Boris Johnson is the man to resolve this crisis, he won’t give an inch to Putin unlike sleepy joe
1 Like
If the Germans didn’t have the security of US troops nearby to keep the naughty Russians away.
NATO is the aggressor here
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/how-a-country-joins-nato-and-why-putin-cares/2022/01/12/037fadd2-73dc-11ec-a26d-1c21c16b1c93_story.html
How much do you know about the Korean War?
He watched MASH a few times
1 Like
Loads.
I’d say I’ve seen two episodes in my life. Well before my time mate
Was China Beach set in Korea or Vietnam?
Unreal the way the covid experts are now experts on the affairs off Russia and the Ukraine.
We are blessed on tfk.
1 Like
When Putin stops behaving like Hitler would be a good time to ask that question.
Professor Snyder is generally very cogent in his thinking but his last paragraph here seems overly optimistic.
I don’t see a diplomatic way out of this that doesn’t throw Ukraine under the bus. Russia is not any sort of honest broker, no more than Hitler was at Munich. And Ukraine was already thrown under the bus eight years ago.
I keep being asked whether Russia will invade Ukraine again. I don’t know. The last time Russia attacked Ukraine, in 2014, I made the correct prediction against the prevailing wisdom. This time we are all aware that Russia might invade Ukraine: after all, it happened once already, not so very long ago, and Russia has more than a hundred thousand troops at the border in addition to the ones stationed in the parts of Ukraine that it already occupies. But I am not sure what will happen next. I am not sure that the Kremlin knows what will happen next. Indeed, I am not sure that there is agreement among Russian elites as to what should happen next.
An invasion of Ukraine would be a horror for Ukrainians, who have done nothing to provoke it. Ukraine has about fourteen thousand war dead and about two million internal refugees from the last Russian invasion, and the suffering this time would be much worse. The forces that Russia has deployed are capable of a terrifying level of destruction. But invading Ukraine would also be an incredibly stupid move by Russia, and more than a few Russians are aware of this. It would probably feel a lot like the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979: seemingly successful at first, then system-destroying after a few years.
But what it is all about? Why now, and why Ukraine? In 2014, the Russian invasion of Ukraine was part of a larger offensive against democracy in Europe and the United States. Russia was able to drive its own political memes through western media, and even create doubt about its own offensive operations as they were underway. Russia’s propaganda victory in Ukraine in 2014 spurred it on to cyberwarfare against members of the European Union and the United States. This time around, Russian propaganda has been much less effective. It seems clunky and dull.
Putin’s threat to invade Ukraine is clearly linked to Europe and the United States, but this time perhaps in a different way. Rather than invading without warning, Russia has ostentatiously prepared for an invasion, and then warned the West that whatever happens is all their fault. Russia has elbowed the Europeans aside, insisting on speaking directly with the Americans. This has brought Ukraine (yet again) to American domestic politics, in a configuration that is awkward for President Biden. Perhaps that is the point. Moscow prefers a Trump administration to a Biden administration. Trump has said that he would withdraw the United States from NATO in a second term. Anything that weakens Biden might then be regarded as in the Russian interest, or rather in the interest of the Putin regime.
But is it all strategic? Last July, President Putin published a strange missive about Ukraine and Russia and their historical relationship. It present the kind of argument that makes historians wince. The basic idea is that a thousand years ago there was a country called Rus, the most important city in Rus was Kyiv, and now a thousand years later Kyiv is the capital of Ukraine, and therefore Ukraine cannot be a real country, and everyone involved and their descendants must be Russians or a brotherly nation to Russians. A historian confronted with this sort of mess is in the same unhappy situation as a zoologist in a slaughterhouse. You do have expertise, and feel you have to say something, and so: oh yes, that is clearly a femur, and that cartilage was probably from a snout, and that there is a bit of liver; but this isn’t your job, and you wish profoundly that you were somewhere else. So I could say: Rus’ was founded by Vikings, Moscow did not exist at the time, Kyiv was not ruled from Moscow until late in its history, the story of the brotherly nations is recent, as for that matter is national identity in the modern sense. But you can’t really engage in historical argument with people who are set on believing a myth, let alone with presidents who believe that the past is just there to confirm their present prejudices.
What is most striking about Putin’s essay is the underlying uncertainty about Russian identity. When you claim that your neighbors are your brothers you are having an identity crisis. There is a nice German saying about this: “Und willst Du nicht mein Bruder sein, so schlag’ ich Dir den Schädel ein”: if you won’t be my brother, I’ll beat your skull in. That is Putin’s posture. In his essay, what Russia lacks is a future, and the nation is much more about the future than it is about the past.
Kyiv, Ukraine
Nationality is about the way that people in the present think about the what is to come. If Ukrainians regard themselves as a national community with a future together in a state, then the issue is settled. Historically speaking, the idea that a dictator in another country decides who is a nation and who is not is known as imperialism.
The fact that Putin misunderstands the world does not mean, however, that he cannot change it. It seems possible that he actually believes what he wrote. There are people in the Kremlin and in the Russian armed forces who know perfectly well that Putin’s view of Ukraine does not conform to reality. If it did so, Ukrainians would have welcomed Russia’s last invasion. The official view is that they did, but there are plenty of Russians who know better. And there are even more Russians who do not care one way or the other, but do not share the extreme view of the issue expressed by their president.
The fact that all Russian representatives have to act as though Putin’s essay were true creates a problem for American and European negotiators. Putin assigns the West responsibility for something that Russia did, which is to push Ukrainian public opinion towards NATO. In Putin’s essay, the claim is that Ukrainians belong to a larger community with Russia, but have been misled by Western perfidy. Now, there is always plenty of perfidy to go around, and reasonable people can disagree about whether Ukraine should be invited to join NATO. But the simple fact is that Ukraine’s present western orientation is a result of the last Russian invasion. So the Americans are in an impossible situation. It is America’s fault, supposedly, that Ukrainians have turned away from their natural Russian destiny. If Americans point out that Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014, and that this stands behind the unpopularity of Russia in Ukraine and Ukrainian desires for security guarantees, they meet obstinate denial and brute hostility. Putin’s official ideology is enraged by the basic facts.
When Russia invaded Ukraine the last time, it demonstrated an astonishing ability to win the headlines. Russian forces were less capable of moving the front lines. The Crimean Peninsula, where Russia already had naval bases, was quickly occupied by regular Russian forces without insignia. Elsewhere, relying on local and Russian irregulars and on units of the Russian army sent from far afield, Moscow managed to control much less territory than it expected. The war was cruel with extensive shelling from the Russian side of the border, and the use of Russian anti-aircraft to bring down Ukrainian transport planes (not to mention a civilian airliner, MH17). But the basic Russian strategy of simulating rebellions against the Ukrainian government failed in most places it was tried. Russia now occupies parts of two southeastern Ukrainian districts, Luhans’k and Donets’k under the cover of fake “republics.”
This time the forces engaged would be more numerous and better trained. The Russian army is in better shape now than it was in 2014. On the other hand, so is the Ukrainian army. In 2014 Ukraine was in the midst of a revolution, and singularly incapable of defending itself. It is not now in any position to match Russia, but it would be capable of inflicting much greater damage than eight years ago. There is not at present a patriotic euphoria in Russia about invading Ukraine again. Although Russian leaders like to vaunt their toughness, they are almost as sensitive to casualties as American leaders might be. In 2014, the courageous Russian reporters who wrote about Russians killed in action were all silenced. Russian civil society is under stricter control now than in 2014, and it would be a brave and skillful Russian reporter who managed to report on this war. But it will still likely be hard to suppress news of Russian casualties.
The Russian propaganda that worked the last time around was directed against Ukraine, which was portrayed as reactionary or homosexual, nationalist or cosmopolitan, depending upon the target audience. This time, it is more as though we are meant not to think about Ukraine at all, and remain fixed on the geopolitics. The Russian line that America is to blame for suggests that Ukraine is not really sovereign and its people’s experiences of war do not really matter. It also distracts us from what Ukrainian policy has actually been.
One of the first actions of independent Ukraine was nuclear disarmament. Ukraine was once the third-greatest nuclear power in the world, at least according to the number of weapons on its territory. It gave up its nuclear weapons in 1994 in exchange for security assurances from the United Kingdom, the United States – and Russia. Russia’s past and threatened invasions of Ukraine harm the global cause of nuclear non-proliferation, because they seem to indicate that countries that give up nuclear weapons get attacked by their neighbors. Under the current presidential administration, Ukraine has been conciliatory to Russia. Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelens’kyi, was elected in 2019 by a weary society on a platform of bringing the war to an end. His gestures of reconciliation to Putin have now been met with Russia’s threat of an escalated war. This is perhaps one reason why Russian propaganda focuses on the West and on the United States. If we pause to think about Ukraine as a country, we immediately ask: just why should those people be invaded? Again?
Unlike Russia, Ukraine is a democracy. Unlike Putin, Zelens’kyi came to office in a credible election where opposing candidates (one of them was the sitting president) had access to media and were able to compete. (That is a fundamental difference between Ukraine and Russia: in Ukraine, presidents have lost elections and left office. That has not yet happened in Russia.) One of the central elements of Russia’s traditional attacks on Ukraine has been that “Russian speakers” in Ukraine are subject to oppression. This is conceptually misleading, in that most Ukrainians are bilingual in Ukrainian and Russian to one degree or another, and in that language does not determine identity (if it did, I’d be English). But insofar as it is reasonable to talk about “Russian speakers” in Ukraine, the Ukrainian president himself is certainly one of them. Zelens’kyi is from eastern Ukraine, and his dominant language is Russian. So a “Russian speaker” in Ukraine can be elected president. Indeed, “Russian speakers” in Ukraine are far more free in Ukraine in this respect than are “Russian speakers” in Russia. In Russia, there is no democracy for anyone.
Another line of Russian propaganda has been that Ukraine is uninhabitable for Jews. Zelens’kyi is Jewish. Incidentally, the prime minister when Zelens’kyi took office was also Jewish. For several months in 2019, Ukraine was the only country (beyond Israel) to have a Jewish head of state and a Jewish head of government. In Putin’s essay, and more directly in a more recent article by his onetime political partner Dmitri Medvedev, this state of affairs is presented as evidence of Ukraine’s lack of sovereignty and dependence on the West. Medvedev’s language crossed into antisemitic territory.
So what to do? Negotiations seem both necessary and difficult. The Ukrainians should obviously be included. The practice of excluding the country concerned from discussions of its future has a poor pedigree. America is not actually responsible for everything, so it cannot deliver what Russians seem to want, which is an alternative reality where Russia had not alienated its neighbor by invading it; or perhaps an alternative reality in which the Soviet Union had never fallen apart, or one where the old Soviet empire was held together by admiration for Russia. These are dreams that no one can make true. In a clear sign of the awkwardness of the Russian position, Moscow tabled two draft treaties and asked that they be signed as they stand; in them, Americans are asked to accept provisions that the Kremlin must surely know are unacceptable and to sign away the sovereignty of other countries, especially Ukraine.
What seems worth trying are negotiations on a broader basis, not limited to Russia’s specific claims or ambitions, but accepting the basic premise that something is wrong in the European security system. Just what that might be will of course look different in different capitals, from Kyiv for instance, but that is what negotiation is all about. One thing that America and Russia do have in common is that their diplomats have been downgraded in recent years. Perhaps they should be given something serious to work on, something that might make some real history.
1 Like
Gerhard Schroder is some fucking cunt.
Germany’s despondent foreign policy
The SPD has a Russia problem
A comment by Mathieu von Rohr , head of the SPIEGEL foreign department
Russian President Putin wants to shift the balance of power in Europe – and is threatening war. The federal government does not find a clear answer to this. This is mainly due to the party of Chancellor Olaf Scholz.
01/18/2022, 06:29 am
The danger of a war of aggression in Europe is real, but the German government does not yet seem to understand it. Or how else to explain that she seems strangely paralyzed when dealing with Russia ?
Germany , as the most important EU country , would now play a key role in this: Russia is threatening war against Ukraine . Chancellor Olaf Scholz speaks vaguely of “consequences” in this case, but does not name them. The reason is obvious: the traffic light coalition does not agree at all as to which punitive measures are possible. This is a catastrophe in this serious situation.
Moscow’s behavior is warlike: satellite images and videos show Russian troops deploying near the Ukrainian border, units have been moved west from distant parts of the country. More than 100,000 men are stationed there, tanks, heavy artillery. Russia has not only issued an ultimatum to the Americans and Europeans that Ukraine should never become a NATO member, but also a revision of the entire European security system of the past 25 years because it allegedly feels encircled by NATO.
Russia demands the withdrawal of all NATO troops from the member countries in Eastern Europe and a guarantee that the neighboring Scandinavian states of Finland and Sweden will never join the alliance . Talks between the United States and Russia took place in Geneva last week , but after that Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov initially didn’t want to continue because the Americans and NATO didn’t want to meet Moscow’s catalog of maximum demands.
Despite this alarming global political crisis, the German government is surprisingly cautious. Chancellor Scholz is notable for his taciturnity and formality. The government emphasizes that it will react together with the EU and NATO if Russia attacks. But she cannot even promise that she would stop the Nord Stream 2 Baltic Sea pipeline in this case. This pipeline has already been highly controversial politically, as it is intended to transport gas from Russia directly to Germany, bypassing Poland and Ukraine. The German government apparently still thinks it is conceivable that gas will flow through them - even if Russia attacks Ukraine. So what is all the talk of consequences worth, then?
In German politics, all sorts of people aren’t talking about what they want to do in the event of a Russian attack, but about what they don’t want to do under any circumstances. This applies not only to politicians from the government camp, but also to the designated CDU leader Friedrich Merz : At the weekend he ruled out that Russia could be thrown out of the global payment system Swift - one of the most painful sanctions that was discussed at times: Russian banks and companies would be effectively excluded from international payment transactions. This builds trust rather than pressure in Russia: you can rely on Berlin’s inaction.
Moscow can only feel encouraged in its actions, as weak and divided as Germany looks right now. Prominent trivializers of the warlike approach can even be found within the governing coalition.
The biggest handicap for Germany’s foreign policy at the moment is the chancellor party SPD . This crisis shows that large parts of the party are caught up in a nostalgia for dealing with Moscow that is actually more familiar from the Left Party. There, the glorification of authoritarian regimes is the order of the day: the USA is bad, Russia is not so bad.
It is frightening how much denial of reality in relation to Russia can be heard from the Chancellor’s party at the moment. At the weekend, the SPD member of the Bundestag, Ralf Stegner , delivered a best-of of this mentality on Twitter : He lamented a “disturbing tone” in German comments on Russia and recognized “verbal saber-rattling”. It was commented on in the “Cold War tone” and “unilaterally promoted rearmament and spiraling sanctions where diplomacy and detente were urgently needed”.
It is grotesque: For Stegner, the demands for a credible deterrent against Russia and support for Ukraine are “saber rattling”. He completely ignores the real saber-rattling of Moscow. As a reminder, Russia is standing on the Ukrainian border with an entire army and is unilaterally threatening war.
Of course, Stegner’s tweets also included the phrase “Ostpolitik”: For many in the SPD, it’s a kind of magic word for everything that has anything to do with Russia. But Willy Brandt’s policy of “change through rapprochement” in the 1970s took place in the completely different historical situation of the Cold War; At that time it was about a policy of detente between two rigid blocs, not about an adversary who wanted to achieve a shift in borders and spheres of influence with the concrete threat of war. Incidentally, not about someone who openly carries out murder and poisoning attacks against political opponents in Western Europe. When someone in the SPD calls for “Ostpolitik” today, they are primarily warming the soul of the party and want to show a vague understanding of Russia.
Ralf Stegner is not a particularly important figure in the SPD. But he is the symptom of this party. And he is by far not the only SPD politician who shows a problematic connection to reality in this crisis. Faction leader Rolf Mützenich gives one interview after the other in which he shows a lot of understanding for Russian feelings of a threat and very little understanding for the feelings of a threat felt by our Eastern European neighbors. In December he called for an end to the “mutual threats” in the Ukraine crisis. But when or what did Ukraine threaten Russia with?
Of course, the Russian point of view must also be acknowledged – but not especially when Russia is holding a pistol to a neighboring country’s temple.
SPD General Secretary Kevin Kühnert even declared that potential international conflicts should “not be talked about”, which, given the facts, can only be described as a boycott of reality. Kühnert claimed that this was how projects were to be buried “that have always been a thorn in one’s side.” He meant Nord Stream 2, the pipeline that the green coalition partner has been rejecting for years. One should not mix up the debates about Nord Stream 2 and Russian policy towards Ukraine, said Kühnert.
“Part of the problem is that Gerhard Schröder, a Russian-paid lobbyist, is often still treated like a normal former chancellor and elder statesman.”
You could just as well say that you shouldn’t confuse the needs of the German export industry with a war of aggression in Ukraine. But since Europeans have good reasons not to go to war themselves, economic sanctions are the most powerful tool at their disposal.
It is difficult to understand why so many in the SPD want to exclude this pipeline project from possible sanctions, with which Germany has isolated itself within the Western alliance for years.
Does it have something to do with the fact that the history of the pipeline’s origins is closely linked to the SPD, above all to ex-Chancellor Gerhard Schröder ? He had agreed on the first Nord Stream pipeline with Vladimir Putin shortly before he was voted out, in order to become chairman of the supervisory board of the operating company immediately afterwards – he is now also chairman of the supervisory board of the Russian oil company Rosneft . It is part of the problem that Schröder is treated like a normal former chancellor and elder statesman by many in his party and in Germany. He is 100 percent a lobbyist paid for by Russia.
Manuela Schwesig , Prime Minister of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania , is a particularly good example of how problematic the relationship between parts of the SPD and Russia is . She insisted on setting up a so-called environmental foundation with Russian money to complete Nord Stream 2 in order to circumvent American sanctions and even finish the pipeline with her own ship. Otherwise, right-wing populist parties in Europe are often financed with Russian money - and now it’s going into the foundation of an SPD-led state government.
Fortunately, there are notable exceptions in the party. One of them is Michael Roth, the chairman of the foreign affairs committee in the Bundestag , who spoke out in the SPIEGEL in favor of using Nord Stream 2 as a means of pressure and demanded “defensiveness” against Russia. He, too, cannot do without the term »Ostpolitik«, but he defines it in a pleasantly different way than most in his party: According to Roth, a »new European Ostpolitik« should also take into account »the security interests of our Central Eastern European partners« – they come into the considerations of many Russia - Hardly understand: you like to talk about the “neighbor” Russia, as if Poland, Ukraine or the Baltic States didn’t even exist.
During the election campaign, Chancellor Olaf Scholz claimed that anyone who orders leadership from him will get it. In view of the confusion and the voices of appeasement in his party, he should now express himself in clear words to Moscow. Scholz is not one of the outspoken Russia friends in his party, but he too keeps repeating the untruth that the Nord Stream 2 pipeline is a “purely private-sector project”. The fact that he seriously denies the political dimension of the project is actually below Scholz’ level.
Putin himself made it clear in the autumn that the pipeline is a means of pressure for him: he threatened to deliver more gas to Western Europe only if Nord Stream 2 were opened. The neighboring countries in Eastern Europe have always seen the tube as a geopolitical project, as has the USA, even though the Biden government has done a great deal to avert further congressional sanctions against Germany. The German fussing about these days is therefore another blow for the allies: Representatives of the US government are making great efforts to publicly emphasize their unity with Germany. But the fact that the federal government still does not want to say whether Nord Stream 2 could become part of a sanctions package is something that is happening in Washington stunned many who are actually well-disposed towards Germany.
“As long as Germany hesitates like this, Europe will remain weak.”
The only one who has positioned herself more clearly in the federal government is Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock . The Greens have clearly opposed Russian hegemonic efforts in the past, as have large parts of the FDP . The two smaller coalition partners have a more realistic stance on Russia than the SPD; this gives reason to hope that the government might eventually adopt robust measures.
The fact that the Foreign Minister made a stopover in Ukraine before her meeting with Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov was an important gesture. Since the beginning of the new Russian crisis, however, the Federal Chancellery has claimed leadership in foreign policy, and it is literally slowing Baerbock down.
It would now be up to Chancellor Scholz to counter the nostalgic currents in his party for Russia and to clearly commit to possible punitive measures. Of course, these would also have to include Nord Stream 2. As long as Germany is so reluctant to clearly show Moscow the possible consequences, Europe will remain weak. When it comes to the future of Europe, its security system and Russia’s future influence on the continent, you can be a little more active.
It’s no longer just about Ukraine, which Russia sees as part of its historic territory. For Vladimir Putin, it’s not just about averting danger, but also about restoring power and influence in Europe - with the only means he has: the military. It is true that his country’s economic output is only twice as large as that of Switzerland - with seventeen times as many inhabitants.
But Russia’s military has shown in recent years from Georgia to Syria and Crimea that it is capable of waging war effectively. It cannot be ruled out that Ukraine will be followed by other places of conflict: Russian representatives are already making indirect threats against other states as well - Mikhail Ulyanov, permanent representative of Russia to the international organizations in Vienna , claimed that the NATO membership of the Baltic states is destabilizing the immediate vicinity . Most recently, the non-NATO state Sweden sent additional troops to the Baltic Sea island of Gotland because Russia had stepped up its activities in the region.
The federal government must respond to this threat. It should also reconsider its resistance to arms deliveries to Ukraine - it is incomprehensible that Germany refuses this support to this partner country in dire need. Of course, in view of the new Russian threat, Germany and Europe must also decide on their own military deterrence.
Above all, the SPD should now undergo a reality check: In parts of the left, the word “warmonger” is still a popular vocabulary to discredit anyone who calls for an economic, military and political strategy in the face of Russia’s destabilizing and warlike intentions. Nothing Russia does in these circles is ever half as bad as what the US or Europe do to keep them safe.
But there can be no doubt these days who the real warmonger and war leader is. The Federal Government and especially the SPD Chancellor’s Party should not only urgently recognize this, they should also act accordingly.
2 Likes
if Germany does that we should park our Co2 commitments.
Germany stalling cheaper gas for us.
NordStream 2 will not increase the amount of gas pumped to Europe. It is a geo-political play to harm Ukraine. If Germany and Europe have any gumption at all about them it should lie there unused and rusting at the bottom of the Baltic Sea.
And me and you will continue to suffer higher energy costs
What price do you put on freedom and democracy?
If these two go to war it’ll sky rocket oil prices won’t it?
The blockhead alcoholics just love aggression.
The Germans will freeze to death if these two go to war
Hopefully they are the only sky rockets.
Be a shame to beat Covid and face nuclear fallout