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"It is significant that the hostilities, which began under the pretext of the need to move NATO away from our borders, have already led to the opposite result: two of our neighboring countries - Sweden and Finland - have decided to abandon their neutral status. Moreover, in Finland this happened at the request of the people. Now NATO can, if desired, deploy missiles a few tens of kilometers from St. Petersburg. The requirements regarding the neutrality of Ukraine have lost all meaning. NATO has already come closer to Russia than it would be even if Kyiv joined; from the Finnish border to St. Petersburg, the distance is several times less than from Kharkiv to Moscow."

Without a doubt, this quote succinctly and accurately describes the most important consequence of Russia's war on Ukraine: in a matter of weeks, NATO has already become stronger and more united as a result of Russia's actions. Heck, even Switzerland, a country that has been strictly neutral for centuries, was so disgusted with Putin's actions that it has CHOSEN to abandon its stated neutrality position and enforce sanctions. Congratulations, Vladimir, you have achieved something that not even Hitler could accomplish!

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So the Finnish people are okay with Russian nukes aimed at their cities now?? I suspect they are as propagandized as any western population.... That's one thing the west is much better at.. maintaining the narrative!!

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this was a well laid trap that Putin stumbled into. I am astonished at the cleverness, the genius that went into conceiving this campaign to strengthen the west by baiting Russia into this quagmire. I have never in my life seen such competence from a neocon, the US military brass or the US State dept. Whoever birthed this plan is a political mastermind. In a rare league far above Kissinger and Brzezinski. Light years ahead of Nuland and Biden.

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I can promise you with complete confidence that no such level of competence exists within the US Federal government. Sometimes in life, leaders (like the rest of us) make bad decisions without the need of any mysterious 'baiting.'

Wishing nothing but peace and prosperity for both the Russian and Ukrainian people, I hope that the freedom of thought and expression that this site facilitates might speed up the process of a least-horrific resolution to this tragedy.

Thank you, Matt and all of the contributors for your work.

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I would like to second what Donny says. The federal government could not have been anywhere near as clever as you think.

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Yeah, I never expected it but seeing it with my own eyes is jaw dropping. This is too good to be dumb luck. A master stroke.

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Under Joe Biden? Really? Have you seen the man? His last coherent thought fled at least 5 years ago. Planning to bait Putin on to do this stupid invasion is light years beyond a guy that can only think of where he can lick his next ice cream cone

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Carl BUZAWA... This isn't about Joe Biden. The people who really make things go are in place across administrations. This is not a Biden plan, what kleenbreeze is referencing is the uncanny effect of the trap which reeks of intelligent design and not mere happenstance. None of us know the names of the actual minds that set this into motion. The only part I differ on at all is I still see room for Putin to win. The propaganda against Russia is immense, but Russia is way more rooted in reality than the West. I don't know where you live, but I live in the US and it is insane how detached from reality most of the people around me are. That only comes from having multiple long generations baked in consumerism. Russia hasn't had that so-called "privilege". The propaganda will do anything to make it seem like the Russians can't survive this, that it was a stupid mistake on their part, but really it is all just hocus pocus. Russia can survive if it gets local. Russia can outlast the magic trick as long as the people of Russia realize the decadence of the West is not something to be envied or wished for. They need to get local, keep the trade partnerships they do have healthy, keep working to strengthen their military, and tell the West to kiss off. The West is mostly lost up its butthole and in the end it will be the West falling and I am almost certain that is the ultimate goal of the Western leaders anyway, to bottom out their own people while trying to do the same to the Russians. The Russians should do everything they can to escape such stupidity. For that matter, the people of the United States and Europe should too.

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That fact is that even cognitively damaged people tell obvious truths. People who think that this war is about something else and not about simple and unforgivable act of aggression, are not honest.

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I get that perspective but see it slightly differently. To Russia (and maybe everyone) NATO appears to be defined solely as an anti-Russia military. That Sweden and Finland are joining NATO could have also been an unintended consequence. If Russia was willing to invade Ukraine to create a buffer at even hinting at NATO membership, how will it react with an obviously aggressive move closer to it's 'center'? Do we really want a nuclear-armed nation even more jumpy?

As I understood it the lesson learned from Cuba in the 60s was that it isn't wise to put a gun in an opponent's face. So both sides wisely put space between each other. And now we're narrowing that gap. That doesn't feel like a win.

Nor would regime change during such heightened tensions. Do we really think some happy, western-friendly leader will step up in this chaos? I'd venture to guess it'll be someone less reserved.

This is very concerning.

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It's certainly concerning, but what is a rational response from Finland/Sweden? Russia just invaded a neighbor. Exigent circumstances not withstanding, they did in fact invade their sovereign neighbor. The West has allied to assist Ukraine, but not to defend. Ukraine is getting pummeled. If I were a resident of one of those countries, I would very much consider a military alliance with NATO to help protect my country. While it is certainly escalatory, the other option seems to be a real risk of Russian invasion.

Crazy times. There is obviously no simple answer, neither from Western foreign policy, or Russian foreign policy.

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Good point. It'd be easy to say that Finland (or Sweden) is not Ukraine for a number of reasons. But if all this was happening in my backyard I'm not sure how comfortable I would be in counting on that.

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Russia did not attack Ukraine to create buffer for NATO. It attacked because Putin hates that Ukrainians can be free and successful and wants to eliminate Ukraine as a free nation. That is, his aims are genocidal, not security based.

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Seems like most on here read the neocon NYT... or some European version...

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You seem to be a Hare Krishna. No, Putin is not some Vedic king with monopoly on truth. He is clearly a demon.

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Well i'm not claiming that he's Maharaj Pariksit.... but then again Zenensky is not either.... more like a servant of Kali... you follow?

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Well there is certainly some truth in your rant. But be advised that the US MIC/etc has no intention of stopping until Russia is balkanized, disarmed and has new leadership. They smell blood, their veins are pumped full of testosterone and their egos are getting vindication (and validaton) after losing the game of occupier to the Afghans. Even a complete and humiliating victory the US no more wants Russias surrender under the harshest of terms than it did in 1989. The bottom line is that for the US to maintain its global hegemony it needs a lasting Cold War. This is an appetite that can never be sated by one country grovelling in submission. It is a permanent state of war necessary to sustain the aging empire which is in need of internal reform as much as any other. Like elderly, wealthy men drinking the blood of youth to insure immortality....

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Apr 14, 2022·edited Apr 14, 2022

No, the West has no desire to waste money unnecessarily, but Russia needs to be neutralised, like a rabid dog. There's a good article here about how Russia is viewed by the rest of the world, dating back to their last invasion of Ukraine in 2014: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/two-abysses-soul. A shorter version updated recently is here: https://unherd.com/2022/03/the-dark-heart-of-russia.

In summary though, the Baltic states have warned of Russia's essentially toxic nature for decades, and many in the US have arrogantly ignored them. Here's what one Estonian described as a "Taste of 500 years of history":

- 1558-59 Russian forces ransack Estonia.

- 1700 Peter I attacks Estonia.

- 1721 Estonia annexed into Russia, 75% of the population killed in the war.

- 1918-1920 Estonian War of Independence.

- 1940 Estonia annexed into the USSR.

He concluded, "Tell me again how Estonia joining NATO provoked Russia." (https://twitter.com/KaroliinaAinge/status/1503676027314311169)

Russia is congenitally toxic, so we should embrace the opportunity to accelerate its decline. It is a pre-modern society which has never had freedom, democracy, a functioning judiciary or reliable property rights. Instead, for over a century they've failed to evolve from a series of autocratic, tyrannical dictatorships. Russians working for Stalin murdered over 20 million of their own citizens in famines, purges and gulags, let alone their brutal subjugation of their long-suffering neighbours.

This is deeper than “just a few bad apples at the top”. Germany had a notable excursion from sanity from 1933 to 1945, but was a normal, western state before and after this period. Russia has consistently been a rogue state for over 100 years. I suspect Russia is the victim of its own history. Every chapter of a Russian history book ends “and then things got worse.” There is is a national sense of insecurity which means the default system of government is totalitarian and that it leaders dare not refrain from totalitarian methods. The majority of the population find it easier to do the leadership's bidding, however evil, than to stand up to them. As one analyst warned, "it is much more convenient for Russians to believe the regime’s lies. Psychologically it is easier to ignore reality and trust propaganda. Until they begin to see the damage this war brings to their own world, their own society, and their sons.” https://thebulletin.org/2022/03/russias-information-war-painful-truths-vs-comfortable-lies

Russia’s main weakness is demographics (see https://twitter.com/kamilkazani/status/1504585616834457619). This is why they have so few infantry escorting their tanks, which makes the latter easier to kill (for a detailed analysis, see Defeating the Russian Battalion Tactical Group: https://www.benning.army.mil/armor/earmor/content/issues/2017/spring/2Fiore17.pdf). Long term, the world should seek to exacerbate their military manning problems. The more Russian military who can be neutralised in Ukraine the better. The Ukrainian military is attempting a combination of attacking Log and HQ/C2 nodes (i.e. a very manoeuvrist approach), with an attrional approach of imposing mass casualties on Russian troops. The more neutralised, the better. Further, the greater the extent to which Russia itself can be depopulated by encouraging its population to flee, and by starving the rest so they choose not to breed, and the children of those who do don’t survive until conscription, the harder it is for Russia to generate infantry. Perhaps the best thing that can happen thanks to Putin's war is that the West leaves blocking sanctions imposed on Russia for decades, and literally starves its ability to function as a state: including its war-fighting ability. In other words, simply removing Putin leaves the country intact; doing to Russia what we did to Iraq in the 1990s would bring the country to its knees, and maybe preferable.

Finally, the reason why Russia is so dangerous is because it is nuclear armed. Before sanctions are lifted on a post-Putin Russia, it should be required to unilaterally disarm: destroy all of its nuclear weapons, storage facilities, launchers, nuclear trains, military nuclear research facilities, etc. Russia has been an evil, aggressive presence in international relations since time immemorial. It has no redeeming features. If a future, post-Putin, Russia has no aggressive intentions, it will be willing to unilaterally disarm. If it refuses, we should continue to starve it: their choice to pay for missiles instead of medicine, they should suffer accordingly. Every Russian we starve, and prevent from reaching conscription age, is one fewer potential future Russian soldier.

Moscow used nuclear blackmail to inhibit the West from preventing rapes and murders in Bucha. Since time immemorial, and in conflicts around the world, Russians have revelled in such tactics. The world should remove the threat by demanding unilateral disarmament - or suffocating Russia in sanctions indefinitely, and depopulating it, until they comply.

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This is a great example of why Russians need to wake up and realize there are serpents all around them who aim to destroy. This is exactly why Russia needs to rally behind Putin instead of letting the poison seep into them. The West is the current host of the parasite. There is nothing pretty about what is happening, but the enemy came to their door and not the other way around. The people in Russia who do not understand the goal is to destroy them, need only to read the comment above. You can't negotiate with such an ideological response. I'm a US citizen and so I should be all in on the anti-Russian propaganda, but I'm not. I see exactly what the US and NATO are doing. We never negotiated anything in good faith. Russia needs to see this and read the comment above. I have zero desire for Russians to be suffocated, starved, and killed. I don't want that for the Ukrainians either, but their government still went and aligned itself with the West and became hostile. This is simple what is now happening. All the ideological force behind the article and the comment above only show how insane the hatred for Russia is. I'm not in on the hatred.

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The incognito person above seems like a Nazi from Ukraine or a toxic version from elsewhere. Denazifying seems a noble task after reading his rant. So many in Ukraine wave the Bandera banner or chant Glory to Ukraine. If calling Russia authoritarian seems reasonable, what do we call Ukraine??

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you could have just said "the only good Russian is a dead Russian".

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Unfortunately-if you hail from a Balkan state, or are Finnish,Polish or Swedish, the

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This is perhaps the most misguided analysis about this situation I have read. Nothing that has occurred suggests that the Western alliance is bent on humiliating Russia in any negotiation to end its campaign in Ukraine. The author of this " comment" seems to need to fit events-- even an unprovoked invasion of the Ukraine-- into a Procustean bed of American guilt. Really, a magnificent example of self-blinding to both common sense and rational argument. There is a rant in these exchanges, and the poster boy ( I'm sure this is not a woman, they are wiser) is ....the envelope please!: "kleenbreeze," who's unfortunately less " a fresh breeze" and more a buff of the halitosis of dogma.

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The US already had China as their foil. It didn't need this but you can be damned sure that it will exploit Russia's blunder here to the full extent possible.

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the genius of goading Russia into this war is that it was easy for the US to arm an insurgency in Ukraine to defeat Russia, whereas it would have been nearly impossible for the US to have done the same for the island of Formosa. The global response to the invasion of Ukraine is tailored to deter China without the US having to square off directly against the Chinese.

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So? The answer is to deplete out even more the russian army in Ukraine?

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There is no solution to this problem. Pick your poison

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kleenbreeze... I agree.

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Shame, the article had so much promise before it uttered the word "blitzkreig" in the title. This was never the style of operation intended by the Russian MoD.

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What word should he have used? Surrounding the country with armored columns and dropping airborne Spaetnaz troops into the airport right next to Kiev sure looked like a 72-96 hour attempt to decapitate the Ukrainian government and replace it with their own pro Russian stooges.

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Apr 16, 2022·edited Apr 16, 2022

Ah yes, because 2.8 million people will just obey a few Russian stooges and 40,000 troops. too much Hollywood in that fantasy. Good thing the Ukrainians fell for it.

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Try 200,000 troops-and yes if the Spaetnaz forces had been able to keep the Hostemel airport open and land thousands of troops in Kiev’s doorstep within the first few hours of the invasion and capture/kill Zelensky as the Chechens and they were assigned then yes a blitzkrieg might indeed have worked-especially if Mad Tsar Vladimir was right and the “heroic” Russian troops were only truly opposed by the Azov batsllion and a few battalions of “Natiobalists”. I can’t help that the Tsar was so stupid as to believe his own propaganda. That is totally on him as was the faulty premise of the entire invasion—-that they would be welcomed by their Slavic brothers and sisters.

Sure it looks different now with the Russian invaders routed all through the North and the Moskva comfortably resting on the bottom of the Black Sea, but no one knew it at the time. Heck, even the USA, which had excellent intelligence (a mole perhaps high in the Kremlin) thought that 2 days into the invasion Zelensky should be airlifted out by the Americans to serve in some sort of government in exile. Obviously Pres Biden underestimated the courage of the Ukrainians and the stupidity in tactics, and crappy training of the invading Russian army.

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"Ukraine is no longer the same as it was 8 years ago. There was clearly no plan B. They did not prepare for a prolonged armed struggle in hostile territory.": Anyone who has studied war in history realizes there is never a "Plan B", despite the fact that "Plan A" never works out as envisioned. It's called "the fog of war". When will the human race ever figure this out and quit warring with each other?

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So Russia has not destroyed virtually all of Ukraine's military capacity? Ukraine still has a viable air force and navy? The Ukrainian army is not in the process of surrendering Mariupol? There are no ultranationalists in Ukraine? No ethnic Russians were killed in Donbass by the Ukrainian army? Europe is not crashing towards recession? I'm sure there are plenty of reasons to hate Putin, but maybe you've got the surrendering party wrong? Surrender is a loaded term anyway regardless of who does it. It should be seen as a peace accord to save lives.

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I can’t respond to each of your :comments. But it sure looked like the Ukrainians have enough remaining military might to have defeated the Russian effort to take Kiev, have just destroyed the Pride of Russia’s Black Sea fleet with missiles along with their only troop carrier, yes they likely have lost Mariupol. But if that is the only “victory” they have had along with retreats all over the rest of the Ukraibe I would say the Ukrainian military is very much alive and well whilst the cream of the Russian forces were battered way beyond anyone’s forecasts, certainly those that predicted a 72 hour war where they would be greeted as liberators.

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There was no "Russian effort to take Kiev." If they had intended to take Kiev, they wouldn't have only sent 40,000 troops there, they'd have sent more like 200,000. Kiev was a diversion to keep many Ukrainian troops tied down there. The overwhelming majority of Russian troops were sent to the east and south.

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Sorry. But nonsense. The Russians sent their elite parachute Spataez forces to take the Kiev primary airport. They were appropriately slaughtered. Then they tried with Chechen and other “special forces” to take out Zelensky. Those infiltrators were hunted down and eliminated. Finally, having failed to secure Zelensky’s assassination or abdication they tried to send massive numbers of troops from the East and from Belorussian-including the infamous 40 kilometer highway convoy. They too were picked apart. Finally in the /ki an suburbs they did occupy like Bacha and Irwin, clearly they did not anticipate leaving or they would not have left hundreds and hundreds of civilian corpses to be seen by the world as either genocide or at the least War Crines. These were meant to pacify through terror the civilian population as a permanent basis. The only purpose of such permanent efforts was to seize Kiev.

To have a reasonable discussion, you at least need to acknowledge that the invasion has not gone according to plan. We can intelligently debate whether Putin is on plan B or Plan C (the first plans having failed) but it is a charade to claim that Putin did not try and fail in a lightening assault to take Kiev (and for that matter Kharkiv.

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That Russia has tried things that haven't worked is true. But they clearly did not send troops in numbers anywhere near sufficient to "take Kiev." Taking over a major city requires substantially outnumbering the opponent. They sent such numbers of troops to Mariupol, not Kiev.

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Fascinating.

Thank you Boris for your courage, and thank you Matt for bringing this viewpoint to the world.

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This is so biased, the only traitor here is you.

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Apr 14, 2022·edited Apr 14, 2022

looks like Vladimir's troll factories have quickly responded! Instead of hurling ridiculously unsubstantiated accusations, why don't you actually write something of substance to refute the author's claims? Because you can't. You can only manage to hurl ad hominem attacks.

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"national betrayal" that's HIS words. just bec you are talking about ad hominem - maybe you should have read the article first. btw. there is nothing in his article than claims related to his simplistic world view. Nothing worth a discussion. All the experts tell you one thing. Then this random guy comes in and joins the enemy.

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Care to elaborate on why it's "biased" and he's a "traitor"?

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Which experts are you talking about? The author's assessment directly supports those of experts around the world! I'm sure that "experts" in Russia have different assessments. I assume those are the ones that you are listening to.

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Putin right now is destroying Russia in an accelerated manner. The real patriot does not want to see his country being destroyed and wants to stop. Those who support Putin are traitors of their own country because they are responsible for tens of thousand pointless Russian deaths in Ukraine, even more Ukrainian civilians killed and brutally tortured by Russian army. And yet, many of Putin's supporters want this destruction of Ukraine and also Russia to continue. I have a question for them: why do you want this war so badly?

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States fall under Russian control when the Russian military invade them, rape their women and murder their children. States join NATO voluntarily, in response to Russian being a terrorist state, led by war criminals, with a military comprised of cowards, rapists and child killers.

The West did not choose this war, and nor did the women and children tortured, raped and murdered across Ukraine. Do I need to quote descriptions of vaginal and anal tears in 5 year children to remind you of the barbarity of what Europe faces, and what Ukraine is already being subjected to? What about the wheelchair-bound elderly mother shot to death in front of her 20-something daughter, so that Russian troops could rape the daughter without being distracted? Or the mayor and his family, kidnapped, tortured and dismembered before being disposed of down a sewer? There's more below.

Russia brought this upon itself, and it will suffer the consequences for decades.

The reality of Russian brutality. The following useful summary is from Politico. Lest there be any doubt, Europe is threatened by a terrorist state, led by war criminals and populated by torturers, rapists and murderers. Every Russian conscript had the choice to lay down their arms and surrender to the Ukrainians: instead, they chose to torture, rape and murder women, children and civilians. When people show you who they are - believe them. The next generation of Russian conscripts will be just like this one. As will the generation after that... As will the generation after that... There is no excuse for being naïve ingénues, affecting surprise - even shock - when a new generation of Russians behave just like every generation before them.

THE EVIDENCE: Human Rights Watch (https://www.hrw.org/news/2022/04/03/ukraine-apparent-war-crimes-russia-controlled-areas) says it has collected evidence of Russian war crimes in multiple Ukrainian cities. In one case, “Russian forces in the village of Staryi Bykiv, in Chernihiv region, rounded up at least six men on February 27, and later executed them, according to the mother of one of the men.” In another, “Russian forces in Bucha, about 30 kilometers northwest of Kyiv, rounded up five men and summarily executed one of them. A witness told Human Rights Watch that soldiers forced the five men to kneel on the side of the road, pulled their T-shirts over their heads, and shot one of the men in the back of the head.” In a third incident: “Russian soldiers in the village of Vorzel, about 50 kilometers northwest of Kyiv, threw a smoke grenade into a basement, then shot a woman and a 14-year-old child as they emerged from the basement, where they had been sheltering.”

On the ground: The BBC’s Jeremy Bowen has been in Bucha and Hostomel, outside Kyiv, and filed a series of essential reports over the past three days documenting Russian war crimes. On Friday (https://twitter.com/BowenBBC/status/1510674601474469889), Bowen found evidence of unarmed Russian civilians shot dead, with the bodies of other murdered civilians burned in an apparent attempt to destroy evidence. On Saturday (https://twitter.com/BowenBBC/status/1510525340078252033), Bowen reported seeing at least 20 bodies, some with their hands tied behind their backs. On Sunday (https://twitter.com/BowenBBC/status/1510738861286113282), he interviewed a woman whose son was shot dead by Russian soldiers, who then took over their house and apparently held a party with large numbers of bottles of vodka and whisky. Bowen says he and his team will retain all the video and photos they have taken for the record. In her disturbing report for the Sunday Times (https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/14ce1e48-b2bb-11ec-b03d-8bd1be808b51), Louise Callaghan reported the mutilated bodies of men, women and children had been found in a basement.

Execution-style killings: The Times’ Catherine Philp has this dispatch (https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/war-in-ukraine-town-of-bucha-shattered-by-russian-invaders-atrocities-bqgj58pdg) from Bucha in today’s paper. She reports seeing the bodies of the dead men: “One has his hands tied behind his back with army boot laces; another with plastic tape wound round and round his wrists. A third has his ankles bound with electrical cable, an empty Russian ration box by his side. All of their shoes are missing.” Philp counted eight men, “all in civilian dress and shot through the head and chest.” She says there is evidence of similar crimes, as well as of women being raped, in other towns around Kyiv. Melinda Simmons, Britain’s ambassador to Ukraine, tweeted (https://twitter.com/melsimmonsfcdo/status/1510500801554354181): “Rape is a weapon of war. Though we don’t yet know the full extent of its use in Ukraine it’s already clear it was part of [the Russian] arsenal. Women raped in front of their kids, girls in front of their families, as a deliberate act of subjugation. Rape is a war crime.”

Satellite proof: Chilling images released (https://twitter.com/jackdetsch/status/1510734387729649676) by the U.S. satellite firm Maxar overnight appear to show Russian troops had dug a 45-foot long mass grave in a church yard in Bucha.

C speaks: Richard Moore, aka C, the chief of MI6, said (https://twitter.com/ChiefMI6/status/1510629183365517326) last night: “We knew Putin’s invasion plans included summary executions by his military and intelligence services. The reports of execution-style killings of civilians emerging from liberated areas are horrifying and chilling.

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Lul. You must be the dumbest person on earth.

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You sir are a troll to ignore evidence and simply based on Russian propaganda spew personal attacks

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I sympathize greatly with the writer of this post. Although obviously the Ukraine is being ripped apart militarily now, when all is said and done and the invasion ended (even if they acknowledge loss of the Crimea and part of the Donbas region, the biggest loser long term will be Russia. That is why no one thought that Putin, supposedly a master tactician would invade.

After all, although the Ukraibian leader Zelensky now agree not to joinNATO, the Ukraine was never going to be allowed to join anyway-that’s why the application sat for 8 years after the fall of the Crimea. Meantime now it is clear that the Ukraibe will be fast tracked to the EU, unlike Turkey and as such will get many hundreds of billions of dollars to rebuild and Re modernize. Plus, clearly it’s military, even if not part of NATO will get access to thousands and thousands of anti armor equipment and will develop their own missiles. Meantime Sweden and Finland will likely join NATzo leaving the potential of missiles within 30 miles of St Petersburg. and the possibility of a totally new 1000 Mike long frontier that Russia needs to militarize. Finally over 200,000 of Russia’s best and brightest have already left in less than 2 months with many hundreds of thousands likely to follow as sanction hit harder and harder and it becomes Europe’s reason d’etre to completely eliminate buying oil and gas from Russia within a few years. This will effectively leave Russia to the “tender mercies” of China a power that certainly covets Russia’s resources.

Yes the best thing for Russia would be to negotiate a peace . Heck Putin can even bizarrely claim he “won” by killing off much of the Azov Batallion (even though now they will be replaced by 10 times as many new recruits that now have reason to fiercely hate Russia), and crow that The Ukraine will not join NATO and that they have “secured the peace” for the Donbas and Crimea.

Unfortunately Putin appears to lack the self reflection and the agility to be able to do this so regrettably even more Russians and Ukrainians are likely to keep dying

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Both Ukraine and Russia are fascist-adjacent nakedly oligarchic states. Ukraine especially is run on a nakedly neo-feudalist or industrio-feudalist model. The principal politicians control their own militias, while simultaneously being governors of, for example, "pacified" Russian speaking areas that are being subjected to increasing linguistic and other repressions. These two hyper-oligarchic klepto-capitalist states are being used by the far more sophisticated Western capitalist powers like dogs pitted against each other for great profit--and its working. Obviously the whole ultra-nationalist ideology that has an imperious hold over most authorities in Ukraine (including such things as the Ukrainian Film Academy) is massive, all but Orwellian, in its anti-democratic enforcement, as is to be expected from the fact that both Ukraine and Russia are run for and by oligarchs.

The Maidan revolution is surely an almost completely failed enterprise considering the level of democratic repression, with literal fascist battalions on the official march, seen in Ukraine long before the Russian invasion. Obviously if the states in question, especially Ukraine, had been able to combine socialism with democracy it would have been NATO itself doing the attacking.

So what is in evidence both in the case of Russia and Ukraine is the absolute failure of even a social democratic possibility and the submission of the respective populations tout court to oligarchy, whose natural political disposition is fascistic, because it naturally fears the masses from which it has stolen so much and so resorts to their fascistic repression and because fascism's ultra-nationalism is simultaneously a long-resorted to popular distraction from the more fundamental menace and pre-existing threat to the well-being of the population: oligarchy (and from which all other menaces, not least of which war, arise). If the people of both countries had been able to do away with oligarchism and its handmaid fascist ultra-nationalism then surely the present war would not have come about.

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Largely accurate, but if Yanukovych had not turned away from the EU that many/most? the Ukrainian people wanted the EU has spent enormous efforts to try to democratize the Warsaw Pact members using economic incentives to do so. Might that have been an opportunity for the Ukrainian people and then ultimately for the Russians if it worked? Was that perhaps what frightened Putin the most in 2014?

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As an American I fully support the Citizens of Russia. I hope you can get the Putin regime out of office and take your country back!

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the problem with getting Putin out of office is who would replace him? Would that person be better or worse? Seems like the most likely person would be one of the current oligarchs or one of their puppets. Would that person be any better than Putin or far worse?

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Unfortunately, there are many examples of world powers willing to pay high prices to avoid admitting a mistake. "Our prestige is at stake!"

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".....a classic mistake that governments make when they are not ready to embark on urgent and inevitable reforms." All reading, look in that mirror, please.

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This article does a good job looking at the situation from Russia's POV, and a bit from the US/ NATO/ West. But, like so many before the invasion, it continues to ignore Ukraine and Ukrainian desires. Today, and certainly for the next few weeks & months, tho unlikely for many years, Ukrainians are willing to fight, to KILL, and to DIE, for "Ukraine".

What's Next is the question of WHERE is the peaceful border? Is it Donbas? Does Crimea stay with Russia? What are the Ukrainian's willing to die for, and for how long? Who will control what's left of Mariupol?

There's also the WHEN will there be some "peace" - a huge reduction in killing based on some agreement.

Naturally both Zelenskyy's team and Putin's team will be negotiating for maximum demands. I suspect Russia keeps Crimea (& Sevastopol), and probably Donbas, despite not caring so much about their development during the last 8 years of occupation.

My own goal would be peace, sooner. So neither side "wins", but both stop fighting and killing.

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Good luck to the Russian people, and particularly to the contributors on this substack.

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My article here (https://www.thomaspaines.blog/p/an-open-letter-to-vladimir-vladimirovich) is dated and quite obviously overcome by events. But I would very much like to read a Russian perspective on what I call "the ancient things which have always been and the old things of our family memories." The Russian world view seems driven by both; we have neither.

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Can you include this in Russian also? It might be useful for some.

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