Russia and Ukraine

GRtak

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Yeah… I’m certainly looking forward to the war that Mad Vlad is so actively trying to avoid. :-|
 
Sweden is moving troops to the baltic coast...

Meanwhile,Finnish media argues that by sidelining the EU and doing direct US-Russia talks, the Biden administration is actually playing into Putin's hands.
 
Some Finns are afraid that joining NATO will provoke our eastern neighbor even more, but the "big and mighty empire" is mostly wasteland, actually not very rich and can't under any circumstances afford to pick a fight with NATO. I'm as far from a political expert as possible so I don't have an opinion on whether it's better for us to join NATO or not, but those are the facts as far as I know.

We found ourselves in the 1939 Winter War after the soviet union faked an attack on themselves. Wonder how long it'll take before the same thing happens over in Ukraine. Mainila 2.0 or something.

edit: Russia's Minister of Foreign Affairs Sergey Lavrov says that Russia respects Sweden and Finland as sovereign states, but we also know that Russian leaders aren't always... or ever... really sticking to the truth. It's sad when one of our closest neighbors is a country full of good people governed by lying sacks of дерьмо.
 
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Russia can't afford an all-out war, not now where Western powers getting involved is a given. Putin is upping the ante until he gets some concessions in negotiations.

I believe Putin hoped to sneak into Ukraine (and gain access to trade routes as well as oil) while the western World was distracted by Omicron panic*. And for the first week or a bit longer it worked - I tried unsuccessfully to find any reporting on the crisis in German or British newspapers, because they were all about Omicron. But then Omicron did not lead to societies' collapse, and the reporting on Ukraine started, and western politicians started to react before Russia had made their move stick.

At the same time, Putin can't afford to be seen as backing down from an interior politics point of view, since his power is built on a "strongman" brand. So now he is piling bullshit demand upon bullshit demand ("Russian veto power on new NATO members"), so that in a "compromise" he can get at least some point through and claim to have vanquished the West.
So why should the West give something to him? We have covid, we have climate change, we have the supply crisis. The last thing we need is an unstable Russia that has a Putin succession debate. Putin may be a villain, but he is a known and reliable commodity of a villain, so from my point of view him being in power is vastly preferable for the time being.

*A tactic called "burying" - like pushing a tax raise through parliament during a sports final.
 
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Sergei Lavrov is on record saying "Russia doesn't want war"... so why are you behaving like you are then?
 
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Sometimes I have a feeling that the US is at least as interested in war as Russia...
 
Sometimes I have a feeling that the US is at least as interested in war as Russia...


Because they observe that the Russians are not doing as they say? Don't forget that Russia has already invaded and annexed Crimea.
 
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