The Russians, NATO. and Ukraine

Yes they are part of NATO. But do we really think that Putin will stop at Ukraine, if he takes the whole of it relatively quickly, and there is not a sizeable ongoing insurrection there? This is like the Rhineland then Sudetenland occupations in the late 30's - every new action that was not opposed by the democratic powers emboldened Hitler, and during that time his army went from being powerful but not able to confront GB and France head on, to being able to take on basically the whole world for 5 years. 

Hit hard, and hit early, is the lesson from history. Appeasing a lying dictator got us exactly the same this time, as in 1936-9. We should in my view be prepared to use cruise missiles and stand-off airpower, even enforce a no fly zone over Ukraine, right now to tackle Russian forces inside Ukraine only. We could even do so and completely deny it. See how Putin takes his own medicine! Because if Ukraine is rolled over relatively easily without big losses, and there is no messy ongoing occupation costing serious numbers of Russian lives (only a lot of body bags going home will start to make the Russian people realise the scale of what they have got themselves into) then this will seem all too easy. And Geogia and other countries will follow (as will Taiwan for China as people have said). And by the time it gets to NATO countries, Russia will be vastly more powerful and war-ready than they are now. 

It doesn't have to mean WW3 any more than Russian support for Vietnam meant, it may well prevent a slow slide into WW3 which is what I fear may now happen. 

You know there’s issues when the ECB says this:






And whilst there have been comparisons with pre-WW2 Europe for various reasons, there’s another inter-war phenomenon to consider.

It's genuinely a shocking situation. Barbaric is not too strong a word.

I'm not sure what can be done to rectify it. The outside world cannot force the Ukrainians to surrender and yet the thought of being drawn into war with a man who seems indifferent to the human cost of his actions is rightly giving many pause for thought.

In fact the only potential tidy(ish) ways out seem to me to be that either there is a putsch in the Kremlin (which currently seems unlikely but can never be fully discounted - after all, this is Putin's war, not Russia's war) or China calculates that its interests are better served by openly siding against Putin, at which point he might be persuaded to compromise (and there are conspiracy theories (which I am not condoning) out there that hold that China may even have egged Putin on, on the grounds that it could suit China very well to see its three main global competitors mired in a costly, toxic and damaging conflict). Neither of those is in the West's control.

I am regrettably sure we are about to see some truly appalling events in the meantime. Possibly including some of the smaller scale nuclear warheads that Russia possesses, which do relatively limited damage (albeit only by comparison to the popular notion of the vast devastation wrought by an atomic bomb) and are designed to up the pressure in the "I'll go full nuclear tonto if I don't get my way" stakes.

Trouble we have is that Putin now has no way back. If he backs down he's already done enough that he will never again be able to leave Russia to visit another land without facing arrest. And backing down will be the ultimate show of weakness that will prove that Western sanctions are stronger than the Russian economy. Thus his only option is to try and win the war against Ukraine and put an end to the crisis by pummelling the Ukrainian government into submission. And as we in the west can see everything he's doing he's probably planning on telling us to lift sanctions or we'll be next.

I wouldn’t compare him with either. Bush had the larger support of his electorate and Hitler was fairly popular at home as well. Not to say Putin is not popular but not to the same extent. He is more like the Soviet leaders of old that preferred isolationism and control over international trade and affairs. I did read that some of those soviet-era-mindset Russians are fine with a total loss nuclear war as if the west destroyed Russia the rest of the world wouldn’t be worth living in without Russia so they can all die too.

Just discussing with W2.1 and she expounded the theory that because of the expectation of swift wins the arriving invaders were not fuelled or rationed to withstand a long initial foray. So a drawn out attritional war has commenced, to extend the 8 years of a scenario in the east akin to what we called “the troubles” in the ‘70s and ‘80s.

Aside from the physical operational readiness there’s one other issue: these boys in the convoys weren’t psychologically prepared for what’s been encountered. This is a Slav v Slav battle, albeit Rusyn and Ukrainian are different tribes of old. They see the lives and homes of babkas and dedos like their own grandparents’ destroyed they start to question it.

I don’t think there are many voices saying “this is the West’s fault”. There are people (myself included) that say it’s more nuanced than ‘Putin bad, West good’. My reason for advancing that argument is that I’d like to see a resolution before tens of thousands of Ukraine civilians are slaughtered and the lives of thousands of young Russian soldiers are snuffed out. There is no chance of getting to a resolution if you believe the other party is an evil bastard with no legitimate viewpoint. Just like any negotiation, empathy is the key. The NATO thing might be a red herring, but it’s worth exploring and it might enable Putin to save face and withdraw .

My bet it that if this doesn’t end with the destruction of civilisation than the likely outcome is a NATO free buffer zone around Russia. It would be better to get there without the unimaginable horror of a war that destroys the lives of countless innocent families.

Not one of the countries that Putin sees as creating that buffer wants to be part of Russia’s buffer and no other country in the world (all of which are smaller) feels the need to create a buffer. And what Putin means by buffer is really “vassal states”.

I am not convinced that the EU is doing all the right things here but I am equally not sure that replicating Eisenhower’s decision to abandon Hungary to the Soviets in the 1950s is the right course of action either.

Mine was not necessarily an attack on anyone in particular. I just note on the left a tendency to a worldview that likes to blame America / NATO and still hasn’t fully accepted that Kremlin aren’t the comrades of the USSR anymore. And then on the right a tendency to blame the EU / Soros, and in many countries a past record of stuffing its pockets with Russian cash (Tories, Le Pen, Salvini etc). All of that is unhelpful friendly fire in my view.

Agree completely. 

Yep. MSF all the way.

This makes the assumption that the US runs NATO, which it doesn’t. Asking the POTUS to give an assurance from NATO highlights the mentality of Russia feeling that Europe is overrun and guided by the US, which is an historical view based on the occupied post war years. It also ignores the fact that a lot of US culture, values and population is essentially European (which is where the bond comes from) and the fact that European industries are as rife in US territories as the US ones are in Europe so there’s less domination. Putin also wants to undermine the European trading and security bloc on his doorstep by still prattling on about the power of the US as opposed to the EU.

Frankly. Shirley, they are all muppets.

I get all of that. Doesn't take away from the fact that Putin considers the issue so important that he raised it with Biden in one of their few conversations