I have a feeling that "Russia invading the Donbas is as bad as Nazi Germany taking the Sudetenland" doesn't really hold up. I'm admittedly not a historian though
originally seen on neolib Twitter and then traced back to here
I have a feeling that "Russia invading the Donbas is as bad as Nazi Germany taking the Sudetenland" doesn't really hold up. I'm admittedly not a historian though
originally seen on neolib Twitter and then traced back to here
No, it doesn't hold up at all. Russia is basically just emulating the US but on a lag.
I'm seriously surprised by how poorly Russia is doing. It makes sense based on how everything's played out, but it's baffling that Russia wasn't better prepared for this eventuality. Western foreign policy experts of many sorts have talked up the Russian invasion of Ukraine for almost 30 years (almost 20 at the time of the Russo-Ukraine War breaking out). It was always in the context of what would happen should the West make serious overtures regarding NATO/EU membership for Ukraine. Hell, iit was speculated on almost as soon as the USSR was dissolved, no doubt even beforehand in the event that it did dissolve in some circles.
Even if we pretend the 2014 origins of the Russo-Ukraine War came from nowhere, Putin has had 8 years to prepare for what I'd consider to be totally predictable... Not only is it the same playbook the CIA ran beforehand and during the Soviet-Afghan invasion, but the US had just withdrawn from Afghanistan and the defense contractors whose financial interests are served by our media and natsec state would clearly be looking for new avenues to launder US taxpayer money. If history isn't accelerating and pretenses are still needed, we should see a US invasion of Ukraine before 2045 related to stopping ultranationalist terrorism spawned by... CIA training, money, weapons, and surveillance equipment...
We don't really know how Russia is doing, or at least it's hard to tell definitively. We don't really know what their goals were going in. We don't really know if there were any optional goals that they would have liked, but weren't top priorities. We don't really know what their losses look like, what expectations were, and how much they are willing to bear. We don't really know what contingencies they planned for, and how far outside of those contingencies we are, if at all. We don't really know if the broader implications of this war (Destroying a bunch of European economies? Deepening commercial ties between Russia, China, and India?) will outweigh any unexpected costs.
Hell, we don't even have a decent idea of what Ukraine's internal situation is really like. Can they make it through the winter?