It was public doctrine in textbooks, taught at university. The warnings about moves at the chessboard (which in diplomacy often are issued in advance, contrary to chess) have been stated for decades, publicly and face to face. The products of the propaganda machine were quite reachable, and not really ambiguous.
Really, that «few saw» is farcical.
Edit: and it is quite worrisome to think that said "doctrine" is now implemented only up to a small fraction, and those expressions suggest blindness not just about the current actions, but the openly planned, stated future ones.
War is always unthinkable. Yes, there were warning signs that, in retrospect, were obvious, but Russia invading Ukraine was so profoundly dumb it was difficult to expect for Putin to really go through with it. He did, his country is suffering in result, and he wants to make it mutual, WWI style. You can't really blame Germany for doing their best on making a war unthinkable through economic interdependence.
You may enjoy the following cartoon (20 Jan 2022) from Zemgus Zaharans from Riga - I literally just met it:
https://cartoonmovement.com/cartoon/germany-and-russia
Which by the way is about having kept the stance until the last moment.
An intention spelt out in textbooks?! Quite an understatement.
Q: "So the part had been expressing an explicit, literal intention, public, codified, written, divulgated, explained et cetera?" // A: "...Heart, Hope, Daily routine, Expectation, Being alike..."
You are defending a perspective of intentional removal of reality, and the principle of reality constraint, from conscience.
> You can't really blame... for doing their best on making a war unthinkable through
In that '«unthinkable»' you show the whole point. It was very much duly thinkable.
Surely those who overrode reality, and in favour of illusion, and clinging unprepared in a cage of "que será", are to blame, and to blame, and to blame.
I don't even agree in 'hindsight' this situation was obvious. It's a hugely risky and crazy manoeuvre by Putin that may very well be his undoing.
The Russian economy is starting to crack, vast elements of key industrial sectors are collapsing.
There are no good cars being made in Russia, and even their garbage Lada's, which nobody wants, might not get made due to sanctions.
Car sales have dropped 80%, there's a vicious black market for spare parts.
Most Russians drive foreign cars. What happens when the all need parts?
Russian airline fleets cannot get maintenance or parts. They are being grounded.
Nothing about this invasion is obvious or doctrinal.
Entirely a surprise? Maybe not - but certainly not expected by anyone, even those paying attention.
Which book(s), at which university? Genuinely curious.
Of course! I think you just should (or at least that it makes full sense to ask).
I remember - to the best of my memory, it was probably well over five years ago when I read the articles - it was the geopolitics course at Uni Moscow; the professor is/was an ideologist influential in the circle of the core decision makers. The list included a pretty large number of objectives, of which the current topic is just a line.
When, after the war really started¹ and of course you think of the tick-mark in the list, I looked for the original article, I found it definitely not the most immediate needle in the haystack. A few weeks later, though, as the ideologists started to present their point of view to the western public, one interview emerged which I have good reasons to believe was from the above said professor.
I will check for you later when I will have some contiguous time: the name of that interviewed professor (easier to find: I have it in my RSS harvest) should be a better lead to retrieve the articles about his course about the national geopolitical objectives.
¹With reference to those commentators which gave it for a fact well before the actual border trespassing - e.g. Niall Ferguson.
It was absolutely not 'doctrine' on either side, in any sense, either military or economic, that dependency on Russian Oil would bring war.
Nor was it 'doctrine' that Russia would ultimately invade Ukraine 'full on'. Even most Russian elite were surprised.
The only 'doctrine' we have to rely on is a) how Russia will use nuclear weapons, b) how they generally operate on the battlefield (aka heavy on Army, esp. Artillery), and how they basically 'lie about everything' in foreign policy.
It was in many ways rational to contemplate that economic ties would diminish hostility, it mostly worked for the rest of Europe.
Were Putin to have eventually retired, his replacement would not have had the power necessary to do, almost alone, what he and a very small cadre of people did.
This is something you conjured - it was not in the original post.
> Nor was it 'doctrine'
And this is something you cannot state.
The documents were there: I read articles about them many years ago.
> surprised
May that possibly be because of a "they would never" bad reasoning, as mentioned in the other sibling post?
