Basically said Ukraine is an illegitimate State, a 'historical accident'. He has always been furious about the USSR breaking up in 1991 and how the west dominated. He sure wants to turn the clock back to pre 1991. Putin Address Takes Swipe at U.S.-Led World Order - WSJ Russian President Vladimir Putin’s combative address Monday from the Kremlin was a nearly hourlong recitation of decades worth of historical grievances and an unmistakable challenge by Moscow to the post-Cold War international order dominated by the West. The speech, ostensibly aimed at recognizing the independence of two breakaway statelets that Russia carved from Ukraine in 2014, outlined Mr. Putin’s view that Ukraine was a historical accident that the U.S. has turned into a launchpad to attack Russia. “The United States and NATO have begun the shameless development of the territory of Ukraine as a theater of military operations,” Mr. Putin said, seated at a desk flanked by Russian flags. Mr. Putin’s speech echoed defiant remarks he delivered in Munich in 2007 that helped set the trajectory of his combative relations with Washington. Then, he sharply criticized what he called a U.S. monopoly on foreign relations and American use of force in places such as Iraq. While on Monday he left his precise intentions toward Ukraine unclear, he expounded the Russian view that Ukraine’s borders were drawn arbitrarily by the Soviet Union’s founder, Vladimir Lenin, and only exist now because of the U.S.S.R.’s hurried breakup in 1991. Mr. Putin said those borders ignored deep civilizational ties between Russia and Ukraine and questioned the legitimacy of an independent Ukrainian state, saying, “Ukraine for us is not just a neighboring country, it is an integral part of our own history, culture and spiritual space.” Mr. Putin addressed his speech not only to Russia, but also to “our compatriots in Ukraine.” Ukraine declared independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, a move backed in a referendum by an overwhelming majority of the population and quickly recognized by Russia. Ukrainians have increasingly sought to forge a separate identity from Russia, particularly since Moscow invaded and seized portions of the country in 2014. A senior Biden administration official said Mr. Putin’s speech was intended to attack Ukrainian sovereignty and independence. “He made a number of false claims about Ukraine’s intention that seems designed to excuse possible military action,” the official said. “This was a speech to the Russian people to justify a war.” Mr. Putin has long railed against what he calls U.S.-led efforts to turn Ukraine into a Western-facing democracy, claiming Russia’s ties with Ukraine gave it a unique right to intervene there. Now, he has bracketed Ukraine on three sides with more than 150,000 troops. “Right now I have my doubts that the European political elite and diplomats understand the full complex of problems they will run into” as Mr. Putin works to advance his agenda, said Aleksei Chesnakov, a former adviser to the Kremlin on foreign policy. “He wants more decisive steps militarily, politically and economically. He is ready.” The Russian president’s address veered from assessments of Ukrainian economic policies to a recounting of debates between Lenin and Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin to a theoretical estimate of flight times for ballistic missiles from an eastern Ukrainian city to Moscow. The U.S. has said it has no plans to place missiles in Ukraine. The speech echoed years of complaints by Mr. Putin that the West was trying to tear Ukraine away from Russia. He was scarred by the 2004 Orange Revolution, when mass protests overturned a tainted election and vaulted a pro-Western candidate to the presidency over one of Mr. Putin’s protégés. Another revolution in 2014 ousted a pro-Russian president and led the Kremlin to seize Crimea and try to foment pro-Russian protests across the south and east of Ukraine, a territory that Mr. Putin then referred to by its Czarist-era name, Novorossiya. Those protests were largely put down by local law enforcement or pro-Ukrainian activists, with only the protests in Donetsk and Luhansk escalating into warfare. One protest in Odessa ended with the deaths of dozens of pro-Russian protesters who took shelter in a building that then caught fire in a day of pitched street battles. Mr. Putin promised vengeance in his address. “The criminals who committed this atrocity have not been punished, no one is looking for them, but we know their names and will do everything to punish them: find them and bring them to justice,” he said. Mr. Putin said “external forces” had been promoting governments in Kyiv that have been striving to dissolve the traditional bonds between Russia and Ukraine and “distort the consciousness and historical memory of millions of people, entire generations living in Ukraine.” As a result, he said, “Not surprisingly, Ukrainian society is faced with the rise of extreme nationalism, which quickly took the form of aggressive Russophobia and neo-Nazism.” Mr. Putin and his propaganda channels have long tarred pro-Western forces in Ukraine as nationalists and sought to portray radical groups, which are marginal, as a guiding force behind government policy. Successive Ukrainian governments have pursued closer security, political and trade ties with the West, policies Mr. Putin has decried as anti-Russian. The Russian president for years has appealed to shared cultural ties, from language to religion, in calling Ukraine and Russia “brother nations.” But Moscow’s military interventions in Ukraine since 2014, which have caused some 14,000 deaths, have turned Ukrainians against their former ruler. Since 2014, Ukrainian authorities have sought to rid their country of the symbols of the Soviet past, felling statues of Lenin and changing the names of roads and cities across the country. They have won recognition for their own Orthodox church, independent of Moscow. Polls show more than half the country would now vote for membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the European Union, rather than accession to any Russia-led blocs. Those changes, Mr. Putin suggested in his address, were forced on the country by nationalists backed by the U.S. “Ukraine has become a colony of puppets,” he said. “Ukrainians squandered not only everything we gave them during the U.S.S.R., but even everything they inherited from the Russian empire.” In one portion of his speech, he called Soviet ideals “odious” but elsewhere made a veiled threat against Ukrainians who had pulled down statues of Lenin. “Do you want decommunization? Well, we’re fine with that. But there is no need, as they say, to stop halfway. We are ready to show you what real decommunization means for Ukraine.” Mr. Putin wants to return to a world of empires with spheres of influence, which makes Ukraine the key challenge, said Volodymyr Yermolenko, a Ukrainian philosopher and editor. “Putin is quite logical in a way,” he said. “But this logic is inhuman. It says human lives and nation states don’t matter.”
Tulsi Gabbard over the last few days. 2 days ago - "Ukraine isn't actually a democracy". After today invasion - "Putin has made clear all along that their security is what's at stake here". A talking head for Putin.
Unstable, unhinged. Dangerous. Putin Chooses a Forever War - The Atlantic Russian President Vladimir Putin, in a long speech full of heavy sighs and dark grievances, made clear today that he has chosen war. He went to war against Ukraine in 2014; now he has declared war against the international order of the past 30 years. Putin’s slumped posture and deadened affect led me to suspect that he is not as stable as we would hope. He had the presence not of a confident president, but of a surly adolescent caught in a misadventure, rolling his eyes at the stupid adults who do not understand how cruel the world has been to him. Teenagers, of course, do not have hundreds of thousands of troops and nuclear weapons. Even discounting Putin’s delivery, the speech was, in many places, simply unhinged. Putin began with a history lesson about how and why Ukraine even exists. For all his Soviet nostalgia, the Russian president is right that his Soviet predecessors intentionally created a demographic nightmare when drawing the internal borders of the U.S.S.R., a subject I’ve explained at length here. But Putin’s point wasn’t that the former subjects of the Soviet Union needed to iron out their differences. Rather, he was suggesting that none of the new states that emerged from the Soviet collapse—except for Russia—were real countries. “As a result of Bolshevik policy,” Putin intoned, “Soviet Ukraine arose, which even today can with good reason be called ‘Vladimir Ilyich Lenin’s Ukraine’. He is its author and architect.” It is true that Soviet leaders created the 1991 borders. That is also true of what we now call the Russian Federation. Putin, however, went even further back in history: “Ukraine never had a tradition of genuine statehood.” By that kind of historical reasoning, few nations in Europe, or anywhere else, are safe. Putin’s foray into history was nothing less than a demand that only Moscow—and only the Kremlin’s supreme leader—has the right to judge what is or is not a sovereign state (as I recently discussed here). Putin’s claims are hardly different from Saddam Hussein’s rewriting of Middle East history when Iraq tried to erase Kuwait from the map. For most of the speech, Putin was drinking one shot after another straight from a bottle of pure Soviet-era moonshine. He accused Ukraine, for example, of developing nuclear weapons, a play right out of the old Soviet handbook, when Kremlin leaders would accuse the former West Germany of developing nuclear arms to serve their “revanchist” plans for war. He even accused Bill Clinton of denigrating him personally when Putin asked, more than 20 years ago, about the possibility of including Russia in NATO. Among the Russian president’s various other quirks, the man knows how to hold a grudge. Putin then suggested that international sanctions are “blackmail”—a word used almost daily in the old Soviet press about the West—and are aimed at weakening Russia and undermining its existence as a nation. “There is only one goal,” Putin said. “To restrain the development of Russia. And they will do it, as they did before. Even without any formal pretext at all.” This is nonsense, and either Putin knows it (which is likely) or he has become so detached from reality that he has come to believe it (which is not impossible). Putin left no room for negotiation with the Biden administration. He is prepared for sanctions, which he says will come no matter what Russia does. He asserts that Western hostility is permanent (perhaps because it would be too painful to his ego to admit that most people in the West, if given the choice, would not think about Russia or its leaders at all). In short, Putin is now embracing a Russian tradition of paranoia, an inferiority complex that sees Moscow as both a savior of other nations and a victim of great conspiracies, a drama in which Russia is both strong enough to be feared and weak enough to be threatened. The West, in this story, is motivated not to seek peace and security, but to undermine Russia, and Putin has cast himself as the beleaguered Russian prophet who must subvert the evil plans drawn against his people. Back here on Earth, however, we have a more pressing problem. At the end of his speech, Putin recognized the Russian-occupied areas of Ukraine, the “people’s republics” of Lugansk and Donetsk, as independent entities. In so doing, Putin has effectively partitioned Ukraine. This specific form of meddling in sovereign nations, too, is a Soviet tradition, as the Poles and others would remind us. His claim to these areas—for they will be Russian satrapies, and not “independent” in any meaningful way—is a claim to be the ultimate arbiter of former Soviet borders, including those now within NATO. Literally within minutes of completing his television address, Putin sent “peacekeepers” into eastern Ukraine. His likely next move will be to stage some sort of incident in which he claims (as he did in Georgia in his war there) that the Ukrainians are the aggressors, and that Russia is acting only in defense of ethnic Russians. That “defense” could lead right into the streets of Kyiv. Putin demanded in his address, as he has before, that Ukraine “cease hostilities” in these areas—in other words, that the legitimate government of Ukraine stop trying to control its own territory—and he warned that “all responsibility for the possible continuation of the bloodshed will be entirely on the conscience of the regime ruling on the territory of Ukraine.” This is the pretext for war. Putin has now affirmed that he refuses to accept the outcome of the Cold War and that he will fight to dismantle the European system of peace and security constructed by the international community after its end. This is Vladimir Putin’s forever war, and Russia, cursed as it has been so many times in its history with a terrible leader, will be fighting it for as long as Putin remains the master of the Kremlin.
Remember when people would get all worked up when someone would accuse this traitor of being in the pocket of Putin?? The giveaway was when she was on RT all the damn time. I think the takeaway is we need to stop worrying and say boldly what is obvious when it is obvious and not worry about being called an alarmist or engaging in red scare or whatever. Somethings things just are what they seem.
@Astrodome as the only semi rational Trump supporter here, is it finally clear that Putin is not our friend or are you hearing from your media still that Putin > America if Democrats hold positions in government?? I would like to believe the right is finally waking up but not holding my breathe.
Don't be foolish, we are not going to war. Ukraine is a lost cause - it will be a failed state. Russia has no interest in another Afghanistan. What it wants is to turn Ukraine into a mess without political direction - to keep it out of Western influence. Ukraine is Russia's buffer. So long as there are NATO troops in a nation, Putin will not invade given NATO's pact that an attack on one member is an attack on all. That is why Putin could not afford to have Ukraine go to NATO and have NATO on Russia's border. For Russia, this was an existential threat. Moldova may also fall into Russian hands but is not worth fighting for. Finland knows how to navigate politics with Russia, and there is zero chance it will ever join Russia and Russia doesn't seem too worried about Finland. It already has Belarus as a puppet state. So what else is left for Russia to invade? Every other bordering state has NATO troops in it. For all those who cry about appeasement being the repeat of Hitler - let's remember that we live in a nuclear age and Russia and NATO forces have never fired on one another. Neither side has any desire to change that given the road that can lead us all down. And Putin knows it has no chance of finding any kind of victory in a nuclear war. Russia won't invade a country with NATO troops, instead it will work to manipulate people to vote for pro-Russian / far right leaders whom it can be on friendly terms with or at least destabilize. That is their agenda.
I am definitely anti-Russia, but from a purely strategic standpoint, Putin had no choice but to invade and remove the Ukrainian gov't that was leaning westward. NATO was expanding east onto it's border and let's be honest, NATO has one purpose which is to contain Russia. Putin understands this and he understands that if Ukraine goes to NATO which it was trending towards, it would have completely lost its entire sphere of influence and have hostile troops bordering it from multiple countries. It would be a huge loss in multiple ways to have Ukraine join NATO, and even the anti-Russian position of Ukraine was too much to take. Had Ukraine been smart, it would have understood Russia's position and played a more neutral role, and denounce ever joining NATO long ago. It in fact had a law against that which it removed in 2017. I think that doomed its fate to a large degree as Putin was merely waiting for Trump to leave office before invading. Putin's "war" will now consist of misinformation with attempts to install pro-Russia leaders in NATO countries to weaken the alliance from within. We've already seen how Trump was anti-NATO and that's not a coincidence. The people like @basso @dachuda86 etc who try to politicize this to serve their anti-Biden interests are either cynically being the bots to the cause or just have zero grasp of how the world actually works - probably both tbh.
My fear is not Russia invading more counties. It is the fall of the geopolitical influence of the West. More countries around the world might now become more bolden to take pieces of other countries that once they had historic ties too. I can see this happen in the Balkans, countries in Africa and Asia. Look to see what China does next. The West has to act strong (severe sanctions etc.) there so much high intense geopolitical gamesmanship going right now. Putin unfortunately has the keys to Europe(natural gas)we will see how this plays out.
White House wrestles with whether Russia has ‘invaded’ Ukraine Putin announced he is sending troops into Russian-backed separatist regions within Ukraine. Opinions differ on whether that is an invasion of the country. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/02/21/biden-russia-ukraine-putin/ excerpt: Still, the administration official repeatedly refused to say whether Putin’s decision to send “peacekeeping” troops into the two Russian-backed separatist areas constituted a red-line invasion in the eyes of the Biden administration. If anything, the official tried to portray Monday’s developments as far short of a dramatic change in the status quo. “Russia has occupied these regions since 2014,” said the official, a point he emphasized several times throughout the call. “It has been Russia’sposition that there are not Russian forces present in this part of the Donbas. The reality, as we pointed out on a number of occasions over these past years, has been quite different. There have been Russian forces present in these areas throughout.” After the call, a different administration official defined a Russian invasion that would prompt a clear U.S. response as crossing into Ukrainian territory that Russia has “not occupied since 2014.” more at the link
if occupying the land controlled by the separatists was all Putin wanted, he could have done that relatively painlessly months ago. there are far too many troops, far too provocatively positioned, to stop there. the "peacekeepers" will move right up to the line of contact, and will provoke a confrontation that they will then use to further escalate.
I'm not anti-Russia, but anti-Putin. Russia was once moving toward western Democracy. The people there hate his gut but they are powerless. Oh, Putin has a choice (unless he's completely delusional, which is a possibility after yesterday's drunk like behaviors). No one is attacking Russia or has the desire to. As soon as Ukraine's 2nd revolution happens in 2014 (kicking out Putin's puppet), Putin was mad and invaded. This isn't about Russia's security. It is all about Putin's security and his desire to return to the old USSR. He hasn't made that a secret. Yesterday, he went at it again and stated it. He doesn't recognize Ukraine as a legitimate state. That's the problem, not that it wanted to join NATO (which it does because Putin keeps on attacking it). Even if Ukraine said it won't join NATO, Putin will still want it back to the motherland as he doesn't recognize it as legitimate.
I agree. That is why I said "soft invasion". This is a move to setup something more including provoking a response from Ukrainian forces.
The problem with this is that Putin did have other options . While yes NATO was created to contain the USSR and now exist because of fear of Russia Putin has had decades to reverse that. He could've focused instead of trying to reconstitute the Soviet Union but on building Russia's internal economy and World Standing through things like soft power. In other words he could've been Deng Xiao Ping. Instead while we've seen Russia assert military power in the former Soviet Union along with trying to stick it to the West in places like Syria, the Russian economy is a basket case that is weaker now than it was 10 years ago. So while Putin might be able to rebuild something like the Soviet Union with vassal states in former Soviet States. it will remain a second rate power, bankrupt and run by a kelptocracy.
Also for those saying that Russia is just acting out of it's own security interests and has no expansionist aims. Putin's speech showed that his ambitions are far greater than just Ukraine. His complaints about the breakup of the USSR would including countries like Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania which even during the heyday of the Soviet Union had no love for Russia and are now NATO members. Failure to check Russian ambitions would make those countries tempting targets in the future and then we would be stuck in a shooting war. At the minimum taking Ukraine would make those countries and the rest of the NATO countries nearby Russia very uneasy leading to more military buildup in the region rather than less.
