-appeaser, or any other synonym will get you flagged for harassment.
While you’re at it, don’t forget to flag people who call others neocons.
What can one say?
Obviously they exist Henry. The French Govt. defines them. Whether they are ‘no go zones where sharia rules and whitewomen dare not go unarmed’ is another matter.
You think people with an agenda are incapable of distorting or even outright lying when it suits them? If Claire Berlinski told me that the sky above Paris is also blue, I’d want independent verification.
Also, you should get your message to Claire who continues to claim expertise about the US when she hasn’t lived here for years.
Actually, I don’t agree with Instugator but I also don’t believe that he’s being manipulative or dishonest. We just disagree.
And what if you didn’t like what that independent verification told you? Debunking no go zones in Paris is not just a Claire thing, the whole French press got in on it when Pipes piped.