I think this is what disaster capitalism looks like, isn’t it? Presumably there won’t be much left of Ukraine after the war, but what there is will be owned by US corporations & their local neoliberal allies. Which is why they’ve funded the war in the first place.
Create a disaster, then exploit it to asset strip a country. It’s hardly a new strategy. As the Iraqis could point out if anyone asked them. (Weird how we never hear about them now, isn’t it?)
True! I am still waiting for the "supportive" collection of postcards and t-shirt ads with flags of Libya, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Serbia, Afghanistan to start appearing every 10 minutes on my Facebook feed.
Yep. And to add. The idea that Russia is threatening to use nukes is a typical mischaracterization of what Putin and other leaders have been saying and supports the (also typical) mischaracterization of the conflict as Russia being cornered.
I'm thinking by Spring there won't be much of Ukraine as we know it left, and these guys just want it to be a neoliberal, weaponized outpost of NATO/US.
I was in Iraq as an AID advisor. I can assure you few assets were stripped out of Iraq. If anything, wealth was stripped out of the USA for Iraq, with US government contractors as middlemen collecting a lot of it.
The amount of Iraqi assets owned by foreign owners in infinitesimally small.
The massive privatization in Iraq was exactly that, national wealth being stripped away. Plus moving the economy to be subservient to the USD. Iraq cannot ask for US troops to be removed because it will end up like Afghanistan or Russia, with all USD holdings out of Iraq blocked.
Remind me who decided to invade Ukraine February 24?
It seem you very averse to blame Putin's for this war. I mean the man is a billionaire who made his wealth from looting the Russian state. You can't seriously say opposing US/NATO support is a way to oppose neoliberalism, whilst ignoring the role played by its worst incarnation.
This is a war that was provoked. It’s a war that never should have been started. Gamesmanship on all sides. Biden was not pushing for negotiations or a peace settlement, he was (I believe) absurdly seeking regime change in Russia. So stupid! And Zelensky will be playing Roosevelt in the Hollywood movie soon to be released. Once again, the people suffering under the yoke of these big ego “leaders” are the ordinary people--now homeless refugees. It’s obscene. And we sure appreciate all their sacrifices. The media has been pumping this war up so much! It’s deeply disturbing. Fighting for democracy again. Really?
“The choice that we faced in Ukraine — and I'm using the past tense there intentionally — was whether Russia exercised a veto over NATO involvement in Ukraine on the negotiating table or on the battlefield,” said George Beebe, a former director of Russia analysis at the CIA and special adviser on Russia to former Vice President Dick Cheney. “And we elected to make sure that the veto was exercised on the battlefield, hoping that either Putin would stay his hand or that the military operation would fail.”
So everyone aside from the man who ordered Russian tanks into Ukraine is to blame?
If the world's richest man, with its largest nuclear arsenal isn't responsible for own actions, there is no point to attributing blame.
If we going to negate Putin's own agency we should do so by invoking the 1995 statement of Immanuel Wallerstein, the inventor of world system theory:
"Your [Russia's] next presidents will bear epaulets. You can't have anything else. You'll resume the Cold War with America because you are a semi-periphery country specialised on creating new conflicts"
Russian imperialist social structures made this war inevitable. Moscow was going to try to conquer Ukraine sooner or later, as it did under Catherine the Great and Lenin.
Immanuel Wallerstein was far too immersed in the centrality of the west and thus he ended having blinders. Until 1700s, the world's biggest economies were China's and India's. And they are going to regain that status in the very near future. The centrality of the west will absolutely be gone. As the Indian Foreign Minister said publicly: "Europe should end up with thinking that its problems are the world's problems". Wallerstein obviously didn't know much about Russia and its history and culture. Maybe he should have had a talk with late Professor Stephen Cohen...
Putin has agency and the attack on Ukraine was a reaction: West / US relentless push east, to come ever closer to Russian borders and threaten. Now that Ukraine is off the table, suddenly Finland, who was a neutral country, not only wants to join NATO, but argues for bringing US nuclear armament in the country, which, for all intents and purposes is a breach of the Non Proliferation Treaty. But that is the "rules based order" pushed by the US.
And beside the relentless US push to threaten Russia and to reduce it again to the prostrate state it was between 1991 to 2000, Ukraine was actively persecuting the ethnic minorities, especially the Russian large minority in the country (remember that Crimea was Russian until 1954, and Novorossiya was Russian until 1922). And starting with 2021, Ukraine was on the path to squash the Russian resistance in Donbas, resistance to the ultranationalist regime in Kiev. That path was legislated in March 2021 and then bolstered with actions. And at the beginning of February 2022, Ukraine has started a massive bombing campaign in Donbas, as witnessed by the western leaning OECD reports. SO Russia, as in a good bar brawl, moved to hit first.
To me, it is obvious that no facts and arguments would sway you in any shape and form. But the playwright Harold Pinter’s acceptance speech for the 2005 Noble Prize for Literature set out a widely held view of US foreign policy: “The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.” It looks to me you are under that strong hypnosis.
Wallerstein was literally speaking a few years after the implosion of the Warsaw pact USSR, which dominated eastern Europe since the end of WW2, and shortly after the first Chetnyan war. Russian imperialism wasn't ancient history in 1995.
I think your Russian spelling of Kyiv as "Kiev" reveals a certain bias in your arguments which distorts your analysis of events.
1) Describing the US and western reaction to Russia's invasion, doesn't legitimise russian imperialism. It shows that it is self-defeating. Putins invasion was exactly what eastern Europe feared when it rushed to join NATO, and justifies their decision in hindsight. Finland and Sweden joining NATO is not a since of American aggression, but Putin's incompetence coming home to roost. I mean after the war on terror, is the concept of blowback so hard to understand.
2) The NATO expansion was never an issue. Putin didn't care much when Estonia join up over a decade ago. Indeed he didn't seem to mind selling gas to NATO Germany, keeping the profits in banks in NATO UK, to buy NATO German, French and Czechia capital goods to build up his military industrial complex.
3) Much of what you say about Ukraine is Russian propaganda. Ukrainianisation is no different from any other decolonising language policy. Indeed, the accusations that Ukraine is suppressing Russia speakers is disproved by the infamous Azov battalion being filled with russophone Ukraines (who the Kremlin says are instrumental in the oppression of russophone Ukrainians). The shelling of the Donbas, literally a meme in Russian propaganda much like Ukraine biolabs, or "gestures of goodwill". What is ignore is that the DPR and LPR, were Russian puppet states used by Putin to weaken the government in Kyiv, and as part of a project of annexation. As Kamil Galeev argues, the states were systematically looted economically, had any independent leaders killed by the FSB, and now are subject to brutal conscription, with virtually every fighting aged man being used as cannon fodder (or essentially colonial troops). Putin's exploitation of the Donbas is a significant reason for the fierce resistance seen in eastern russophone Ukraine. The shelling meme is just a red herring.
4) US = bad isn't a valid school of IR. It is entirely reactionary, and is dependent on US action, whilst being agnostic who should oppose it. It offers nothing constructive, and ultimately with unprincipled. If opposing American hegemony requires pushing the irredentist claims of a European colonial empire run by a billionaire who decriminalised domestic violence, then any critique it can offer against the US is discredited.
Wallerstein was wrong. Putin and Medvedev are both trained lawyers and not generals.
Russia is not showing imperialist tendencies, just nationalistic, pro Russian ethnicity tendencies. Eastern Europe didn't fear a Russian invasion. Look at Hungary nowadays. Romanians didn't fear a Russian invasion. As a Romanian, I know that we were forced to join NATO as a precondition of joining EU.
Sweden and Finland have fallen under the spell of US propaganda as well as grooming and buying of their elites. As well as threats to economy (which are never in public).
NATO expansion was always an issue, but Ukraine was the bright red line, as the present CIA director has described in 2008, when he was ambassador to Moscow and warned the Bush regime of its decision to invite Ukraine in NATO. Russia sold gas to Germany as a means to pacify it. Didn't work prior to WWII and is not working now, when Germany has to obey its occupier and overseer.
Getting rid of "colonialism"! That is a bit rich. You totally are out to lunch here mister. Russia has taken those lands from Tatar hordes through time (end with Crimean conquest at the end of 1700s), which took them in 1200s from the other people living there, some of them being Slavs. Ukraine just want to accomplish its full blown nationalistic project to the exclusion of all other nationalities, especially those bordering Ukraine and that could have population and historical claims of territories. As such Hungarians and Romanians in Ukraine have been persecuted and the Venice Convention in its report from 2019 found Ukraine as persecuting minorities through law and one can be sure if law is biased, the reality is that there is actual persecution of the minorities and their rights.
As a Romanian a learned about Kiev and Londra, and Moscova, and what not. I am not going to bastardize my language to stroke the bottomless pit that is Ukrainian ego.
And the shelling meme has been acknowledged by OECD for the period between 2015 and 2022. There were 14,000 died, and all 2500-3000 civilians that died among them (including women and children) was on the separatist side. These are numbers reported by OECD, which is biased against Russia.
Thus, it is obvious that you do not believe Ukrainian statements, American statements, and international organization statements that go against the picture you have in your had. Showing how deeply under hypnosis you are.
The critique Putin offers against the US hegemonic aspirations is taken to hart by most of the world. OPEC+ is not listening to US demands. It is only the EU US, Canada, Australia, New Zeeland, and to some extent Japan that have sanctioned Russia. And the Global South can see that their access to Russian grains and fertilizer and energy has been curtailed by the West, not by Russia.
You seem to desperate to just a pretty blatant effort to conquer land from a formerly colonisalised land from its colonial overlord.
Your right Putin wasn't a trained general (he is ex-KGB), but his wars are real is not conventional. The second Chetnyan war, the invasion of Georgia, Syria, the annexation of Crimea, and the Donbas war, and now this invasion.
If you don't see Putin's recent "referendums" in contested bits if Ukraine weren't evidence of his imperialist desire to conquer land beyond the Donbas, then I'm afraid you are letting your hatred for the west blind you to the realities of this war.
I recommend you actually watch Putin's speeches and listen to Russian TV. You'll find little about the NATO expansion, but a lot of jingoism, Ukraine being a fake country, and war crime advocacy.
As an EU report, even mentioned on the Radio Free Europe site, indicated that Georgia attacked and Russians reacted to the attack.
Russia was invited in Syria and Syrians and Iranians begged Russia on their knees to get involved. However, nobody invited the US army in Syria, where it still has some thousands soldiers, occupying 1/3 of Syria and stealing oil and wheat.
Crimeans wanted from 1991 to get reunited with Russia. The ultranationalist coup in 2014 gave them the opportunity. And ethnic Russians in Donbas wanted to follow. What is good for the goose (Kosovo) should be good for the gander (ethnic Russians in Ukraine; maybe ethnic Romanians and ethnic Hungarians as well).
I love Putin speeches. I read all of them as soon as they are translated. No jingoism at all, but a rallying flag against the US neocolonialism and brute hegemony that empowers plutocracy everywhere.
Yes I'm well aware of the argument that Ukraine was not a real country invented by Lenin (and Crimea is only Ukrainian via Krushchev's mistake) and Ukrainians are in fact "little Russians". That Ukrainianisation is actually genocide against Russian speakers. That the Ukrainians are developing anti-slav biology weapons in special biolabs.
The very existence of a Ukraine not under Putin's thumb is provocation. That doesn't mean its a reasonable justification.
You are jumping the gun mate. Russia asked for two things: Ukraine to not join NATO and Russian minority rights to be respected. From there to eliminating Ukraine from the map is a huge chasm. But your induced hypnosis makes you oblivious to that fact.
Apparently Gorbachev didn’t get the memo and the tooth fairy didn’t write the Treaty of Versailles. I think you know what I’m saying is that things aren’t as simple as the narrative suggests. They never are. That’s why the gods invented history.
When democracy is under attack we need to tread carefully on political economy.
Really? Calling Ukraine democracy is beyond ridiculous, it insults the intelligence of any reader who has looked at the nature of post-Maidan regime. Leaving aside banning of all opposition parties and confiscations of their property, effectively banning labor unions, suppressing Russian language (which is native even for many remaining in the rump Ukraine), control of neo-Nazi far right elements of Army and security services etc., the true nature of the whole project is best summed up by the ex-president Poroshenko:
This is just a selective misquotation about the state of administration in separatist territories and not the intent, you would know it, if you actually listen to a full speech or even a minute before this segment.
The indiscriminate shelling of Donbass since 2014 (which continues to this day), cutting off water to Crimea (which caused hardship to millions and effectively destroyed much of agriculture, with drought visible from satellite images), not to mention pogroming Roma, burning demonstrators in Odessa and similar crimes give quite a clear illustration of both the intent and execution. Poroshenko was just honest enough to talk about it.
How much of that is real and not just Russian propaganda used to the justify Putins 8 year long colonial war in the Donbas?
Seriously.
The same people who bring up the donbas shelling are the same ones that invoke the biolabs, and how Ukrainianisation is destroying the Russian language.
Russian propaganda? A country of 40 million in which about 30% of population lists Russian as their native language (admittedly, these are pre-Maidan coup numbers, good luck declaring that now) has 0 high-schools in Russian, 0 universities in Russian, import of Russian books is forbidden, not to mention any other media. All of this is easily verifiable information, after all one can just look at the history of laws passed by post-Maidan Rada.
How would you feel for example about Canada, if French Canadian kids could get education in French only until 4th grade but not beyond, and Anglicization would be official state policy? Or more to the point, do you think French Canadians would feel about it - there is little wonder that most Russians living in Ukraine don't want anything to do with the country that officially wants to ethnically cleanse them.
As for the shelling, OSCE kept the tally, even with their pro-Western bias they could not deny the reality.
Well said, Mr. Tooze. Market reforms during wartime not only puts the cart before the horse, but such an action also might mean the death of the animal.
The "animal" has already died. US committed 1.5 billion monthly for 2023 to prop up Ukraine, and asked EU for similar amount, news is today from EU summit that has been approved. So each month Ukraine will be financed to the tune of 3 billion, and this is excluding military / logistics help.
At best. Not much of these funds will ever reach citizens of Ukraine - first in line of payments will be various consultants and banks in the West, then next will be the well-connected in Kiev, and from that point on at each level of epically corrupt Ukrainian administration a certain cut will be skimmed off.
But none of this is really the point. We are seeing the "shock doctrine" taken to the extreme - whatever is going to remain of Ukrainian economy and natural resources will be completely taken over by Western multi-nationals or certain governments (Polish will be the main beneficiaries). Ukraine will be a vassal state ruled by corrupt comprador elite, de-industrialized and source of cheap labor, much more efficient, abundant and more easily absorbable into EU labor market. In other words, what was the plan for Russia to become in 1990s will become true for Ukraine in 2020ies.
Russia ended so dysfunctional because they specifically didn't sell stuff on the competitive international markets but to locals and didn't allow foreign owners at first which created politically influential but economically incompetent managerial class, this "corrupt comprador elite" you don't like so much, almost any coherent improvement in management in Russia after 00s happened through the foreign partnerships, ownerships and so on. Ukraine obvious is even more dysfunctional example of this because they didn't have energy exports.
I lived near a large paper factory plant that raised wages by a lot, started to provide far bigger benefits, implemented European safety and environmental standards only after the Finns bought it from Russians who was just ruining it for 10 years after the initial privatisation and most stories are mostly likes this.
The main reason liberals care so much about this Ukraine project is because it would represent their ideal state. Everything is completely outsourced to the NGO-complex funded by liberal oligarchs. This is already happening in both the US and Europe, where parliaments are less and less relevant while governments are effectively tied by supranational organizations like NATO and the EU, with NGOs acting as filter from public opinion.
I think you are projecting a lot. If you at any major liberal party in the developed world over the past few years, they are all calling for more social spending by the state.
A lot of anti Ukraine types tend to see Russia as saviour from something they don't like about the west; be it wokeness or neoliberalism.
Being anti-woke hasn't won the Russian army many victories, contrary to the far rights predictions. Its atomised social order, lack of mass politics, a weak state where only law enforcement is effective, and a corrupt ruling class enriching themselves via looting the state, Russia looks like the worst version of neoliberalism imaginable.
What are you talking about man? The most progressive of liberal parties have indeed expanded the state, to the point of killing its own citizens, like the recent euthanasia iniatives in Canada, New Zealand etc. That's ''social spending'' ....
As for Russia, roll back the clock a century and they were not even on par of France, Germany or the UK. Now Russia is taking on all of them combined plus a lot more and standing its ground. It's an astounding feat and testimony of how liberal oligarchs have looted and depleted Western Europe.
Cherry picking canadian right to die law's doesn't social spending negate the largest reductions in poverty, brought on by higher social spending since Trudeau came to power.
Russia was literally a massive superpower a few decades ago at the cockpit of the USSR. Now it cannot seize Ukraine, and it isn't even fighting the EU. It is petro state even more dependent on western capital goods than the USSR.
Also, western Europe is one of the richest most egalitarian places in the world with high degrees of social spending, and civil liberties, where the average person can live to the age of 80. That doesn't sound like 90s Russia.
Russia, or rather your imagined image of it, represents the anti-liberal force destined to end the end of history. It isn't. If anything Putin has proven Fukuyama right. The alternatives to the Liberal state are too dysfunctional to compete.
Mate, Ukraine is merely the battlefield and cannon fodder. Troops are trained by NATO, receive real time intelligence from NATO, are armed by NATO, and receive orders from NATO.
Fukuyama is a charlatan that goes into hiding every time history takes a turn he doesn't like. The world, indeed, is siding against the woke empire.
The Ukrainian army was in transition before 2022, hence their extensive use of soviet era tanks, often captured from Russia (sorry left behind by Russia as "a gesture of good will").
Cannon fodder tend not be successful beat back an invading army from a nuclear power. But that is a distraction isn't. Ukrainians have always been accused of being foreign puppets whenever they disobey the Kremlin. Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth, puppets, Habsburg puppets, Polish puppets, and now American puppets. The Moscovite metropole has always needed scapegoats to blame when those it wants to dominate resist. Easier to blame NATO, than acknowledge the annexation Crimea shocked the Ukrainian state out of complacency, and develop a decent army.
Also, does Russia really look like its winning? Does China, with its imploding property market, covid lockdowns, 20% youth employment, rapidly aging population, heading towards a middle income trap under one man rule look like its a viable alternative to the west?
Yes, the ''Ukrainian army'' which somehow speaks Polish, French and English, with NYT admitting Delta, SAS and French special forces are on the ground.
LOL
Now, given that you have showed your true colors, the British ones, meaning the genocidal hatred of Russia and desire to dismantle the nation, as nobody uses ''Moscovite'' for no other reason, I think we can end the conversation.
"the question on the battlefield is whether Russia resorts to nuclear escalation”. No! The question on the battlefield is why Russia defeated NATO's biggest, best equipped, best trained army in 48 hours. The answer is, because Russia has controlled the skies and delivered 10x more strikes than Ukraine, causing a kill ratio between 10:1 and 12:1.
"Ukraine celebrates its military triumphs"? Ukraine retook 2% of the land it lost in the Donbas – at a cost of 10% of its remaining frontline troops.
Ukraine is not, has never been, and will never be a viable state. It's always been a frontier region, which is why it's called 'the Ukraine.' George Curzon, 1st Marquess Curzon of Kedleston, KG, GCSI, GCIE, PC, FRS, FBA, Viceroy of India from 1899 to 1905, had some well chosen words of advice about such places:
"When, at the end of December, 1905, the then Vice-Chancellor asked me to be the Romanes Lecturer in the following year, I chose the subject of Frontiers. It happened that a large part of my younger days had been spent in travel upon the boundaries of the British Empire in Asia, which had always exercised upon me a peculiar fascination. A little later, at the India Office and at the Foreign Office, I had had official cognizance of a period of great anxiety, when the main sources of diplomatic preoccupation, and sometimes of international danger, had been the determination of the Frontiers of the Empire in Central Asia, in every part of Africa, and in South America. Further, I had just returned from a continent where I had been responsible for the security and defence of a Land Frontier 5,700 miles in length, certainly the most diversified, the most important, and the most delicately poised in the world; and I had there, as Viceroy, been called upon to organize, and to conduct the proceedings of, as many as five Boundary Commissions.
"I was the more tempted to undertake this task because I had never been able to discover, much less to study, its literature. It is a remarkable fact that, although Frontiers are the chief anxiety of nearly every Foreign Office in the civilized world, and are the subject of four out of every five political treaties or conventions that are now concluded, though as a branch of the science of government Frontier policy is of the first practical importance, and has a more profound effect upon the peace or warfare of nations than any other factor, political or economic, there is yet no work or treatise in any language which, so far as I know, affects to treat of the subject as a whole. Modern works on geography realize with increasing seriousness the significance of political geography; and here in this University, so responsive to the spirit of the age, where I rejoice to think that a School of Geography has recently been founded, it is not likely to escape attention. A few pages are sometimes devoted to Frontiers in compilations on International Law, and here and there a Frontier officer relates his experience before learned societies or in the pages of a magazine. But with these exceptions there is a practical void. You may ransack the catalogues of libraries, you may search the indexes of celebrated historical works, you may study the writings of scholars, and you will find the subject almost wholly ignored. Its formulae are hidden in the arcana of diplomatic chancelleries; its documents are embedded in vast and forbidding collections of treaties; its incidents and what I may describe as its incomparable drama are the possession of a few silent men, who may be found in the clubs of London, or Paris, or Berlin, when they are not engaged in tracing lines upon the unknown areas of the earth.
Frontiers in History.
And yet I would invite you to pause and consider what Frontiers mean, and what part they play in the life of nations. I will not for the moment go further back than a century. It was the adoption of a mistaken Frontier policy that brought the colossal ambitions of the great Napoleon with a crash to the ground. The allied armies might never have entered Paris had the Emperor not held out for an impossible Frontier for France. The majority of the most important wars of the century have been Frontier wars. Wars of religion, of alliances, of rebellion, of aggrandisement, of dynastic intrigue or ambition—wars in which the personal element was often the predominant factor—tend to be replaced by Frontier wars, i.e. wars arising out of the expansion of states and kingdoms, carried to a point, as the habitable globe shrinks, at which the interests or ambitions of one state come into sharp and irreconcilable collision with those of another.
To take the experience of the past half-century alone. The Franco-German War was a war for a Frontier, and it was the inevitable sequel of the Austro-Prussian campaign of 1866, which, by destroying the belt of independent states between Prussia and her Rhenish provinces, had brought her up to the doors of France. The campaign of 1866 was itself the direct consequence of the war of 1864 for the recovery by Germany of the Frontier Duchies of Schleswig-Holstein. The Russo-Turkish War originated in a revolt of the Frontier States, and every Greek war is waged for the recovery of a national Frontier. We were ourselves at war with Afghanistan in 1839, and again in 1878, we were on the verge of war with Russia in 1878, and again in 1885, over Frontier incidents in Asia. The most arduous struggle in which we have been engaged in India in modern times was waged with Frontier tribes. Had the Tibetans respected our Frontiers, we should never have marched three years ago to Lhasa. Think, indeed, of what the Indian Frontier Problem, as it is commonly called, has meant and means; the controversies it has provoked, the passions it has aroused; the reputations that have flashed or faded within its sinister shadow. Japan came to blows with China over the Frontier-state of Korea; she found herself gripped in a life-and-death struggle with Russia because of the attempt of the latter to include Manchuria within the Frontiers of her political influence. Great Britain was on the brink of a collision with France over the Frontier incident of Fashoda; she advanced to Khartoum not to avenge Gordon, but to defend an imperilled and to recover a lost Frontier. Only the other day the Algeciras Conference was sitting to determine the degree to which the possession of a contiguous Frontier gave France the right to exercise a predominant influence in Morocco. But perhaps a more striking illustration still is that of Great Britain and America. The two occasions on which in recent times (and there are earlier examples[1]) the relations between these two allied and fraternal peoples—conflict between whom would be a hideous crime—have been most perilously affected, have both been concerned with Frontier disputes—the Venezuelan and the Alaskan Boundary.
The most urgent work of Foreign Ministers and Ambassadors, the foundation or the outcome of every entente cordiale, is now the conclusion of Frontier Conventions in which sources of discord are removed by the adjustment of rival interests or ambitions at points where the territorial borders adjoin. Frontiers are indeed the razor's edge on which hang suspended the modern issues of war or peace, of life or death to nations. Nor is this surprising. Just as the protection of the home is the most vital care of the private citizen, so the integrity of her borders is the condition of existence of the State. But with the rapid growth of population and the economic need for fresh outlets, expansion has, in the case of the Great Powers, become an even more pressing necessity. As the vacant spaces of the earth are filled up, the competition for the residue is temporarily more keen. Fortunately, the process is drawing towards a natural termination. When all the voids are filled up, and every Frontier is defined, the problem will assume a different form. The older and more powerful nations will still dispute about their Frontiers with each other; they will still encroach upon and annex the territories of their weaker neighbours; Frontier wars will not, in the nature of things, disappear. But the scramble for new lands, or for the heritage of decaying States, will become less acute as there is less territory to be absorbed and less chance of doing it with impunity, or as the feebler units are either neutralized, or divided, or fall within the undisputed Protectorate of a stronger Power. We are at present passing through a transitional phase, of which less disturbed conditions should be the sequel, falling more and more within the ordered domain of International Law.
The illustrations which I have given, and which might easily be multiplied, will be sufficient to indicate the overwhelming influence of Frontiers in the history of the modern world. Reference to the past will tell a not substantially different tale. In our own country how much has turned upon the border conflict between England and Scotland and between England and Wales? In Ireland the ceaseless struggle between those within and those outside the Pale has left an ineffaceable mark on the history and character of the people. Half the warfare of the European continent has raged round the great Frontier barriers of the Alps and Pyrenees, the Danube and the Rhine. The Roman Empire, nowhere so like to our own as in its Frontier policy and experience—a subject to which I shall have frequent occasion to revert,—finally broke up and perished because it could not maintain its Frontiers intact against the barbarians".
Putin invokes this threat all time in his various speeches.
True, it's a bluff designed to scare westerners into giving him parts of Ukraine, but it's easy to be scared by the threat invoked by a man who just violated Kekkonen's peace.
You are aware these articles quote Putin at length? This is a well established acceptable research method to gather information about what a world leader, politician, central banker, celebrity, and CEO has said on any given topic.
Why does Putin somehow warrant his own unique epistemology?
Threatening to use nuclear weapons against a state isn't the same as Bush 2 war on terror rhetoric. Even if it was, it all it proves is that Putin isn't the based red-pilled giga-chad online reactionaries claim he is, as these threats never go anywhere.
Despite the plethora of economic challenges, Ukraine’s achievements in prosecuting their national defence against such a large and brutal foe have been exceptionally competent and well beyond what one could have reasonably expected. The main failings have been external such as a severe lack of military hardware provided by NATO and other Western nations when compared with what Russia has retained from the Soviet era. The numbers of critical items like heavy artillery, tanks, infantry fighting vehicles both tracked and wheeled, armoured personnel carriers and logistics trucks may look large when compared to Germany’s feeble current stocks but fall way short of Russia’s holdings of these weapons.
Thankfully the lack of Russian trained manpower, poor training, poor leadership, poor tactics, poor battle space intelligence, low competence of the airforces, low morale and high levels of corruption of the Russian regime and military have tipped the balance in favour of Ukraine who are now on a trajectory to regaining all territories lost since 2014 including Sevastopol.
The insufficiency of foreign military hardware and training support for Ukraine will however prolong the war, delay final victory and lead to many more casualties and much more destruction by Russia of Ukrainian infrastructure.
As Ukraine is experiencing relatively high inflation the actual source and likely duration of each inflation source must be investigated and countered where possible and where appropriate. Some additional government deficit spending may even be justified where the money spent can help reduce an inflationary source. For example repairs or new gas or electricity generation or transmission infrastructure that may increase supply to a region and reduce energy costs. Wood or coal fired fired boilers may be needed to replace gas fired boilers for example? Transport infrastructure may be lacking given the blockade and wartime carnage?
The blunt tools of reducing aggregate demand and raising the cash rate are usually counter productive in times of existential threat during war and even during times of peace.
Ukraine is very cost competitive in terms of labour and raw material costs and is well placed geographically but probably needs better rail and road links to the Eastern and South Eastern neighbouring nations given the current shipping constraints. Ukraine should therefore aim to repair most existing industries, to become more economically self sufficient and to export what they are good at which includes heavy industries, agriculture, value for money weapons and munitions, advanced manufacturing including high volume mass production, light industries including electronics and software, aircraft production and servicing for international airlines and so on. The national government should actively facilitate such reconstruction and expansion in the same way most East Asian nations have successfully done in particular Japan and South Korea and foreign investment is also beneficial. Avoid the ‘pay back the debt economic puritans’ and learn from Keynes and the MMT economists so as to optimise the outcomes.
Russia will bounce back and Russian ultranationalism is unlikely to ever completely disappear and so Ukraine must be prepared to maintain full spectrum regional economic and military parity with Russia while also seeking mutually beneficial trade and cooperation with Russia when conditions allow. Ukraine can eventually remain on good terms with all neighbours and Russia’s leadership may eventually learn that cooperation is better than conflict but on terms that are acceptable to the Ukrainian people that have suffered so much because of that difficult neighbour.
Ukraine needs ample foreign recovery aid and very competent local leadership to recover much like Japan or Germany received and demonstrated after the Second World War.
Keynes would have known what to do as he was a balanced man of wisdom, compassion and not just a hard theoretical, narrowly focussed and inflexible economist.
The economy must serve the people as a whole, genuinely productive private and public enterprises and the national interest and not just enrich the well connected few as is too often the case in Russia and sections of the West.
Price controls and limits on profiteering appear to now be needed, a progressive tax scale to reduce the burden on the poor and to increase revenues as well as much more foreign military and economic aid are desperately needed, as Ukraine is fighting for all of Europe and NATO given Russia’s aggressive expansionist aims under Putin - and mostly from their own very limited resources.
Yes, and then Mexico will attack the US with their cartel fighters standing in for the Azov regiment .and the Georgian legion. In a year they'll take back all the lands they lost in the 1840s.
You should read some professional military officers rather than the generals and spooks talking on CNN. They're just feathering their retirement nests, hoping to get on the board at Raytheon.
You're economic prescriptions for Ukraine are very good. I wish we had those here in the US.
Can't Ukraine make a deal with the border states that the Ukrainian businesses move there (where they are safe), but still pay the taxes in Ukraine and employ mostly displaced Ukrainians?
I think this is what disaster capitalism looks like, isn’t it? Presumably there won’t be much left of Ukraine after the war, but what there is will be owned by US corporations & their local neoliberal allies. Which is why they’ve funded the war in the first place.
Create a disaster, then exploit it to asset strip a country. It’s hardly a new strategy. As the Iraqis could point out if anyone asked them. (Weird how we never hear about them now, isn’t it?)
True! I am still waiting for the "supportive" collection of postcards and t-shirt ads with flags of Libya, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Serbia, Afghanistan to start appearing every 10 minutes on my Facebook feed.
Yep. And to add. The idea that Russia is threatening to use nukes is a typical mischaracterization of what Putin and other leaders have been saying and supports the (also typical) mischaracterization of the conflict as Russia being cornered.
I'm thinking by Spring there won't be much of Ukraine as we know it left, and these guys just want it to be a neoliberal, weaponized outpost of NATO/US.
First there wasn't going to be a Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Then Ukraine would fall in days...in weeks...in months.
They wouldn't drive Russian forces from the North, from Sumy, from Khariv, and east of Oskil.
Maybe western observers of the russian invasion of Ukraine should perhaps be less certain in predictions?
Maybe western observers should study the actions taken by Ukraine and the West as well? Maybe what Russia did, as most of its history, was reaction?
I was in Iraq as an AID advisor. I can assure you few assets were stripped out of Iraq. If anything, wealth was stripped out of the USA for Iraq, with US government contractors as middlemen collecting a lot of it.
The amount of Iraqi assets owned by foreign owners in infinitesimally small.
The massive privatization in Iraq was exactly that, national wealth being stripped away. Plus moving the economy to be subservient to the USD. Iraq cannot ask for US troops to be removed because it will end up like Afghanistan or Russia, with all USD holdings out of Iraq blocked.
Remind me who decided to invade Ukraine February 24?
It seem you very averse to blame Putin's for this war. I mean the man is a billionaire who made his wealth from looting the Russian state. You can't seriously say opposing US/NATO support is a way to oppose neoliberalism, whilst ignoring the role played by its worst incarnation.
This is a war that was provoked. It’s a war that never should have been started. Gamesmanship on all sides. Biden was not pushing for negotiations or a peace settlement, he was (I believe) absurdly seeking regime change in Russia. So stupid! And Zelensky will be playing Roosevelt in the Hollywood movie soon to be released. Once again, the people suffering under the yoke of these big ego “leaders” are the ordinary people--now homeless refugees. It’s obscene. And we sure appreciate all their sacrifices. The media has been pumping this war up so much! It’s deeply disturbing. Fighting for democracy again. Really?
“The choice that we faced in Ukraine — and I'm using the past tense there intentionally — was whether Russia exercised a veto over NATO involvement in Ukraine on the negotiating table or on the battlefield,” said George Beebe, a former director of Russia analysis at the CIA and special adviser on Russia to former Vice President Dick Cheney. “And we elected to make sure that the veto was exercised on the battlefield, hoping that either Putin would stay his hand or that the military operation would fail.”
https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/russia-s-ukraine-invasion-may-have-been-preventable-n1290831
So everyone aside from the man who ordered Russian tanks into Ukraine is to blame?
If the world's richest man, with its largest nuclear arsenal isn't responsible for own actions, there is no point to attributing blame.
If we going to negate Putin's own agency we should do so by invoking the 1995 statement of Immanuel Wallerstein, the inventor of world system theory:
"Your [Russia's] next presidents will bear epaulets. You can't have anything else. You'll resume the Cold War with America because you are a semi-periphery country specialised on creating new conflicts"
Russian imperialist social structures made this war inevitable. Moscow was going to try to conquer Ukraine sooner or later, as it did under Catherine the Great and Lenin.
Immanuel Wallerstein was far too immersed in the centrality of the west and thus he ended having blinders. Until 1700s, the world's biggest economies were China's and India's. And they are going to regain that status in the very near future. The centrality of the west will absolutely be gone. As the Indian Foreign Minister said publicly: "Europe should end up with thinking that its problems are the world's problems". Wallerstein obviously didn't know much about Russia and its history and culture. Maybe he should have had a talk with late Professor Stephen Cohen...
Putin has agency and the attack on Ukraine was a reaction: West / US relentless push east, to come ever closer to Russian borders and threaten. Now that Ukraine is off the table, suddenly Finland, who was a neutral country, not only wants to join NATO, but argues for bringing US nuclear armament in the country, which, for all intents and purposes is a breach of the Non Proliferation Treaty. But that is the "rules based order" pushed by the US.
And beside the relentless US push to threaten Russia and to reduce it again to the prostrate state it was between 1991 to 2000, Ukraine was actively persecuting the ethnic minorities, especially the Russian large minority in the country (remember that Crimea was Russian until 1954, and Novorossiya was Russian until 1922). And starting with 2021, Ukraine was on the path to squash the Russian resistance in Donbas, resistance to the ultranationalist regime in Kiev. That path was legislated in March 2021 and then bolstered with actions. And at the beginning of February 2022, Ukraine has started a massive bombing campaign in Donbas, as witnessed by the western leaning OECD reports. SO Russia, as in a good bar brawl, moved to hit first.
To me, it is obvious that no facts and arguments would sway you in any shape and form. But the playwright Harold Pinter’s acceptance speech for the 2005 Noble Prize for Literature set out a widely held view of US foreign policy: “The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.” It looks to me you are under that strong hypnosis.
Wallerstein was literally speaking a few years after the implosion of the Warsaw pact USSR, which dominated eastern Europe since the end of WW2, and shortly after the first Chetnyan war. Russian imperialism wasn't ancient history in 1995.
I think your Russian spelling of Kyiv as "Kiev" reveals a certain bias in your arguments which distorts your analysis of events.
1) Describing the US and western reaction to Russia's invasion, doesn't legitimise russian imperialism. It shows that it is self-defeating. Putins invasion was exactly what eastern Europe feared when it rushed to join NATO, and justifies their decision in hindsight. Finland and Sweden joining NATO is not a since of American aggression, but Putin's incompetence coming home to roost. I mean after the war on terror, is the concept of blowback so hard to understand.
2) The NATO expansion was never an issue. Putin didn't care much when Estonia join up over a decade ago. Indeed he didn't seem to mind selling gas to NATO Germany, keeping the profits in banks in NATO UK, to buy NATO German, French and Czechia capital goods to build up his military industrial complex.
3) Much of what you say about Ukraine is Russian propaganda. Ukrainianisation is no different from any other decolonising language policy. Indeed, the accusations that Ukraine is suppressing Russia speakers is disproved by the infamous Azov battalion being filled with russophone Ukraines (who the Kremlin says are instrumental in the oppression of russophone Ukrainians). The shelling of the Donbas, literally a meme in Russian propaganda much like Ukraine biolabs, or "gestures of goodwill". What is ignore is that the DPR and LPR, were Russian puppet states used by Putin to weaken the government in Kyiv, and as part of a project of annexation. As Kamil Galeev argues, the states were systematically looted economically, had any independent leaders killed by the FSB, and now are subject to brutal conscription, with virtually every fighting aged man being used as cannon fodder (or essentially colonial troops). Putin's exploitation of the Donbas is a significant reason for the fierce resistance seen in eastern russophone Ukraine. The shelling meme is just a red herring.
4) US = bad isn't a valid school of IR. It is entirely reactionary, and is dependent on US action, whilst being agnostic who should oppose it. It offers nothing constructive, and ultimately with unprincipled. If opposing American hegemony requires pushing the irredentist claims of a European colonial empire run by a billionaire who decriminalised domestic violence, then any critique it can offer against the US is discredited.
Wallerstein was wrong. Putin and Medvedev are both trained lawyers and not generals.
Russia is not showing imperialist tendencies, just nationalistic, pro Russian ethnicity tendencies. Eastern Europe didn't fear a Russian invasion. Look at Hungary nowadays. Romanians didn't fear a Russian invasion. As a Romanian, I know that we were forced to join NATO as a precondition of joining EU.
Sweden and Finland have fallen under the spell of US propaganda as well as grooming and buying of their elites. As well as threats to economy (which are never in public).
NATO expansion was always an issue, but Ukraine was the bright red line, as the present CIA director has described in 2008, when he was ambassador to Moscow and warned the Bush regime of its decision to invite Ukraine in NATO. Russia sold gas to Germany as a means to pacify it. Didn't work prior to WWII and is not working now, when Germany has to obey its occupier and overseer.
Getting rid of "colonialism"! That is a bit rich. You totally are out to lunch here mister. Russia has taken those lands from Tatar hordes through time (end with Crimean conquest at the end of 1700s), which took them in 1200s from the other people living there, some of them being Slavs. Ukraine just want to accomplish its full blown nationalistic project to the exclusion of all other nationalities, especially those bordering Ukraine and that could have population and historical claims of territories. As such Hungarians and Romanians in Ukraine have been persecuted and the Venice Convention in its report from 2019 found Ukraine as persecuting minorities through law and one can be sure if law is biased, the reality is that there is actual persecution of the minorities and their rights.
As a Romanian a learned about Kiev and Londra, and Moscova, and what not. I am not going to bastardize my language to stroke the bottomless pit that is Ukrainian ego.
And the shelling meme has been acknowledged by OECD for the period between 2015 and 2022. There were 14,000 died, and all 2500-3000 civilians that died among them (including women and children) was on the separatist side. These are numbers reported by OECD, which is biased against Russia.
Thus, it is obvious that you do not believe Ukrainian statements, American statements, and international organization statements that go against the picture you have in your had. Showing how deeply under hypnosis you are.
The critique Putin offers against the US hegemonic aspirations is taken to hart by most of the world. OPEC+ is not listening to US demands. It is only the EU US, Canada, Australia, New Zeeland, and to some extent Japan that have sanctioned Russia. And the Global South can see that their access to Russian grains and fertilizer and energy has been curtailed by the West, not by Russia.
You seem to desperate to just a pretty blatant effort to conquer land from a formerly colonisalised land from its colonial overlord.
Your right Putin wasn't a trained general (he is ex-KGB), but his wars are real is not conventional. The second Chetnyan war, the invasion of Georgia, Syria, the annexation of Crimea, and the Donbas war, and now this invasion.
If you don't see Putin's recent "referendums" in contested bits if Ukraine weren't evidence of his imperialist desire to conquer land beyond the Donbas, then I'm afraid you are letting your hatred for the west blind you to the realities of this war.
I recommend you actually watch Putin's speeches and listen to Russian TV. You'll find little about the NATO expansion, but a lot of jingoism, Ukraine being a fake country, and war crime advocacy.
You should be corrected.
As an EU report, even mentioned on the Radio Free Europe site, indicated that Georgia attacked and Russians reacted to the attack.
Russia was invited in Syria and Syrians and Iranians begged Russia on their knees to get involved. However, nobody invited the US army in Syria, where it still has some thousands soldiers, occupying 1/3 of Syria and stealing oil and wheat.
Crimeans wanted from 1991 to get reunited with Russia. The ultranationalist coup in 2014 gave them the opportunity. And ethnic Russians in Donbas wanted to follow. What is good for the goose (Kosovo) should be good for the gander (ethnic Russians in Ukraine; maybe ethnic Romanians and ethnic Hungarians as well).
I love Putin speeches. I read all of them as soon as they are translated. No jingoism at all, but a rallying flag against the US neocolonialism and brute hegemony that empowers plutocracy everywhere.
Again, about Russian "unprovoked" attack on Ukraine:
https://twitter.com/RnaudBertrand/status/1498491107902062592
Yes I'm well aware of the argument that Ukraine was not a real country invented by Lenin (and Crimea is only Ukrainian via Krushchev's mistake) and Ukrainians are in fact "little Russians". That Ukrainianisation is actually genocide against Russian speakers. That the Ukrainians are developing anti-slav biology weapons in special biolabs.
The very existence of a Ukraine not under Putin's thumb is provocation. That doesn't mean its a reasonable justification.
You are jumping the gun mate. Russia asked for two things: Ukraine to not join NATO and Russian minority rights to be respected. From there to eliminating Ukraine from the map is a huge chasm. But your induced hypnosis makes you oblivious to that fact.
Apparently Gorbachev didn’t get the memo and the tooth fairy didn’t write the Treaty of Versailles. I think you know what I’m saying is that things aren’t as simple as the narrative suggests. They never are. That’s why the gods invented history.
There's complexity and there's ignoring who did the invasion.
When democracy is under attack we need to tread carefully on political economy.
Really? Calling Ukraine democracy is beyond ridiculous, it insults the intelligence of any reader who has looked at the nature of post-Maidan regime. Leaving aside banning of all opposition parties and confiscations of their property, effectively banning labor unions, suppressing Russian language (which is native even for many remaining in the rump Ukraine), control of neo-Nazi far right elements of Army and security services etc., the true nature of the whole project is best summed up by the ex-president Poroshenko:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aHWHqj8g7Bk
This is just a selective misquotation about the state of administration in separatist territories and not the intent, you would know it, if you actually listen to a full speech or even a minute before this segment.
The indiscriminate shelling of Donbass since 2014 (which continues to this day), cutting off water to Crimea (which caused hardship to millions and effectively destroyed much of agriculture, with drought visible from satellite images), not to mention pogroming Roma, burning demonstrators in Odessa and similar crimes give quite a clear illustration of both the intent and execution. Poroshenko was just honest enough to talk about it.
How much of that is real and not just Russian propaganda used to the justify Putins 8 year long colonial war in the Donbas?
Seriously.
The same people who bring up the donbas shelling are the same ones that invoke the biolabs, and how Ukrainianisation is destroying the Russian language.
Russian propaganda? A country of 40 million in which about 30% of population lists Russian as their native language (admittedly, these are pre-Maidan coup numbers, good luck declaring that now) has 0 high-schools in Russian, 0 universities in Russian, import of Russian books is forbidden, not to mention any other media. All of this is easily verifiable information, after all one can just look at the history of laws passed by post-Maidan Rada.
How would you feel for example about Canada, if French Canadian kids could get education in French only until 4th grade but not beyond, and Anglicization would be official state policy? Or more to the point, do you think French Canadians would feel about it - there is little wonder that most Russians living in Ukraine don't want anything to do with the country that officially wants to ethnically cleanse them.
As for the shelling, OSCE kept the tally, even with their pro-Western bias they could not deny the reality.
Would you believe Poroshenko?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aHWHqj8g7Bk
He also declared to DW in July, that he signed Minsk I & II just to stall for time and had no intention of ever implementing them.
Well said, Mr. Tooze. Market reforms during wartime not only puts the cart before the horse, but such an action also might mean the death of the animal.
PG
The "animal" has already died. US committed 1.5 billion monthly for 2023 to prop up Ukraine, and asked EU for similar amount, news is today from EU summit that has been approved. So each month Ukraine will be financed to the tune of 3 billion, and this is excluding military / logistics help.
That comes to, what, maybe twenty dollars per person per week? Enough to buy food.
At best. Not much of these funds will ever reach citizens of Ukraine - first in line of payments will be various consultants and banks in the West, then next will be the well-connected in Kiev, and from that point on at each level of epically corrupt Ukrainian administration a certain cut will be skimmed off.
But none of this is really the point. We are seeing the "shock doctrine" taken to the extreme - whatever is going to remain of Ukrainian economy and natural resources will be completely taken over by Western multi-nationals or certain governments (Polish will be the main beneficiaries). Ukraine will be a vassal state ruled by corrupt comprador elite, de-industrialized and source of cheap labor, much more efficient, abundant and more easily absorbable into EU labor market. In other words, what was the plan for Russia to become in 1990s will become true for Ukraine in 2020ies.
Russia ended so dysfunctional because they specifically didn't sell stuff on the competitive international markets but to locals and didn't allow foreign owners at first which created politically influential but economically incompetent managerial class, this "corrupt comprador elite" you don't like so much, almost any coherent improvement in management in Russia after 00s happened through the foreign partnerships, ownerships and so on. Ukraine obvious is even more dysfunctional example of this because they didn't have energy exports.
I lived near a large paper factory plant that raised wages by a lot, started to provide far bigger benefits, implemented European safety and environmental standards only after the Finns bought it from Russians who was just ruining it for 10 years after the initial privatisation and most stories are mostly likes this.
The main reason liberals care so much about this Ukraine project is because it would represent their ideal state. Everything is completely outsourced to the NGO-complex funded by liberal oligarchs. This is already happening in both the US and Europe, where parliaments are less and less relevant while governments are effectively tied by supranational organizations like NATO and the EU, with NGOs acting as filter from public opinion.
I think you are projecting a lot. If you at any major liberal party in the developed world over the past few years, they are all calling for more social spending by the state.
A lot of anti Ukraine types tend to see Russia as saviour from something they don't like about the west; be it wokeness or neoliberalism.
Being anti-woke hasn't won the Russian army many victories, contrary to the far rights predictions. Its atomised social order, lack of mass politics, a weak state where only law enforcement is effective, and a corrupt ruling class enriching themselves via looting the state, Russia looks like the worst version of neoliberalism imaginable.
What are you talking about man? The most progressive of liberal parties have indeed expanded the state, to the point of killing its own citizens, like the recent euthanasia iniatives in Canada, New Zealand etc. That's ''social spending'' ....
As for Russia, roll back the clock a century and they were not even on par of France, Germany or the UK. Now Russia is taking on all of them combined plus a lot more and standing its ground. It's an astounding feat and testimony of how liberal oligarchs have looted and depleted Western Europe.
Cherry picking canadian right to die law's doesn't social spending negate the largest reductions in poverty, brought on by higher social spending since Trudeau came to power.
Russia was literally a massive superpower a few decades ago at the cockpit of the USSR. Now it cannot seize Ukraine, and it isn't even fighting the EU. It is petro state even more dependent on western capital goods than the USSR.
Also, western Europe is one of the richest most egalitarian places in the world with high degrees of social spending, and civil liberties, where the average person can live to the age of 80. That doesn't sound like 90s Russia.
Russia, or rather your imagined image of it, represents the anti-liberal force destined to end the end of history. It isn't. If anything Putin has proven Fukuyama right. The alternatives to the Liberal state are too dysfunctional to compete.
Mate, Ukraine is merely the battlefield and cannon fodder. Troops are trained by NATO, receive real time intelligence from NATO, are armed by NATO, and receive orders from NATO.
Fukuyama is a charlatan that goes into hiding every time history takes a turn he doesn't like. The world, indeed, is siding against the woke empire.
The Ukrainian army was in transition before 2022, hence their extensive use of soviet era tanks, often captured from Russia (sorry left behind by Russia as "a gesture of good will").
Cannon fodder tend not be successful beat back an invading army from a nuclear power. But that is a distraction isn't. Ukrainians have always been accused of being foreign puppets whenever they disobey the Kremlin. Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth, puppets, Habsburg puppets, Polish puppets, and now American puppets. The Moscovite metropole has always needed scapegoats to blame when those it wants to dominate resist. Easier to blame NATO, than acknowledge the annexation Crimea shocked the Ukrainian state out of complacency, and develop a decent army.
Also, does Russia really look like its winning? Does China, with its imploding property market, covid lockdowns, 20% youth employment, rapidly aging population, heading towards a middle income trap under one man rule look like its a viable alternative to the west?
Yes, the ''Ukrainian army'' which somehow speaks Polish, French and English, with NYT admitting Delta, SAS and French special forces are on the ground.
LOL
Now, given that you have showed your true colors, the British ones, meaning the genocidal hatred of Russia and desire to dismantle the nation, as nobody uses ''Moscovite'' for no other reason, I think we can end the conversation.
Your country is evil and may it pay for its sins.
Spot on.
"the question on the battlefield is whether Russia resorts to nuclear escalation”. No! The question on the battlefield is why Russia defeated NATO's biggest, best equipped, best trained army in 48 hours. The answer is, because Russia has controlled the skies and delivered 10x more strikes than Ukraine, causing a kill ratio between 10:1 and 12:1.
"Ukraine celebrates its military triumphs"? Ukraine retook 2% of the land it lost in the Donbas – at a cost of 10% of its remaining frontline troops.
Ukraine is not, has never been, and will never be a viable state. It's always been a frontier region, which is why it's called 'the Ukraine.' George Curzon, 1st Marquess Curzon of Kedleston, KG, GCSI, GCIE, PC, FRS, FBA, Viceroy of India from 1899 to 1905, had some well chosen words of advice about such places:
"When, at the end of December, 1905, the then Vice-Chancellor asked me to be the Romanes Lecturer in the following year, I chose the subject of Frontiers. It happened that a large part of my younger days had been spent in travel upon the boundaries of the British Empire in Asia, which had always exercised upon me a peculiar fascination. A little later, at the India Office and at the Foreign Office, I had had official cognizance of a period of great anxiety, when the main sources of diplomatic preoccupation, and sometimes of international danger, had been the determination of the Frontiers of the Empire in Central Asia, in every part of Africa, and in South America. Further, I had just returned from a continent where I had been responsible for the security and defence of a Land Frontier 5,700 miles in length, certainly the most diversified, the most important, and the most delicately poised in the world; and I had there, as Viceroy, been called upon to organize, and to conduct the proceedings of, as many as five Boundary Commissions.
"I was the more tempted to undertake this task because I had never been able to discover, much less to study, its literature. It is a remarkable fact that, although Frontiers are the chief anxiety of nearly every Foreign Office in the civilized world, and are the subject of four out of every five political treaties or conventions that are now concluded, though as a branch of the science of government Frontier policy is of the first practical importance, and has a more profound effect upon the peace or warfare of nations than any other factor, political or economic, there is yet no work or treatise in any language which, so far as I know, affects to treat of the subject as a whole. Modern works on geography realize with increasing seriousness the significance of political geography; and here in this University, so responsive to the spirit of the age, where I rejoice to think that a School of Geography has recently been founded, it is not likely to escape attention. A few pages are sometimes devoted to Frontiers in compilations on International Law, and here and there a Frontier officer relates his experience before learned societies or in the pages of a magazine. But with these exceptions there is a practical void. You may ransack the catalogues of libraries, you may search the indexes of celebrated historical works, you may study the writings of scholars, and you will find the subject almost wholly ignored. Its formulae are hidden in the arcana of diplomatic chancelleries; its documents are embedded in vast and forbidding collections of treaties; its incidents and what I may describe as its incomparable drama are the possession of a few silent men, who may be found in the clubs of London, or Paris, or Berlin, when they are not engaged in tracing lines upon the unknown areas of the earth.
Frontiers in History.
And yet I would invite you to pause and consider what Frontiers mean, and what part they play in the life of nations. I will not for the moment go further back than a century. It was the adoption of a mistaken Frontier policy that brought the colossal ambitions of the great Napoleon with a crash to the ground. The allied armies might never have entered Paris had the Emperor not held out for an impossible Frontier for France. The majority of the most important wars of the century have been Frontier wars. Wars of religion, of alliances, of rebellion, of aggrandisement, of dynastic intrigue or ambition—wars in which the personal element was often the predominant factor—tend to be replaced by Frontier wars, i.e. wars arising out of the expansion of states and kingdoms, carried to a point, as the habitable globe shrinks, at which the interests or ambitions of one state come into sharp and irreconcilable collision with those of another.
To take the experience of the past half-century alone. The Franco-German War was a war for a Frontier, and it was the inevitable sequel of the Austro-Prussian campaign of 1866, which, by destroying the belt of independent states between Prussia and her Rhenish provinces, had brought her up to the doors of France. The campaign of 1866 was itself the direct consequence of the war of 1864 for the recovery by Germany of the Frontier Duchies of Schleswig-Holstein. The Russo-Turkish War originated in a revolt of the Frontier States, and every Greek war is waged for the recovery of a national Frontier. We were ourselves at war with Afghanistan in 1839, and again in 1878, we were on the verge of war with Russia in 1878, and again in 1885, over Frontier incidents in Asia. The most arduous struggle in which we have been engaged in India in modern times was waged with Frontier tribes. Had the Tibetans respected our Frontiers, we should never have marched three years ago to Lhasa. Think, indeed, of what the Indian Frontier Problem, as it is commonly called, has meant and means; the controversies it has provoked, the passions it has aroused; the reputations that have flashed or faded within its sinister shadow. Japan came to blows with China over the Frontier-state of Korea; she found herself gripped in a life-and-death struggle with Russia because of the attempt of the latter to include Manchuria within the Frontiers of her political influence. Great Britain was on the brink of a collision with France over the Frontier incident of Fashoda; she advanced to Khartoum not to avenge Gordon, but to defend an imperilled and to recover a lost Frontier. Only the other day the Algeciras Conference was sitting to determine the degree to which the possession of a contiguous Frontier gave France the right to exercise a predominant influence in Morocco. But perhaps a more striking illustration still is that of Great Britain and America. The two occasions on which in recent times (and there are earlier examples[1]) the relations between these two allied and fraternal peoples—conflict between whom would be a hideous crime—have been most perilously affected, have both been concerned with Frontier disputes—the Venezuelan and the Alaskan Boundary.
The most urgent work of Foreign Ministers and Ambassadors, the foundation or the outcome of every entente cordiale, is now the conclusion of Frontier Conventions in which sources of discord are removed by the adjustment of rival interests or ambitions at points where the territorial borders adjoin. Frontiers are indeed the razor's edge on which hang suspended the modern issues of war or peace, of life or death to nations. Nor is this surprising. Just as the protection of the home is the most vital care of the private citizen, so the integrity of her borders is the condition of existence of the State. But with the rapid growth of population and the economic need for fresh outlets, expansion has, in the case of the Great Powers, become an even more pressing necessity. As the vacant spaces of the earth are filled up, the competition for the residue is temporarily more keen. Fortunately, the process is drawing towards a natural termination. When all the voids are filled up, and every Frontier is defined, the problem will assume a different form. The older and more powerful nations will still dispute about their Frontiers with each other; they will still encroach upon and annex the territories of their weaker neighbours; Frontier wars will not, in the nature of things, disappear. But the scramble for new lands, or for the heritage of decaying States, will become less acute as there is less territory to be absorbed and less chance of doing it with impunity, or as the feebler units are either neutralized, or divided, or fall within the undisputed Protectorate of a stronger Power. We are at present passing through a transitional phase, of which less disturbed conditions should be the sequel, falling more and more within the ordered domain of International Law.
The illustrations which I have given, and which might easily be multiplied, will be sufficient to indicate the overwhelming influence of Frontiers in the history of the modern world. Reference to the past will tell a not substantially different tale. In our own country how much has turned upon the border conflict between England and Scotland and between England and Wales? In Ireland the ceaseless struggle between those within and those outside the Pale has left an ineffaceable mark on the history and character of the people. Half the warfare of the European continent has raged round the great Frontier barriers of the Alps and Pyrenees, the Danube and the Rhine. The Roman Empire, nowhere so like to our own as in its Frontier policy and experience—a subject to which I shall have frequent occasion to revert,—finally broke up and perished because it could not maintain its Frontiers intact against the barbarians".
Curzon's essay is worth reading in full..
"As the war in Ukraine rages on, the question on the battlefield is whether Russia resorts to nuclear escalation."
That is not a question on the battlefield at all. That is only a question in the mouths of politicians, "journalists" and the rubes.
Putin invokes this threat all time in his various speeches.
True, it's a bluff designed to scare westerners into giving him parts of Ukraine, but it's easy to be scared by the threat invoked by a man who just violated Kekkonen's peace.
He never "invokes this threat" and never did. You should quit lying.
Several years late I know, but there is considerable evidence he has done so.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/putin-threatens-nuclear-war-nato-speech-b2505212.html
https://www.reuters.com/world/putin-update-russias-elite-ukraine-war-major-speech-2023-02-21/
https://www.politico.eu/article/vladimir-putin-new-speech-ukraine-war-transnistria-nato/
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/oct/05/vladimir-putin-escalates-nuclear-rhetoric-with-threat-to-resume-testing
https://www.npr.org/2024/02/29/1234943055/russia-putin-threatens-nuclear-war
https://www.ft.com/content/6e58e6d5-6379-4ab7-b69e-64cde7e489f3
This of course doesn't count the numerous threats made by talking heads in Russia media or Dmitry Medvedev.
Hahahah!
The Independent, Reuters, Politico, NPR and The Financial Times all say so?
Why don't you tell us what he said?
He says the same thing that every politician in the US says - everything is optional if you threaten our existence.
You are aware these articles quote Putin at length? This is a well established acceptable research method to gather information about what a world leader, politician, central banker, celebrity, and CEO has said on any given topic.
Why does Putin somehow warrant his own unique epistemology?
Threatening to use nuclear weapons against a state isn't the same as Bush 2 war on terror rhetoric. Even if it was, it all it proves is that Putin isn't the based red-pilled giga-chad online reactionaries claim he is, as these threats never go anywhere.
No.
Despite the plethora of economic challenges, Ukraine’s achievements in prosecuting their national defence against such a large and brutal foe have been exceptionally competent and well beyond what one could have reasonably expected. The main failings have been external such as a severe lack of military hardware provided by NATO and other Western nations when compared with what Russia has retained from the Soviet era. The numbers of critical items like heavy artillery, tanks, infantry fighting vehicles both tracked and wheeled, armoured personnel carriers and logistics trucks may look large when compared to Germany’s feeble current stocks but fall way short of Russia’s holdings of these weapons.
Thankfully the lack of Russian trained manpower, poor training, poor leadership, poor tactics, poor battle space intelligence, low competence of the airforces, low morale and high levels of corruption of the Russian regime and military have tipped the balance in favour of Ukraine who are now on a trajectory to regaining all territories lost since 2014 including Sevastopol.
The insufficiency of foreign military hardware and training support for Ukraine will however prolong the war, delay final victory and lead to many more casualties and much more destruction by Russia of Ukrainian infrastructure.
As Ukraine is experiencing relatively high inflation the actual source and likely duration of each inflation source must be investigated and countered where possible and where appropriate. Some additional government deficit spending may even be justified where the money spent can help reduce an inflationary source. For example repairs or new gas or electricity generation or transmission infrastructure that may increase supply to a region and reduce energy costs. Wood or coal fired fired boilers may be needed to replace gas fired boilers for example? Transport infrastructure may be lacking given the blockade and wartime carnage?
The blunt tools of reducing aggregate demand and raising the cash rate are usually counter productive in times of existential threat during war and even during times of peace.
Ukraine is very cost competitive in terms of labour and raw material costs and is well placed geographically but probably needs better rail and road links to the Eastern and South Eastern neighbouring nations given the current shipping constraints. Ukraine should therefore aim to repair most existing industries, to become more economically self sufficient and to export what they are good at which includes heavy industries, agriculture, value for money weapons and munitions, advanced manufacturing including high volume mass production, light industries including electronics and software, aircraft production and servicing for international airlines and so on. The national government should actively facilitate such reconstruction and expansion in the same way most East Asian nations have successfully done in particular Japan and South Korea and foreign investment is also beneficial. Avoid the ‘pay back the debt economic puritans’ and learn from Keynes and the MMT economists so as to optimise the outcomes.
Russia will bounce back and Russian ultranationalism is unlikely to ever completely disappear and so Ukraine must be prepared to maintain full spectrum regional economic and military parity with Russia while also seeking mutually beneficial trade and cooperation with Russia when conditions allow. Ukraine can eventually remain on good terms with all neighbours and Russia’s leadership may eventually learn that cooperation is better than conflict but on terms that are acceptable to the Ukrainian people that have suffered so much because of that difficult neighbour.
Ukraine needs ample foreign recovery aid and very competent local leadership to recover much like Japan or Germany received and demonstrated after the Second World War.
Keynes would have known what to do as he was a balanced man of wisdom, compassion and not just a hard theoretical, narrowly focussed and inflexible economist.
The economy must serve the people as a whole, genuinely productive private and public enterprises and the national interest and not just enrich the well connected few as is too often the case in Russia and sections of the West.
Price controls and limits on profiteering appear to now be needed, a progressive tax scale to reduce the burden on the poor and to increase revenues as well as much more foreign military and economic aid are desperately needed, as Ukraine is fighting for all of Europe and NATO given Russia’s aggressive expansionist aims under Putin - and mostly from their own very limited resources.
Yes, and then Mexico will attack the US with their cartel fighters standing in for the Azov regiment .and the Georgian legion. In a year they'll take back all the lands they lost in the 1840s.
You should read some professional military officers rather than the generals and spooks talking on CNN. They're just feathering their retirement nests, hoping to get on the board at Raytheon.
You're economic prescriptions for Ukraine are very good. I wish we had those here in the US.
Can't Ukraine make a deal with the border states that the Ukrainian businesses move there (where they are safe), but still pay the taxes in Ukraine and employ mostly displaced Ukrainians?