The End of the Postwar World
Today marks the end of the post-Cold War world. At least that's how the editorial board of the Washington Post views Vladimir Putin's decision to recognize two disputed regions of Ukraine as independent, sending Russian forces in to back up his words.
This is the way the postwar world ends, and the post-Cold War world, too: not yet with a bang, and not with anything close to a whimper, but with a rant. In an extraordinary soliloquy viewed live around the world Monday, President Vladimir Putin of Russia attacked and delegitimized not just independent Ukraine and its government but all facets of the security architecture in Europe, declaring both to be creatures of a corrupt West — headed by the United States — that are unremittingly hostile toward Russia.
...More ominous, given his subsequent dispatch of “peacekeeping” troops over the border into the regions, was Mr. Putin’s demand that “those who seized and hold power in Kyiv” cease hostilities, or else “all responsibility for the possible continuation of the bloodshed will be entirely on the conscience of the regime ruling on the territory of Ukraine.” War looming, he had this warning to those who helped oust a Kremlin-backed regime in Ukraine in 2014: “We know their names, and we will find them and bring them to justice.”
...The truth is that Ukraine is a member state of the United Nations, whose security Russia itself undertook to respect 28 years ago, in exchange for Ukraine’s nuclear disarmament. Ukraine has not been waging “genocide” against a Russian-speaking ethnic minority, as Mr. Putin alleged, but defending itself from a 2014-2015 Russian destabilization campaign that created the breakaway regions and engineered the seizure of Ukraine’s strategic Crimean region on the Black Sea. Mr. Putin’s pseudo-history about the kinship of Russians and Ukrainians ignores those facts. His true reason for targeting Ukraine is not Russian national security but to preserve his own power in Moscow, which would be threatened by a successful democratic experiment in a former Soviet republic of Ukraine’s size and cultural importance.
Does this mean war between the West and Russia? Not necessarily. Not overtly. The greatest risk of war, as the "war studies" types see it, is through inadvertence. Think of it as war that the adversaries back into. Before the outset of WWI, the prospects of war between Moscow and Berlin was considered laughable. Weren't these two countries each other's closest trading partners? They would both have far too much to lose to go at it fang and claws. Besides, Russia's Czar and Germany's Kaiser both had the same grandmother, Victoria. Yet world war ensued nonetheless.
From my favorite scribe!
ReplyDeletehttps://lfpress.com/opinion/columnists/dyer-american-rhetoric-on-russian-invasion-of-ukraine-grows-less-plausible
Don't forget the neo Nazi element that resides in the Ukraine and that the so called independent part of the Ukraine is ethically Russian.
TB
"Wait this crisis out, and it will eventually go away."
Deletewise words from Gwynne
funny -
Reuters calls the Russian troops 'peacekeepers'.
Many headlines state 'incursion'.
Meanwhile things are calm in Kyiv and the Ruskies and Canadian truckers are both hit with banking sanctions!!
Brings back memories of the incomparable Presidents Choice sauce:
'Memories of Kosovo'.
Ethnically...
ReplyDeleteTB
well
ReplyDeleteIt was the line,
"And we come to the aid of a friend"
that chased me back to this song.
Other than that
As I know 80% is missing information,
And 20% is dis information
There seems to be no reason to jeopardise any relationship,
by actually being fool enough to voice an opinion.
A DJ would follow with
Carole King You Got a Friend Tapestry album
Jackson Browne
Lives in the Balance C. 1986
I've been waiting for something to happen
For a week or a month or a year
With the blood in the ink of the headlines
And the sound of the crowd in my ear
You might ask what it takes to remember
When you know that you've seen it before
Where a government lies to a people
And a country is drifting to war
And there's a shadow on the faces
Of the men who send the guns
To the wars that are fought in places
Where their business interest runs
On the radio talk shows and the TV
You hear one thing again and again
How the U.S.A. stands for freedom
And we come to the aid of a friend
But who are the ones that we call our friends
These governments killing their own?
Or the people who finally can't take any more
And they pick up a gun or a brick or a stone
There are lives in the balance
There are people under fire
There are children at the cannons
And there is blood on the wire
There's a shadow on the faces
Of the men who fan the flames
Of the wars that are fought in places
Where we can't even say the names
They sell us the president the same way
They sell us our clothes and our cars
They sell us every thing from youth to religion
The same time they sell us our wars
I want to know who the men in the shadows are
I want to hear somebody asking them why
They can be counted on to tell us who our enemies are
But they're never the ones to fight or to die
And there are lives in the balance
There are people under fire
There are children at the cannons
And there is blood on the wire
Ukrainian shelling of border areas of Donetsk over the past few years has forced thousands to flee into Russia for safety. I wonder if they will be able to return and rebuild from the rubble now.
ReplyDeleteIt seems to be a rerun of the Russia/Georgia/South Ossetia conflict.
Delete