Senate Russia: its impact on the world, its invasion of Ukraine, and its future

I say just let Putin keep digging himself deeper into the hole. If he keeps saying stuff like that, his country will just get more and more isolated as people around the world find out just what kind of maniac is in charge there.

 

US is apparently offering a military alliance with Russia

https://www.yahoo.com/news/leaked-proposal-us-offering-russia-military-pact-syria-075608701.html

(the article focuses on Syria, but it's a worldwide and permanent military alliance from the sound of it)

 

About time, an alliance like that with Russia is long overdue. It's really the only way any progress is going to be made in Syria now.

 

Putin is planning on effectively resurrecting the KGB

 

Even without knowing the details this doesn't make sense. The Baltic states gained independence from the USSR, not Russia. It's like Ohio claiming sovereignty over New York State.

 

Well, Putin...

 

He's laying the groundwork for one of his little green men invasions.

If Trump wins, it'll happen the day after his inauguration. He's laying the public-relations/home-turf-rally-the-Russian-people foundation for it now. And the Orange One will hand them right over to him.

"Have they paid their two percent? Oh, only 1.8? **** 'em. Let the Russians have 'em."

 

Well Putin basically equates Russia with the USSR. He said its breakup is the greatest tragedy of the last 100 years or something like that.

 

tbh the collapse of the ussr was a tragedy but not for the reasons putin thinks it is.

 

Well, the Russian Commonwealth still exists. Ukraine, bizarrely, is still technically a member.

 

Do you mean the Commonwealth of Independent States?

 

Guys just because you oversimplify things grossly doesn't mean they're true elsewhere.

Russians culturally admire the image of the strongman, and the image of strength. The breakup of the Soviet union was an affront to people like Putin because it lead to a decline in Russian influence and prestige - or, in simpler terms, it made them look weak.

Now what needed to happen to ensure an orderly transition going forward, and didn't because Americans like you guys exist, was that Russia's nose not be rubbed in it. They needed to not be made to feel "humbled" by the collapse of the bipolar world, of which they were a leader.

When Pat Buchanan is calling the US' needless, and mindless, provocation out you know you're in the wrong to perpetuate it:

http://buchanan.org/blog/russia-resents-us-125183

When Ronald Reagan met Mikhail Gorbachev in Reykjavik in 1986, Putin was in his mid-30s, and the Soviet Empire stretched from the Elbe to the Bering Strait and from the Arctic to Afghanistan.
Russians were all over Africa and had penetrated the Caribbean and Central America. The Soviet Union was a global superpower that had attained strategic parity with the United States.
Now consider how the world has changed for Putin, and Russia.
By the time he turned 40, the Red Army had begun its Napoleonic retreat from Europe and his country had splintered into 15 nations.
By the time he came to power, the USSR had lost one-third of its territory and half its population. Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan were gone.
The Black Sea, once a Soviet lake, now had on its north shore a pro-Western Ukraine, on its eastern shore a hostile Georgia, and on its western shore two former Warsaw Pact allies, Bulgaria and Romania, being taken into NATO.
For Russian warships in Leningrad, the trip out to the Atlantic now meant cruising past the coastline of eight NATO nations: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Germany, Denmark, Norway and Great Britain.
Putin has seen NATO, despite solemn U.S. assurances given to Gorbachev, incorporate all of Eastern Europe that Russia had vacated, and three former republics of the USSR itself.
He now hears a clamor from American hawks to bring three more former Soviet republics — Moldova, Georgia and Ukraine — into a NATO alliance directed against Russia.
After persuading Kiev to join a Moscow-led economic union, Putin saw Ukraine’s pro-Russian government overthrown in a U.S.-backed coup.
He has seen U.S.-funded “color-coded” revolutions try to dump over friendly regimes all across his “near abroad.”
“Russia has not accepted the hand of partnership,” says NATO commander, Gen. Philip Breedlove, “but has chosen a path of belligerence.”
But why should Putin see NATO’s inexorable eastward march as an extended “hand of partnership”?
Had we lost the Cold War and Russian spy planes began to patrol off Pensacola, Norfolk and San Diego, how would U.S. F-16 pilots have reacted?
If we awoke to find Mexico, Canada, Cuba, and most of South America in a military alliance against us, welcoming Russian bases and troops, would we regard that as “the hand of partnership”?
We are reaping the understandable rage and resentment of the Russian people over how we exploited Moscow’s retreat from empire.
Did we not ourselves slap aside the hand of Russian friendship, when proffered, when we chose to embrace our “unipolar moment,” to play the “great game” of empire and seek “benevolent global hegemony”?
If there is a second Cold War, did Russia really start it?

 

the soviet union is not something I want to see reformed, and it wasn't a system that I would consider something to aspire to to say the least. but its collapse was still a tragedy. and not because of nationalist humiliation or whatever. there were real human consequences and it was not a victory of 'democracy' and 'free markets' as the west likes to claim. a majority voted to maintain a reformed soviet union, but in the end boris yeltsin exploits an autocratic coup to seize power from a state that had been moving towards positive reform. how did democracy really win here? we end up with some semi democracy/autocracy hybrid, and that's just in russia. it regressed even further in places like turkmenistan.

and victory of capitalism? maybe, but that's not a good thing. the country goes from stagnant to chaotic and we get one of the worst economic depressions of the century, causing real, human suffering for many. meanwhile oligarchs take control of the economy and basically loot the country. major flaws of the soviet union like corruption and militarism are inhereted by the russian federation anyway.

I do not like putin or the soviet union, but this is my thoroughly uninsightful perspective for why the collapse of the soviet union was a tragedy.

and while i will criticise the russian federation government for a variety of reasons, i do not buy into the idea that they are this evil enemy. I think the rf and usa actually have a similar negative influence on international politics, and that the truth is more grey and more complicated. I think it is more accurate to describe russia as a whole as a country that is trying to improve, but no country can just leave behind the baggage. and some questionable people like putin and friends have decided it might be better just to work with the baggage you've got.

 

Great post, Ender Sai

The eastward expansion of the EU has to be a factor, too. I think Ukraine and Turkey flirting (mutually) with the EU with a view to future membership was becoming something of a bugbear. It's blatantly obvious that FSB active measures units helped things along in the Crimea but I'll eat my hat if they weren't also involved in the recent coup attempt in Turkey.

This can't be overstated. It may seem dumb (although not to me - I wish it were the same here where physical strength is seen as something to be derided) but it's a huge thing in Russian culture. The West have been slapping the Russians in the face over this too. The Soviet pride in their Olympic weightlifting accomplishments is huge and the banning of Russian athletes from 2016 has been a major kick in the knackers. As was the re-jigging of weight categories so that all the Soviet Olympic and world records that were set (and remain unequalled) were swept aside. No-one, not even Iran or China, has been able to match them but they're no longer on the record books. The thinking behind it was that all the soviet athletes were on performance enhancing drugs. True, but so was everyone else and that's a further slap in the face - cheats accusing cheats of cheating. There's a lot of resentment, for example, about Sharipova's ban from tennis for taking an over-the-counter med that had little to no performance enhancing effect while Serena Williams takes a stack of actual performance enhancing drugs because she has a doctor's note to say that she needs them for medical reasons. Interestingly - among athletes at least - I've seen that resentment grow throughout eastern Europe as well as in Russia itself. This image has been used for various memes expressing dissatisfaction with perceived anti-Russian judgements in sport:



Anyhoo, I'll be getting some popcorn and watching Russia with interest over the next decade or so.

 

Yeah I know. I'm just saying it makes no sense legally (although there could be a technicality about Russia being the international successor to the USSR, although I doubt it).

Ender Sai, Great article, and I generally agree with Buchanan's assessment of the situation. However I do think the US was in a catch-22 with regards how to incorporate Russia into the defence framework. There were really three options, each with bad outcomes:

1. Incorporate Russia under NATO (or a new alliance). This would have greatly worried the Eastern European states with good reason, as a Russia under the NATO umbrella is far more difficult to defend against should they determine they want to maintain a more tight grip on the former Soviet Republics and Warsaw Pact countries. And given the Russian admiration and leading toward authoritarianism you can understand their concern.

2. Not expand NATO. This would have left the former Warsaw Pact and Soviet Republic countries defenceless, which would have formed a type of 'Intermarium' military alliance, which would have potentially sort to acquire nuclear weapons, or, more likely, enter a state of constant tension with Russia, as they attempted to influence the more eastward nations.

3. Expand NATO.

Either way Russia's overbearing nature has always been a concern of Eastern Europe, however it would not have gone away without NATO expansion, it would rather have only taken another form.

 

So, this is bad right?

 

Yes, but it can also be seen as a counter-move to Putin's announcement that he's keeping 34 tons of weapons-grade plutonium.

The problem with Russia/US relations is that both countries are still stuck on the "you started it!" Phase when the reality on the ground has moved well beyond that. This has led to a continuing spiral of escalation when we should be discussing de-escalation.

Syria, for example, is now a de facto proxy war between the two nations, and the US is losing. Badly. Putin likely sees this as a justified humiliation of the United States and Western interests based on the reasons outlined in the excellent post by Ender Sai.

Until Putin feels that America has been sufficiently "slapped around" by the Russian bear, the beatings will continue. And with oil prices slated to rise after OPEC's agreement to put a floor under production, he's probably not in a conciliatory mood.

Peace,

V-03

 

Posted about that yesterday in the U.S. politics thread.

Between that and Russia withdrawing from the nuclear disposal treaty, Russia (as Vaderize03 alludes to) is making moves to just say that they're going to dictate things on their terms from here on out.

 

Well done, America. Amazing effort at humility in winning the cold war. Bloody marvellous effort guys.

 

Since when has America been good at humility, showing or otherwise?

 

Policy officials had plans for a U.S.-Russian alliance in the event of a Soviet collapse in place since at least the HW Bush administration. But the plans were ignored by the more idealistic members of the foreign policy teams of HW Bush and Clinton. Mersh still talks about it in his lectures from time to time.

 

So, this is bad too right?

 

Yes it is bad, all bad.

 

It's bad because America's fundamentally destabilising the world in consistently provoking and marginalising Russia.

 

Bingo.