According to The Duran it was the Ukrainians who first moved men and materiel to the ‘contact zone’, in March. Putin’s build up has been in response to this.
The US and NATO etc will do nothing. Apparently the two US ships have already turned around, although the British for some reason are – absurdly – sending a destroyer to the Black Sea. This destroyer should, of course, be in the English Channel, turning back migrants in dinghies.
Further, owing to Nordstream 2 there is now little or no money in Ukraine for the Biden family to get their hands on. And, as even Macron admitted, NATO is ‘brain dead’, along with more or less every other western government and entity.
You are absolutely correct. Whilst H.MS. Dogsbody is swanning around the Black Sea, Sinbad & Co are gathering on the French beaches, preparing for the annual migration.
‘My’ spies tell me you cannot buy a lilo, canoe, dinghy or water-wings for ‘love nor money’ anywhere between Calais and Dunkirk.
What on Earth happened to that old naval battle cry of “prepare to repel boarders!”
To Mr. Bailey who has an uninformed opinion on everything. Ukrainians didn’t “move” any additional material anywhere. That is BS. Nice how, in your ignorance, you open the door for further Russian aggression. Maybe they will show up with their poisons again in your country.
It seems to be a fact that Ukraine moved men and military materiel to the ‘contact zone’ in early and mid-March. The Russians have been responding to this. Meanwhile, Zelensky has been desperately asking for Ukraine to be fast-tracked into NATO. Well, he made his living as a comedian before becoming a politician and I guess some habits die hard.
Unfortunately for Ukraine, it has been ruled by the corrupt and/or lunatic since its formation 30 years ago. There is no great shame in this as the same can be said of most countries. However, you are up against Putin, one of the few national leaders who, while almost certainly extremely corrupt, is not a lunatic.
As for the Russians coming to the UK to poison ex-KGB members who betrayed their country, I have no particular problem with it. I blame the UK for allowing these people into the country. If you are the type of person who joins organizations like the KGB you know what to expect. And so should the British authorities.
Oh yes, that “free” vote to remain a part of a dictatorship. For someone sufficiently brainwashed, it can excuse or explain a lot – as reflected in many of these posts.
Destroyers, surprisingly, aren’t very good at preventing migrant boats. They are surprisingly good at firing missiles.
The HM Coastguard handles the problem you are talking about.
Armand L
3 years ago
It’s not the UK’s fight, it’s not America’s fight, it has nothing to do with ‘the West’. Ukraine and Russia’s relationship is their own business. The West cannot pretend to care about Eastern Ukraine’s civilians when it is actively perpetrating a genocide in Yemen and has caused nothing but devastation in Syria, Libya, Iraq, etc. Tend to our own garden.
And in 1938 Chamberlain described Czechoslovakia as a ‘far away country of which we know nothing’ as he sold out its people to the Nazis. Appeasement went well, didn’t it?
As AJP Taylor commented, Britain went to war for Poland, which suffered terribly and ended up having half its territory handed to the Soviet Union, not without further conflict. It did nothing for Czechoslovakia, which survived as an entity, and lost far fewer people.
You are correct, but you have to realize that it’s all part of the globalist one world government agenda to control everything, but Putin is standing in their way.
Uptick! Surely Bojo will order our boys into the valley of death? Unless of course he’s pretending to be a Russian, or Turk. Oddly the one ethnic group he doesn’t seem to pretend to be is the one he most likely comes from – the Norse. Its little wonder these characters have no compuction about bombing civilians in Yemen, Syria etc, they have no relationship with reality, including their own ethnic origins.
Anna Bramwell
3 years ago
Emboldened probably,by Biden’s presence,Zelensky passed a law saying that Ukraine would fight to take back Crimea. The Russian troops massed on the northern border of Crimea are in a defensive position, as they face a bottleneck should they try to advance into Ukraine. Russia did not invade Ukraine, there was a separatist movement after the illegal coup that got Poroshenko into power and deposed Yavtushenko.. Covert Russian support from one side and pretty overt US support from the other side. The first fighting was nasty, including the burning to death of 50 trade unionists by Poroshenko’s supporters. So convinced was Poroshenko that Russians had invaded eastern Ukraine that he blocked pensions to pensioners and hospital supplies to hospitals,since of cpurse that was the most effective way to defeat the Russian army,and indeed was magically effective….
Andrew Baldwin
3 years ago
Patrikarakos writes: “Seven years ago, the Ukraine conflict began with a lie: that millions of people across the country’s east wanted to splinter and join Russia.” Well, actually it started with the illegal and unconstitutional overthrow of a duly elected Ukrainian president, aided and abetted by the Obama-Biden administration. The objective was to put a NATO-friendly government in power. This cancelled an EU-brokered agreement that would have seen early presidential elections within the constitutional framework that almost certainly would have seen President Yanukovych turfed from office democratically, but not necessarily with the same cast of characters replacing him. Virtually the first action of the new government was to repeal the right to have Russian as a second official language in oblasts where it was widely spoken, which hit particularly hard in the Crimea and the Donbass, where more of the people spoke Russian than Ukrainian as their first language. To ignore all this, and just put “protestors” in quotes like Patrikarakos does, simply turns him into a NATO propagandist of the worst kind. Whether there would have been a civil war without Russian support is an open question. There is no doubt that the Russophones in Donbass had authentic grievances and that gross errors by the American government and the illegal Ukrainian government contributed to the tragedy that ensued.
Patrikarakos compares the Donbas to other frozen conflicts like South Ossetia and Transnistria. The comparison is misleading, since the Donbas conflict is much the least frozen, with violence still going on. It is also hard to see Transnistria, non-contiguous with Russia, becoming a Russian oblast, but it is easy to see this happening to Donetsk and Luhansk. For this reason people who want to keep Ukraine from losing the Donbas as it has already lost Crimea should really focus on finding a better role for its people than serving as proxies in an American war with Russia. NATO membership should be taken off the table by the government of Kyiv as part of the process of reabsorbing the Donbas. Ukraine should also grow up, and restructure itself as what it is: a bilingual country with two main languages, Ukrainian and Russian. It is shameful that the website of the National Bank of Ukraine has an English-language portal but no longer has a Russian-language portal.
Last edited 3 years ago by Andrew Baldwin
wrirwin
3 years ago
It is clear from these postings that the Russian disinformation agencies, along with a lot of useful idiots, are for some reason interesting in following Unherd.
You need to play the ball not the man. What makes you think you are not a useful idiot manipulated by US-Nato misinformation? It is better to present or refute the evidence in support of your position rather than insult those who cite evidence to support an opposing view.
Madeleine Jones
3 years ago
“It looks like Putin has achieved his goal, which was to attract Biden’s attention.”
This is an interesting article, yet this statement made me consider something. Perhaps a flaw in American International Relations thinking (whether in journalism, government or academia) is centering themselves too much in the story. Whilst America certainly has many capabilities, there are limits to how much they can change the current situation. Biden, and America, may be more powerless than they think.
Still, Putin will put on a show. If he takes more of Ukraine, then that’s a huge blow to NATO. It’s not just Americans who are watching: I looked at media from say, Germany, and they too, are focused on Ukraine. My point is: What can America honestly do?
I appreciate the extra context for this statement, and I know the author is not claiming that Putin is obsessed with Biden, or anything like that.
You raise an interesting question about the limits of US and western power in this dispute. The US and other nations have the capability to intervene militarily but I think it’s highly unlikely they’ll do so for fear of triggering a much bigger conflict with Russia, and also because I doubt there’s any domestic support (at least in the US) for more military conflict.
So the West will arm the Ukrainian army, train them, provide real-time intelligence about Russian troop movements, and maybe sanction Russia. Then the Ukrainians will have to fight for themselves, which they seem more than willing to do.
The issue here is that the West cannot even properly arm Ukraine as they do not have the money and providing capable weapons in itself would be seen as an escalation by Russia.
We have been arming and training various armies in various parts of the worlds for some years now. They always seem to collapse when faced with a few members of the Taliban or whoever.
As for sanctioning Russia, we have also been doing that for years. As a consequence Russia is now, apparently, self sufficient in food, can produce its own microchips and various other technologies, has evolved its own virtual currency and payment system (independent of Swift), and has formed a close alliance with China.
It is also expected to make even more money on the completion of Nord Stream 2. It is this project the Americans want cancelled-so that they can have it instead & this is perhaps what all this ‘Russia is the ultimate evil’ propoganda is about. The only bit of Ukraine Russia wanted back was Crimea and as over 90% people who live there like being part of Russia thats surely OK? American foreign policy is -pick a country , pick any country , now distablize it, destroy most of it and then tell everyone how they have brought them ‘freedom’, then a few ( who obviously love this policy ) make money ‘re-building’ it.
What America, Europe and NATO can do is stand up to Putin’s aggression if moves against Ukraine by generously supporting the Ukraine resistance. Russia will have a hard time defeating a Ukraine military backed by the resources of the West. And conquering and occupying a country the size of Ukraine is likely beyond Russia’s capabilities. Russia would pay a high price in international standing and blood and treasure. Putin knows this so is not likely to make any serious move against Ukraine so long as the West is clear it will not tolerate another Crimea.
Have you heard the expression-Russia the place where foreign troops go to die?
Mavka Rusalka
3 years ago
Ah, the lazy and cowardly “realists” rear their ugly heads. There are no spheres of influence in the modern world. There are alliances and those are chose by the parties and not “great power” overlords or UnHerd readers who haven’t left home in a year.
Are you suggesting little old GB plc gets involved?
We couldn’t even subdue Northern Ireland after 30+years and made a complete fiasco of Iraq & Afghanistan?
Our one ‘result’ was the Falklands, albeit against a very poor second XI.
Yes agreed, but they still had NORAID and the Kennedy clan behind them, and it meant victory.
Last edited 3 years ago by Charles Stanhope
Russell Caplan
3 years ago
The Ukrainian government does not act without instructions from Washington. It is not in Russia’s interests to go to war with Ukraine. But it is in the interests of the US and its imperial Nato alliance of satraps to set Ukraine ablaze. This would provide the perfect pretext to change Nato rules and incorporate a rump Ukraine in to the Nato orbit. It would allow Nato to surround Russia with a ring of steel on its Eastern flank providing naval bases all along the coast.
The fake news presented for Western consumption that Russia is aggressively massing an invasion force to attack Ukraine is only true in so far as Russia is preparing a response inside Russia to the massive build up of Ukrainian military forces in the East that can be for only one purpose, the resumption of hostilities against the break away self proclaimed republics of Lugansk and Donetsk. This Ukrainian build up would be a violation of the Minsk accords negotiated and agreed under the auspices of Russia and the EU which provides a perfectly reasonable settlement that reintegrates the breakaway regions in to Ukraine on a federal basis reassuring these Russian speaking regions with a degree of autonomy. It would appear that the Ukrainian government has been encouraged to repudiate this agreement by its Western masters in favour of conflict.
Let us not forget that these breakaway Russian speaking regions resorted to such a move in response to the US and EU orchestrated coup against a democratically elected government. The coup leaders, many of them hand picked by the US, were full of anti Russian invective threatening to ban Russian as an official language. Pro Russian political parties were made illegal and there was an atmosphere of triumphant menace against Russian people, their language and culture. This anti Russian sentiment continues unchecked with the banning of popular political parties that happen to be supported by Russian speaking citizens of Ukraine.
Russia of course is obliged to protect its people. The Russians in these break away regions are not just any Russians. They find themselves living in a country that was not too long ago very much part of Soviet Russia but now despises and maligns them, their language and culture as foreign. Russia also has security interests and cannot be expected to tolerate what the West would never put up with. Consider this for example.
Imagine Russia involved itself in the overthrow of the Canadian government and had it replaced by a group of French speaking politicians from Quebec (no disrespect to the French or Quebec). And imagine these politicians making all sorts of negative comments and declarations about American/ English culture and language that included ideas about banning English as one of the country’s official languages. The English speaking part of Canada would justifiably take fright and probably decide to secede (I am not sure whether the geography in this analogy quite stacks up). I can assure you the US would not stand idly by and probably, unlike Russia, would have intervened militarily long before the coup. They certainly would not put up with Russian military advisers and trainers as well as the provision of military hardware to this new putschist government on the borders of the US. So why do we in the West think Russia is behaving unreasonably when it behaves in accordance with its own security interests? Or is Russia not allowed to have security interests? Russia can move, amass troops and frankly do what the hell it likes with its army inside its own borders. Just as the US, UK etc can within their borders. Problem is, it is the US and Nato that move and amass armies outside their sovereign territory, all over the world. Not Russia!
The truth is the West does not give a damn for the poor Ukrainians who are mere canon fodder for their anti Russian intrigues whose goal is to try and perpetuate a unipolar US-Nato dominated world that a resurgent Russia threatens. What is going on in Ukraine at the moment is a dangerous gambit for the US and the government it controls in Ukraine. Having failed to stop the completion of North Stream 2 thus far with sanctions, things have now got desperate. First we had the alleged poisoning of Navalny that failed to stop the co-operation between Germany and Russia. Russian forces coming to the defence of their compatriots in the breakaway republics of Donetsk and Lugansk may just tip it in favour of killing North Stream 2 and bringing rump Ukraine in to Nato. But this is fraught with terrible danger of a conflict that can quickly spiral out of control.
People in the West need to understand that Ukraine for Russia is ‘personal’. The perceived existential threat Western military involvement in this part of the world poses is something as I have argued, the West would never put up with on their own respective borders. It is time to try get along with Russia instead of relentlessly baiting this major nuclear power. In the words of the distinguished Russian scholar Stephen Cohen who recently passed away we need to ask ourselves the question “Who, . . . will avert the prospect of war with Russia, a new Cuban missile-like crisis, conceivably in the Baltic region, Ukraine, or Syria?”
Frank Freeman
3 years ago
If Ukraine allowed a UN observed referendum on the status of the Donbass the matter would be settled. Ukraine invaded the Donbass to stop a referendum, were they so certain they would loose?
The people of Donbass and Crimea wanted self determination after a violent armed coup overthrew the Government in Kiev which the Crimea and Donbass had voted for.
While Russia may have sent weapons, and Russian mercenaries may be involved, this is no more an invasion than American weapons and American mercenaries going to support the Ukrainian Junta is an invasion of Ukraine by the west.
Wars are ended by negotiation and compromise, not by crying fake news whenever the other side reports collateral damage or war crimes.
Richard E
3 years ago
Ukraine, Belarus and the ex Soviet States of Central Asia are Russia’s sphere of influence. Not for us to interfere.
Kazakhstan wanted to join the EU, arguing that half its territory was in Europe. They were not just refused but treated badly, pushing them Into the Shanghai Agreement with Russia and China. The other stans are seen by Russia as Muslim, and feared rather than wanted, since Russia is obsessed with and fears its own Muslim population. Don’t forget that Central Asians were expelled from Russia in the late ‘90s.
Spheres of influence is so 19th century. It’s what gave us the Sykes-Picot agreement and a century’s worth of trouble.
Russ Littler
3 years ago
..and so the western media propaganda continues to flow, keeping a firm grasp on the misinformation campaign. They must ramp up the anti-Russian narrative at all costs in order to create another deepstate war on behalf of the Globalist EU and World bank. No matter that it was the UN, and EU who previously put their puppet General in power, to bomb and shell his own people, (Poroshenko) to force them to capitulate. All aided and abetted by Obama, Cameron, Nato, the US Deepstate, and military industrial complex. The people of Crimea voted on two separate occasions (legally) to remain allied with Russia (they are Russian speaking people) but the Kiev agenda was to become a part of the EU. Obviously the new Biden administration want to start exactly where the Obama administration left off again.No change there then. Once a globalist, always a globalist.
Eleanor Barlow
3 years ago
I find the silence of left wingers very strange when it comes to Russia and Ukraine. No condemnation of Russia’s lack of coming to terms with its loss of empire – and no calls to Ukrainians to apologise and atone for their collaboration with Nazi murderers during WW2.
As for Ukraine joining NATO….the last thing we need is a lame duck country that will require immense resources to defend – and the possibility of Western involvement triggering WW3. Ukarine simply isn’t worth it.
Ukraine was literally the bread basket of the Soviet Union. It still has the bulk of its nuclear infrastructure and was, at one point, the third most powerful nuclear power on Earth.
A westernised, modernised Ukraine would be one of the most powerful nations on Earth.
David Otness
3 years ago
The Russophobic ignorance is palpable. The propaganda herein mediocre. Why such facile reactionary propaganda continues to find a voice here is disturbing; anyone seeking or having sought truth re: the US-inspired and financed Maidan massacre can spot this lemon coming in the story lede.
This one is as absurd as seeing Mr Bellingcat himself strutting and preening about his righteous mission a few months ago.
Gawd save us from fools leading other fools forward to our mutual doom, especially those of us standing for rational assessment of what is truly going on here. When paid trolls from the Atlantic Council, ‘Integrity’ Initiative, and all of the other so-called NGOs are given implicit endorsement to spout unwarranted and untruthful tripe in a publication seeking authenticity and a standard of objectivity(?) like this one on a semi-regular basis it gives a thinking person pause as to just what this ‘Unherd’ business is actually all about.
Corrie Mooney
3 years ago
May God bless and protect Ukraine. And may God grant the wisdom to Russians to keep anything foolish from happening.
Allan Edward Tierney
3 years ago
The author of this piece seems to be suffering from a virus which has been infecting western journalists since the spring of 2014. It manifests itself in an inability to recognize anything other than the rights of those in western Ukraine and completely ignoring those of inhabitants of the east.
It is reminiscent of a type of disease where myopia or even total blindness occurs and only the last thing told by an editor is endlessly reported as objective fact. When journalists catch this particular disease it immediately makes their credentials for their trade vanish in a flash.
They begin to imagine that it is Kiev that is surrounded by extremists firing mortar rounds into it and snipers taking pot shots. In fact, since the spring of 2014 when ultra-nationalists and a ragtag Ukrainian military began lobbing random mortar shells into apartment blocks, schools and hospitals in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions of eastern Ukraine western journalists have discovered an ever-increasing inability to see straight.
It has not been 13,000 inhabitants of Kiev who have died, it has been those of Donetsk and Luhansk. Somehow or other this fact seems to fly right over the seemingly totally blinkered eyes of western journalists such as Mr Patrikarakos.
It was not Russia that killed them. It was not Vladimir Putin. But, hey, we mustn’t let facts get in the way of the insurmountable prejudice and self-censorship that getting a paycheck demands, must we?
According to The Duran it was the Ukrainians who first moved men and materiel to the ‘contact zone’, in March. Putin’s build up has been in response to this.
The US and NATO etc will do nothing. Apparently the two US ships have already turned around, although the British for some reason are – absurdly – sending a destroyer to the Black Sea. This destroyer should, of course, be in the English Channel, turning back migrants in dinghies.
Further, owing to Nordstream 2 there is now little or no money in Ukraine for the Biden family to get their hands on. And, as even Macron admitted, NATO is ‘brain dead’, along with more or less every other western government and entity.
You are absolutely correct. Whilst H.MS. Dogsbody is swanning around the Black Sea, Sinbad & Co are gathering on the French beaches, preparing for the annual migration.
‘My’ spies tell me you cannot buy a lilo, canoe, dinghy or water-wings for ‘love nor money’ anywhere between Calais and Dunkirk.
What on Earth happened to that old naval battle cry of “prepare to repel boarders!”
Changed to “Prepare to adjust borders.”
To Mr. Bailey who has an uninformed opinion on everything. Ukrainians didn’t “move” any additional material anywhere. That is BS. Nice how, in your ignorance, you open the door for further Russian aggression. Maybe they will show up with their poisons again in your country.
It seems to be a fact that Ukraine moved men and military materiel to the ‘contact zone’ in early and mid-March. The Russians have been responding to this. Meanwhile, Zelensky has been desperately asking for Ukraine to be fast-tracked into NATO. Well, he made his living as a comedian before becoming a politician and I guess some habits die hard.
Unfortunately for Ukraine, it has been ruled by the corrupt and/or lunatic since its formation 30 years ago. There is no great shame in this as the same can be said of most countries. However, you are up against Putin, one of the few national leaders who, while almost certainly extremely corrupt, is not a lunatic.
As for the Russians coming to the UK to poison ex-KGB members who betrayed their country, I have no particular problem with it. I blame the UK for allowing these people into the country. If you are the type of person who joins organizations like the KGB you know what to expect. And so should the British authorities.
…wow.
This is the most singularly ignorant viewpoint I’ve ever seen.
The people of Crimea voted to remain as part of Russia. It’s the UN and EU who are the aggressors because they want the Ukraine.
Oh yes, that “free” vote to remain a part of a dictatorship. For someone sufficiently brainwashed, it can excuse or explain a lot – as reflected in many of these posts.
Putin is using the same tactics employed by Hitler against Austria/Czechoslovakia/Poland
“The Duran” is hardly a reliable source.
Destroyers, surprisingly, aren’t very good at preventing migrant boats. They are surprisingly good at firing missiles.
The HM Coastguard handles the problem you are talking about.
It’s not the UK’s fight, it’s not America’s fight, it has nothing to do with ‘the West’. Ukraine and Russia’s relationship is their own business. The West cannot pretend to care about Eastern Ukraine’s civilians when it is actively perpetrating a genocide in Yemen and has caused nothing but devastation in Syria, Libya, Iraq, etc. Tend to our own garden.
And in 1938 Chamberlain described Czechoslovakia as a ‘far away country of which we know nothing’ as he sold out its people to the Nazis. Appeasement went well, didn’t it?
As AJP Taylor commented, Britain went to war for Poland, which suffered terribly and ended up having half its territory handed to the Soviet Union, not without further conflict. It did nothing for Czechoslovakia, which survived as an entity, and lost far fewer people.
You are correct, but you have to realize that it’s all part of the globalist one world government agenda to control everything, but Putin is standing in their way.
Uptick! Surely Bojo will order our boys into the valley of death? Unless of course he’s pretending to be a Russian, or Turk. Oddly the one ethnic group he doesn’t seem to pretend to be is the one he most likely comes from – the Norse. Its little wonder these characters have no compuction about bombing civilians in Yemen, Syria etc, they have no relationship with reality, including their own ethnic origins.
Emboldened probably,by Biden’s presence,Zelensky passed a law saying that Ukraine would fight to take back Crimea. The Russian troops massed on the northern border of Crimea are in a defensive position, as they face a bottleneck should they try to advance into Ukraine. Russia did not invade Ukraine, there was a separatist movement after the illegal coup that got Poroshenko into power and deposed Yavtushenko.. Covert Russian support from one side and pretty overt US support from the other side. The first fighting was nasty, including the burning to death of 50 trade unionists by Poroshenko’s supporters. So convinced was Poroshenko that Russians had invaded eastern Ukraine that he blocked pensions to pensioners and hospital supplies to hospitals,since of cpurse that was the most effective way to defeat the Russian army,and indeed was magically effective….
Patrikarakos writes: “Seven years ago, the Ukraine conflict began with a lie: that millions of people across the country’s east wanted to splinter and join Russia.” Well, actually it started with the illegal and unconstitutional overthrow of a duly elected Ukrainian president, aided and abetted by the Obama-Biden administration. The objective was to put a NATO-friendly government in power. This cancelled an EU-brokered agreement that would have seen early presidential elections within the constitutional framework that almost certainly would have seen President Yanukovych turfed from office democratically, but not necessarily with the same cast of characters replacing him. Virtually the first action of the new government was to repeal the right to have Russian as a second official language in oblasts where it was widely spoken, which hit particularly hard in the Crimea and the Donbass, where more of the people spoke Russian than Ukrainian as their first language. To ignore all this, and just put “protestors” in quotes like Patrikarakos does, simply turns him into a NATO propagandist of the worst kind. Whether there would have been a civil war without Russian support is an open question. There is no doubt that the Russophones in Donbass had authentic grievances and that gross errors by the American government and the illegal Ukrainian government contributed to the tragedy that ensued.
Patrikarakos compares the Donbas to other frozen conflicts like South Ossetia and Transnistria. The comparison is misleading, since the Donbas conflict is much the least frozen, with violence still going on. It is also hard to see Transnistria, non-contiguous with Russia, becoming a Russian oblast, but it is easy to see this happening to Donetsk and Luhansk. For this reason people who want to keep Ukraine from losing the Donbas as it has already lost Crimea should really focus on finding a better role for its people than serving as proxies in an American war with Russia. NATO membership should be taken off the table by the government of Kyiv as part of the process of reabsorbing the Donbas. Ukraine should also grow up, and restructure itself as what it is: a bilingual country with two main languages, Ukrainian and Russian. It is shameful that the website of the National Bank of Ukraine has an English-language portal but no longer has a Russian-language portal.
It is clear from these postings that the Russian disinformation agencies, along with a lot of useful idiots, are for some reason interesting in following Unherd.
You need to play the ball not the man. What makes you think you are not a useful idiot manipulated by US-Nato misinformation? It is better to present or refute the evidence in support of your position rather than insult those who cite evidence to support an opposing view.
“It looks like Putin has achieved his goal, which was to attract Biden’s attention.”
This is an interesting article, yet this statement made me consider something. Perhaps a flaw in American International Relations thinking (whether in journalism, government or academia) is centering themselves too much in the story. Whilst America certainly has many capabilities, there are limits to how much they can change the current situation. Biden, and America, may be more powerless than they think.
Still, Putin will put on a show. If he takes more of Ukraine, then that’s a huge blow to NATO. It’s not just Americans who are watching: I looked at media from say, Germany, and they too, are focused on Ukraine. My point is: What can America honestly do?
I appreciate the extra context for this statement, and I know the author is not claiming that Putin is obsessed with Biden, or anything like that.
You raise an interesting question about the limits of US and western power in this dispute. The US and other nations have the capability to intervene militarily but I think it’s highly unlikely they’ll do so for fear of triggering a much bigger conflict with Russia, and also because I doubt there’s any domestic support (at least in the US) for more military conflict.
So the West will arm the Ukrainian army, train them, provide real-time intelligence about Russian troop movements, and maybe sanction Russia. Then the Ukrainians will have to fight for themselves, which they seem more than willing to do.
The issue here is that the West cannot even properly arm Ukraine as they do not have the money and providing capable weapons in itself would be seen as an escalation by Russia.
We have been arming and training various armies in various parts of the worlds for some years now. They always seem to collapse when faced with a few members of the Taliban or whoever.
As for sanctioning Russia, we have also been doing that for years. As a consequence Russia is now, apparently, self sufficient in food, can produce its own microchips and various other technologies, has evolved its own virtual currency and payment system (independent of Swift), and has formed a close alliance with China.
It is also expected to make even more money on the completion of Nord Stream 2. It is this project the Americans want cancelled-so that they can have it instead & this is perhaps what all this ‘Russia is the ultimate evil’ propoganda is about. The only bit of Ukraine Russia wanted back was Crimea and as over 90% people who live there like being part of Russia thats surely OK? American foreign policy is -pick a country , pick any country , now distablize it, destroy most of it and then tell everyone how they have brought them ‘freedom’, then a few ( who obviously love this policy ) make money ‘re-building’ it.
Had Russia not asserted its authority in the Crimea, we can rest assured that Sevastopol would now be hosting a U.S. naval base.
What America, Europe and NATO can do is stand up to Putin’s aggression if moves against Ukraine by generously supporting the Ukraine resistance. Russia will have a hard time defeating a Ukraine military backed by the resources of the West. And conquering and occupying a country the size of Ukraine is likely beyond Russia’s capabilities. Russia would pay a high price in international standing and blood and treasure. Putin knows this so is not likely to make any serious move against Ukraine so long as the West is clear it will not tolerate another Crimea.
Have you heard the expression-Russia the place where foreign troops go to die?
Ah, the lazy and cowardly “realists” rear their ugly heads. There are no spheres of influence in the modern world. There are alliances and those are chose by the parties and not “great power” overlords or UnHerd readers who haven’t left home in a year.
Are you suggesting little old GB plc gets involved?
We couldn’t even subdue Northern Ireland after 30+years and made a complete fiasco of Iraq & Afghanistan?
Our one ‘result’ was the Falklands, albeit against a very poor second XI.
The IRA were militarily defeated, which is why they came to the negotiating table. Then the idiot Blair threw it away.
Yes agreed, but they still had NORAID and the Kennedy clan behind them, and it meant victory.
The Ukrainian government does not act without instructions from Washington. It is not in Russia’s interests to go to war with Ukraine. But it is in the interests of the US and its imperial Nato alliance of satraps to set Ukraine ablaze. This would provide the perfect pretext to change Nato rules and incorporate a rump Ukraine in to the Nato orbit. It would allow Nato to surround Russia with a ring of steel on its Eastern flank providing naval bases all along the coast.
The fake news presented for Western consumption that Russia is aggressively massing an invasion force to attack Ukraine is only true in so far as Russia is preparing a response inside Russia to the massive build up of Ukrainian military forces in the East that can be for only one purpose, the resumption of hostilities against the break away self proclaimed republics of Lugansk and Donetsk. This Ukrainian build up would be a violation of the Minsk accords negotiated and agreed under the auspices of Russia and the EU which provides a perfectly reasonable settlement that reintegrates the breakaway regions in to Ukraine on a federal basis reassuring these Russian speaking regions with a degree of autonomy. It would appear that the Ukrainian government has been encouraged to repudiate this agreement by its Western masters in favour of conflict.
Let us not forget that these breakaway Russian speaking regions resorted to such a move in response to the US and EU orchestrated coup against a democratically elected government. The coup leaders, many of them hand picked by the US, were full of anti Russian invective threatening to ban Russian as an official language. Pro Russian political parties were made illegal and there was an atmosphere of triumphant menace against Russian people, their language and culture. This anti Russian sentiment continues unchecked with the banning of popular political parties that happen to be supported by Russian speaking citizens of Ukraine.
Russia of course is obliged to protect its people. The Russians in these break away regions are not just any Russians. They find themselves living in a country that was not too long ago very much part of Soviet Russia but now despises and maligns them, their language and culture as foreign. Russia also has security interests and cannot be expected to tolerate what the West would never put up with. Consider this for example.
Imagine Russia involved itself in the overthrow of the Canadian government and had it replaced by a group of French speaking politicians from Quebec (no disrespect to the French or Quebec). And imagine these politicians making all sorts of negative comments and declarations about American/ English culture and language that included ideas about banning English as one of the country’s official languages. The English speaking part of Canada would justifiably take fright and probably decide to secede (I am not sure whether the geography in this analogy quite stacks up). I can assure you the US would not stand idly by and probably, unlike Russia, would have intervened militarily long before the coup. They certainly would not put up with Russian military advisers and trainers as well as the provision of military hardware to this new putschist government on the borders of the US. So why do we in the West think Russia is behaving unreasonably when it behaves in accordance with its own security interests? Or is Russia not allowed to have security interests? Russia can move, amass troops and frankly do what the hell it likes with its army inside its own borders. Just as the US, UK etc can within their borders. Problem is, it is the US and Nato that move and amass armies outside their sovereign territory, all over the world. Not Russia!
The truth is the West does not give a damn for the poor Ukrainians who are mere canon fodder for their anti Russian intrigues whose goal is to try and perpetuate a unipolar US-Nato dominated world that a resurgent Russia threatens. What is going on in Ukraine at the moment is a dangerous gambit for the US and the government it controls in Ukraine. Having failed to stop the completion of North Stream 2 thus far with sanctions, things have now got desperate. First we had the alleged poisoning of Navalny that failed to stop the co-operation between Germany and Russia. Russian forces coming to the defence of their compatriots in the breakaway republics of Donetsk and Lugansk may just tip it in favour of killing North Stream 2 and bringing rump Ukraine in to Nato. But this is fraught with terrible danger of a conflict that can quickly spiral out of control.
People in the West need to understand that Ukraine for Russia is ‘personal’. The perceived existential threat Western military involvement in this part of the world poses is something as I have argued, the West would never put up with on their own respective borders. It is time to try get along with Russia instead of relentlessly baiting this major nuclear power. In the words of the distinguished Russian scholar Stephen Cohen who recently passed away we need to ask ourselves the question “Who, . . . will avert the prospect of war with Russia, a new Cuban missile-like crisis, conceivably in the Baltic region, Ukraine, or Syria?”
If Ukraine allowed a UN observed referendum on the status of the Donbass the matter would be settled. Ukraine invaded the Donbass to stop a referendum, were they so certain they would loose?
The people of Donbass and Crimea wanted self determination after a violent armed coup overthrew the Government in Kiev which the Crimea and Donbass had voted for.
While Russia may have sent weapons, and Russian mercenaries may be involved, this is no more an invasion than American weapons and American mercenaries going to support the Ukrainian Junta is an invasion of Ukraine by the west.
Wars are ended by negotiation and compromise, not by crying fake news whenever the other side reports collateral damage or war crimes.
Ukraine, Belarus and the ex Soviet States of Central Asia are Russia’s sphere of influence. Not for us to interfere.
Hitler considered Russia a part of Germany’s sphere of influence. Was it wrong of the USA to interfere and help Russia ?
Kazakhstan wanted to join the EU, arguing that half its territory was in Europe. They were not just refused but treated badly, pushing them Into the Shanghai Agreement with Russia and China. The other stans are seen by Russia as Muslim, and feared rather than wanted, since Russia is obsessed with and fears its own Muslim population. Don’t forget that Central Asians were expelled from Russia in the late ‘90s.
Spheres of influence is so 19th century. It’s what gave us the Sykes-Picot agreement and a century’s worth of trouble.
..and so the western media propaganda continues to flow, keeping a firm grasp on the misinformation campaign. They must ramp up the anti-Russian narrative at all costs in order to create another deepstate war on behalf of the Globalist EU and World bank. No matter that it was the UN, and EU who previously put their puppet General in power, to bomb and shell his own people, (Poroshenko) to force them to capitulate. All aided and abetted by Obama, Cameron, Nato, the US Deepstate, and military industrial complex. The people of Crimea voted on two separate occasions (legally) to remain allied with Russia (they are Russian speaking people) but the Kiev agenda was to become a part of the EU. Obviously the new Biden administration want to start exactly where the Obama administration left off again.No change there then. Once a globalist, always a globalist.
I find the silence of left wingers very strange when it comes to Russia and Ukraine. No condemnation of Russia’s lack of coming to terms with its loss of empire – and no calls to Ukrainians to apologise and atone for their collaboration with Nazi murderers during WW2.
As for Ukraine joining NATO….the last thing we need is a lame duck country that will require immense resources to defend – and the possibility of Western involvement triggering WW3. Ukarine simply isn’t worth it.
Ukraine was literally the bread basket of the Soviet Union. It still has the bulk of its nuclear infrastructure and was, at one point, the third most powerful nuclear power on Earth.
A westernised, modernised Ukraine would be one of the most powerful nations on Earth.
The Russophobic ignorance is palpable. The propaganda herein mediocre. Why such facile reactionary propaganda continues to find a voice here is disturbing; anyone seeking or having sought truth re: the US-inspired and financed Maidan massacre can spot this lemon coming in the story lede.
This one is as absurd as seeing Mr Bellingcat himself strutting and preening about his righteous mission a few months ago.
Gawd save us from fools leading other fools forward to our mutual doom, especially those of us standing for rational assessment of what is truly going on here. When paid trolls from the Atlantic Council, ‘Integrity’ Initiative, and all of the other so-called NGOs are given implicit endorsement to spout unwarranted and untruthful tripe in a publication seeking authenticity and a standard of objectivity(?) like this one on a semi-regular basis it gives a thinking person pause as to just what this ‘Unherd’ business is actually all about.
May God bless and protect Ukraine. And may God grant the wisdom to Russians to keep anything foolish from happening.
The author of this piece seems to be suffering from a virus which has been infecting western journalists since the spring of 2014. It manifests itself in an inability to recognize anything other than the rights of those in western Ukraine and completely ignoring those of inhabitants of the east.
It is reminiscent of a type of disease where myopia or even total blindness occurs and only the last thing told by an editor is endlessly reported as objective fact. When journalists catch this particular disease it immediately makes their credentials for their trade vanish in a flash.
They begin to imagine that it is Kiev that is surrounded by extremists firing mortar rounds into it and snipers taking pot shots. In fact, since the spring of 2014 when ultra-nationalists and a ragtag Ukrainian military began lobbing random mortar shells into apartment blocks, schools and hospitals in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions of eastern Ukraine western journalists have discovered an ever-increasing inability to see straight.
It has not been 13,000 inhabitants of Kiev who have died, it has been those of Donetsk and Luhansk. Somehow or other this fact seems to fly right over the seemingly totally blinkered eyes of western journalists such as Mr Patrikarakos.
It was not Russia that killed them. It was not Vladimir Putin. But, hey, we mustn’t let facts get in the way of the insurmountable prejudice and self-censorship that getting a paycheck demands, must we?