By Malcolm Dash Mar 14, 2022
No state should invade another country. It’s morally and ethically unjustifiable. But when descending from mount Olympus, the real world of national interests obscures all virtuous modalities. From time immemorial, powerful nation-states have asserted their hegemony over other states; through military, economic, and territorial expansion.
From the age of the Czars, Russia has exercised its influence over the Baltic nations. However, regarding Ukraine, Russia considers this country and its people as one with Russia. And Ukraine serves as a buffer state for Russia; let’s not overlook that the West invaded Russia many times, the Swedes in the 1700s, Napoleon in the 1800s, the French and British during the 1917 Russian revolution, and the third Reich in WWII. It imprinted these invasions into the collective history of generations of Russians.
From the moment Putin arrived at the Kremlin, he telegraphed to the West that a Ukraine aligned with NATO and the EU is unacceptable. He clarified that with the termination of USSR, elimination of Soviet communism, and the Warsaw pact, that they should disband NATO. Not only did NATO dismiss a quid pro quo, it even expanded the organisation to include eastern European states like Poland and Hungary. For Putin, incorporating Ukraine into NATO is a casus belli for Russia, hence the prevailing conflict.
It was misleading for Zelensky, or he miscalculated when he concluded that America, NATO and Europe would come to his rescue. Why was it not clear to him that a western intervention on behalf of Ukraine risked a nuclear exchange between America and Russia? Thus, they limited their involvement to economic aid, late war material, and heaps of rhetoric?
Ukraine is gallantly defending itself against the Russian bear. As the resistance increases, Russia doubles the number of its divisions, shifts tactics from surgical strikes to indiscriminate shelling, and missile strikes. And to suggest that Putin will cave in under the Draconian sanctions is wishful thinking or simple naivete. It is highly probable that his political leadership and very survival threatened if Russia loses this war.
Within a week, a month, Ukraine will agree to peace talks and Zelensky will cede the Crimea, recognise the Donbas region’s independence and strike the NATO provision from the Ukrainian constitution.
If my prognosis is correct, then why didn’t Zelensky read the same ‘tea leaves’, draw the same conclusions and agree with Russia’s interests? He would have avoided thousands of Ukrainian deaths, 2,600,000 refugees, millions of displaced refugees and billions of dollars of destroyed infrastructure.
Sometimes, negotiated surrender makes more strategic sense than suicidal valour.
No. The expansion of NATO into eastern Europe has always been unacceptable. NATO just thought itself strong enough to ignore it. It did not start when Putin arrived at the Kremlin. Perhaps his arrival, however, was the start of Russia saying, nyet!
Russia does not employ “Indiscriminant shelling” in the same way that Ukraine has done for 8+ years against the civilian population of Donetsk city and other places. Artillery is by it’s nature imprecise, but the Russians do not employ it as a terror tactic, as does Ukraine.
This is becoming the new narrative amongst those who recognize that Ukraine is not going to win, but these parameters are no longer reasonable or acceptable to Russia, because it does address the nazi problem in Ukraine, nor does it prevent Ukraine from re-arming. No, sorry folks. Bigger changes are coming.
Ted and Peloni
Good but we are in most dangerous situation and this is not just a matter of me being unfair.
“You are forever lecturing us neither of who have ever equivocated on this issue.”
We have existing almost totally a crazed fog directed against Russia and China
This has consequences
What can we do?
The people in Ukraine are rendered powerless one of the features of a Fascist state.
But Israel is not powerless, is in contrast and active freedom of speech and could act making a big difference.
But there’s silence on the great conjuncture of Putin and this insolent ICC and Israel as a state and this ICC.
And I still await Ted and Peloni on this. So far silence.
There needs to be a complete unity Jews with Putin on this so everyone sees this and knows this.
Over to you.
All are missing the FACT……go back millions of years……
EVERY conflict YES,EVERY, is the result ot
YOU GOT SOMETHING AND I WANT IT !
Make your own scenario, but my own grandchildren, if only the two
were present here on earth, one would kill the other to OWN IT ALL
so there….nyaa nyaa
Eddie
Would you have written that conclusion about Israel in 1948? or Ireland in 1920 ? For that matter about Britain after Dunkirk? which would have well suited the US and its Lindbergh myopia of the time?
This is the same argument as the contemporaries who cautioned Rabbi Akba for supporting Bar Kochba that, “Grass will grow between your jaws before the Romans leave?” Herod for all his violence towards blinkered religious extremists managed his relations with the Romans more successfully. In his reign the bulk of the population did better and the Romans stayed out of the door – like the USA compared to the Turks and British.
@Felix
You are forever lecturing us neither of who have ever equivocated on this issue.
Galina wrote:
“Sometimes, negotiated surrender makes more strategic sense than suicidal valour.”
Any one can fight if they want. Ukraine mace the wrong choice and will suffer for it.
Your analysis with Israel is way off base.
@Sebastien
Well done! I was aware of many of these invasion forces, but far from all of them.
@Michael
You misunderstood his message. Look at the next par4agraph.
Ber
But when you say Russia may be pulling the trigger
This confuses that it was the Fascists that is Ukraine who started this war
This was the outcome of the Coup of the Maidan February 2014
We have to be crystal clear on this.
All of this is being denied on a worldwide Media basis
The choice facing Russia early 2022
DO NOTHING and watch the genocide
CROSS THE BORDER to halt the genocide
This is why I characterise the Russian Special Military Operation as being in essence a struggle for basic human rights, specifically in this case THE RIGHT TO LIFE against Fascism and Proxies of America and Britain, NATO and EU.
Ted Belman and Peloni1976 – there cannot be and isn’t any room for equivocation.
The person in this situation who seeks equivocation is muddying the water and is assisting the Fascists.
Thereby …Assisting the Fascist Britain and America and Ukrainian Banderaism
So many experts!
Wasn’t just the British and the French in 1917-1921.
It was every country that had fought in WWI on both sides plus newly independent ones.
“…The Czechoslovak Legion was at times in control of most of the Trans-Siberian Railway and all major cities in Siberia. Austro-Hungarian prisoners were of a number of various nationalities;..
“…Foreign forces throughout Russia
The positions of the Allied expeditionary forces and of the White Armies in European Russia, 1919
Numbers of foreign soldiers who were present in the indicated regions of Russia:
1,500 French and British troops originally landed in Arkhangelsk[45]
14,378 British troops in North Russia[46]
1,800 British troops in Siberia[47]
50,000 Romanian troops belonging to the 6th Romanian Corps under General Ioan Istrate, in Bessarabia.[48]:?375–376?[49]:?167–168?
23,351 Greeks, who withdrew after three months (part of I Army Corps under Maj. Gen. Konstantinos Nider, comprising 2nd and 13th Infantry Divisions, in the Crimea, and around Odessa and Kherson)[50]
15,000 French also in the Southern Russia intervention
40,000 British troops in the Caucasus region by January 1919[9]
13,000 Americans (in the Arkhangelsk and Vladivostok regions)[36][37]
11,500 Estonians in northwestern Russia[34]
2,500 Italians in the Arkhangelsk region and Siberia[51]
1,300 Italians in the Murmansk region.[52]
150 Australians (mostly in the Arkhangelsk regions)[53]
950 British troops in Trans-Caspia[8]
70,000+ Japanese soldiers in the Eastern region
4,192 Canadians in Siberia, 600 Canadians in Arkhangelsk[54]
2,300 Chinese troops in Vladivostok[11]…”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allied_intervention_in_the_Russian_Civil_War
“German troops quickly occupied the former tsarist Baltic territories of Ukraine. In the meantime, from late 1917 onwards, anti-Bolshevik agitators began to form a volunteer army that would form the basis of ‘White’ opposition to the newly installed Communist government.”
https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/pathways/firstworldwar/spotlights/allies.htm
Absolutely correct except it presupposes that Zelensky is an independent actor when in fact he is very much beholden to the powers that put him in office and have kept him there. This includes but is not limited to the neo-con Russia haters and war mongers (John McCain, Joe Biden, Barack Obama, George Soros, Victoria Nuland and others) from the US as well as the local oligarchs. Russia may be pulling the trigger but the war is the result of unbridled neo-con arrogance, their desire for world domination in a unipolar Anglo/US world order. Putin has put the kabosh on that. The neocons have innocent blood on their hands but they don’t give a damn.