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Post by kaima on May 3, 2022 18:55:21 GMT -7
Indian Author Pankaj Mishra on the War in Ukraine "Have You Really Thought This Through?"Pankaj Mishra is one of the most important voices in the Global South. In an interview, he discusses why he thinks Western sanctions against Russia overshoot the mark and how the developing world views the conflict. Interview Conducted by Bernhard Zand 03.05.2022, 14.58 Uhr About Pankaj Mishra Pankaj Mishra was born in India in 1969. The historian has been a guest professor at Wellesly College and at University College in London. His writing focuses on travel literature and historical works that are enriched by philosophical queries. Foto: Grey Hutton Pankaj Mishra was born in India in 1969. The historian has been a guest professor at Wellesly College and at University College in London. His writing focuses on travel literature and historical works that are enriched by philosophical queries. Der indische Essayist und Schriftsteller Pankaj Mishra, 53, ist eine der wichtigsten Stimmen des ärmeren Teils der Welt. Seine Bücher »Butter Chicken in Ludhiana« und »Zeitalter des Zorns« waren Weltbestseller. DER SPIEGEL: Mr. Mishra, which historical conflict do you believe is most instructive for understanding the war in Ukraine? Pankaj Mishra: I think it would be more useful to not reach for historical analogies at this point. We’ve not seen a geopolitical situation like this before, with the political assertiveness of nuclear-armed countries like Russia and China and the ambiguous role of countries like India. It could even be dangerous to think that we can reach for easy historical analogies. DER SPIEGEL: You, yourself, recently drew a comparison with the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in the Unites States. Mishra: If I were asked about cautionary tales in history, I would point not to Hitler, Munich and appeasement, as many Anglo-American politicians and journalists have done – but to the Western response to 9/11. The fanatics of al-Qaida killed many people and caused a lot of damage on September 11. But what was truly irreparable was the global damage caused by the catastrophically foolish response to 9/11 – which was to declare an open-ended war on terror, which involved practically every country in the world and ended, as we now know, in defeat and humiliation and the political disintegration of entire parts of the world. DER SPIEGEL 18/2022 The article you are reading originally appeared in German in issue 18/2022 (April 30th, 2022) of DER SPIEGEL. SPIEGEL International DER SPIEGEL: What does this teach us for the current conflict? Mishra: Putin is heading for certain defeat, just as al-Qaida was heading for certain defeat more than 20 years ago. But if you deploy such an excess of military, economic, and political weapons today, you will do far greater damage in the long run. DER SPIEGEL: You think the measures taken against Putin are excessive? Mishra: You’re freezing the central reserves of the eleventh largest economic power, something that has never been done before. You’re imposing sanctions of a kind we’ve not seen on any country before. We’ve seen disengagement of companies, some of which have been present in Russia for 25 or 30 years. I think the response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine has been quite extreme. Because it affects not only Russia, not only the countries in the region and in Europe, but also countries far away from Russia. This raises several questions: At what stage will these sanctions end? What’s going to happen to those countries which depend on Russian energy and food exports? Will Russia be forever ostracized and stigmatized? Will Russians maybe get rid of Putin, or will he become more popular? Is it likely that they might elect or might choose an even more extreme nationalist leader? We know that the experience of national humiliation can breed uglier evil. DER SPIEGEL: If you think the sanctions are too extreme, how do you propose to stop the war and prevent its consequences? Mishra: What did the Americans do in Afghanistan? They negotiated with the very people they had set out to exterminate completely. This is a lesson that history teaches over and over again, and we always forget it. We over-invest in our military capacity and our economic capacity. And we don't realize that by doing so, we cause deep damage to the economic and social fabric, which is already very fragile right now. Particularly in a world as interdependent as today. DER SPIEGEL: You propose negotiating with a man who has unleashed this war despite dozens of rounds of negotiations? Mishra: There is no alternative to dialogue. I’m not a policymaker, nor am I an intelligence operative. I’m not a finance minister. I cannot offer you details on any of this. But I really do worry that this whole policy of imposing severe sanctions will ultimately destroy Russia’s economy. And you’re doing this to a nuclear power, which is currently ruled by a quite crazy man in many ways. But more importantly, that man, even if he is overthrown, can pave the way for someone even more dangerous than him. What, then, is the endgame of this policy of isolation, punishment and humiliation? DER SPIEGEL: How can there be dialogue after what we have seen and learned about events Bucha and other cities? Even Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy – who has consistently argued for direct negotiations – says that such talks have become much harder after Bucha. Mishra: War always breeds barbarism of the kind we have seen in Bucha, though we don’t always notice it. Tens of thousands of civilians were killed in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Do we seriously propose not talking to the people responsible for this unprecedented global violence? The Ukrainians will, of course, find it hard to negotiate with the Russians after the brutalities they have suffered. But Zelenskyy knows he can’t rule out negotiations altogether. Is there any other way to secure justice and peace in both the short and long terms? Is military and rhetorical escalation against a nuclear power the answer to the global crisis of inflation and hunger emerging across the Global South? DER SPIEGEL: It is Putin who triggered this reaction. Mishra: Yes, but against whom is this reaction now directed? Against Russia – or against the globalized world itself? If you start thinking about the consequences of this policy, you will immediately recognize that it’s destroying the very fabric of global interdependence. The West is sending out a message that it can wield its dominance of globalization as a weapon. In addition to Russia, this signal is also sent to autocratic countries like China and India. It’s giving them good reasons to further disengage, to turn themselves into digital fortresses, to limit foreign influence and keep out foreign media. DER SPIEGEL: And thereby create another bloc, as was the case during the Cold War? Mishra: The Cold War paradigm, democracy versus autocracy, used by politicians like U.S. President Joe Biden, is highly defective and misleading. This antiquated intellectual framework assumes that there are only two major powers, and that the world hasn’t become intricately interdependent. But that’s not the case. By punishing Russia, you are inadvertently punishing a lot of poorer countries. You encourage paranoia and embolden autocrats to take the very path that China has already embarked upon. What I’m asking is: Have you really thought this through? DER SPIEGEL: How are you thinking it through? Mishra: I am not denying the massive challenge facing the West today. The greatest geopolitical challenge of the modern era since the 19th century has been how the leaders and earliest beneficiaries of modernity, the UK, U.S. and France, accommodate the claims of the latecomers to modernity – first Germany, then Japan and Russia, and now, China, India and a lot of smaller regional powers like Iran. In the early 20th century, the claims of rising Germany and Japan were managed through calamitous world wars. But that option seems inconceivable when so many rising powers today have nuclear weapons. We can survive the next few years only if we recognize our unique historical conjuncture and act accordingly and prudently. "Putin embraced the West, and the West embraced him." DER SPIEGEL: Isn’t Putin himself a Cold Warrior? Just a few weeks before this war, he and China’s President Xi Jinping signed a manifesto which openly challenged the West. Mishra: You’ll remember a time when both Russia and China, their populations, and their leaders, desperately wanted to be part of Western modernity. Putin started off as a Westernizer, with his transformation into a Cold Warrior coming later. The same is true for the Chinese. Their idea was: We are part of a world order which was created by the West, and we are going to take advantage of that. We are going to embrace Western investment, and we’ll invest in the West. Over the years, however, suspicions have arisen that globalization is a means of ensuring Western hegemony over the world. DER SPIEGEL: Putin a "Westernizer”? He is a former KGB agent who began his presidency with a brutal war on Chechnya. Mishra: Let’s not rewrite history. Look at all his visits to America, his visits to Britain, where he was received by George W. Bush and Tony Blair with great fanfare. Putin embraced the West, and the West embraced him – and his oligarchs. Whatever he might have done in Chechnya, his anti-democratic and repressive policies, that was fine with most people. Because back then he was "our guy.” He was very much a collaborator in the War on Terror. Russia and America were close during that time. DER SPIEGEL: He wasn’t "our guy” anymore in Syria. Today, Russia and China are close. What do you make of the manifesto Putin and Xi signed in early February? Is a bloc of autocrats emerging? Mishra: China’s and Russia’s thinking has miraculously coincided. Xi Jinping’s mind, I think, was formed during the four years of the Trump presidency when Trump imposed sanction after sanction during his trade war against China. Xi and Putin have both concluded that they need to find a way militarily, economically and politically such that they no longer depend on the West. That is the basis of their friendship and their alliance. The Chinese are deeply disturbed by what is happening in Ukraine, but they cannot go too far towards the West because they have made the decision that they need to start decoupling. This is going to be very difficult because China is deeply embedded in the global economy. But the trust that was there before is gone. The four years of the Trump presidency made them suspicious in a way that’s not going to fade for a long time. DER SPIEGEL: The South China Morning Post recently described you as a "dark and brooding” realist and contrasted you with U.S. political scientist Francis Fukuyama. For Fukuyama, Ukraine’s resistance against the invasion demonstrates the rebirth of the "spirit of 1989” and reminds us of the value of the liberal world order. Mishra: I like to think that I’m looking at the world as it is, drawing conclusions based upon learning about the histories of the particular societies that I’m talking about. If you do all that, then there is a danger that you will be described as a pessimist. But I think the notion that history is about to end, yet again, with the new birth of freedom globally is nonsense. And I’m amazed that this nonsense has been given so much credit. But the United States has not just military or economic power, it also has cultural power and prestige, and so its intellectual output is automatically valued, no matter how disconnected it might be from the reality of so many societies and countries. We’ve been hearing for the last 30 years or so that Western liberal democracy is the only game in town and that most countries are converging to it – even when that self-flattery is decisively defeated by reality. DER SPIEGEL: Of the 193 countries in the United Nations, 141 have sided with Ukraine. Only four have explicitly voted for Russia, with 35 abstaining. Mishra: If you look at the countries that have either abstained or refused to join the sanctions against Russia, you’re looking at the vast majority of the human population. These countries have cast their vote for a variety of reasons. The people who run South Africa today were supported by the Soviet Union during the Apartheid regime. India is in a difficult situation economically and cannot really afford to be on the American side whenever the Americans decide to move against Iran or Russia. Mexico, Argentina, Brazil – they all had their own reasons for not joining the sanctions regime and not condemning the invasion. And we have discussed China. So, I think the idea that the international community is united against Russia is a delusion. DER SPIEGEL: You speak of countries. In this case, is it perhaps better to distinguish between the governments that vote in the UN and their peoples? "We have a massive deficit of leadership and intellectual quality at the highest levels in the West today." Mishra: I can only speak of India and maybe a little bit of Indonesia, where Putin’s popularity has been surging over the last month or so. This is disturbing but something we have to reckon with. Putin is perceived by many as someone who has acted decisively against a neighbor that is being supported by the West. That alone is enough to support him for many people who don’t have access to information … DER SPIEGEL: … or who are exposed to concerted disinformation campaigns. Mishra: In India, many of these people are also supporters of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. So we are looking at a very segmented, a fragmented global population in which it is difficult to reach unanimity about even something as straightforward as the absolute evil of the war in Ukraine right now. It’s important to understand this diversity of opinion and motivation rather than assume moralizing positions before then making decisions which turn out to be rash and deeply destructive. DER SPIEGEL: Many in the West are surprised that India, of all countries, the world’s most populous democracy, is not taking a clearer stance against Putin. Mishra: I would make it a safe bet that many in the West are not aware that under Modi, India has systematically destroyed Kashmir's constitutionally guaranteed autonomy. And not a peep was heard from any of the Western nations. The entire valley has lived under martial law for months on end, under the most dehumanizing conditions. And yet the larger public in the West has not even become aware of the situation, let alone done something about it. There are all kinds of issues here. Where are the Western countries going to go after sanctioning Russian oil? Well, they are going to Venezuela, to Saudi-Arabia – to regimes they have been criticizing all the time. Many people in the Global South deeply resented the way the rich West hoarded COVID vaccines. This is where the moralistic position suddenly seems hypocritical and hollow, and where it encourages anti-Westernism in the Global South. DER SPIEGEL: How will the countries of the Global South orient themselves after this crisis? Mishra: When the world was divided up into two antagonistic blocs, many developing countries followed the strategy of non-alignment. Both blocs were interested in gaining influence in the Third World, so you could seek help from both sources. Later, this movement became irrelevant, because the only game in town was U.S.-led globalization. With the rise of China, however, things started to change again. China became a major source of credit and infrastructure to poor countries, and it didn’t ask questions about democracy and human rights either. Russia was never a big player in all of this. But I’m convinced that the world is going to be divided again into these blocs – with China and Russia on the one side and the U.S. and Europe on the other side. This will lead to countries like India, Indonesia, Argentina and Brazil to keep a distance from both sides and to play them off against each other. DER SPIEGEL: Given the current situation in Ukraine, what would be your policy advice to governments like those in China, India or Indonesia that have abstained in the UN or do not support the sanctions? Mishra: I would obviously tell their leaderships: Please, do everything you can to persuade Putin to see the error of his ways and withdraw his troops. You have enormous responsibility. Particularly China has that responsibility, much more so than India. DER SPIEGEL: What are the implications of the Ukraine crisis for democracy or, in Fukuyama’s words, the "spirit of 1989”? Mishra: I think it’s not serious to conclude that the spirit of 1989 is back simply because Ukrainians are bravely resisting a brutal Russian tyrant. We have to recognize the painful and complex reality that democracy is currently under assault from elected leaders, and not just in countries like India, Brazil or Hungary. You also have to look at the United States. A very popular yet crazy man was running that country just a few months ago, and that crazy man, or someone even crazier, could easily come back to power. So, the idea that we will reverse the trend of de-democratization because of Ukraine is a fantasy. The policy of tough sanctions and the withdrawal of Western companies from Russia is only going to help autocracies become more self-reliant, crank up the machinery of repression and leave dissenters with absolutely no appeal to international civil society. DER SPIEGEL: How might Western nations use their newfound unity to prevent that? Mishra: If this unity is only directed at punishing Russia and, by extension, a lot of poorer countries who are dependent on Russia’s energy and food exports, then I’m afraid this unity is deeply negative and destructive. If it aimed at something bigger, a reflection about what mistakes have been made and how such a situation can be avoided, that would be great. All sides have to reflect on mistakes. Putin has made a disastrous mistake and he is going to pay for it. But the scent of victory in Ukraine – which is going to be a very brief moment – should not distract us from the essential task of formulating wise policy. And it will be difficult because we have a massive deficit of leadership and intellectual quality at the highest levels in the West today. DER SPIEGEL: In the face of such a massive attack of one country against another, is it appropriate to ask both sides to reflect on their mistakes? Isn’t this a case of false balance? Mishra: What’s the alternative? Saying that only one side has made all the mistakes? Doesn’t this sound foolish, or, in fact, completely idiotic? DER SPIEGEL: No, because Putin is the aggressor, and this is about an acute, dramatic crisis and not about working through and relativizing historical errors. Mishra: It is important to look how we arrived here and what we can learn from that. To simply look at the present and assume a highly moralistic position is dangerous. All of the big and small powers today, whether early arrivals to modernity or latecomers, have been guilty of appalling crimes; from slavery, imperialism, and genocide to wars of aggression. Let’s not start pretending to be innocent at this late and crucial stage in the history of the modern world.
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Post by kaima on May 3, 2022 19:19:12 GMT -7
More interesting perspective out of Germany ... during the time that I was there ... wondering about the USA (George Bush I) sitting on his hands while EUrope struggled to accept German reunification, then the 1991 progression on the Soviet Union falling apart; Bonn-Moscow Ties Newly Released Documents Shed Fresh Light on NATO's Eastward ExpansionIn 1991, German Chancellor Helmut Kohl wanted to prevent the eastward expansion of NATO and Ukrainian independence, according to newly released files from the archive of the German Foreign Ministry. Was he trying to assuage Moscow? By Klaus Wiegrefe 03.05.2022, 11.32 Uhr Artikel zum Hören•15 Min German Chancellor Helmut Kohl and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in Kyiv in 1991 Bild vergrößern German Chancellor Helmut Kohl and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in Kyiv in 1991 Foto: Frank Darchinger Usually, only experts take much note when another volume of "Documents on the Foreign Policy of the Federal Republic of Germany" is released by the Leibniz Institute for Contemporary History. They tend to be thick tomes full of documents from the Foreign Ministry – and it is rare that they promise much in the way of reading pleasure. This time around, though, interest promises to be significant. The new volume with papers from 1991 includes memos, minutes and letters containing previously unknown details about NATO’s eastward expansion, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the independence of Ukraine. And already, it seems that the documents may fuel the ongoing debate surrounding Germany’s policies toward the Soviet Union and Russia over the years and up to the present day. DER SPIEGEL 18/2022 The article you are reading originally appeared in German in issue 18/2022 (April 30th, 2022) of DER SPIEGEL. SPIEGEL International Critics will find plenty of evidence that the Germans have long paid undue heed to Moscow’s interests. But defenders of the country’s lenient approach toward the Kremlin – which looks naïve from today’s perspective – will also find support in the documents for their position. At the heart of Germany’s policy toward Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union – known collectively as "Ostpolitik" – at that time were two giants of Germany’s postwar history: Helmut Kohl, from the center-right Christian Democrats (CDU), who served for 16 years as German chancellor; and Hans-Dietrich Genscher, from the business-friendly Free Democrats (FDP), Kohl’s foreign minister and vice chancellor. Both of them were in their early 60s and had a nose for power. And following German reunification, both were at the peak of their reputations. In 1991, the Soviet Union was still in existence, though many of the nationalities that formed the union had begun standing up to Moscow. Kohl, though, felt that a dissolution of the Soviet Union would be a "catastrophe" and anyone pushing for such a result was an "ass." In consequence, he repeatedly sought to drum up momentum in the West against independence for Ukraine and the Baltic states. Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania had been annexed by Soviet dictator Josef Stalin in 1940, with West Germany later never recognizing the annexation. But now that Kohl found himself faced with the three Baltic republics pushing for independence and seeking to leave the Soviet Union, Kohl felt they were on the "wrong path," as he told French President François Mitterrand during a meeting in Paris in early 1991. Kohl, of course, had rapidly moved ahead with Germany’s reunification. But he felt that Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania should be more patient about their freedom – and should wait around another 10 years, the chancellor seemed to think at the time. And even then, Kohl felt the three countries should be neutral ("Finnish status"), and not become members of NATO or the European Community (EC). A German Foreign Ministry memo on the eastward expansion of NATO Bild vergrößern A German Foreign Ministry memo on the eastward expansion of NATO Foto: DER SPIEGEL He felt Ukraine should also remain in the Soviet Union, at least initially, so as not endanger its continued existence. Once it became clear that the Soviet Union was facing dissolution, the Germans were in favor of Kyiv joining a confederation with Russia and other former Soviet republics. In November 1991, Kohl offered Russian President Boris Yeltsin to "exert influence on the Ukrainian leadership" to join such a union, according to a memo from a discussion held between Kohl and Yeltsin during a trip by the Russian president to the German capital of Bonn. German diplomats felt that Kyiv was demonstrating a "tendency toward authoritarian-nationalist excesses." When over 90 percent of Ukrainian voters cast their ballots in favor of independence in a referendum held two weeks later, though, both Kohl and Genscher changed course. Germany was the first EC member state to recognized Ukraine’s independence. Nevertheless, the passages could still cause some present-day eyebrow raising in Kyiv, particularly against the backdrop of the ongoing Russian invasion. An anti-Soviet demonstration in Kyiv in 1991 Bild vergrößern An anti-Soviet demonstration in Kyiv in 1991 Foto: Anatoly Sapronenkov / AFP Soviet soldiers in Leipzig in 1991 Bild vergrößern Soviet soldiers in Leipzig in 1991 Foto: Peter Hirth Germany’s policies toward Eastern and Central Europe also raise questions. The Warsaw Pact collapsed during the course of 1991, and Genscher sought to employ a number of tricks to prevent countries like Poland, Hungary and Romania from becoming members of NATO – out of consideration for the concerns of the Soviet Union. The momentum of Eastern and Central European countries toward joining the NATO alliance was creating a volatile mixture in Moscow of "perceptions of being under threat, fear of isolation and frustration over the ingratitude of former fraternal countries," reported the German ambassador as early as February 1991. Genscher was concerned about fueling this situation further. NATO membership for Eastern-Central Europeans is "not in our interest," he declared. The countries, he noted, certainly have the right to join the Western alliance, but the focus should be on ensuring "that they don’t exercise this right." Was his position born merely of prudence and a desire to ensure peace for the good of Europe? Or was it a precursor to the accommodation with Moscow "at the expense of other countries in Eastern Europe" that Social Democratic (SPD) parliamentarian Michael Roth recently spoke of? The chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee in the German parliament, Roth is in favor of establishing a committee of inquiry to examine failures in Germany and within his own party when it comes to Ostpolitik. He believes that Germany "de facto denied the sovereignty" of its neighboring countries. Roth is referring specifically to Berlin’s policies in recent years. But should the analysis perhaps take a look further into history? All the way back to the era of Kohl and Genscher? “Initially, the former Warsaw Pact countries pursued the intention of becoming NATO members. They have been discouraged from doing so in confidential discussions.” German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher in 1991 Curiously, Germany’s Ostpolitik – both in the period leading up to German reunification and since then – has today become the focus of criticism from all sides. Russia, too, is among the critics, accusing the West of having broken its word with the eastward expansion of NATO. Some of the documents that have now been declassified may even be reframed by Russian President Vladimir Putin and his acolytes as weapons in the ongoing propaganda war. Because in several instances, Genscher and his top diplomats refer to a pledge made during negotiations over German reunification – the Two Plus Four negotiations – that NATO would not expand into Eastern Europe. Russian politicians have been claiming the existence of such a pledge for decades. Autocrat Putin has sought to use the argument to justify his invasion of Ukraine. Yet Moscow approved the eastern expansion of NATO in the NATO-Russia Founding Act of 1997, if only grumblingly. Many of the documents that have now been made public seem to support the Russian standpoint: On March 1, 1999, Genscher told the U.S. that he was opposed to the eastward expansion of NATO with the justification that "during the Two Plus Four negotiations the Soviets were told that there was no intention of expanding NATO to the east." Six days later, the policy director of the German Foreign Ministry, Jürgen Chrobog referred in a meeting with diplomats from Britain, France and the U.S. to "the understanding expressed in the Two Plus Four process that the withdrawal of Soviet troops from the West cannot be used for our own advantage." On April 18, Genscher told his Greek counterpart that he had told the Soviets: "Germany wants to remain a member of NATO even after reunification. In exchange, it won’t be expanded to the east ..." On October 11, Genscher met with his counterparts from France and Spain, Roland Dumas and Francisco Fernández Ordóñez, respectively. Minutes from that meeting recorded Genscher’s statements regarding the future of Central and Eastern European Countries (CEECs) as follows: "We cannot accept NATO membership for CEEC states (referral to Soviet reaction and pledge in 2 + 4 negotiations that NATO territory is not to be expanded eastward). Every step that contributes to stabilizing situation in CEEC and SU is important." SU is a reference to the Soviet Union. Kohl, Genscher and Gorbachev in 1990 Bild vergrößern Kohl, Genscher and Gorbachev in 1990 Foto: STAFF / REUTERS As such, Genscher wanted to "redirect" the desires of CEEC to join NATO and was on the lookout for alternatives that would be "acceptable" to the Soviet Union. The result was the North Atlantic Cooperation Council, a body within which all former Warsaw Pact countries would have a say. "Initially, the former Warsaw Pact countries pursued the intention of becoming NATO members," said Genscher. "They have been discouraged from doing so in confidential discussions." For a time, the Germans were even in favor of NATO issuing an official declaration that it would not expand eastward. Only after the German foreign minister visited Washington in May 1991 and was told that an expansion "cannot be excluded in the future" did he quickly back off and say that he was not in favor of a "definitive declaration." De facto, however, it appears that he wanted to avoid expanding NATO to the east. In Bonn, the initial capital of newly reunified Germany, the mood was one of self-confident optimism. The Cold War was over, Germany had been unified and Kohl and Genscher were pushing forward the consolidation of the EC into the European Union. The chancellor also saw an historic opportunity when it came to relations with the Soviet Union. "Perhaps we will now be able to make right some of what went wrong this century," he said. After World War II with its millions of deaths and the partitioning of Germany that resulted, Kohl was hoping to open a new chapter in relations with Moscow. "The dissolution of the Soviet Union cannot be in our interest ..." Chancellor Helmut Kohl in 1991 The Soviet Union at the time was under the leadership of Mikhail Gorbachev, an idealistic, pro-reform communist who the Germans loved since he had acquiesced to the end of East Germany. "If the Germans are prepared to help the Soviet Union, it is primarily out of gratitude for the role played by Gorbachev in Germany’s reunification," was Kohl’s description of the situation. The fact that Gorbachev was vehemently opposed to expanding NATO into Central and Eastern Europe was of no consequence when it came to the esteem in which he was held in Germany. Later, the chancellor would say in public that he had been Gorbachev’s "best advocate." The two leaders used the informal term of address, passed along greetings to their wives and gossiped over the phone. Kohl sought to drum up support around the world for "Misha" and his policies. He helped secure an invitation for the Kremlin leader to attend the G-7 summit and under Kohl’s leadership, Germany sent by far the most foreign aid to Moscow. Kohl was deeply concerned that Gorbachev detractors in the Soviet military, secret services or state apparatus could seek to overthrow him. And an attempted putsch only just barely failed in August 1991. A group surrounding Vice President Gennady Yanayev detained Gorbachev, but mass demonstrations, the widespread refusal to obey orders in the military and resistance from Boris Yeltsin, who was president of the republic of Russia at the time, doomed the attempted overthrow to failure. Gorbachev remained in office. It is hard to imagine what might have happened if the Soviet military had ended up under the command of a revanchist dictator at the time. Hundreds of thousands of Soviet soldiers were still stationed in what had been East Germany and additional units were still waiting to be pulled out of Poland and Czechoslovakia. The German Foreign Ministry files make it clear that the withdrawal of the troops was a "central priority" of German policy. And then there were the roughly 30,000 Soviet nuclear warheads, which represented a significant danger. The "nuclear security on the territory of Soviet Union has absolute priority for the rest of the world," the Foreign Ministry in Bonn stated. From this perspective, any weakening of Gorbachev was out of the question, and the same held true for the Soviet Union as a whole, which Gorbachev was trying to hold together against all resistance. Kohl and Genscher believed in a kind of domino theory, which held that if the Baltic states left the Soviet Union, Ukraine would then follow, after which the entire Soviet Union would collapse, and Gorbachev would fall as well. And that is roughly what happened throughout the year of 1991. Kohl, though, had his doubts as to whether such a dissolution would be peaceful. He felt that a kind of "civil war" was possible, of the kind that was soon to break out in Yugoslavia. Gorbachav’s longtime foreign minister, Eduard Shevardnadze, even warned the Germans. During a Genscher visit to Moscow in October 1991, Shevardnadze, who was no longer in office by that time, prophesied that if the Soviet Union were to fall apart, a "fascist leader" could one day rise to power in Russia who may demand the return of the Crimea. Putin annexed the Crimea a little over two decades later. In 1991, Kohl even felt it was possible that the poisonous form of nationalism that appeared in Eastern Europe following World War I could make a reappearance. He believed that if the Baltic countries were to become independent, "the clash with Poland will start (anew)." Poland and Lithuania fought against each other in 1920. The conclusion drawn by the German chancellor was that "the dissolution of the Soviet Union cannot be in our interest ..." Ultimately, the Baltic countries and Ukraine went on to gain independence. And it likely won’t ever be possible to determine conclusively if Kohl’s analysis of the situation was erroneous or whether the Latvians and Lithuanians were simply lucky that their path to independence was more or less peaceful. Many Western allies, in any case, tended to side with the Germans in their analysis of the situation. French President Mitterrand, for his part, complained about the Baltics, saying "you can’t risk everything you have gained (with Moscow – eds.) just to help countries that haven’t existed on their own in 400 years." Even U.S. President George H. W. Bush, a cold realist, complained about the forcefulness of the Baltic politicians as they pushed for independence. Germany’s friendship with the Kremlin even led Chancellor Kohl to overlook a criminal offense on one occasion. On Jan. 13, 1991, Soviet special forces in the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius were unleashed on the national independence movement there, storming the city’s television tower and other buildings. Fourteen unarmed people were killed and hundreds more injured. The protests from Bonn were tepid at best. Just a few days after the violence, Kohl and Gorbachev spoke on the phone. The diplomat listening in on the call noted that the two exchanged "hearty greetings." Gorbachev complained that it was impossible to move forward "without certain severe measures," which sounded as though he was referring to Vilnius. Kohl’s response: "In politics, everyone must also be open to detours. The important thing is that you don’t lose sight of the goal." Gorbachev concluded by saying that he "very much valued" the chancellor’s position. The word Lithuania wasn’t uttered even a single time, according to the minutes. Gorbachev’s role in the violent assault remains unclarified to the present day. www.spiegel.de/international/germany/bonn-moscow-ties-newly-released-documents-shed-fresh-light-on-nato-s-eastward-expansion-a-5a362292-dfe6-4355-b90f-10d635d7d664
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Post by Jaga on May 28, 2022 18:06:36 GMT -7
Kai, I have a hard time to read this interview with this guy. In general India is actually supporting Russia, I have Indian friends and i know where they stand. Russia as a country acts barbaric. This guy is defending Russia and blaming Biden. He uses a highly sound language full of lame excused for Russia.
Nope, Russia as a country attacked Ukraine, while al-Qaeda was just a fringe organization. Russia acts not any better or maybe even worse than Germany. They destroyed some cities completely. I don;t think this happened during WW I.
This guy is diffusing the problem or Putin/Russia super-power treating Ukraine as its buffer zone and its civilians as just necessary casualties.
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Post by kaima on May 31, 2022 9:12:41 GMT -7
OPINION GUEST ESSAYwww.nytimes.com/2022/05/31/opinion/us-ukraine-putin-war.htmlThe War in Ukraine May Be Impossible to Stop. And the U.S. Deserves Much of the Blame.May 31, 2022 Ukrainian fighters of the Odin Unit, including some foreign fighters, survey a destroyed Russian tank in Irpin, Ukraine, in March.Credit...Daniel Berehulak for The New York Times By Christopher Caldwell Mr. Caldwell is a contributing Opinion writer and the author of “The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties” and “Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam and the West.”In the Paris daily Le Figaro this month, Henri Guaino, a top adviser to Nicolas Sarkozy when he was president of France, warned that Europe’s countries, under the shortsighted leadership of the United States, were “sleepwalking” into war with Russia. Mr. Guaino was borrowing a metaphor that the historian Christopher Clark used to describe the origins of World War I. Naturally, Mr. Guaino understands that Russia is most directly to blame for the present conflict in Ukraine. It was Russia that massed its troops on the frontier last fall and winter and — having demanded from NATO a number of Ukraine-related security guarantees that NATO rejected — began the shelling and killing on Feb. 24. But the United States has helped turn this tragic, local and ambiguous conflict into a potential world conflagration. By misunderstanding the war’s logic, Mr. Guaino argues, the West, led by the Biden administration, is giving the conflict a momentum that may be impossible to stop. He is right. In 2014 the United States backed an uprising — in its final stages a violent uprising — against the legitimately elected Ukrainian government of Viktor Yanukovych, which was pro-Russian. (The corruption of Mr. Yanukovych’s government has been much adduced by the rebellion’s defenders, but corruption is a perennial Ukrainian problem, even today.) Russia, in turn, annexed Crimea, a historically Russian-speaking part of Ukraine that since the 18th century had been home to Russia’s Black Sea Fleet. One can argue about Russian claims to Crimea, but Russians take them seriously. Hundreds of thousands of Russian and Soviet fighters died defending the Crimean city of Sevastopol from European forces during two sieges — one during the Crimean War and one during World War II. In recent years, Russian control of Crimea has seemed to provide a stable regional arrangement: Russia’s European neighbors, at least, have let sleeping dogs lie. But the United States never accepted the arrangement. On Nov. 10, 2021, the United States and Ukraine signed a “charter on strategic partnership” that called for Ukraine to join NATO, condemned “ongoing Russian aggression” and affirmed an “unwavering commitment” to the reintegration of Crimea into Ukraine. That charter “convinced Russia that it must attack or be attacked,” Mr. Guaino wrote. “It is the ineluctable process of 1914 in all its terrifying purity.” This is a faithful account of the war that President Vladimir Putin has claimed to be fighting. “There were constant supplies of the most modern military equipment,” Mr. Putin said at Russia’s annual Victory Parade on May 9, referring to the foreign arming of Ukraine. “The danger was growing every day.” Whether he was right to worry about Russia’s security depends on one’s perspective. Western news reports tend to belittle him. The rocky course of the war in Ukraine thus far has vindicated Mr. Putin’s diagnosis, if not his conduct. Though Ukraine’s military industry was important in Soviet times, by 2014 the country barely had a modern military at all. Oligarchs, not the state, armed and funded some of the militias sent to fight Russian-supported separatists in the east. The United States started arming and training Ukraine’s military, hesitantly at first under President Barack Obama. Modern hardware began flowing during the Trump administration, though, and today the country is armed to the teeth. Since 2018, Ukraine has received U.S.-built Javelin antitank missiles, Czech artillery and Turkish Bayraktar drones and other NATO-interoperable weaponry. The United States and Canada have lately sent up-to-date British-designed M777 howitzers that fire GPS-guided Excalibur shells. President Biden just signed into law a $40 billion military aid package. In this light, mockery of Russia’s battlefield performance is misplaced. Russia is not being stymied by a plucky agricultural country a third its size; it is holding its own, at least for now, against NATO’s advanced economic, cyber and battlefield weapons. And this is where Mr. Guaino is correct to accuse the West of sleepwalking. The United States is trying to maintain the fiction that arming one’s allies is not the same thing as participating in combat. In the information age, this distinction is growing more and more artificial. The United States has provided intelligence used to kill Russian generals. It obtained targeting information that helped to sink the Russian Black Sea missile cruiser the Moskva, an incident in which about 40 seamen were killed. And the United States may be playing an even more direct role. There are thousands of foreign fighters in Ukraine. One volunteer spoke to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation this month of fighting alongside “friends” who “come from the Marines, from the States.” Just as it is easy to cross the line between being a weapons supplier and being a combatant, it is easy to cross the line from waging a proxy war to waging a secret war. In a subtler way, a country trying to fight such a war risks being drawn from partial into full involvement by force of moral reasoning. Perhaps American officials justify exporting weaponry the way they justify budgeting it: It is so powerful that it is dissuasive. The money is well spent because it buys peace. Should bigger guns fail to dissuade, however, they lead to bigger wars. A handful of people died in the Russian takeover of Crimea in 2014. But this time around, matched in weaponry — and even outmatched in some cases — Russia has reverted to a war of bombardment that looks more like World War II. Even if we don’t accept Mr. Putin’s claim that America’s arming of Ukraine is the reason the war happened in the first place, it is certainly the reason the war has taken the kinetic, explosive, deadly form it has. Our role in this is not passive or incidental. We have given Ukrainians cause to believe they can prevail in a war of escalation. Thousands of Ukrainians have died who likely would not have if the United States had stood aside. That naturally may create among American policymakers a sense of moral and political obligation — to stay the course, to escalate the conflict, to match any excess. The United States has shown itself not just liable to escalate but also inclined to. In March, Mr. Biden invoked God before insisting that Mr. Putin “cannot remain in power.” In April, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin explained that the United States seeks to “see Russia weakened.” Noam Chomsky warned against the paradoxical incentives of such “heroic pronouncements” in an April interview. “It may feel like Winston Churchill impersonations, very exciting,” he said. “But what they translate into is: Destroy Ukraine.” For similar reasons Mr. Biden’s suggestion that Mr. Putin be tried for war crimes is an act of consummate irresponsibility. The charge is so serious that, once leveled, it discourages restraint; after all, a leader who commits one atrocity is no less a war criminal than one who commits a thousand. The effect, intended or not, is to foreclose any recourse to peace negotiations. The situation on the battlefield in Ukraine has evolved to an awkward stage. Both Russia and Ukraine have suffered heavy losses. But each has made gains, too. Russia has a land bridge to Crimea and control of some of Ukraine’s most fertile agricultural lands and energy deposits, and in recent days has held the battlefield momentum. Ukraine, after a robust defense of its cities, can expect further NATO support, know-how and weaponry — a powerful incentive not to end the war anytime soon. But if the war does not end soon, its dangers will increase. “Negotiations need to begin in the next two months,” the former U.S. secretary of state Henry Kissinger warned last week, “before it creates upheavals and tensions that will not be easily overcome.” Calling for a return to the status quo ante bellum, he added, “Pursuing the war beyond that point would not be about the freedom of Ukraine but a new war against Russia itself.” In this, Mr. Kissinger is on the same page as Mr. Guaino. “To make concessions to Russia would be submitting to aggression,” Mr. Guaino warned. “To make none would be submitting to insanity.” The United States is making no concessions. That would be to lose face. There’s an election coming. So the administration is closing off avenues of negotiation and working to intensify the war. We’re in it to win it. With time, the huge import of deadly weaponry, including that from the newly authorized $40 billion allocation, could take the war to a different level. President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine warned in an address to students this month that the bloodiest days of the war were coming.
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Post by pieter on Jun 1, 2022 10:42:34 GMT -7
Ron,
From the point of view of Audi alteram partem (or audiatur et altera pars) "listen to the other side", or "let the other side be heard as well" I wholeheartedly welcome this Der Spiegel interview with Pankaj Mishra and in the same time the critical reply of Jaga. I miss 'Russia Today' today and have few examples of Russian vioces Pro-Russian stances today. I know the Pro-Ukrainian and US and Western-European, British, Australian, Turkish ( www.trtworld.com/ ) and Al Jazeera voices which are Pro-Ukrainian. I miss Eric Norton's Russian Federation/SovietUnion opinion. That enlarged the Audi alteram partem nature of this Forum.
In his latest post he wrote;
"I am very ashamed
I rarely visit this forum anymore, and whenever I do I'm reminded why I usually stay away. Islamophobia, homophobia, pro-Christian everything (as if Western Christianity is the only "correct" choice, and the same with "Western values"). I am ashamed to be connected in the same forum with people who have such disturbing, closed-minded, bigoted, hate-filled views. And I wonder why I do keep coming back, if only to read comments that disturb me so deeply.
We all live on one planet, but hatred is crippling humanity."
What I monitor folks is that there is a major war going on in Eastern-Europe, that it is taking part mainly in the Donbas region, but also partly Southern-Ukraine (Odessa bombardments), that there were also rockets falling in Western Ukraine. A fact is that this largest armed conflict in Europe since World War 2 has many risks, implications and chalanges. This war if it last for a long time might or will have Geopolitical consequences and might ignite other tension area's and break lines. I think about the existing tensions in Bosnia Herzegovina, Kosovo, Macedonia, on the Turkish-Greek border and Cyprus, various area's where you have ethnic, linguistic, cultural and regionalist/Nationalist tensions. From Catalonia and Basque country, Northern Ireland to Russian provocations in the Baltic sea at the Finnish and Norwegian borders, Denmark, the English Channel (provocative Russian fleets or Submarines) or huge Russian bombers or fighter yets flying over Western-European, Eastern-European and Central-European NATO and EU countries just to intimdate, provocate and disturb the peace. Poland lies in a very risky corner and region of Europe with it's borders with they heavy militarised Kaliningrad Russian exclave sandwiched between Lithuania and Poland, and next to that Lithuania (if occupied by the Russian Federation a huge threat to the Polish security and sovereignty), Belarus (Poland has a long border with Belarus, the close ally of the Russian Federation [Putin]), and Ukraine (at war with the Russian Federation right now and it would be a huge problem if Ukraine would be occupied by the Russians and there would be a Pro-Moscow regime in Kiyv with Pro-Russian armed forces, like the previous Viktor Yanukovych regime before Petro Poroshenko and Volodymyr Zelenskyy).
The Russian Federation might destabilize the Black sea region and make Bulgaria, Romania, Moldova, Georgia and Turkey unstable countries with civil unrest, chaos and maybe civil war or just failed state systems. The Russian Federation don't want the EU and NATO at it's doorstep and wants the Ukraine, the Baltic States, Belarus, Moldova, Romania, Bulgaria, Georgia, Azarbajian, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Mongolia and China in a neutral/objective or Pro-Russian or Russian friendly border zone.
I know a Dutch Russian expert in Arnhem with SovietUnion and Russian Federation experience. She told me that we Western-Europeans and Americans don't understand Russia at all. In Western Europe and the USA Mikhail Gorbachev with his policies of glasnost ("openness") and perestroika ("restructuring") was and is very popular, but in the Russian Federation he was and is less popular. The West sees Mikhail Gorbachev's diplomatic role in ending the Cold War and in his role of dismantling the hard line communist Marxist-Leninist course of his previous Sovjet predecessors Konstantin Chernenko, Yuri Andropov, Leonid Brezhnev, Nikita Khrushchev, Nikolai Bulganin, Georgy Malenkov and Joseph Stalin. Many Russians who live in a tradition, heritage and with the history of Machiavellistic despotic leaders since Ivan the Terrible, Ivan IV Vasilyevich (Russian: Ива́н Васи́льевич; 25 August 1530 – 28 March [O.S. 18 March] 1584) since the 16th century, hated the dismantlement of the SovietUnion due to the in their eyes weak rule of Mikhail Gorbachev and the victory of the Russian opportunist, Chauvinist and drunk Boris Jeltsin who broke up the SovietUnion. The Russians disliked Jeltsin and Mikhail Gorbachev and loved Putin as a strong leader and a guy who initially put an end to the power of the Oligarchs of the Jeltsin era.
Today we see Putin in action as a tactical and strategic leader who makes the same mistakes great leaders in the past before him made (Napoleon and Adolf Hitler) but in the opposite direction. Napoleon and Hitler attacked Russia from the West and Putin attacked Ukraine from the East, North and South and partly in the West (the rocket attacks in the Lviv [Lwów/Lemberg] region at the Polish border). Putin achieved something he did not predicted and didn't wished for. He united many Ukrainian and Russian speaking Ukrainians and ethnic Russians in Ukraine, because he killed Ukrainian and ethnic Russian citizens in Ukraine. Fact in a war is that you have 2 sides and the propaganda machines of 2 sides. So we have to check and double check any Ukrainian and Russian information for the truth in their statements. If the war lasts for a long time both sides will commit war crimes, because that happens in every war and civil war. Today the forces of the Russian Federation and the armed forces of Novarussia (the Peoples republics of the Donbas and Luhansk) will commit war crimes in Eastern Ukrainian cities like Severodonetsk (population 101,135), Zaporizhzhia (population 722,713), and Lysychansk (population 95,031). Of course both the Russian rockets, heavy artillery, mortars and tank fire will cost many civilian lives, but also the replies of Ukrainian rockets, heavy artillery, mortars and tank fire will cost civilian lives. Some people will die in the cross fire being in the middle between the Russian attackers and the Ukrainian defenders. The longer the war will last the more in some cases the Ukrainians will be the attackers and the Russian defenders of the area's they occupied. The Ukrainians if possible will try to recapture lost Ukrainian territory. Today it seems that the morale of the Ukrainians is higher than that of the Russians, but that might change if the war last longer and Russian martyrdom will be used in Russian propaganda and if Russian propaganda has had enough time to infiltrate the minds of the Russians and poison them with war rhetorics. The same will be the case in Ukraine where hate of Russia and Russians is growing, where Russian speakers will start speaking Ukrainian, and where Ukrainian Ultra-Nationalism, state Patriotism and Ukrainian one-sided state propaganda will also dominate the media, press and public opinion. It will be increasingly and combat between Russian nationalism and imperialism on one side and the Ukrainian nationalism and national liberation struggle on the other side. Objective, neutral reporting from the perspective of Audi alteram partem (or audiatur et altera pars) "listen to the other side", or "let the other side be heard as well" will be harder and harder. The use of the principle that no person should be judged without a fair hearing in which each party is given the opportunity to respond to the evidence against them will be harder to maintain. Rechtstaat, Separation of Powers (Trias Politica; The typical division into three branches: a legislature, an executive, and a judiciary, in Free and Democratic societies), Human rights, the protection of propperty, food security, safety for bodily and mental harm, are hard to maintain in a country at war and in a war where Chaos, Anarchy, the Survival of the Fittest, beastiality, bluntness, crualty, sadism, perversion, criminality, looting, rape/mass rape, torture, maiming, contempt for human life rule are a fact of life. Unfortunately, very unfortunately, but that is the case in Ukraine right now. Second World War and First World War circumstances, Bosnian and Croatian War of Independence (the unrecognized Republic of Serbian Krajina between 1994 and 1995), Srebrenica Massacre (inclusive the Dutchbat, Dutch role and guilt in that), Kosovo war (between the Serb army and militia and the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA; UÇK)), and Syrian circumstances (Aleppo, Damascus, Raqqa, Homs, Deir ez Zor, Hama, Idlib and Daraa.). The way Ukrainian civilians were starved to death in Mariupol reminded me of the fate of Palestinian refugees in the Yarmouk Camp in Syria during the Syrian Civil War in which 18 thousand Palestinians were deprived of food and water and many starved to death due to hunger and thirst and due to the battle and shelling between the Syrian army of Hafez al-Assad and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – General Command (PFLP-GC), a Pro-Syrian, Pro-Ba'ath (Pro Hafez al-Assad) Palestinian Nationalist and Arab Nationalist Palestinian armed militia on one side and the Free Syrian Army on the other side and later Islamic State (Daesh) on one side against the Syrian army and Palestinian armed groups on the other side. Palestinian families, elderly, mothers and children, fathers, uncles and aunts, cousins, nephews and nieces, grandparents were trapped between the armed groups. The Yarmouk refugee camp became totally sealed off from the outside world and no water and no food came in and no electricity was present. People ate grass and Palestinian refugees started looking like nazi concentration camp inmates. They were starving and the world did nothing to help them. In Mariupol in Ukraine we saw the samen thing. Children, mothers, fathers, adults were starved to death in basements and cellars. What a world we live in folks. It is a very brutal and inhumane world. The Palestinian baby Israa al-Masri died of a hunger-related illness on January 11, 2014 in the Yarmouk camp [AP]Since July 2015, the Syrian town Madaya was besieged by a combination of Syrian forces loyal to the Syrian president Bashar al-Assad and the allied Lebanese militia Hezbollah. In December 2015, Doctors Without Borders reported that 23 people had died of starvation after a total blockade prevented any food or humanitarian aid to enter since 18 October. Isn't that what took place in Mariupol, and what takes place in Severodonetsk and Lysychansk today the same thing?edition.cnn.com/2014/02/05/world/syria-children-dying-hunger/index.htmlSource: Maps, BBC world service, BBC News.
Folks in 1945 after the terrible Holocaust (Shoah) the world said NEVER AGAIN. After the League of Nations (French: Société des Nations; 1920–1946) the United Nations was founded in 1945. After the UN Charter was signed on 26 June 1945 the Charter entered into force on 24 October 1945.
The UN was established after World War II with the aim of preventing future wars, succeeding the rather ineffective League of Nations. On 25 April 1945, 50 governments met in San Francisco for a conference and started drafting the UN Charter, which was adopted on 25 June 1945 and took effect on 24 October 1945, when the UN began operations. Pursuant to the Charter, the organization's objectives include maintaining international peace and security, protecting human rights, delivering humanitarian aid, promoting sustainable development, and upholding international law.
The World said NEVER AGAIN in 1945, but after the United Nations (UN) were founded the Korean War (25 June 1950 – 27 July 1953) took place with approximately 3 million people dead, the Great Chinese Famine caused by Mao Zedong's Maoist communist government (1959–1961) took place (15–55 million dead), the Vietnam War (with approximately 3.8 million violent war deaths in Vietnam), the Biafra War in Nigeria (6 July 1967 – 15 January 1970; 2 million Biafran civilians perished from famine during the Nigerian naval blockade) took place, the Cambodjan Killing Fields (the Cambodian genocide) of the Khmer Rouge under the leadership of war criminal Pol Pot (2 million Cambodjan Khmer, and the Vietnamese and Cham minorities -The death toll of these two groups, approximately 100,000 people, is roughly 5% of the generally accepted total of two million.-), the Sabra and Shatila massacre in Lebanon in September 1982 as part of the vicious Lebanese Civil War from 13 April 1975 until 13 October 1990 ( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabra_and_Shatila_massacre ), and of course the other genocides and attrocities in Rwanda during the Rwandan genocide from 7 April 1994 until 15 July 1994 (the Hutu majority killing the Tutsi minority and moderate Hutu's; during the Rwandan genocide an estimated 491,000 to 800,000 people were massacred and the world did not prevent it. The UN was powerless) and during the that the terrible Bosnian War from 6 April 1992 until 14 December 1995 during which 101,000 people died, mainly Bosniaks (Bosnian muslims). The world remembers the Srebrenica massacre from 11 July 1995 until 22 July 1995 when more than 7,800 Bosnian Muslim men were killed by Serb soldiers. Thousands of women and girls suffered rape and sexual abuse and other forms of torture. We see such scenes, torture, rape and murder return to Ukraine. Even mercenaries from the same Bosnian War and Kosova War return to the Battle fields of Ukraine in the Donbas War that is already taking place for years (2014-2022 -Today-). By the way mercenaries on both sides folks. Croat Ustaše on the Ukranian side and Serbian Četniks on the Side of the Pro-Russian Novarussia forces of the Donbas Peoples Republic and the Luhansk Peoples Republic and the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation.
What have we learned from the First World War (1914-1918), the devastating effects of the War reparations imposed by the USA, the United Kingdom and France on Germany (Weimarer Republic; 1918–1933) and Austria (causing Famine, poverty, mass unemployment, and the rise of Nazism and Communism in Germany) and the Second World War (1939-1945) with it's Holocaust (Shoah) ( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holocaust_in_Poland ), Intelligenzaktion ( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligenzaktion ), Nazi crimes against the Polish nation ( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_crimes_against_the_Polish_nation ), Operation Tannenberg ( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Tannenberg ), the Außerordentliche Befriedungsaktion (The AB-Aktion), the Gestapo–NKVD conferences (1939-1940) ( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gestapo%E2%80%93NKVD_conferences ), the Katyn Massacre ( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katyn_massacre ), the Soviet repressions of Polish citizens (1939–1946) ( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_repressions_of_Polish_citizens_(1939%E2%80%931946) ), the Germanisation in Poland (1939–1945) ( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanisation_in_Poland_(1939%E2%80%931945) ), the Massacres of Poles in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia ( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massacres_of_Poles_in_Volhynia_and_Eastern_Galicia )? Didn't we learned a lesson from the actions of the Ukrainian commander of the the 31. Schutzmannschafts-Bataillon der SD during the Warsaw Uprising Petro Havrylovych Dyachenko? Petro Havrylovych Dyachenko was one of the commanders on the Nazi side during the Warsaw Uprising (August 1944-October 1944) next to the actions of the Wehrmacht Generalfeldmarschall Walter Model, Wehrmacht General der Panzertruppe Nikolaus von Vormann, Luftwaffe Generalleutnant Rainer Stahel, SS-Obergruppenführer Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski, SS-Gruppenführer and Generalleutnant of the Waffen-SS and Police Heinz Reinefarth, the half Polish Waffen-Brigadeführer der SS Bronislav Kaminski (leader of the murderous Russian Waffen-Sturm-Brigade der SS RONA, a murdering, looting and raping gang of Russians in Warsaw during the Warsaw Rising - Agust 1944-October 1944), the creapy vicious, heavy criminal, psychopathic SS-Oberführer Oskar Dirlewanger ("the most evil man" in the SS) with his SS-Sturmbrigade Dirlewanger consisting of convicted German and Austrian criminals (even feared and loathed, notorious amongst other Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS officers and soldiers) and Luftwaffe Generalfeldmarschall Robert R. von Greim. After the outbreak of the Warsaw Uprising, the Ukrainian commander of the the 31. Schutzmannschafts-Bataillon, Petro Havrylovych Dyachenko organized a military unit out of the battalion and participated in crushing of the Polish resistance against the Nazi Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS forces in Warsaw. It will be no surprise to you folks that I am not a big fan or supporter of Ukrainian Kapo's or guards in German and Austrian Nazi extermination camps (German: Vernichtungslager), nor a big fan or supporter of the Ukrainian 14. Waffen-Grenadier-Division der SS [galizische Nr. 1], the Ukrainian UPA slaughters of Polish civilians and Jews, nor the SD and Order Police battalions with the Ukrainian Auxiliary Police that aided the German/Austrian Einsatzgruppe C and the Sonderkommando 4a and the 45th Battalion of the German Order Police with the killing of killing some Ukrainian Jews 33,771 Jews by executing them and also killing Soviet prisoners of war, communists, Ukrainian nationalists and Roma. It is estimated that between 100,000 and 150,000 people were murdered at Babi Yar during the German occupation. And Ukrainians participated in these killings. It will be no surprise to you folks that I am not a great fan of Stepan Andriyovych Bandera (Ukrainian: Степа́н Андрі́йович Банде́ра, romanized: Stepán Andríyovyč Bandéra, Polish: Stepan Andrijowycz Bandera; 1 January 1909 – 15 October 1959) a Ukrainian politician and theorist of the militant wing of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), an organization responsible for ethnic cleansings also implicated in collaboration with Nazi Germany. I am not a fan of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (Ukrainian: Українська повстанська армія, УПА, Ukrayins'ka povstans'ka armiya, abbreviated UPA) which was a Ukrainian nationalist paramilitary and later partisan formation from 14 October 1942 until 1949. I am not a fan of Stepan Bandera, Roman Shukhevych (one of the organizers of the Galicia-Volhynia massacres of approximately 100,000 Poles), Dmytro Klyachkivsky (a commander of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), first head-commander of the UPA-North. He was responsible for the ethnic cleansing of Poles from Volhynia.) and also not of Vasyl Kuk, a Ukrainian nationalist who was the last leader of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, following the death of Roman Shukhevych.
Stepan Bandera-monument in Ternopil,one of the major cities of Western Ukraine and the historical regions of Galicia and Podolia.
Stepan Bandera (1909 – 1959) was a Ukrainian politician and theorist of the militant wing of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), an organization responsible for ethnic cleansings of Poles also implicated in collaboration with Nazi Germany.
I have sympathy for the present day Ukrainian people who fight for their sovereignty, territory, nation, country, survival, culture, language, religion (s), family, friends, acqiantances and colleagues, neighbours and fellow citizens and compatriots. But I do not endorse Ukrainian Ultra Nationalist tendencies with anti-Russian, anti-Polish and anti-semitic sentiments and convictions. I do not like Ukrainian Neo-Nazi and Fascist elements. I am not fond of Banderites (Polish: banderowcy), former members of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, and the present day organisations with Banderite roots; Svoboda, Right Sector, the Ukrainian National Assembly – Ukrainian National Self Defence, and the Congress of Ukrainian Nationalists with their anti-Polonism (Anti-Polish sentiment/Polonophobia). They are a minority and they are there. And we have to monitor how the Polish, Jewish, Russian, Greek, Armenian, Hungarian, Romanian and other minority groups, migrants and expats are treated in Ukraine, just like we do that in Russia and other nations in the world. We shouldn't be blind for the Ukrainian Propaganda machine and cover up operations and attempts to hinder the Free Press either. It is a war and in e every war the dark bestial extremes pop up. Criminals seek power, corrupt people try to win influence, lunatics want to be the hero, rapists have a free game, serial killers find themselves in killing paradise. The international press, the United Nations, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), the International Red Cross, the European Union, the European Parliament, international Human Rights organisations and the Churches and other religious leaders should emphathise human dignaty, the Geneva Conventions, Human Rights and good treatments of Civilians by the fighting forces in this conflicts on all sides. Human casualties are unfortunately part of a war, but deliberately targeting apartment buildings, hospitals, kindergarten, Play grounds of childeren, nursing homes should be avoided. I know that totalitarian, despotic leaders, military leaders without much political control or boundaries can do crazy things. Next to the military effort, diplomacy, mediation by third parties (Israel, Turkey, Switzerland, the Vatican, and other neutral powers are important).
The slogan NEVER AGAIN of 1945 is a farce, it happens over and over again, massacre after massacre, genocide after genocide. Humanity is incapable of stopping serial killers, hate monguers, mass murderers and genocides. Look at the fate of the Rohingya people in Myanmar (previously known as Burma) today. In 2017 we witnessed the Rohingya genocide , a series of ongoing persecutions and killings of the Muslim Rohingya people by the Burmese military. In China we see the Genocide of Uyghurs in Xinjiang.
Since 2014, Uyghurs in Xinjiang (China) have been affected by extensive controls and restrictions which the Chinese government has imposed upon their religious, cultural, economic and social lives. In Xinjiang, the Chinese government has expanded police surveillance to watch for signs of "religious extremism" that include owning books about Uyghurs, growing a beard, having a prayer rug, or quitting smoking or drinking. The government had also installed cameras in the homes of private citizens.
Further, at least 120,000 (and possibly over 1 million) Uyghurs are detained in mass detention camps, termed "re-education camps", aimed at changing the political thinking of detainees, their identities, and their religious beliefs. Some of these facilities keep prisoners detained around the clock, while others release their inmates at night to return home. According to Chinese government operating procedures, the main feature of the camps is to ensure adherence to Chinese Communist Party ideology. Inmates are continuously held captive in the camps for a minimum of 12 months depending on their performance on Chinese ideology tests. The New York Times has reported inmates are required to "sing hymns praising the Chinese Communist Party and write 'self-criticism' essays," (that 'self-criticism' essays reminds me of the worst periods of Stalinism and Maoism folks) and that prisoners are also subjected to physical and verbal abuse by prison guards. Chinese officials are sometimes assigned to monitor the families of current inmates, and women have been detained due to actions by their sons or husbands.
Folks I am not very postive or optimistic about my fellow human beings, the Homo Sapiens, you can't trust them. They are people with a thin layer of 10% civilization and under that 10% there lies 90% of darkness. As soon as there is an economical crisis, uneployment, poverty and chaos and anarchy or a collectivist or despotic authoritarian regime, system or collective takes things over hell breaks lose, and lynchings, arrests, interrogations, power games, corruption, nepotism, fraud, organised crime, imorality, viciousness, sadism, hedonism, greed, empty materialism, Bling Bling cheap rich people with a bad taste, crualty and barbarism takes over. There is something primitive in people. And these things took place on all continents, in all civilizations, in all countries and in most families if you go back far enough. It is not a pleasent site humanity. You can't trust them, people, whether they are American, Ukrainian, Russian, Polish, Dutch, African, Asian, Native American, Chinese, Indian, Icelandic or Thibetan. There is something disturbing in people. Egocentric, selfish, narcistic, psychopathic, megalomaniac, Machaivellist, Solipsist beings. Machiavellianism is a personality trait centered on manipulativeness, callousness, and indifference to morality. It is one of the dark triad traits, along with narcissism and psychopathy.Machiavellianism is one of the traits in the dark triad model, along with psychopathy and narcissism.I fear I agree with Marek EdelmanCheers, Pieter
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Post by karl on Jun 1, 2022 18:37:26 GMT -7
Kai, Jaga and Pieter
I must say, this presentation is very complicated in the manner of two primary political adversaries battling it out over dominance of Europe being The US and Russian Putin. These two giants are as a dog chasing a car, for if the car stops, what is the dog to do? In the manner of The US and Russian Putin, how are they to know who wins?
What we do know for sure, is all of this nonsense has given cause to far reaching consequences in shortages in food grains to Africa as the Ukraine and Russia were large exporters of grain crops. It is easy to blame Russian people for what the actions of Mr. Putin, is this really so? The Russian people at this time are experiencing shortages as many of us are in products we have had in abundance in short past. For they are people as well as the most of us. It is just the mistakes of our respective leadership that are at fault, a situation that seems to fall in to a hole of ignorance.
The Americans are using NATO in pushing the Russian limits of patience. For it is very well known from over 70 years in past, that the Russian fear is an invasion from the West to over take them in a military manner. For this reason, of using surrounding states as hostage barriers for protection against such an action. For Russian leadership learnt their lessons very well from the war with Nazi military under AH ordered the invasion of Russia and would have overtaken such an action and destroyed communism at its roots. But of course history dictates other wise as we are very well aware of.
In the manner of original presentation of the interview of Mr. Panaj, Mishra. It was some what surprising of his frankness with his many replies. For yes, India has done business for many years with Russia, for Russian industry produces a great deal of necessary products such as to name just a few: Tooth past, auto parts, watches, clothing, as with fuel lubricating oil and such. Russians are good business people with very good terms that are workable with their many customers in both the 3rd world countries as well as those of West if governmental interference will allow. This even extends to the Americans in spite of the popular aspects of supposed Russian hate. For this apparently excludes the aerospace industries in Space exploration and civilian aircraft exchange technology.
With our past member, Eric, yes my self do miss him not so much for his Russian image, but for him as a person. He was a confused young man with his Russian persona, but that was his personal image and that was important for him.
Our world is what we make it to be, if we as people are not satisfied, then we as people must bear the blame.
Karl
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Post by pieter on Jun 2, 2022 13:04:53 GMT -7
Kai, Jaga and Pieter I must say, this presentation is very complicated in the manner of two primary political adversaries battling it out over dominance of Europe being The US and Russian Putin. These two giants are as a dog chasing a car, for if the car stops, what is the dog to do? In the manner of The US and Russian Putin, how are they to know who wins? What we do know for sure, is all of this nonsense has given cause to far reaching consequences in shortages in food grains to Africa as the Ukraine and Russia were large exporters of grain crops. It is easy to blame Russian people for what the actions of Mr. Putin, is this really so? The Russian people at this time are experiencing shortages as many of us are in products we have had in abundance in short past. For they are people as well as the most of us. It is just the mistakes of our respective leadership that are at fault, a situation that seems to fall in to a hole of ignorance. The Americans are using NATO in pushing the Russian limits of patience. For it is very well known from over 70 years in past, that the Russian fear is an invasion from the West to over take them in a military manner. For this reason, of using surrounding states as hostage barriers for protection against such an action. For Russian leadership learnt their lessons very well from the war with Nazi military under AH ordered the invasion of Russia and would have overtaken such an action and destroyed communism at its roots. But of course history dictates other wise as we are very well aware of. In the manner of original presentation of the interview of Mr. Panaj, Mishra. It was some what surprising of his frankness with his many replies. For yes, India has done business for many years with Russia, for Russian industry produces a great deal of necessary products such as to name just a few: Tooth past, auto parts, watches, clothing, as with fuel lubricating oil and such. Russians are good business people with very good terms that are workable with their many customers in both the 3rd world countries as well as those of West if governmental interference will allow. This even extends to the Americans in spite of the popular aspects of supposed Russian hate. For this apparently excludes the aerospace industries in Space exploration and civilian aircraft exchange technology. With our past member, Eric, yes my self do miss him not so much for his Russian image, but for him as a person. He was a confused young man with his Russian persona, but that was his personal image and that was important for him. Our world is what we make it to be, if we as people are not satisfied, then we as people must bear the blame. Karl Karl,
These two primary political adversaries battling it out over dominance of Europe have a long history of rivalry and competition. In the late 19th century, American public opinion was shocked at the accurate reports of murderous anti-Jewish pogroms in the Russian Empire (mostly within the Pale of Settlement). After 1880, repeated anti-Jewish pogroms in Russia alienated American elite and public opinion. In 1903 the Kishinev pogrom killed 47 Jews, injured 400, and left 10,000 homeless and dependent on relief. American Jews began large-scale organized financial help, and assisted in emigration. More violence in Russia led in 1911 to the United States repealing an 1832 commercial treaty.
President Theodore Roosevelt played a major role in ending the Russo-Japanese War (8 February 1904 – 5 September 1905). During the war, Roosevelt tacitly supported Japan. The Treaty of Portsmouth was signed in 1905, marking a humiliating defeat for the Russians. Roosevelt received the Nobel Peace Prize.
In World War I the United States declaration of war on Germany (1917) came after Nicholas II abdicated as a result of the February Revolution. When the Czar was still in power, many Americans deplored fighting a war with him as an ally. With him gone, the Woodrow Wilson administration used this new provisional government to describe how the new democratic nations are fighting against autocratic old empires of Germany and Austria-Hungary. During the war, the American Expeditionary Forces were just starting to see battle when the October Revolution happened, with the Bolsheviks overthrowing the provisional government, and removed Russia from the war.
Before Germany surrendered in November 1918, the US participated in Allied intervention against the Bolsheviks during the Russian Civil War since August 1918, with the Polar Bear Expedition and the American Expeditionary Force Siberia. The American goal was not necessarily ideological, but rather to prevent the German enemy from gaining access to war supplies controlled by the Bolsheviks, although the United States also tacitly supported the White movement against the Soviets.
Operating in the Russian Far East. Following the Bolsheviks′ victory in the Civil War and the establishment of the Soviet Union (USSR) at the end of 1922, the U.S., while developing trade and economic ties, was the last major world power that continued to refuse to formally recognize the Soviet government. The United States and the USSR established diplomatic relations in November 1933.
The United States and the Soviet Union, along with Britain, were the leaders of the Allies against the Axis powers during World War II. Following the onset of the Cold War in 1947, the North Atlantic Treaty was signed by the U.S., Canada, and several Western European nations, on April 4, 1949, a treaty that established the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) designed to provide collective security against the Soviet Union.
The first bilateral treaty between the U.S. and Soviet Russia/USSR was a consular convention signed in Moscow in June 1964. In 1975, the Helsinki Final Act was signed by a multitude of countries, including the USSR and the US, and, while not having a binding legal power of a treaty, it effectively signified the U.S.-led West's recognition of the Soviet Union's dominance in Eastern Europe and acceptance of the Soviet annexation of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania that had been effected in 1940. The Act came to play a role in subsequently ending the Cold War.
In the 1970s—1980s, the USSR and the U.S. signed a series of arms control treaties such as the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (1972), two Strategic Arms Limitation treaties (SALT), the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (1987); in July 1991 the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty was concluded.
In the late 1980s, Eastern Europe nations took advantage of the relaxation of Soviet control under General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev and began to break away from communist rule. The relationship greatly improved in the final years of the USSR.
On December 3, 1989, Soviet general secretary Gorbachev and the U.S. president George H. W. Bush declared the Cold War over at the Malta Summit.
In May 1990, Gorbachev visited the U.S. for talks with President Bush; there, he agreed to allow a reunified Germany to be a part of NATO. He later revealed that he had agreed to do so because James Baker promised that NATO troops would not be posted to eastern Germany and that the military alliance would not expand into Eastern Europe. Privately, Bush ignored Baker's assurances and later pushed for NATO's eastwards expansion.
The relationship was generally warm under the Russian President Boris Yeltsin (1991–99) until the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in the spring of 1999, and has since deteriorated significantly.Putin and George W. Bush: 2001–2009President George W. Bush and President Vladimir Putin meet with the press, prior to the Russian leader's departure, July 2, 2007, from Kennebunkport, Maine, USA.In 2001, in response to the terrorist attacks on September 11, the new Russian president Vladimir Putin quickly announced strong support. Terrorism against Russia was already high on Putin's agenda and he found common ground by supporting the American/NATO invasion of Afghanistan to destroy the Taliban that had harbored the Al-Qaeda terrorists. By 2002, however, the two countries were escalating their disagreements. Russia became more assertive in international affairs; George W. Bush took an increasingly unilateral course in foreign policy.
In 2002, the United States withdrew from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in order to move forward with plans for a missile defense system. Putin called the decision a mistake. Russia strongly opposed the 2003 invasion of Iraq, though without exercising its veto in the United Nations Security Council. Russia has regarded the expansion of NATO into the old Eastern Bloc, and U.S. efforts to gain access to Central Asian oil and natural gas as a potentially hostile encroachment on Russia's sphere of influence. The Russian leadership blamed U.S. officials for encouraging anti-Russian revolts during the Rose Revolution in Georgia in 2003 and the Orange Revolution in Ukraine in 2004. Putin saw intrusions into Russia's historic sphere of interest."Reset" under Obama and Medvedev (2009–11)U.S. president Barack Obama and Russian president Dmitry Medvedev after signing the New START treatyDespite U.S.–Russia relations becoming strained during the Bush administration, Russian president Dmitry Medvedev (president from May 2008 until May 2012, with Vladimir Putin as head of government) and U.S. president Barack Obama struck a warm tone at the 2009 G20 summit in London and released a joint statement that promised a "fresh start" in Russia–United States relations. The statement also called on Iran to abandon its nuclear program and to permit foreign inspectors into the country.
In March 2009, U.S. secretary of state Hillary Clinton and her Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov symbolically pressed a "reset" button. The gag fell short as the Russian translation on the button was misspelt by the State Department and actually meant "overload" instead of "reset". After making a few jokes, they decided to press the button anyway.
In early July 2009, Obama visited Moscow where he had meetings with president Medvedev and prime minister Putin. Speaking at the New Economic School Obama told a large gathering, "America wants a strong, peaceful and prosperous Russia. This belief is rooted in our respect for the Russian people, and a shared history between our nations that goes beyond competition." Days after president Obama's visit to Moscow, U.S. vice president Joe Biden, noting that the U.S. was "vastly underestimat[ing] the hand that [it] h[e]ld", told a U.S. newspaper that Russia, with its population base shrinking and the economy "withering", would have to make accommodations to the West on a wide range of national-security issues.U.S. President Barack Obama meets Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin at the latter's country residence in Novo Ogaryovo, near Moscow.Biden's words, published shortly after his visit to Ukraine and Georgia, were interpreted by George Friedman of Stratfor as "reaffirm[ing] the U.S. commitment to the principle that Russia does not have the right to a sphere of influence in these countries or anywhere in the former Soviet Union"; Friedman pointed up a fundamental error in the analysis that underlay such thinking and predicted, "We suspect the Russians will squeeze back hard before they move off the stage of history".U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov at the Waldorf Astoria New York in September 2010Following Vladimir Putin regaining control of the Russian government in 2012, relations between the two countries significantly cooled due to Russia's annexation of Crimea and Russian military intervention in Ukraine. Deterioration continued with the Russian military intervention in the Syrian Civil War, and over Russia's alleged interference in the 2016 and 2020 U.S. elections.
Following the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, relations reached its lowest point since the Cold War. Mutual sanctions imposed since 2014 were significantly expanded by the U.S. and its allies following the invasion, including several state-owned banks and oligarchs.U.S. President Joe Biden and Russian President Vladimir Putin at the 2021 Russia–United States summit in Geneva, Switzerland, with the US and Russian State secretaries (Foreign Affars Ministers), Karl,
To my knowledge the USA has superior technology, more experience in various wars, a greater military budget, but not necessarily more equipment. The question who wins has to do with the quality of both political and military leaders, strategies, tactics, how fast decisions and made implemented and put into action. At the battle field we see the Russian logistic problems with their suppy lines (petrol, food and water supllies for the Russian tanks, armoured vehicles and artillery units and their infantry). We have not seen American forces in combat with the Russians in Central- or Eastern-Europe so we can't predict who will be the stronger military party in the case of an armed conflict between the 2 military world Powers.
The far reaching consequences in shortages in food grains to Africa, the Middle East and other regions will be at the expense of the EU countries if waves of refugees cross the Mediterranean again. More terrible will be the hunger and devastation in these Middle Eastern and African countries.
You are right Karl, that it is easy to blame Russian people for the actions of Mr. Putin. The Russian people at this time are experiencing shortages due to the sanctions. Many restrictions hinder their lives. They are dragged into that war just like the Ukrainians. Many of them have Ukrainian family members, are half Ukrainian themselves, with Russian fathers and Ukrainian mothers or Ukrainian fathers and Russian mothers. Or they are people with Ukrainian grandparents, aunts and uncles, couins, nephews and nieces, or have Ukrainian friends, colleagues or Ukrainian acqaimtances.
Ukrainians in Russia make up the largest single diaspora group of the Ukrainian people. The 2010 Russian census identified 1.9 million Ukrainians living in Russia, representing over 1.4% of the total population of the Russian Federation and comprising the third-largest ethnic group after ethnic Russians and Tatars. An estimated 340,000 people born in Ukraine, mostly young people, permanently settle legally in Russia each year. In February 2014, there were 1.6 million Ukrainian citizens in the territory of Russia, two-thirds of the labour migrants; however, after the Annexation of Crimea by the Russian Federation and the start of the War in Donbas, the number was estimated to have risen to 2.5 million as of December 2014. Over 420,000 asylum-seekers from Ukraine had registered in Russia as of November 2017. Today of course part of the Ukrainian refugees are unvolunteerly transported from war zones in the Donbas, which were recently under Ukrainian control, but conquered by the Russians, to Russian Federation territory, which adds to the Ukrainians that are already present in the Russian Federation. Many of these Ukrainian refugees however travel through the Russian Federation to the borders of Baltic countries and enter Latvia or Estonia.
The Americans are using NATO for two decades now in pushing the Russian limits of patience. It is true that the membership of Poland, Czech republic, Slovakia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Hungary, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Bulgaria, Albania and Croatia dissatisfies the Russian Federation, and especially Vladimir Putin and old Soviet hard liners to the core. From the Eurasian, the "cradle of Orthodox Christian civilization" (the Byzantine world), Tsarist & Soviet point of view their empire is under attack and for a large part dismantled to the great dissatisfaction of Great Russian, Pan-Slavic, Neo-Stalinist, Putinist, Russian Nationalist and Russian communist thinkers, politicians and leaders. The Old Soviet hardliners think in terms of the territory of the former COMECON and Warsaw Pact. East-Germany, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia (Serbia, North-Macedonia, Kosovo, Montenegro, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Slovenia and Croatia) and Albania belonged to the group of Socialist Peoples Republics, Marxist-Leninist Communist countries in Europe, closely linked with the SovietUnion in which the Russian group and the Russian Soviet Republic was dominant. To the great irritation and frustration these nations and the former Soviet republics Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia followed an independent course, and became more Western than the Russians like.
The Russian fear for an invasion from the West to over take them in a military manner is an old one. The Swedish invaders of Poland, the Teutonic Knights expansion to the East (Lebensraum), Napoleon, the Austrians and the Germans during the First World War and thye Germans and Austrians during the Second World War. The Eastern-Fronts of both wars. The Russians will not have forgotten them.
Hostage barriers for protection against such an action never works, because peoples don't like to be held hostage. Of course the Russians, Ukrainians, Belarussians, Kazakhs, Azeri, Georgians and Armenians learnt a lot from the Great Patriotic War (22 June 1941 to 9 May 1945) fought on the soil of Belarus, Ukraine and Rusia (next to the rest of Europe on the Western-, Southern- and Central-European fronts). Joseph Stalin, Soviet general and Marshal Georgy Zhukov, Marshal of the Soviet Union Kliment Voroshilov, Chief of the Staff of the Red Army, and Marshal of the Soviet Union Boris Shaposhnikov, Chief of the General Staff of the Soviet Armed Forces Aleksandr Vasilevsky, the Ukrainian Soviet military commander and Marshal of the Soviet Union Semyon Timoshenko, General of the Soviet Red Army Aleksei Antonov, Soviet general and Marshal of the Soviet Union who led Red Army forces on the Eastern Front during World War II, responsible for taking much of Axis-occupied Eastern Europe Ivan Konev, and the Soviet and Polish officer who became a Marshal of the Soviet Union Konstantin Rokossovsky learnt their lessons very well from the war with the German Wehrmacht, Waffen-SS, Lutwaffe, and Kriegsmarine Marine-Infanterie-Divisionen under Oberbefehlshaber of the German Army Adolf Hitler. Adolf Hitler ordered Aktion Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union by Nazi Germany and most of its Axis allies (Romania, Finland, Italy, Hungary and Slovakia) and would have overtaken such an action and destroyed communism at its roots, if he had listened to his brilliant Wehrmacht commanders and Fieldmarshalls like Generaloberst Heinz Guderian, Generalfeldmarschall Fedor von Bock, Generalfeldmarschall Gerd von Rundstedt, and Generaloberst Alfred Jodl and not illiminated one of his brightest Generalfeldmarschalls Erwin Rommel. No ethics or morale here folks, but military logic and strategic thinking. Hitlers Wehrmacht generals would have followed different tactics and strategies in the SovietUnion, had made tactical retreats, would have resupplied the troops and certainly retreated the German Wehrmacht's 6th Army of Generalfeldmarschall Friedrich Paulus. We non-Germans, non-Austrians, Non-Nazi's and people who are not German nationalists, Austrian Nationalists, German Patriots and not anti-semites nor anti-Russian, nor anti-Ukrainian, nor anti-Belarussian, say thank God the Soviets won that battle and the Germans, Austrians and their Axis allies lost. India–Russia relations President of Russia Vladimir Putin and Prime Minister of India Narendra Modi, at the 21st India-Russia Annual Summit in New Delhi, 2021.Traditionally, the Indo-Russian strategic partnership has been built on five major components: politics, defence, civil nuclear energy, anti-terrorism co-operation and space. These five major components were highlighted in a speech given by former Indian Foreign Secretary Ranjan Mathai in Russia. However, in recent years a sixth, economic component has grown in importance, with both countries setting a target of reaching US$30 billion in bilateral trade by 2025, from about US$9.4 billion in the year 2017. In order to meet this goal, both countries are looking to develop a free trade agreement. India is the second largest market for the Russian defence industry. In 2017, approximately 68% of the Indian military's hardware import came from Russia, making Russia the chief supplier of defence equipment. India has an embassy in Moscow and two consulates-general (in Saint Petersburg and Vladivostok). Russia has an embassy in New Delhi and six consulate-generals (in Chennai, Goa, Hyderabad, Kolkata, Mumbai and Thiruvananthapuram).
According to a 2014 BBC World Service Poll, 85% of Russians view India positively, with only 9% expressing a negative view. Similarly, a 2017 opinion poll by the Moscow-based non-governmental think tank Levada-Center states that Russians identified India as one of their top five "friends", with the others being Belarus, China, Kazakhstan and Syria.Military relationshipIndian Army battle tanks T-90, foreground, and T-72, background, go past the saluting base during the 54th Republic Day Parade. Source: APA meeting of the Russian-Indian intergovernmental commission on military and technical cooperationIndian and Russian soldiers training during the Indra 2015 counter-terrorism exercise.The Sukhoi Su-30MKI was jointly built by Russia and IndiaA welcoming ceremony for Indian Defense Minister Manohar Parrikar in November 2015.The Soviet Union was an important supplier of defence equipment for several decades, and this role has been inherited by the Russian federation. Russia 68%, USA 14% and Israel 7.2% are the major arms suppliers to India (2012-2016), and India and Russia have deepened their Make in India defence manufacturing cooperation by signing agreements for the construction of naval frigates, KA-226T twin-engine utility helicopters (joint venture (JV) to make 60 in Russia and 140 in India), Brahmos cruise missile (JV with 50.5% India and 49.5% Russia) (Dec 2017 update). In December 1988, an India–Russia co-operation agreement was signed, which resulted in the sale of a multitude of defence equipment to India and also the emergence of the countries as development partners as opposed to purely a buyer-seller relationship, including the joint ventures projects to develop and produce the Fifth Generation Fighter Aircraft (FGFA) and the Multirole Transport Aircraft (MTA). The agreement is pending a 10-year extension. In 1997, Russia and India signed a ten-year agreement for further military-technical cooperation encompassed a wide range of activities, including the purchase of completed weaponry, joint development and production, and joint marketing of armaments and military technologies.
The co-operation is not limited to a buyer-seller relationship but includes joint research and development, training, service to service contacts, including joint exercises. The last joint naval exercises took place in April 2007 in the Sea of Japan and joint airborne exercises were held in September 2007 in Russia. An Inter-Governmental commission on military-technical co-operation is co-chaired by the defence ministers of the two countries. The seventh session of this Inter-Governmental Commission was held in October 2007 in Moscow. During the visit, an agreement on joint development and production of prospective multi-role fighters was signed between the two countries.
In 2012, both countries signed a defence deal worth $2.9 billion during President Putin's visit to India for the 42 new Sukhois to be produced under license by defence PSU Hindustan Aeronautics, which will add to the 230 Sukhois earlier contracted from Russia. Overall, the price tag for the 272 Sukhois - three of the over 170 inducted till now have crashed - stands at over $12 billion. The medium-lift Mi-17 V5 helicopters (59 for IAF and 12 for home ministry/BSF) will add to the 80 such choppers already being inducted under a $1.34 billion deal inked in 2008. The value of India's defence projects with Russia will further zoom north after the imminent inking of the final design contract for the joint development of a futuristic stealth fifth-generation fighter. This R&D contract is itself pegged at US$11 billion, to be shared equally by the two countries. So if India inducts over 200 of these 5th Gen fighters, as it hopes to do from 2022 onwards, the overall cost of this gigantic project for India will come to around US$35 billion since each of the jets will come for upwards of US$100 million at least.
In October 2018, India inked the historic agreement worth US$5.43 billion with Russia to procure five S-400 Triumf surface-to-air missile defence system, one of the best missile defence system in the world ignoring America's CAATSA act. The United States threatened India with sanctions over India's decision to buy the S-400 missile defense system from Russia.
India and Russia have several major joint military programmes including:- BrahMos cruise missile programme - 5th generation fighter jet programme - Sukhoi Su-30MKI programme (230+ to be built by Hindustan Aeronautics) - Ilyushin/HAL Tactical Transport Aircraft - KA-226T twin-engine utility helicopters - Numerous frigates
Between 2013 and 2018, Russia accounted for 62% of arms sales to India.Troops of the 'Tri-Services Guard of Honour' company, of the Indian Armed Forces, during the 2020 Moscow Victory Day Parade. Additionally, India has purchased/leased various military hardware from Russia:
- S-400 Triumf (purchase pending)[40] - Kamov Ka-226 200 to be made in India under the Make in India initiative. - T-90S Bhishma with over 1000 to be built in India - Akula-II nuclear submarine (2 to be leased with an option to buy when the lease expires) - INS Vikramaditya aircraft carrier programme - Tu-22M3 bombers (4 ordered, not delivered) - US$900 million upgrade of MiG-29 - Mil Mi-17 (80 ordered) more in Service. - Ilyushin Il-76 Candid (6 ordered to fit Israeli Phalcon radar)
The Farkhor Air Base in Tajikistan is currently jointly operated by Indian Air Force and Tajikistan Air Force.The Russians and Indians work together on Trade, Economic, Scientific, Technological and have a Cultural Co-operation. Next to that they have Military Technical Co-operation. Bilateral trade between Russia and India is concentrated in key value chain sectors. These sectors include highly diversified segments such as machinery, electronics, aerospace, automobile, commercial shipping, chemicals, pharmaceuticals, fertilisers, apparels, precious stones, industrial metals, petroleum products, coal, high-end tea and coffee products. Russian exports to India amounted to $6.2 billion or 1.3% of its overall exports, and 0.9% of India's overall imports in 2014. Russian imports from India amounted to $3.1 billion or 1% of its overall imports, and 0.7% of India's overall exports in 2014.
India of course can need Russian Tooth past, auto parts, watches, clothing, as with fuel lubricating oil and such. The prices of Russian products are maybe more affordable for them than American or West-European products. Next to this the economical, political and military Indian-Soviet ties from the past were continued in the Indian-Russian ties and exist until today. Russian technology, science, money (for Indian export products), experts, diplomacy and products are no doubt good for India. This Russian-Indian relationship is mutual beneficial.
Karl, I agree with you that I miss Eric as a person, as the human being he is and fellow Forum member. Just like I miss other members who left or died. Rdywenur (thank god I saw her back on Facebook), Gardenmoma (where did she go.), Mary, Nancy, RabiaMuweis (our Palestinian Arab friehd), Sciwriter (Carl Zimmerman) with his love for music, Ludwik Kowalski (kowalskil), Bob, Jim, Jerzy, Pawain, Tuftabis the Varsovian, Aadam the Polish Pole, Bunjo, a Pole with a lot of knowledge of Poland (I had an e-mail correspondence with him, but lost his e-mailaddress) and etc. Eric was and maybe stil is a confused young man with serious physical and mental health and financial issues and his Russian persona (and somewhere East-German DDR family), but that was his personal image and that was important for him. I agree with you about that Karl. I do believe he came from somewhere in the North in the USA andthat he was working somewhere at a Wallmart in Florida, and that he had some friendly female emplpoyee colleague there. I wonder how he is doing today and how he sees the world now!
Cheers, Pieter Source of this thread are my wikipedia searches on the subject and other goodle search sources.www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/nato_countries.htm www.rbth.com/economics/defence/2016/09/07/russia-supplied-india-with-65bln-worth-of-military-vehicles-since-1960_627817 www.financialexpress.com/defence/russia-ukraine-war-start-of-an-arms-race-markets-for-russian-military-equipment-will-shrink-expert/2449955/
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Post by karl on Jun 2, 2022 14:02:40 GMT -7
Pieter
I must say, you have presented a reply in such a professional and very well researched manner that is both educational and informational as excellent.
It was good of you for presenting those past members by name, for it is always good to keep our friends alive withen our memories. For these people have enriched our lives by their presence and contributions that to always keep them in our memories if only in time they may return.
Karl
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Post by pieter on Jun 3, 2022 11:09:21 GMT -7
Folks,
Since in the Ukrainian conflict which encompasses the Russian Federation, Belarus and Ukraine, takes place in that Eastern-European and Eastern slavic space you have to take various sociological, psycholigical, historical, anthropological, military tactical and military strategic, financial, economical, philosophical, cultural, artistic, theatrical, literary, cinematographical, photographical, journalistic, diplomatic, personal human, theological, ethnic, mythological, communication (Public Relations), propaganda, folkloristic, political (and thus ideological) and geopolitical elements in the conlfict into account. The conflict is between the leaders, armies and thus peoples of 2 Eastern-Slavic, Orthodox Christian and former Soviet peoples, Republics and nations. This extremely difficult, destructive, painful, soul searching (for Russians and Ukrainians who shoot at relatives, acqaintances and former colleagues and former compatriots) war is confusing, disruptive and counterproductive.
This terrible and ravaging war is incomprehensible to many honest Russians and Ukrainians who see the futility and absurdity of this war between brother nations. At the same time, nationalism and patriotism is growing on both sides and as the war lasts and the propaganda and misinformation continues, the misunderstanding and hatred for the other will only increase. Meanwhile, families are split into Russian and Ukrainian parts. Ukrainians breake with Russian relatives who believe in Russian state propaganda. Daughters breake off their family relationship with their father, sons with their mothers. What do we see in that Eastern slavic space. That former KGB and GRU (military and foreign intelligence) functionaries and Russian armed forces figures dominate the present day Putin regime. The Main Directorate of Special Programs of the President of the Russian Federation (GUSP), the federal executive agency that performs functions to ensure the fulfillment of the authority of President Vladimir Putin of the Russian Federation in the field of mobilization training and mobilization in the Russian Federation, will be very active today as well.
The Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) will be active in Ukraine, the countries around Ukraine (Poland, the Baltic States, Moldova, Romania, Bulgaria, Belarus, Turkey, Georgia, and in Ukraine's Western allies. The USA, Canada, the UK, France, Italy, Germany, Sweden, the Netherlands, Israel (from within the Russian community in Israel), Denmark, Belgium and other countries. The Russian Federal Protective Service (FSO), an agency concerned with the tasks related to the protection of several high-ranking state officials, mandated by the relevant law, including the Russian President Vladimir Putin, as well as certain federal properties, will of course on high alert and very active today. It wouldn't be surprising if both Ukrainian and Russian assassins will try to eliminate Putin. Comparable to the 20 July 1944 attempted to assassinate Adolf Hitler, called the 20 July plot. The apparent aim of the assassination attempt by Wehrmacht Lieutenant Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg was to wrest political control of Germany and its armed forces from the Nazi Party (including the SS) and to make peace with the Western Allies as soon as possible. The Federal Protective Service reports directly to Vladimir Putin.
Putin of course has learned from the long Russian history starting from Ivan IV Vasilyevich (Russian: Ива́н Васи́льевич; 25 August 1530 – 28 March [O.S. 18 March] 1584), better known as Ivan the Terrible until today. He knows the Tsarist past, he knows the seventy years of Soviet rule in Russia and he knows the history of other 'Socialist nations' that were part of the SovietUnion sphere of influence. He probably knows the history of past emperors, despots, autocrats, dictators and powerful dominant leader of the world. He knows the styles, the propaganda and the purges of Adolf Hitler ( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_of_the_Long_Knives ) and Jozef Stalin ( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Purge ). He saw the approaches of despotic and authoritarian leaders like Saddam Hussein, Hafez al-Assad, Hugo Chávez, Fidel Castro, the present military president of Egypt Abdel Fattah Saeed Hussein Khalil el-Sisi and his predecessor Muhammad Hosni El Sayed Mubarak. Putin certainly will have studied Leonid Brezhnev and Nikita Khrushchev. Joseph Stalin's brand of Communism with the Russian nationalist element in that.
Next to that you have the influence in of the Russian Oligarchs, Russian mobsters (Russian mafia), the Russian public opinion and the Russian opposition of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (Коммунистическая партия Российской Федерации ) with it's Left-wing nationalist leader Gennady Andreyevich Zyuganov who is also a Soviet patriot, neo-Eurasianist and Social Conservative and Marxist Leninist. Zyuganov enthusiastically supported the annexation of Crimea by Russia as well as the pro-Russian insurgency, for which the Ukrainian public prosecutor started against him a criminal case (as well as against Vladimir Zhirinovsky and Sergey Mironov). Other opposition parties are the ultranationalist, Pan-slavic, Monarchist and Rightwing Populist Liberal Democratic Party of Russia of the late Vladimir Zhirinovsky (25 April 1946 – 6 April 2022) and present day Leonid Slutsky, the centrist and liberal New People (political party), the far right Ultra nationalist Pro-Kremlin All-Russian Political Party "Rodina" (Russian: Всероссийская политическая партия «Родина» ), and the Centre-right liberal-conservative Party of Growth. The Party of Growth opposes the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, believing that the war has made international investment in Russia "meaningless". Next to these political parties you have the Centre-right to right-wing Civic Platform, which is a Conservative, Liberal conservative and Economic liberal political party lead by the ethnic Tartar politician Rifat Shaykhutdinov. The Russian separatist paramilitary group Russian Orthodox Army in Ukraine aligned with the Far right Neo-nazi, Russian nationalist and Antisemitic irredentist group Russian National Unity has been fighting Ukrainian forces in the Donbas War. It was founded in 2014. The ROA was later absorbed into the Oplot Fifth Separate Infantry Brigade. Of course Putin's United Russia party, a Big tent party which has an ideology whcih consists of Russian conservatism, Russian nationalism and Statism dominates the Duma. Dmitry Medvedev is the chairman of United Russia and is deputy chairman of the Security Council of Russia since 2020. Gennady Andreyevich Zyuganov (Russian: Геннадий Андреевич Зюганов; born 26 June 1944) is a Russian politician, who has been the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation and served as Member of the State Duma since 1993.In this war the Russians of course us their Soviet and Russian Federation and Second World War experience in Ukraine. Certain battles have similarities with the First World War (1914-1918) Eastern Front with trenches, others have Second World War (1941-1945) similarities, and the Russians use their experience with the Soviet–Japanese War (Part of World War II; 1945), the Guerrilla war in Ukraine (Part of World War II from 1944–1945), Anti-communist resistance in Poland (1944–1953), the Guerrilla war in the Baltic states (1944–1956), the First Indochina War (1946-1954), the Korean War (1950-1953) the East German Uprising (1953), the Vietnam War (1955-1975), the Hungarian Revolution (1956), the invasion of Czechoslovakia (1968), the War of Attrition (1969–1970), the Eritrean War of Independence (1974–1991), the Angolan Civil War (1975–1991), the Ethio-Somali War (also called Ogaden War 1977–1978) between Ethiopia and Somalia in which Ethiopia on one side was supported by Cuba, the Soviet Union, South Yemen, East Germany (the German Democratic Republlic, the DDR/GDR) and North Korea and on the other sided Somalia was supported by the United States and Egypt. Other wars in which the Soviet Union and the Russian Federation gained combat experience were the Soviet–Afghan War (1979–1989), the Georgian Civil War (December 22, 1991 – December 31, 1993), the Transnistria War (also called the Moldo–Russian war; 2 November 1990 – 21 July 1992), the East Prigorodny Conflict in North Ossetia-Alania (19912), the Tajikistani Civil War (1992–1997), the Black January (Azerbaijani: Qara Yanvar), also known as Black Saturday or the January Massacre, was a violent crackdown on the civilian population of Baku, the capital and largest city of Azerbaijan, on 19–20 January 1990, as part of a state of emergency during the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the Russo-Georgian War of 2008 (with their occupation of Abkhazia and South Ossetia), the First Chechen War (1994–1996), the Second Chechen War (7 August 1999 – 30 April 2000), the anti-terrorist operation in Makhachkala, Dagestan (2009–2017), and after that the Donbas War in Eastern Ukraine from 2014 until today (June 2022).
In every war next to ordinary citizens, crooks, criminals and thus organised crime finds way to participate in it or to profit from the anarchy and chaos of it in the conflict. Psychopaths, sociopaths, serial killers, rapists, deviant dark persona, Machiavallestic psychopaths, Narcistic persons, low lifes, corrupted functionaries, opportunists, fraudulent people, bribing people with power and influence, nasty characters come to the forfront. Next to decent, heroic and moralistic people with good ethics. But every war sees a dark side, useless killing, massacres, war crimes, sadistic treatment of civilians and prisoners of war, torture, murder, rape and atrocities. In the vacuum of power where there is no rule of law, no legal system and thus no justice, psychopaths and sociopaths dominate.
Ukrainian human rights activists believe that over 87% of Ukrainian soldiers and 50% of civilians taken prisoner by Kremlin-backed, pro-Russian militants in Donbas have been subjected to torture or ill-treatment. What is more, in over 40% of the so-called ‘interrogations’ and control over them, key roles were played by mercenaries from the Russian Federation or people who identified themselves as Russian military personnel.
The vulnerable dark triad is present on the battle field, the vulnerable dark triad comprises three related and similar constructs: 1) vulnerable narcissism, 2) sociopathy, and 3) borderline personality disorder. Sociopahts, Narcissists and psychopaths on the battlefield with dark personality traits show signs of sadism, antisocial behavior, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism. In the chaos, destruction and lack of social order on the battlefield a higher amounts of violent delinquency occurs, specifically with interpersonal violence of armed combat and civilians who are caught between 2 fighting armies, often traumatized troops (soldiers with shell shock and Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms). Depersonification of the enemy, significant losses on the side of the fighting soldier (s) and an alien and sometimes hostile local population can cause a lack of empathy, interpersonal hostility, and interpersonal offensiveness. Manipulation and exploitation of others, an absence of morality, unemotional callousness, and a higher level of self-interest come in the place of normality, a certain social control, self restraint, the rule of law, the existence of a system with a Separation of Powers and boundaries of once power. In the chaos and anarchy and brutality of war a soldier can be powerful in a situation with unarmed civilians and oponents (enemy soldiers) with a lack of ammunition or who run out of ammunition. Under such circumstances civilians and enemy soldiers have a very bad time if there are vicious sociopathic, sexual deviant, psychopathic soldiers or officers who have no limits and borders to their behavior, and act in a bestial, sadistic, crual, vicious way, torturing, maiming, raping/gangraping, humiliating and killing children, women, elderly, men, teenagers and captured enemy soldiers. This is the ill/sick side of war. The dark, ugly, brutal face of war.
Continuous antisocial behavior, impulsivity, selfishness, sadistic traits, callous and unemotional traits (CU), and remorselessness are common on battle fields in area's where there is no social control, rule of law, protection of civilians, no presence of the police or military police, no leader who protects his people. And even if there are police forces, but the wrong kind of police forces which are the allies of the military who commit war crimes, that police is not to your benefit. I think about the German- and Austrian Ordnungspolizei who participated in the Babi Yar massacre (1 October 1941), the Odessa massacre (October 22–24, 1941), the Operation Harvest Festival (3–4 November 1943), Lviv pogroms (1941), the German Ordnungspolizei, the Polish Blue Police, the Jüdischer Ordnungsdienst (Jewish Police), and Ukrainian and Baltic police forces and guards in Jewish ghettos during the Second World War. The Ukrainian Auxiliary Police was created by Heinrich Himmler in mid-August 1941 and put under the control of German Ordnungspolizei in General Government territory. The uniformed force was composed in large part of the former members of the Ukrainian People's Militia created by OUN in June. There were two categories of German-controlled Ukrainian armed organisations. The first comprised mobile police units most often called Schutzmannschaft, or Schuma, organized on the battalion level and which engaged in the murder of Jews and in security warfare in most areas of Ukraine. It was subordinated directly to the German Commander of the Order Police (Ordnungspolizei) for the area.
Ukrainische Hilfspolizei (Ukrainian Auxiliary Police) execute a Jewish boy, his mother was holding his hand till the end.
Einsatzgruppen and Ukrainian collaborators watch on as Jewish women are forced to undress before their execution
Let's go to the Ukraine today. If you are unlucky and you are an ethnic Ukrainian and you speak only Ukrainian and you are transported to the Donbas Peoples Republic or the Luhansk Peoples Republic, Pro-Russian and mainly Russian speaking area's in Eastern-Ukraine you are having a bad time if you come into contact with the police of these Pro-Russian Peoples Republics, armed militia or armed forces of Novarussia, who fight on the side of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation in Ukraine. The same might be the case for Russian speaking Ukrainians and Russians with a Pro-Russian background who come under Ukrainian rule if their part of Ukraine is reconquered by the Ukrainians. Territories, regions and peoples change during a war and there are always victims of shelling, assassinations, bombings, sniper fire, rocket attacks, mortars and deviant psychopathic blokes with arms who have power over unarmed civilians, wounded enemy soldiers and women, children, elderly, handicapt people and ill vulnerable people who can't defend themselves. Wars and civil wars are always vicious and in reality there are no winners. Let's say you won a war, you conquered land, but by conquering that land you lost thousands of soldiers and officers, and in the land you conquered you killed a lot of people and left a lot of wounded and maimed people. You are the winner, but you occupy land of people that hate, despice you and wait for the moment that you will be kicked out of their land.
Cheers, Pieter
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Post by pieter on Jun 3, 2022 12:00:17 GMT -7
Russian invasion going on for 100 days: how and when will this war end?Tens of thousands of deaths, dozens of cities destroyed and more than 14 million refugees at home and abroad. That is the toll of a hundred days of Russian invasion of Ukraine. There are no signs that the war is ending any time soon. There are differing views on how and when the bloodshed should end.
First the battlefield. While the Russian troops initially conquered territory in three directions of the country, the front hardly moves anymore. In the north, the Russians have withdrawn, in the south they have been brought to a halt in front of the city of Mykolaiv. The heaviest battle is fought in the Donbas, where Russia manages to take territory with great effort and violence.
Who wants to talk when? An overview of the various stakeholders.What does Ukraine want?For the time being, there are sufficient opportunities for Ukraine to gain territory, thanks to the western supply of increasingly heavier weapons. "There are opportunities especially around Kherson," says Eastern Europe expert Bob Deen of the Clingendael Institute. A strong Ukrainian counter-offensive is expected this summer.
In any case, President Zelensky wants to return to the situation before February 24, when the Russian invasion began. "Retaking such a large area will cost many lives," Deen expects. Zelensky does not want to fight on at any cost, he told Nieuwsuur last week. "To the last gasp, but not to the last man."Zelensky wants to win back The Crimea and the 'people's republics' Donetsk and Lugansk diplomatically. "The Crimea is considered lost by experts and diplomats in the corridors," says Laurien Crump, researcher in the history of International Relations at Utrecht University. "Zelensky will also see that, but of course he can't say that out loud."What does Russia want?Formally, Russia 'only' wants to take control of the entire Donbas region. That is already a scaled-down plan, after previous attempts to capture Kiev, Kharkov and Odessa (the three largest cities). President Putin could stop after the Donbas, says Deen. "He can say that he has achieved his goal: 'liberation' of the Donbas and weakening of Ukraine."
However, Moscow does not seem to want to stop. "Rhetoric continues to talk about 'denazifying' the whole of Ukraine." The chances of success are small, Deen thinks. "They have noticed that the Ukrainian defense is very strong."
For now, Putin still has plenty of options to fight on, says Crump. "Enough men. And he can scale even further." The damage to his own country, both economically and in terms of losses and Ukrainian counter-attacks, is manageable for him. "Putin will not soon get to the point where he thinks the damage is too great."What do Ukraine's hardline allies want? As the war continues, it will become more difficult for the West to form a united front, Crump said. "The unity of the first days has weakened. Then there was a great fear that a legitimately elected leader in Kiev would be forcibly removed. That went too far even for Hungarian Prime Minister Orbán. Now there is less at stake, it's no longer about 'saving a democracy'."
The biggest hardliners are Poland and the three Baltic states. "They want the Russians to be pushed back so that they don't go through such adventures again," said Ron Keller, former ambassador to Ukraine (2005-2009) and Russia (2009 and 2013). The British and Americans support this course, although the US sometimes seems to have doubts, Keller sees. "Biden does not want Russia to be pushed too far into the arms of China. That hesitation is reflected in the arms deliveries, which sometimes are not and then are stepped up."
Rhetoric in some countries is becoming increasingly fierce, expressing a desire to depose Putin and humiliate Russia. Crump: "That throws salt in Putin's wounds and takes your negotiating opportunities further away."What do Ukraine's other allies want?A group of countries (mainly Western European) is increasingly pressing for new peace negotiations, in which concessions by Ukraine are not taboo. Keller: "Scholz (Germany) and Macron (France) think every day war is one too many and say: go talk anyway." Erdogan (Turkey) and Draghi (Italy) are also trying to act as mediators. They regularly call Putin, unlike the hardliners.
Zelensky denounces suggestions, for example from the former US Secretary of State Kissinger, to give territory to Russia, recalling the Munich Agreement of 1938. Then the great powers allowed Nazi Germany to take parts of Czechoslovakia, hoping to befriend Hitler with appeasement politics.
According to Crump, it is not necessarily a bad thing that the West thinks differently about Ukraine. "Morally it is of course black and white: the Russian invasion is wrong. But in diplomatic circles you also need gray area. That's where the negotiating room is."When will there be talk? "Warring countries only talk when one side is losing, or when both sides are exhausted," said former ambassador Keller. "In the latter case, they often continue to fight, without major front shifts, comparable to the trench warfare in the First World War."
Deen also fears that it will be a long-lasting war (as it has actually been since 2014). "In such a war of attrition, the losses are reduced, but it does not produce lasting peace." In that scenario, the last 100 days were just the beginning of a very long conflict.Source: nos.nl/index.php/artikel/2431337-russische-invasie-100-dagen-bezig-hoe-en-wanneer-eindigt-deze-oorlog
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Post by Jaga on Jun 3, 2022 19:03:11 GMT -7
I don't believe that the Russian invasion can be justified at all. Unfortunately it looks that Russia would gain 20% of Ukrainian territory. Referring to Eric. He expressed in the beginning a support for Russia but I did not hear anything from him for quite a long time, so I am not sure how does he feels about it and also how is he doing.
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Post by pieter on Jun 3, 2022 21:46:47 GMT -7
Jaga,
I don’t think that Russia’s invasion can be justified. It was and is a criminal undertaking when you uninvited invade and destroy your neighbours cities, towns and villages Jaga. No fear, anxiety, distrust or strategic motivation can justify this. Especially the great lie and monstrous exaggeration and accusation that the Russians liberate Ukraine from a Neo-Nazi regime is preposterous.
I try to understand why the Russians attacked Ukraine, and can only find reasons or so called justifications from old Cold War Soviet thinking, Stalinist and Leninist motivations and some Tsarist (White), Orthodox Christian territorial motivations. But these are very primitive for the 21th century. Russia 🇷🇺 is a huge country and every Russian leader should act responsible in the best interest of his nation and region.
I don’t know if Ukraine will be Russia’s Afghanistan 2.0, Vietnam, Indonesia, Somalia or Iraq, but I am sure the Ukrainians will not stop defending their country and they will fight until the bitter end.
Cheers, Pieter
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Post by kaima on Jun 4, 2022 15:11:11 GMT -7
What is our entrance plan, what is our exit plan? These were questions that in 2001 and 2002 raised extreme hostility among "patriots" in America, and they are valid questions that should be discussed in today's situation in Ukraine. They were not discussed in 2001 and 2002, with the result that we muddled through 20 years of undefined, sometimes religious war in Iraq and Afghanistan.
How badly can we screw up the current situation with our "Grand Alliance of the Willing" under a refreshed name, with a fresh dusting of hubris today? Certainly we have no concept of what constitutes 'victory' when we can relax and go home or allow Russia to set up a new Iron Curtain somewhere and exist in the new Cold War..
From the New York Times:
OPINION ROSS DOUTHAT
We Can’t Be Ukraine Hawks Forever June 4, 2022, 2:30 p.m. ET
By Ross Douthat
Opinion Columnist
Sure, it works in practice, but does it work in theory? Over the years I’ve heard this parody of academic pomposity put in the lips of various targets, from French intellectuals to University of Chicago economists. Lately, though, I’ve begun thinking it myself — about the hawkish side in the debate over the Ukraine War, whose practical policies have so far achieved favorable results but whose deeper theories of the conflict still seem implausible, unworkable or dangerous.
I was not a Ukraine hawk before the war came. I felt the United States had overextended itself with its half-open door to NATO membership, and that eastern Ukraine, at least, wasn’t defensible against Russian aggression without a full-scale American military commitment. Sending arms to Kyiv probably made sense, but as a means of eventually bogging down a Russian incursion, not stopping it outright. And a Ukrainian collapse, of the kind we saw from our client government in Afghanistan, seemed within the realm of possibility.
The war itself has defied those expectations. The hawks were proven right about Ukraine’s simple capacity to fight. They were proven right that American arms could actually help blunt a Russian invasion, not just create an insurgency behind its lines. And their psychological read on Vladimir Putin has been partially vindicated as well: His choices suggest a man motivated as much by imperial restoration as by anti-NATO defensiveness, and his conduct of the war offers little evidence that there is a stable, permanent peace available even with Ukrainian concessions.
So in the realm of practical policy to date, I have joined the hawks. Our military support for Ukraine has worked: We have safeguarded a sovereign nation and weakened a rival without dangerous escalation from the Russian side. And for now, with Russia continuing to mount offensives while mostly avoiding the bargaining table, there isn’t any obvious “off-ramp” to peace that we ought to force Kyiv to take.
Yet when I read the broader theories of hawkish commentators, their ideas about America’s strategic vision and what kind of endgame we should be seeking in the war, I still find myself baffled by their confidence and absolutism.
For instance, for all their defensive successes, we have not yet established that Ukraine’s military can regain significant amounts of territory in the country’s south and east. Yet we have Anne Applebaum of The Atlantic insisting that only Putin’s defeat and indeed “humiliation” can restore European stability, while elsewhere in the same magazine Casey Michel calls for dismantling the Russian Federation, framed as the “decolonization” of Russia’s remaining empire, as the only policy for lasting peace.
Or again, the United States has currently committed an extraordinary sum to back Ukraine — far more than we spent in foreign aid to Afghanistan in any recent year, for instance — and our support roughly trebles the support offered by the European Union. Yet when this newspaper’s editorial board raised questions about the sustainability of such support, the response from many Ukraine hawks was a furious how dare you — with an emphasis, to quote Benjamin Wittes of the Brookings Institution, on Ukraine’s absolute right to fight “until every inch of their territory is free”; America’s strictly “modest” and “advisory” role in Ukrainian decision-making; and the importance of offering Kyiv, if not a blank check, at least a “very very big check with more checks to follow.”
These theories all seem to confuse what is desirable with what is likely, and what is morally ideal with what is strategically achievable. I have written previously about the risks of nuclear escalation in the event of a Russian military collapse, risks that hawkish theories understate. But given the state of the war right now, the more likely near-future scenario is one where Russian collapse remains a pleasant fancy, the conflict becomes stalemated and frozen, and we have to put our Ukrainian policy on a sustainable footing without removing Putin’s regime or dismantling the Russian empire.
In that scenario, our plan cannot be to keep writing countless checks while tiptoeing modestly around the Ukrainians and letting them dictate the ends to which our guns and weaponry are used. The United States is an embattled global hegemon facing threats more significant than Russia. We are also an internally divided country led by an unpopular president whose majorities may be poised for political collapse. So if Kyiv and Moscow are headed for a multiyear or even multi-decade frozen conflict, we will need to push Ukraine toward its most realistic rather than its most ambitious military strategy. And just as urgently, we will need to shift some of the burden of supporting Kyiv from our own budget to our European allies.
Those goals are compatible with what we’ve done to date, and they can obviously be adapted if better opportunities suddenly arise. But a good strategic theory needs to assume difficulty, challenge, limits. The danger now is that the practical achievements of our hawkish policy encourages the opposite kind of theorizing, a hubris that squanders our still-provisional success.
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Post by Jaga on Jun 4, 2022 16:48:21 GMT -7
I think that Ukraine is culturally much closer to the US and Western European cultures than Afghanistan ever was. We have to help. It is hard to predict one specific exit plan since the situation is quite flexible and changing. We need to help Ukraine all of us. The money do not really matter, since the economical crisis is killing us all. Marshal plan looks good. Lets just hope that Russia would stop soon.
What is our entrance plan, what is our exit plan? These were questions that in 2001 and 2002 raised extreme hostility among "patriots" in America, and they are valid questions that should be discussed in today's situation in Ukraine. They were not discussed in 2001 and 2002, with the result that we muddled through 20 years of undefined, sometimes religious war in Iraq and Afghanistan.
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Post by kaima on Jun 4, 2022 18:40:23 GMT -7
Well, it seems the world has largely figured out what they want to do to start with. Now we have the challenge of figuring out where we are goingWhat's Next for Ukraine?The West Tries to Figure Out What Peace Might Look LikeRussian President Vladimir Putin is apparently settling in for an extended war of attrition in Ukraine. NATO, meanwhile, has begun debating what war aims it is willing to support and how peace might ultimately look.By Christian Esch, Matthias Gebauer, Martin Knobbe, René Pfister, Jan Puhl und Britta Sandberg 30.05.2022, 18.21 Uhr Artikel zum Hören•13 Min A Ukrainian soldier standing next to a destroyed military vehicle in March. Foto: Sergei Supinski / AFP There are places where victory seems to be within reach. In the capital of Kyiv, the war can sometimes feel merely like a distant threat, with many cafés and restaurants having reopened, and even the opera staging shows again. Air raid sirens have become a rarity. But can the momentum of battlefield success be carried forward to victory? Kyrylo Budanov, head of Ukraine’s military secret service, thinks so. He said that even the Crimea will have been reconquered by the end of the year – and that only a return of the Black Sea peninsula, which was annexed by Russia in 2014, will mark the end of the war. It is a melody of a kind that many people, and not just in Ukraine, have begun humming. "Victory has to be the goal, and not some peace agreement," Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas told DER SPIEGEL earlier this month. Her Polish counterpart was even clearer. "It has come to my attention that attempts are afoot on the international stage to present Putin with a face-saving solution," said Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki. "But how can you save a face that is already completely deformed?" DER SPIEGEL 22/2022 SPIEGEL International Russia’s invasion of Ukraine began more than three months ago. Since the end of the Cold War, nothing has united NATO as much as Vladimir Putin’s war. He gifted the alliance with a new sense of purpose and self-confidence, along with two new accession candidates – Sweden and Finland. Now, though, the unexpected military successes of the Ukrainians have triggered a new dispute within the Western alliance. Putin, it seems safe to say, is not going to be able to take over all of Ukraine. He also won’t be able to install a puppet government, as he had hoped to do. But how does a war launched by a nuclear power come to an end? Since World War II, there have been numerous examples of a David defeating a Goliath: The United States withdrew from Vietnam in 1975 because, after more than 50,000 lives lost in the war in the Far East, American voters had had enough. The Soviet Union pulled its last troops out of Afghanistan in February 1989 because leader Mikhail Gorbachev had realized that the war against the mujahedeen could not be won. But the that defeat paved the way for the ultimate collapse of the Soviet empire – an ignominy that Putin has called the greatest catastrophe of the 20th century and which he had hoped to compensate for with his invasion of Ukraine. Officially, all Western leaders insist that the conditions under which peace with Putin becomes possible is entirely up to Ukraine. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, whose relationship with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is anything but warm, has been especially eager to avoid the impression that decisions about Ukraine’s future are being made anywhere but in Kyiv. On the other hand, the U.S. and NATO have collectively pledged more than 50 billion euros in military aid and have delivered tanks, drones, howitzers and plenty of additional weaponry. Further deliveries of materiel are also a referendum on the military prospects of the Ukrainians – and for that reason alone, Kyiv isn’t entirely on its own in establishing its aims. Behind the scenes, NATO allies have begun wrestling with the question of what war aims the alliance should support, and which it should not. Scholz and French President Emmanuel Macron are very clearly opposed to setting the bar too high for Putin. They certainly don’t want the Kremlin leader to win, but they are even less interested in risking a direct conflict with a humiliated and unpredictable nuclear power. In Berlin, a number of leading politicians were concerned when U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said at a conference with allies at the Ramstein Air Base in Germany in late April that Ukraine doesn’t just have to win the war against Putin, but Russia also has to be weakened to ensure that it is more difficult for the Kremlin to invade neighboring countries. The "Win and Weaken" strategy, as it quickly came to be known in Washington, was enthusiastically welcomed in many Eastern European countries. But it was in diametrical opposition to comments made by Scholz and Macron. The German chancellor has never even uttered the word victory, and in contrast to U.S. President Joe Biden, he has also shied away from labelling Putin a war criminal. Macron, for his part, said in an early May speech before European Parliament that the temptation to "humiliate" Russia must be resisted. In recent years, Macron has repeatedly sought to pursue dialogue with Moscow, and the French president has also spoken on the phone with Putin on numerous occasions since the beginning of the war – with nothing to show for it. All Eyes on WashingtonNeither Macron nor Scholz were able to prevent Putin from marching into Ukraine, and thus far, the Russian president has shown no particular urge to engage in serious negotiations. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said a few weeks ago that negotiations will only be engaged in on the basis of military results. Which is why all eyes are now on Washington, the source of by far the largest contributions to the military buildup of Ukraine. The Americans have sent state-of-the art drones, artillery and anti-tank missiles – and plenty of money. Officially, Biden has never sought to water down the words of his defense secretary. A week ago Friday, U.S. NATO Ambassador Julianne Smith said at a conference in Warsaw: "We want to see a strategic defeat of Russia. We want to see Russia leave Ukraine." Behind the scenes, though, leading officials like National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan and CIA chief William Burns have said in closed-door meetings with allies that the words of the Pentagon chief have been overinterpreted. Instead of a victory on the battlefield, they say, Washington is more interested in forcing Putin to understand that he cannot win the war. U.S. President Joe Biden is at the center of the world's attention as the West seeks to figure out what an end to the war in Ukraine might look like. Foto: Evan Vucci / AP That is a line that leaves plenty of room for interpretation and which avoids pushing Putin into a corner. It is also a reaction to the gloomy reality on the eastern front. Ukraine may have achieved astounding successes early on in the war and managed to push Russia back from many areas. But in contrast to the beginning of April, Western intelligence services now agree that a rapid Ukrainian victory is extremely unlikely. Putin, they say, is now pursuing a strategy that is far more astute than the poorly planned advance on Kyiv seen in the first days of the war. Russia’s war aims, to be sure, are far more limited that they were initially, even in eastern Ukraine. Instead of completely encircling the Ukrainian troops in the Donbas, a goal that Russia quickly had to discard, Putin’s army is now focusing its attentions on the eastern tip of the Donbas in the area of Sievierodonetsk. Over the weekend, the Russians continued to up the pressure in the region, and on Monday, reports emerged that the first Russian troops have now entered the city. The strategy Putin has pursued in the Donbas has involved heavy artillery fire against Ukrainian positions before then slowly advancing. Supply lines have also been firmly established. Germany’s foreign intelligence service, the BND, estimates that Russia is currently able to send up to 300 tons of munitions to the front every day – sufficient for a huge amount of firepower. At the same time, says the German government, Western sanctions on the import of Russian energy have not proven as painful as hoped. India alone more than doubled its oil imports from Russia from March to April. A leading German official says that the Russian war machine will only begin sputtering once the embargo results in a lack of important electronic parts necessary for modern weapons systems. The CIA has produced similar scenarios. According to the U.S. intelligence agency, Putin is preparing for a slow and brutal war of attrition in eastern and southern Ukraine. Because the Kremlin chief is completely isolated from any form of critical advice, experts believe that he thinks he will be able to continue to conquer territory in the coming months. Militarily, the U.S. is prepared for a protracted conflict. When defense ministers from more than 40 countries gathered for a video conference last Monday, the focus was not just on the rapid deliveries of armored vehicles and howitzers. U.S. Defense Secretary Austin also requested allies to begin planning for a war that could stretch out over several years. Gloomy ForecastsThe German government shares that gloomy outlook. For a breakthrough, one side has to have a 3:1 advantage over the other, a dominance that neither the Russians nor the Ukrainians can muster. Which means that most signs now point to an extended and bloody standoff. Experts in Berlin believe that Putin will only sit down to the negotiating table once it becomes clear that there is no more land left for him to win. It is an analysis that is consistent with what top Russian officials are saying. Nikolai Patrushev, head of the Russian Security Council, said last Tuesday that Russian troops are not "chasing deadlines," when asked about the slow pace of the invasion. Putin has apparently now identified a minimum goal of conquering all of the Donbas, the protection of which served as one of the justifications of the war in the first place. Of the two parts of the Donbas area, Russia has almost completely taken the Luhansk region and around half of the Donetsk region. Furthermore, the Kremlin looks intent on officially annexing those areas of southern Ukraine that it has occupied in recent weeks. "Russia is here forever," said Andrey Turchak, leader of the United Russia party, during a recent visit to Kherson. A new decree from Putin has enabled the rapid distribution of Russian passports to residents of the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions, another indication that Putin is intent on moving rapidly to solidify control. A destroyed Russian tank near Kharkiv A destroyed Russian tank near Kharkiv Foto: Maxim Dondyuk / DER SPIEGEL The question is for how long the West can continue to insist that Putin’s invasion was a "strategic error." If Russia is able to conquer the rest of the Donbas and also overrun large parts of southern Ukraine, that line of argumentation begins to lose relevance. Any negotiated solution that might emerge at that point, many observers fear, would likely be little more than an extended cease-fire for Putin – after which he would simply continue his war against Ukraine, just as he did after taking his initial steps in 2014. As a result, calls have grown louder in Washington for taking a more assertive stance against Moscow and for getting Europe to support it as well. The goal of weakening Russia is correct, says John Herbst, the former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine. Putin, he says, is committing horrific war crimes in Ukraine. "When countries like Germany or Italy now say we have to find an off ramp for Putin or even a face-saving solution, that is utterly wrong." In Berlin, by contrast, there are fears that an extended war of attrition could lead to a fracturing of the alliance against the Kremlin. "Putin is trying to ensure that the West tires of the war to the point that the focus shifts to the significant economic consequences of the sanctions," says a senior German intelligence official. He believes that the consensus could even begin to crumble as early as this summer. Last Wednesday, German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock spoke openly about her worries of war "fatigue," which could lead, she says, to a situation in which the European public begins focusing its attentions on other issues. "Dealing with Horrible Leaders Is Part of the History of International Relations"The Chancellery noted with a fair amount of gratification that Ukrainian President Zelenskyy has been far more conservative in his stated war aims than many of his own people. During a video call early last week at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Zelenskyy was asked if he felt that a reconquering of the Crimea was realistic. He responded that doing so could cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian soldiers, and said that such a price plays a role. And at the moment, not even the Americans seem prepared to arm Ukraine to the point that it could launch a battle for Crimea – much less Scholz, whose government still hasn’t even managed to fulfill its promise of delivering Gepard tanks to Ukraine. Kyiv isn’t the only capital to have noticed the shortcoming; the rest of Eastern Europe has as well. "For Berlin, the conflict seems to be far away," says Justyna Gotkowska, a security expert at the Center for Eastern Studies in Warsaw. Whereas many Eastern Europeans are secretly hoping for regime change in Moscow, she says, Scholz is only able to come up with the statement: Putin cannot be allowed to win. It’s seriously damaging to Germany’s image, Gotkowska says. And she believes Germany won’t be able to repair it simply with money, once it comes time for the rebuilding of Ukraine. "Germany would then look like it was trying to make a profit – after having done so little to save the country."
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