Putin has learned from the Chinese and is contemplating the long play. Just as with Crimea in several years all will eventually be forgiven. It's simply a matter of: 1) Is it worth it? (we'll see his thinking on this soon) and 2) Is this the right time? (apparently yes).
I'm sure Putin would like to learn the lessons of the CCP but it's not clear he has the patience of them. The CCP does have a long view but partly because since Mao it hasn't been dominated by one person and could focus on long term gain of the institution. That is changing with Xi and he's making moves that are less pragmatic and more about his own gain. Putin has always been about himself that is why he might be one of the richest men in the World even as Russia's economy flounders.
Putin has been doing that since Georgia invasion when annexed half of that country. Not a word or sanctions were brought against him.
What if it's all a big bluff to keep oil prices up. Isn't the Russian economy still dependent on the price of oil?
He's betting on Trump to get back in power to forgive and forget him. All he has to do is give Trump a soccer ball as a gift.
Russia is flooding their own airwaves with propaganda that Ukraine is going to invade Donekst, the Russian separatist province of Ukraine.
The Russian separatist released a video to evacuate. The metadata from the video show that it was created two days ago. Metadata shows pro-Russian separatists filmed Ukraine evacuation video days earlier (yahoo.com) Metadata from the messaging app Telegram indicates that pro-Russian separatist leaders created videos ordering "emergency" evacuations from eastern Ukraine two days ago, but posted them on Friday, Bellingcat first reported and Axios can confirm. Why it matters: U.S. officials have for days now accused Russia of preparing to fabricate a pretext to invade Ukraine. The two-day-old metadata from the leaders of the self-declared Donetsk and Luhansk People's Republics could undermine claims that they ordered the evacuations due to an imminent threat of a Ukrainian offensive.
this guy has been on a shortlist for SCOTUS for a long time (he's too old/white now), and he wants to imprison Tucker Carlson for treason
Obviously, war is not good, and Putin can **** himself sideways, but there’s something sick in my brain that gets excitement from seeing the maps and images of military buildup. I think it’s from those buckets of cheap toy soldiers I’d play with as a kid. Couldn’t really fight with them, so I’d just line them up against each other, the green and beige. Don’t know why it was fun, but it was...
Whoever that was, looks like he deleted it. Good for him, that's not a value of this country. It's a value of Putin. Tucker Carlson gets to say whatever he wants on Fox. He's being pro Putin, is against Western democracy, and is just not a good person.
Not only that, he got to host the Olympics, annex Crimea and host a World Cup in that order! The world came to him twice for marquee events and he learned that he could act with impunity.
Because he can, and so can we......doing what is right for your country apparently overtakes what is right for the world or what the world thinks.... And no one wants War, they are all learning from Hitler......when governments gave him everything for a while until it was too much, same will happen with Putin. I loved the suggestion about giving all Russian Military FREE Ukraine citizenship if they defect.... DD
They are the same people that believe 45 won the 2020 election so feeling bad is not something i'm going to do for them.
Putin has been playing the long game on this and he's going to win and the Trumpers are going to give it to him.
How many proven lies does Putin have to say before we send armored brigades to the NATO countries in Eastern Europe? Biden should have done that already. After the debacle of leaving Afghanistan, Putin has viewed Biden as weak. He only understands force. The best way to prevent war is to be ready for it. We have sent a few thousand of our people to "reassure" our allies in Eastern Europe who are, right now, viewing themselves as possibly the next targets of Russian military aggression. After all, they spent decades under the thumb of Russia, AKA the Soviet Union, Russia's "modern day" empire that Putin can't stop dreaming about recreating. In my opinion, Biden should have never said early on that NATO wouldn't send troops to support Ukraine. It would have been far better to have left Putin guessing. Now all he sees is a big green light.
Biden has to consider the domestic politics of the time. Anti-interventionism feelings are quite strong and have propelled Trump to presidency not too long ago. Can't do that during mid-election cycle. The europeans have to deal with the russia problem and now we'll get to see how serious they are about showing russia that disrespecting sovereign borders on the European continent has big ass consequences. We'll have to wait and see. We'll also have to wait and see which borders the DNR and LNR are officially recognized by Russia Those two questions will make it more clear if Biden's diplomacy was effective in deterring a major military conflict over there. I hope it was effective and this deescalates and sanctions are in place and Ukraine can use this as a motivation to unite and modernize where Russians can't f*ck with them no more and they become a steady and economically booming democracy.
