Russia can then ingest Ukraine, continue to seed political distrust in Western countries and then potentially start another war in Europe a few years later.
Holy shit this is the most mapgame-brained comment of all time. You mean Russia will get enough war score to annex Ukrainian territories, wait a few years for aggressive expansion to die down, spend some admin points to press the “sow discontent” button, then war when the casus belli is ready? Like a classic EU4 blob?
Stop gaming and read some books.
Russia has been seeding discontent in Europe for decades. (1)
Russia has invaded Checnya, Abkhazia, Southern Ossetia, Transnistria, Krim, Ukraine (2). Baltics stand next in line, in a few years, if West fails.
It’s literally a sick war game for Putin’s Kreml.
Ok, I’ll bite
- How has Russia invaded Transnistria? Transnistria was a breakaway region during the collapse of the Soviet union, similar to Gagauzia
- No one disputes that Chechnya is Russian territory. Russia cannot invade its own territory.
- Georgian military intended to genocide ethnic minorities. Russia supported the autonomy of said minorities.
- Crimea was given to Ukraine by Kruschev very recently. It is almost entirely ethnically Russian, and those ethnic Russians voted overwhelmingly to secede during a coup/constitutional crisis as the alternative was staying in a country where there culture and language are banned, or worse become the target of hate crimes from neo-nazi battalions as many cases are well-documented
I mean.
It’s not like Russia has never done any of those things individually.
So doing them again in that sequence seems right.
I’m by no means an expert in international relations. However, with respect to your last paragraph, I do think that China monitors the development carefully. I would even go so far and assume that they won’t act on Taiwan until the situation in the Ukraine is decided. Not because the cases are so similar, but because China and Russia seem to be important partners for each other. Right now, China is supporting Russia financially by buying resources from them (if I’m not mistaken) and also supporting them with equipment embargoed by the EU/US. China will probably know what it’s risking when they attack Taiwan and I doubt that they want to create that sort of situation while one of their most important partners (might be mistaken here) is in a war that binds their resources and weakens their support for China.
On the other hand, they could also try to start the war on Taiwan soon, hoping that NATO/US stretch their support too thin.
Tl;Dr: I don’t know either.
The number of fronts in this war seems to keep expanding.
I hate that I predicted this all the way back when the “two week” lockdown was starting, and that nobody listened to me and I got accused of “valuing the economy over Grandma”.
If my account hadn’t been deleted I could link to my comment where I predicted:
- lockdowns would extend far longer than two weeks
- it would ruin the global economy
- causing world war 3 to start
I was just laughed at basically.
I can’t follow you. Where is the connection between lockdowns (I assume you mean the Covid19 lockdowns?) and the war in Ukraine?
Why do people talks so easily about US starting war with Russia? They each have thousands of nukes and if it devolves into nuclear war then earth is fucked beyond repair for at least a few centuries. This is not WW2 anymore, a war doesn’t mean dropping with a bunch of soldiers on a beach, it means an apocalyptic destruction of earth.
I didn’t read that comment as implying war was easy or okay. How’d you get that impression?
the NATO/EU/US may decide to become directly involved in the war
After their involvement, I doubt they’d do nothing if some of their soldiers get shredded by a Russian bomb. Let’s imagine Russia is beaten and it’s on the brink of complet defeat. Do you really not expect them to send nuclear warheads everywhere before collapsing as an ultimate fuck you ? 10% of the warheads are enough to turn earth into a post apocalyptic wasteland.
I live in Germany, was a teenager in the 80s. We would have been ground zero then, and would be ground zero now.
I’ve already spent all the fear of nuclear war in the 80s. I am just not able to fear nuclear war now, anymore. The fear just dulls after nearly half a century.
The choice is to let a madman bring war to one country after another or to stop it - with the cost that stopping has a miniscule chance of me getting vaporized.
But doing nothing will keep the risk of nuclear war for another 50 years. It has to be stopped now, appeasement never did anything good.
All the west has accomplished so far is to ensure that more Ukraine is destroyed, and it’s obvious to anybody with a functioning brain that there is no chance of Ukraine winning at this point. The best chance Ukraine had was last summer during the fabled offensive that failed miserably. Ukraine is never going to be in as good position going forward. So the actual choice is to ensure more people keep dying or to negotiate with Russia. Incredible that after two years westerners still can’t get this through their skulls.
That is true but at the same time, a line has to be drawn somewhere. If we just let Russia win because they have nukes, there is nothing to stop them from invading and absorbing other neighbors. We can’t let the threat of nukes keep us from doing anything and allowing for Russia and China to just invade anywhere they want.
Only the US and Europe has the unalienable right to invade and bomb anywhere they want.
We can’t let the threat of nukes keep us from doing anything and allowing for Russia and China to just invade anywhere they want.
I’m sorry, but yes-we-fucking-can.
Jesus, people here are so fucking blood thirsty that they’re willing to entertain nuclear-fucking-holocaust just to ‘draw a line in the sand’
Friendly reminder that the US has already been ‘invading anywhere they want’ - I sure am glad the baddies aren’t as eager as the good guys are to glass half the planet.
No earth is better ? Got it! Let the great reset begins!
We haven’t even colonized a single other planet and we depleted earth ressources pretty bad,so if it’s a reset, it will be a complete hard reset that bricks earth save file forever. No more technological evolution for any future inhabitants ! The great filter might actually be the answer to the Fermi paradox after all.
We can’t let the threat of nukes keep us from doing anything and allowing for Russia and China to just invade anywhere they want.
This part gave me a nervous laugh. ‘Only us are allowed to invade anywhere we want, and if anyone else does it we’re ready to hard reset earth because we want the exclusivity rights!’