thisbody wrote:

What Geert Wilders' victory means for Dutch society

Sudden surge in support for Europe’s right-wing parties due to migration and deep dissatisfaction with Europe’s mainstream parties

Why is Hungary a NATO member?

 kurtster wrote:

FTA: In 2019, Trump moved to block the delivery of lethal aid to Ukraine as part of an effort to pressure Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to announce an investigation connected to Biden’s son. Zelensky made no such announcement, and the hold-up triggered the first impeachment of Trump.

https://www.politico.com/news/...

 haresfur wrote: 
imo ...

You are completely wrong on everything you stated.  While Obama only gave Ukraine blankets and pillows, Trump actually sent weapons (defensive).  Putin stopped at Crimea because Trump was elected.  I know you and nearly everyone else here still believes the Steele Dossier and that Trump was Putin's bitch.  The demonetization of Putin /Russia by the democratic party with the phony Russia, Russia, Russia hoax is why things are the way they are today.  And it drove Putin into the open arms of Xi.  I hold the DNC directly responsible for this.

Putin does not want Ukraine to join NATO.  Putin wants Ukraine back more than anything else and for a multitude of reasons.  Also reading the comments below, everyone seems to forget the genocide of 4+ million Ukrainians starved to death by Stalin.
.
In spring 1933 death rates in Ukraine spiked. Between 1931 and 1934 at least 5 million people perished of hunger all across the U.S.S.R. Among them, according to a study conducted by a team of Ukrainian demographers, were at least 3.9 million Ukrainians.

Another win for socialism and collectivism. Not.

 Lazy8 wrote: 
  oops

 NoEnzLefttoSplit wrote:
Umm...

 NoEnzLefttoSplit wrote: 
totally unrelated dominant social theme: sometimes bad rulers with bad ideas don't like change

but whatever...

We never see the masses on the streets demanding more autocracy.

 haresfur wrote: 
yep, there seem to be parallels with North Korea in that sense. My guess is he mainly wants to whip up patriotism and visions of a slavic brotherhood to shore up his eroding domestic base. That is the most obvious motive to me. Further down the list, he might be wanting to test European cohesion now that Merkel has gone and the UK has left the EU.

I know a lot of people in the Baltic states are very nervous about the development, so there may indeed be more substance to it than just grandstanding. Also you will find that former Eastern bloc nations are hugely in favour of US leadership of NATO, much more so than most of western Europe, purely for historical reasons, so if he is wanting to drive a wedge between the US and Europe by threatening military action, that is very likely to backfire. Europe will turn away from Russia as a gas supplier and find alternatives and the EU might finally get its shit together and create a joint military force with some teeth to it. At the very least, Nato's eastern flank will see reinforcement. France, not wanting to be outdone by the US in Europe, will encourage Germany towards a joint European strike force and a Russian invasion of Ukraine could very well be the trigger that is needed for this to work, so yeah, strategically, an invasion of Ukraine doesn't seem to make much sense. That is why I think he is doing this all to scare his own people by painting NATO and EU as a hostile threat that is about to pounce upon them. Ironic thing is, probably half his own country would welcome a regime change.

There is also a very slight chance Putin is in possession of superior weaponry that might be giving him the confidence to move now (cyber warfare crippling the west, that kind of thing). But I don't think that is how he functions. Rather, he is playing public opinion to win support at home and divide and cripple his adversaries. He's more of a brain over brawn type of guy.

Last but not least, I doubt very much he wants to piss off one of his biggest customers, unless he has made some kind of deal with China now and doesn't need to sell gas to Europe anymore, but that doesn't make much sense either as it would make Russia almost entirely dependent on the huge potential adversary to his southeast.  A broad customer base is always a good thing.

 NoEnzLefttoSplit wrote:

So here's the thing I don't get. If putin wanted to invade Ukraine, he easily could have done it with no US response when trump was president. As soon as trump was elected, I figured Ukraine was a goner. Why did he stop at Crimea? 

My only guess is that he doesn't really give a shit about Ukraine but is using it to drive a wedge between US and western Europe. But I really don't know.

 westslope wrote:   
far out.  yeah, right, dude.   

1. so how many people do you know who do business in Russia? How many Russian émigrés do you know? How many people from the former Eastern bloc?  How many Ukrainians? 

2. try reading properly for a change. I am not falling into the fallacy, which you seem to be, of equating Putin and the other robber barons with the Russian people. While I have no doubt that Putin is extremely patriotic and by almost any metric qualifies as a peculiarly Russian kind of calamity, there is no way I am falling into an "us" vs. "them" cold war story book. It is patently obvious that that is precisely what Putin is trying to create (and doing it successfully, by the way), but I can't shake off the suspicion he is doing it to shore up his support at home. Look at his position more closely. His direct neighbours, Belarus and Ukraine are falling apart and more importantly moving away from Russian hegemony (Ukraine successfully, Belarus, not yet). At home, he is struggling to gather a majority and is grasping at straws to keep popular support, all the while milking the country for all its worth. 

On top  of that, he is himself a product not just of the cold war but the Soviet KGB and is not averse to doing what he can to upset/disrupt western democracies. Why else would you invest such enormous resources into spamming the internet with paid shills (we seem to have at least three here, for God's sake). I am pretty confident Putin thinks the west is weak and with a very soft underbelly. In that he might very well be right. But it still annoys the hell out of me when anyone tries to erode the painstaking process made to unify Europe. So easy to destroy and infinitely harder to create, but absolutely essential to peace and prosperity on the continent.

3. the other angle, that a number of people on the left seem to be prey to, at least here in Germany, is that modern Russia is in someway more left-wing and socialist and therefore inherently a good thing. It's not. It's just another failed state, ruined by decades of government failure. Your diatribes against the US (not unjustified in many cases but that doesn't make bigotry suddenly de rigeur as you seem to think) suggest to me you are one of them. 

4. All of which is tragic, for Russia is an amazing country and could be so much more, if it only had half a chance.

 

 westslope wrote:
You're missing something important about this conflict: it (like many things that happen in other countries) isn't about us.

The US and NATO aren't about to go to war over Ukraine. Ukraine is—despite the hollow bellicose rhetoric—on its own against a powerful, unprincipled, and ruthless neighbor intent on re-establishing an empire. Whatever Putin's motives there are a lot of actual humans about to get stepped on.

 NoEnzLefttoSplit wrote:
No.  Your sense of entitled righteousness is making you tribal.  You are going full on 'us versus them' just like Trump and his supporters.   I view your conspiracy theory fear-mongering as uninformed. 

I have yet to see you write anything that makes me think that you actually understand modern day Russia and the strategic mistakes the west has made since the Soviet Union imploded.

I can only assume that you support the constant flows of lies coming out of the mouth of Joe Biden and other Democratic party members over the past few years.

 Red_Dragon wrote:
They don't have the luxury of selective/revisionist history.

 Red_Dragon wrote:
sure is, look at how hesitant Germany was to intervene in the Balkan war and take action against Serbia. 

Nordstrom was signed by a past chancellor, Gerhard Schroeder (SPD party), who is very friendly with Putin for reasons I am not entirely sure of, but the left-centrist party that is backed by the unions is traditionally much much softer on Russia than others have been. The current chancellor is from the same party and is receiving a lot of criticism for being completely absent from any discussion on the current stand-off. It's like they have no backbone.

 westslope wrote:

your sense of geopolitics is making you myopic.  Russia started opening to the west but balked at the opportunity to install anything like the necessary political reforms and legal framework to do it, instead favouring its robber barons who are gutting the country. The only thing propping it up is its oil and gas exports. 

Russia could (and in my opinion) should be part of Europe. Instead its leadership is chasing some form of Slavic brotherhood but Putin is in no way as popular as one might suspect. Which is another reason why stoking up an imaginary conflict with the West is right in line with his playbook. It's not the west he's trying to intimidate, but rather unite his own people.

 NoEnzLefttoSplit wrote:


You live there, right? Is this still a real thing?

 Ohmsen wrote:

If you removed this purported US leadership and took away German war-guilt and had left the decision to the EU 27 (minus Germany), Nordstream would never have got to the planning stage.