So far Russia is hewing closely to this playbook laid out by Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). It is likely Ukraine will fall within a week or two barring substantial rearmament from the West, which seems logistically difficult in this operational environment. The long game is much harder to plan out. Ordinary Ukrainians have a high degree of technical proficiency and access to small arms and their military has been planning a partisan insurgency for this dark moment.
Continuing to supply their forces with personnel based anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles could turn Ukraine into another Afghanistan for the Russians. Echoes of Iraq as well with shock and awe in the opening round followed by a much costlier insurgency. There seems to be a high degree of bipartisan support for this move in the United States Senate. Unlike Iraq or Afghanistan, Ukrainians already have a strong sense of national identity and affinity for liberal democracy. They will stand united against unjustified Russian aggression and will not surrender their freedom without a fight.
Over the next few weeks we will learn whether this is more like the German invasion of Poland in 1939 or the Russian invasion of Afghanistan — or the US invasion of Afghanistan a few decades later.
The most chilling aspect of this for me, so far, is Mr. Putin’s reminder that Russia is a nuclear power. Indeed.
It appears to me that Mr. Putin believes that his influence with the GOP and Donald Trump is at its high-water mark. It remains to be seen whether Ukraine is the focus of his strategy with Trump or whether Ukraine is a rehearsal for a Russian operation aimed at toppling the American government, with Mr. Trump as Mr. Putin’s American puppet.
Although America has not yet declared war on Russia, surely this action crosses the subjective — even if not legal — threshold that makes aiding and abetting Vladimir Putin treasonous.
I hope that this invasion will pop the zit of American fascism that has been growing since 2016. The apparent embrace of Mr. Putin by Donald Trump and the treasonous thugs who now control the GOP is surely a wakeup call for every American.
The world is now at war. It’s time to take sides.
“The world is now at war. It’s time to take sides”
Total war with missiles? Limited war with tough sanctions? Or what?
Figure it out, Bob. What do YOU think?
How about a war with an exit strategy?
If there is to be war, I prefer it to be between somebody else and somebody else.
I presume you’re being ironic — I hope you agree that there is no such thing as a “war with an exit strategy”.
At the moment, I’m hoping that Mr. Putin is doing to Russia what the US did to itself when the US invaded Afghanistan.
By all accounts, any full-scale occupation of Ukraine by Russia will result in decades of Afghanistan-style guerilla warfare — enormously costly for Russia with no hope of long-term benefits.
So Ukraine in a few years will be in the condition Afghanistan is now? Is that your most optimistic scenario?
Does Putin have one? He has already wasted 400-2800 of his own men on this misadventure. Thousands of his own people risked their freedom to protest this illegal, unjust, and immoral war.
I think that a public figure who applauds, aids and abets Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is a traitor, just as the Americans who continued to support Hitler after September 1, 1939 were traitors.
And like Hitler, I fear we risk Putin continuing to help himself to more territory if he is not stopped now. I really don’t want to hear from any Neville Chamberlains at the moment.
Stopped how?
Similar to pushing Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait.
So you advocate for a full scale attack on Russian troops in Ukraine?
At very least I wish Biden had not ruled out American troops on the ground in Ukraine. I’d also call this defensive. I am not advocating a US or allied invasion of Russia, but all force should be brought to bear to make sure Russian troops themselves retreat back across their border.
Our mistake was not letting Ukraine into NATO after Crimea and putting sufficient US boots on the ground to deter further Russian aggression. Bush abandoned the Georgians in 2008 (Condi told me to my face they wouldn’t go in and then they did 3 days later, we were totally caught flat footed) and Obama badly miscalculated with the reset and was caught flat footed with Crimea. Trump got elected with Russian assistance and owes Russian banks money, so he was compromised. He held up vital aid to Ukraine to blackmail Hunter Biden. He’s a traitor. So that leaves Biden as the first president in my lifetime with the testicular fortitude and relationships to build a coalition to effectively deter Putin. I’ll concede it may be too little too late,
I agree.
At the same time, I remind myself that the Europe and the world prospered for decades while the “Warsaw Pact” nations were still controlled by Russia (the “Soviet Union” at the time).
There is a substantial risk that any direct military confrontation with Russia will result in a nuclear exchange. At that point, humanity is done. There is no “limited nuclear war”.
I’m not sure what the red line ought to be.
The prospect of American military forces attacking Russian warships because of a Russian invasion within the Warsaw Pact boundaries is distinctly unappealing to me.
I can’t imagine either side goes nuclear. That would be insane and I think everyone knows it. The Warsaw Pact side of Europe was less free and less prosperous than I think would be acceptable today.
So you’re counting on Putin to be humane and rational? And you’re willing to risk nuclear war on that assumption?
Humane? Not necessarily. Coldly rational? – yes, that is still my bet. I do not see nuclear war in the cards. We were closer to that in the Cold War, but it ultimately did not happen. We got through Korea and Vietnam without resorting to it.
Until Russia is disarmed, our view of what is or is not acceptable is irrelevant.
America would not tolerate the construction of major Chinese military installations in Vancouver, Toronto or Mexico City. The hostility of Russia to being surrounded by NATO nations is unsurprising.
In the long run, surely the solution is to outlast Vladimir Putin and the worldview he represents.
We don’t need force the issue. Vladimir Putin’s over-reach will destroy his fledgling empire just as the Soviet Union was destroyed from within 40 years ago.
You may have a bit more patience than I do on this one. It sounded like you think we have to accept a Russian-dominated Eastern Europe, which I do not. NATO is no threat to Russia as it is purely defensive. As I recall in the 90s when we sought to expand NATO we even invited Russia itself to join in a co-operative relationship. NATO may have started as an anti-Soviet bulwark, but that raison d’etre ceased to exist when the USSR itself ceased to exist.
NATO itself is an excuse, not a cause.
Nothing we do or say about NATO will change the attitude of Vladimir Putin towards it.
The point remains that the rest of the world lived and thrived while the Warsaw Pact nations were within the Iron Curtain.
It seems to me that our choice is between a period of likely Russian domination of its immediate neighbors on one hand and a likely nuclear exchange on the other.
Even without a nuclear war, the likely outcome of a full-scale military conflict with Russia is to again destroy and desolate the very nations we aim to “protect”.
It will take just as long to rebuild them after a “victory” as it will for Vladimir Putin’s overreach to collapse of its own accord.
There is no victor in a major military conflict between the world’s superpowers.
I refuse to accept that choice, though of course Russia and its neighbors will have to find a way to coexist.
Today Gov. Ron DeSantis condemned international authoritarian rulers – in Canada and Australia! 🙁
It’s really shameful to see all the Reaganite Republicans embrace Putin and his lapdog Trump. This war proved Romney right and Obama wrong, and yet for too many Americans on the right Russia is a strong Christianist state worthy of praise rather than the backward authoritarian gulag it has become under Putin. Too many leftists like my man Bernie are also making the wrong calls, Russia can be wrong and America can be right, if anything, the latter has become more liberal while the former has become even less hospitable to progressive values since communism ended.
Russia never struck me as a super-Christian nation in either theory or practice, at least not since the dual leadership of the Czar and the Muscovite Patriarchy.
It’s not but there’s an axis on the far right between Le Pen, Salvini, Orban, and their many American admirers from Tucker Carlson to Steve Bannon to Rod Dreher. Even BoJo who has talked a good game bas familial and financial ties to Russian oligarchs. So there is definitely a far right view that Putin and Orban were the last authentically Western leaders since their states are bastions of Christendom. It’s all BS, I’m 100% sure Putin and Orban as former communist apparatchiks are atheists, but they use the symbols of Christianity to link themselves with the Western right. It’s a real phenomenon.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/06/american-orbanism/612658/
Russia is a state ruled by heterosexual white males with guns who have complete authority over the nation. Full stop. That is the appeal to the Trump Cultists, Tucker Carlson, Steve Bannon, and the rest.
I’d like to see the British and U.S. Governments start to seize the property in their nations that are owned by the Russian oligarchs.
Fertilizer magnate Dmitry Rybolovlevbo bought an $88 million condo at 15 Central Park West in 2011—possibly for his daughter, Ekaterina Rybolovlev—breaking the record for the priciest condo sale ever.
Let’s evict Ms.Rybolovlev and go on to the next one.