The Ukraine war is a tragedy and I hope it ends soon.
But they have no economical & military power to really do any harm the Europe & the US. Putin makes a lot of noise but really can't even win a few km's in Ukraine.
But the real threat is further east. China is slowly building it's empire, and it's a scary one. Taking over parts of Africa. Migrating it's people. Integrating it's tech worldwide. Making the world dependent while building it's own full independence.
The situation in Ukraine is not very comparable with the US occupation of Afghanistan. The US captured all of the major cities in Afghanistan in a matter of weeks, after which the Taliban were pushed into a sliver of southern Afghanistan and into Pakistan, which borders those Southern regions of Afghanistan. The issue, as the other commenter mentioned, was in holding the territory. This issue of maintaining stability was worsened by how the US both ignored the Taliban's attempts to negotiate early in the occupation and ignored the fact that the Taliban were being harbored in Pakistan (which was considered an ally), allowing the Taliban to regain strength. Had the US targeted objectives in Pakistan in the early 2000s when the Taliban were weak, rather than waiting till 2011, history may have turned out differently.
The problem of Afghanistan has never been conquering it, but holding it, the Soviets ran into the same issue. Anyway, the km's really do matter, if people truly fear for a deeper invasion into Europe.
I don't think it's a convincing narrative that that's what Putin wants, and also that that's something he could reasonably accomplish. But I do hear it often as a powerful narrative to help Ukraine more, and I understand why, but from my point of view it's not very convincing.
At the same time I agree with the sentiment that heavier the losses in Ukraine, the more he will have difficulties in starting similar drama in other countries with large Russian communities.
The US occupied the country for 20 years. Staying just became unpopular. The US lost about as many troops in 20 years as Russia loses in 2 days of fighting in Ukraine.
Not a chance. Kaliningrad is barely even useful to Russia - now that Finland is part of NATO, they can't cut off the Baltics from resupply, and the Baltics watched Ukraine and are less enthusiastic about Russia than ever.
Realistically there's no (strategic) benefit to even defending Kaliningrad in case of a war (and the thing is surrounded by NATO so it would be taken immediately if not heavily defended), so stationing lots of troops there is just a pointless drain on resources. If the Kaliningrad secession movement picks up steam, then they might just let them leave.
I think the links there are less about 'wow look at how this disruption playbook worked in the US' and more about'look you can cause instability without inviting open warfare with NATO'.
Or are the Baltics and her people immune to propaganda?
Sure, but they do the "promoting polarity" thing outside the US plenty. It's a useful tactic; pick wedge issues like gay people or immigrants, spread false or out-of-context news, etc.
> Facebook is where the light skirmishes take place; the mortal combat is reserved for the comment sections of Lithuanian news articles, where the trolls loose a constant drizzle of falsehoods and complaints, each comment helping to construct an alternate reality version of life in this Baltic country of 3 million. Rather than a thriving and patriotic post-Soviet success story, which it is, the image the trolls cultivate is that of a demoralized and angry society whose people are ready for regime change, be it through internal democratic mechanisms or through “liberation” by a friendly neighboring army.
There are significant Russian minorities left in the baltic states from the SU.
Russia will support and radicalize those.
If the Baltics dont react it will lead to unrest and Russia is forced to intervene and "protect" their fellow Russians.
If the states react this will be seen as suppressing the Russian minorities and Russia will be forced to intervene and "protect" their fellow Russians.
True, Putin would need to wait for Trump to make it clear that he wouldnt come to their defense and/or Orban/Fico have done enough damage to the Organization to make this viable.
The same way as in Transnistra, Georgia and Ukraine. Soviet Russia colonized these areas with Russians to control access to the baltic sea/coal production/... and today these Russians lead a "Back to Mother Russia" campaigns.
Ukraine was busy closing Russian language schools all across country, including Donbass.
The inconvenient truth is that such a policy didn't get any serious reversal during the reign of "pro-Russian, Donbass choice" Yanukovich. Nevertheless, Donbass only really went ballistic when the first action of post-Yanukovich Rada was to repeal the "language law" which half-assedly permitted the things I have mentioned in my previous comment.
They are mostly in place. You can get "Ukrainian as native tongue" lessons in these "new regions". Not sure about LDNR as there's some stigma, plus the fact that all those regions are predominantly Russian speaking.
Putin and the Russian political elite have declared several times, in speeches and articles, they want the Russian Tsar Empire back. As early as 1994 it was clear that Putin wants the Baltics back (see Hamburg incident).
> But they have no economical & military power to really do any harm the Europe & the US. Putin makes a lot of noise but really can't even win a few km's in Ukraine.
Let's see how the situation in Avdiivka develops in the next few weeks. Ukraine is reinforcing the area, but it doesn't look good.
We've seen plenty of blunders by the russian army. But you should not underestimate your enemy.
Putin (and the Russian (leaderhsip) culture in general, see Stalin) is this:
What are a 100M (of our) people dead if we own Ukraine/Baltics/East Poland/Georgia/... for the next hundreds of years?
Stalin had the same blunders, thats priced in, the Red Army had meat wave attacks in WW2 and lost millions, but achived all it's war goals (Poland, Baltics, Eastern Europe including half of Germany - only the US achieved all it's war goals too, everyone else lost, sadly Poland had the biggest loss).
People have been steadily getting poorer thanks to inflation eating their stagnating wages combined with skyrocketing consumer and housing prices and the birthrate keeps dropping.
Poor people had plenty of kids because they had no standards nor accessible birth control or they come from a conservative religious culture where having kids is the norm.
But once people taste the good life, like westerners had it so good a while a ago, they don't want to bring kids in economic conditions worse than before, so the poorer you make them, the less kids they'll have.
So to compensate, you don't focus on improving the conditions for the locals to convince them to procreate, but you open the immigration gates to people from poor places with no standards, happy to bring kids in conditions that are way better than what they have in their own country, even though they're worse than the locals had a few decades ago.
He absolutely increased poverty levels, education is in extremely sharp decline, propaganda is thriving, and he started to fight birth control (so far, emergency contraception only).
And I must remind that Russia is having an electoral event this March, so the repressions were temporarily put on a back burner - but unpopular changes will come shortly afterwards. Check back in May or June.
Considering the USSR partnered with Nazi Germany to invade and split up Poland, yes, the Red Army was definitely the aggressor. There's also a school of thought amongst historians that if Germany hadn't attacked the USSR in 1941, the Soviets would have been prepared to attack Germany.
There is prehistory[1] to Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, and simply labelling Red Army as the aggressor instead of considering political actions of every EU state is injustice to sanity as well as ignoring prehistory of 2022 escalation.
Really not sure what you're rambling about mixing up the EU with Red Army stuff or "injustice to sanity". Poland had existed for centuries before being dismembered in the 18th Century. Reconstituted after WW1, it was a fully recognized and sovereign country with its own language and culture. The fact that it had the misfortune to lie between Russia and the Hapsburg/Prussian states.
The Ukraine war is a tragedy and I hope it ends soon.
But they have no economical & military power to really do any harm the Europe & the US. Putin makes a lot of noise but really can't even win a few km's in Ukraine.
But the real threat is further east. China is slowly building it's empire, and it's a scary one. Taking over parts of Africa. Migrating it's people. Integrating it's tech worldwide. Making the world dependent while building it's own full independence.