Like, I've seen arguments that the whole "Ukraine joining NATO" justification is just a pretext. But if that's just a pretext, what's the actual reason? I haven't seen a good answer yet.
I honestly don't think we'll know the true story for decades.
It was auto published on 26 on ria and bunch of other sites and than purged. It explains everything
It does not represent real thoughts of those in power.
one extra point: this book is written by somebody who is considered to be putin's guru. wiki article contains summary of the book. go through it and for every bullet point that you find something corresponding in today's reality, get yourself a candy :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundations_of_Geopolitics
i also found today's interview with author of this book. interview pretty much exactly echoes sentiments of the article (google translate is your friend). https://bloknot-voronezh.ru/news/nikakogo-yanukovicha-2-0-po...
it's not propoganda. it's just batshit crazy people who are obsessed with rebuilding russian empire. is it so hard to believe when we have qanon on display for past few years ?
see the idea ?
What putin is doing now is something along the Kosovo playbook... someone has interest in some area somewhere (us in kosovo, putin in donbas/lugansk), they help the separatists, the main country fights back, and then they start war (bombing in case of yugoslavia, this now in case of ukraine), to get what they want. Putin also mentioned weapons of mass destruction in ukraine ("the iraq playbook" USA used), but the theory didn't get a lot of traction.
Also, it's just the beginning of the war, so you can expect the propaganda machines to work 24/7 on both sides, so what the truth is, will probably never be know and will be rewritten by the winners and CNN.
Yeah it is, the Baltics are already in NATO. Ukraine joining would not significantly change the balance of power in the region.
Cuba on the other hand was far more significant because the Soviet Union did not otherwise have assets so close to the US.
Also the US never invaded Cuba in the way Russia invaded Ukraine. Their actions were more comparable to Russian support of DPR and LPR.
USA definitely had the plan for a war with cuba, but it luckily didn't happen. They did start many other wars in the meantime, mostly on the other side of the world.
Just look at a map. There's a reason "Turn the map around" is a mantra in professional military officer schools in the West: it's essential to understanding your adversary.
Russia's land border with Estonia and Latvia is ~325km long, straddling Lakes Peipus and Pihkva. This is a small frontage, and fairly easy for Russia's massive army to defend.
There is only 1 MSR/highway (M-9) that leads to Russia from these Baltic States, and the distance is just about 570km. The operational combat range of an M1 Abrams or Leopard 2 MBT is ~450km. So they can't reach Moscow from NATO territory without stopping to refuel a good distance short of the capital.
Now let's add a NATO-member Ukraine to the mix. Not even including Crimea, the Russian-Ukrainian land border is over 1200km long. That is a LOT of frontage to protect. It features 2 MSRs/highways with direct access to Moscow, 3 if you took a detour to secure Voronezh (not an easy task). If you use subsidiary roads from the closest part of Ukraine's border, before merging onto the M-3 highway, you can get to Moscow in about ~475km, JUST about the maximum range for tanks.
So Russia would be risking shorting the invasion distance to their capital by 20%, putting it in range of a mechanized lightning thrust. It would also massively complicate their ability to mass combat power on their border because their NATO front would quintuple in length. It would give the US the option of putting anti-ballistic missiles in eastern Ukraine, closer to potential Russian launch locations and probably making it easier to achieve boost-phase intercepts of ICBMs. That undermines the strategic deterrence balance of power/MAD. US ABMs in Eastern Europe is something Russian leadership has been bitching about for 15 years. For some reason we keep pretending to not consider their concerns legitimate.
That's a WHOLE lotta downsides. What is the UPSIDE, for Russia, of a NATO-member Ukraine, though? Pretty much nothing. So Russia's leadership did some risk mitigation calculus and they figured that immediate economic damage was more acceptable than the highly-negative long term Expected Value of a NATO Ukraine. Even if the probability of NATO attacking is low, the damage potential is astronomical. Keep in mind this is a country who's arguably most important holiday commemorates the war where they lost 25+ million lives fighting off an invasion from a hostile alliance on their western border. That's still in living memory for them.
Where they miscalculated was a) Putin's perceptions of the Ukrainian popular sentiment and b) their military's actual ability to pull off a nearly-bloodless blitz of Kiev to facilitate a regime change. The Russian military is looking hella-incompetent right now. I think if Kiev had fallen in <72hrs, there wouldn't even be sanctions against Russia today.
Because in Putin's mind, "Soviet" and "Russian" are synonyms. In other words, the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991 was to him the breakup of Russia, and as a Russian nationalist he sees that as a great tragedy. He blames it on the Communists for adopting a constitutional structure which contained within it the seeds of separatism; the Communists only ever meant it as lip-service, and as long as they remained in control that was all it was, but as they lost control those seeds began to sprout and 1991 was the result. To him, Lithuanians, Ukrainians, Georgians, Armenians, etc, are not neighbouring foreign nationalities, they are Russians, they are traditional ethnic minorities of the Russian nationality, just as he views Chechens, Tatars, Tuvans, etc, as being.
He wants to "Make Russia Great Again" by reversing the breakup of 1991, or getting as close to that goal as he possibly can. And annexing large parts of Ukraine and installing one or more puppet governments in the rest is, in his mind, an important step towards that ultimate goal.
You can hear threads if this in the speeches he gives to Russian audiences where he argues that Ukraine isn't a real country.
He's actually going further back than that, to the various Rus empires that predated the modern countries of Russia, Ukraine, etc.
To some extent I think the extensive propaganda about numerous political/celebrity figures being great and powerful and capable has been a sham from the beginning. I would call the war on Ukraine 'put up or shut up' time, where reality tests the value of the claims that have been made for many, many years.
I think we've all been told a lot of lies for a long time.
History's monsters so often seem to be dumb, deeply fallible, weak humans in the wrong place at the wrong time, doubling down on wrong decisions. I've seen people being unsettled and afraid and going 'but what if it's a feint and then the REAL Russian Army comes to obliterate everything', in the face of the shitshow we're seeing.
Not an accident: the effort that went into putting forth that narrative has been extensive. But once tested, we see where reality lies.
Hitler was an example of this. He cleverly came to power, astutely conserved himself in power for years, but then badly fucked up almost from the beginning once he embarked on major military adventures. However, many people kept believing him even militarily clever because of previous political cleverness. I believe something similar is the case with Putin (This is not a comparison of Putin with Hitler in moral terms, just an example)
Maybe was tricked into war by .. I don't know .. and the war is just collateral demage.
Maybe his information had been so wrong because he and all people around him lives in a bubble.
Today Lavrov again repeated the RF's demands for removal of US's nuclear weapons from Europe.
(And yes, I too believe we are not privy to what has transpired in the past few months, if not past year between the various powers. And there is no way short of collective madness in Russian leadership that this "operation" will be limited to Ukraine.)
The power gained in this case is attempting to rebuild the Russian empire by "liberating" areas that have since become independent countries and want nothing to do with the Russian rule.
