Originally Posted by
JamesMcClean
How has it come to this?
On the face of it it’s mental. But, as per, ‘we’ in the West have totally underestimated the Russian psyche. Again. We might think it’s idiotic, but Russians have been invaded from the ‘West’ since time immemorial. From Napoleon through to Hitler. No wonder they are paranoid.So, after the the fall of the Soviet Union did ‘we’ engage and reassure them and bring them into the fold. No - instead we brought NATO further and further toward the Russian border by signing up loads and loads of ex Warsaw Pact Countries - talk about rubbing your nose in it. Is it little wonder then that despots like Putin use this as an example to promote nationalism and populism?
The difficulty now is that the US, UK, and it’s allies can cry foul about the invasion of the ‘sovereign’ nation of Ukraine under false pretences, but it’s hardly different from the invasion of the ‘sovereign’ nation of Iraq under false pretences (i.e. WMD that did not and never existed). Putin is not stupid - he knows he can bring that one up if he wants to in order to justify his actions.
This is really scary stuff now. It may take days, weeks or months, but Putin is going to eventually subjugate Ukraine. After that, he’ll turn his attention westward. It’ll take a few years but he will start to look at the Baltic States and kick off the same sort of nonsense (cyber warfare, indigenous ‘rebels’, disinformation) as a prelude as an excuse to invade one or more of them. The only snag is that they are all now in NATO and that can only lead to one thing…………………….
