Mea Culpa, I was wrong.

[VySky]

Well, now that Trump is out of power, Putin finds opposition to him a lot stiffer. Biden is a lot closer to our European allies and NATO.

 

[Court Jester]

EU is too locked in to cheap Russian gas.

Can't blame Donald Trump for that. He warned them. I wonder if anyone is willing to say he was right about that?

 

[Fledermaus]

Can't blame Donald Trump for that. He warned them. I wonder if anyone is willing to say he was right about that?

I didn't say anything about Trump.

Nor about Biden.

Irrelevant post .

 

[Juin]

Can't blame Donald Trump for that. He warned them. I wonder if anyone is willing to say he was right about that?

Plus Trump would have called Putin's bluff. Trump would have quickly struck first. You recall the hit on Assad following the chemical attack? That was as Trump was about to sit down to dinner with Xi.

 

[joluoto]

Plus Trump would have called Putin's bluff. Trump would have quickly struck first. You recall the hit on Assad following the chemical attack? That was as Trump was about to sit down to dinner with Xi.

Trump would have told Putin he can have Ukraine in exchange for dirt on Hunter Biden.

 

[Nilhus]

I still hope and believe that will be the end of it for now.

It will end when the US will stop cornering Russia with bases and missiles and regime change operations in nations friendly to Russia.

 

[Toggle Almendro]

It will end when the US will stop cornering Russia with bases and missiles and regime change operations in nations friendly to Russia.

It is exactly the opposite. It will end when Russia is surrounded with enough weapons to ensure that future invasions will be resisted.

 

[Lethargic Aptitude]

To all who read this I was wrong.

I believed Putin was merely sabre rattling when he posted troops on the borders of Ukraine.

He has reportedly is moving "peacekeeping" troops into the newly declared "republics".

If so, I was wrong about that.

I still hope and believe that will be the end of it for now.

You could be wrong again?

 

[MaryP]

It is not. Putin did not place all those troops and all that matériel around Ukraine just to let it rust.

From his speech yesterday:

I want to say clearly and directly that in the current situation, when our proposals for an equal dialogue on fundamental issues have actually remained unanswered by the United States and NATO, when the level of threats to our country is increasing significantly, Russia has every right to take retaliatory measures to ensure its own security. That is exactly what we will do."

Sounds pretty clear to me.

Extracts from Putin's speech on Ukraine

Following are extracts from a televised speech on Monday by Russian President Vladimir Putin on Ukraine:

www.reuters.com

(I've been looking for an English version of the entire speech, but it's not out yet.)

 

[Lursa]

Ukraine passes through Russian gas.

I realize that. That's why I'm focusing on the Nord Stream.

 

[Lursa]

That is what I have not heard so far: shutting the whole thing down. All I have heard so far is vows to shut Nord Stream 2 down. Nord Stream 2 is an alternative pipeline, not a main or necessary pipeline for Russia. Russia can send all the gas it wants to Germany through Ukraine. The Nord Streams were only built so Putin can by pass troublesome Ukraine. Is Germany gonna shut all the pipelines from Russia?

Why was there an investment in Nord Stream? To bypass Ukraine, but the $$$ has been invested. Germany esp. has been investing in alternative fuels. I dunno.

IMO, let them (Europe) start re-negotiating with SA. THey were stupid and shortsighted...I knew years ago this Ukraine link was the weak point. I thought they (EU) did too, since they made major changes towards alternatives.

 

[joluoto]

Why was there an investment in Nord Stream? To bypass Ukraine, but the $$$ has been invested. Germany esp. has been investing in alternative fuels. I dunno.

IMO, let them (Europe) start re-negotiating with SA. THey were stupid and shortsighted...I knew years ago this Ukraine link was the weak point. I thought they (EU) did too, since they made major changes towards alternatives.

The Nordstream project predates the Orange revolution, with Nordstream 1 already been decided in the early 2000s during Schröder's time as Chancellor (and can be traced back to ideas and loose agreements btween Kohl and Yeltsin in the 1990s regarding Russian gas exports to Germany). It became a geostrategic tool as relations between Russia and Ukraine cooled as the Russian puppet regime fell in 2004, and deepened with the Euromaidan and Russian invasion of Crimea and Donbas in 2014.

 

[Lursa]

The Nordstream project predates the Orange revolution, with Nordstream 1 already been decided in the early 2000s during Schröder's time as Chancellor (and can be traced back to ideas and loose agreements btween Kohl and Yeltsin in the 1990s regarding Russian gas exports to Germany). It became a geostrategic tool as relations between Russia and Ukraine cooled as the Russian puppet regime fell in 2004, and deepened with the Euromaidan and Russian invasion of Crimea and Donbas in 2014.

Translation? My views on its importance are outdated?

 

[cpwill]

To all who read this I was wrong.

I believed Putin was merely sabre rattling when he posted troops on the borders of Ukraine.

He has reportedly is moving "peacekeeping" troops into the newly declared "republics".

If so, I was wrong about that.

I still hope and believe that will be the end of it for now.

We are all wrong, on occasion.

When we are, this is the harder - and better - path. Well done.

 

[joluoto]

Translation? My views on its importance are outdated?

No, Nordstream wasn't a geopolitical tool against Ukraine at first, but became it when Moscow lost it's influence over Ukraine. The reason Nordstream happened was because it originally wasn't a geopolitical tool, and the German governments of the 90s and early 2000s never thought it would become one, because the issue between Russia and Ukraine did not yet exist.

You wondered why it happened? it happened because it seemed a good idea at the time: Back then the push for renewables was also not a big deal as it is now.

Then of course we have the current conundrum with Nordstream 2, an outdated concept of the need of Russian gas at a time when gas really should be phased out, and opposition from the Green Party within the German government for the pipe, which makes it a hot potato in many ways in current German politics. Nordstream 2 was a bad idea that shouldn't have happened, however already when Nordstream 1 was planned there were already talks about an additional Nordstream. It's an old issue, a embarrassing inheritance of an old concept of energy, a dinosaur from 90s and early 2000s politics.

 

[Airyaman]

Plus Trump would have called Putin's bluff. Trump would have quickly struck first. You recall the hit on Assad following the chemical attack? That was as Trump was about to sit down to dinner with Xi.

 

[Nilhus]

It is exactly the opposite. It will end when Russia is surrounded with enough weapons to ensure that future invasions will be resisted.

Do you mean... never? Russia is too big and powerful to be put in that situation.

But the premise is wrong as it's not Russia invading or attacking other countries, it's the US:

Huge, huge lists(and although huge, ironically incomplete) of illegal acts committed by the US against other countries(with very few exceptions like ww2):

List of armed conflicts involving the United States - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

List of wars involving the United States - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

United States involvement in regime change - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

The US has a lot of enemies: Russia, China, most of the Middle East(ordinary people, not unelected US puppets), large chunks of South America and East Asia.

The US will be nuked if it doesn't understand to back down.

 

[Chagos]

The invasion is well underway. Putin's speech was very angry and also very unusual. It completely misrepresented the history of Ukraine, but did more than that. It apparently attempted to erase Ukraine's identity and glorify the Russian empire as it existed long before the Soviet Union. In other words, Putin was making a case that Russian identity was part of an ethnicity rooted in a Russian history. Only Russian people who spoke the Russian language shared that. Other people were lesser. This implies that Putin is doing more than trying to establish the Soviet Union. It implies he has a prejudice against people who cannot change who they are based on the group they were born into.

With by now quite a few threads on the matter, I could link to a post of mine in another, but for convenience's sake I'll copy and paste its content into here:

The more important matter to Putin is that he fears an economically successful Ukraine on his doorstep, while his own country is actually a basket case, economically, industrially and in the field of desperately needed reforms of modernization in both instances.
The only field he's been successful in going ahead is the military.
That makes Russia powerful but in all other and far more important fields it is actually enormously weak.
So he's selling the delusion of actual strength and greatness to his people who simply just love and always have loved the image since csarist times, and he's doing that before those same people start asking why things work far better in Ukraine (actual fact even now), by screwing that country up and bringing it under his thumb.
Just like the rest of the Russian shithole, once one looks beyond Moscow and other singular entities where things actually work better.
What he fears most, much as he won't admit it, is a domestic clamor for democracy and free market economy. The upheaval in Belarussia probably had him wet himself at the time and his only answer, there and elsewhere, was and continues to be to exert control over any such threat.
His foray today into history was such a compilation of own falsification that it was laughable.
But people who really believe in the crap they spout cannot justifiably be called liars, seeing how they don't see themselves as those. Especially when their narrative is lapped up by their own addressees.
Western figures can tear their hair out over this farce, it doesn't matter. They're not the ones this is all aimed at.

As regards the reforms mentioned right at the beginning, Putin will not and thus cannot implement any of them at home, seeing how he would lose the support of the self-serving oligarchs at home who depend on him as much as he does on them.

 

[Nilhus]

It apparently attempted to erase Ukraine's identity and glorify the Russian empire as it existed long before the Soviet Union. In other words, Putin was making a case that Russian identity was part of an ethnicity rooted in a Russian history. Only Russian people who spoke the Russian language shared that.

You have no idea what you're talking about.

Russia and Belarus and Ukraine are actually THE SAME PEOPLE, sharing the SAME HISTORICAL ROOTS, all of them being descendants of the people that lived in a political federation called by historians "Kievan Rus" - due to it having its capital in Kiev for much of its existence(though it had other different names in the past) - it included the territories of present day Kiev, Moscow, and Minsk.



The idea of Ukraine being something separate from the Russian people appeared around 1700. Same for Belarus. In reality they were political spin-offs, not different people with different cultures.
Ukraine first appeared as a state in 1918.

That's what Putin tried to explain.

 

[NewfieMom]

Russia and Belarus and Ukraine are actually THE SAME PEOPLE

That's what Putin tried to explain.

Ukraine is not solely comprised of ethnic Russians. It is a multi-ethnic state. Only the east and south are Russian.
Putin "explains" what he wants to force down the throats of others.

 

[CaughtInThe]

Putin can't just annex the "independent states" like Hitler did Austria so he declares them to to be "free" then "protects" them.

It's genius.

 

[CaughtInThe]

The question we need to ask is

Why now? Why is Putin choosing this time to test the United States?

This plan didn't start this year.

 

[VySky]

This plan didn't start this year.

Yea, has nothing to do with the vegetable we have at the helm. Nah....

 

[Nilhus]

Ukraine is not solely comprised of ethnic Russians. It is a multi-ethnic state. Only the east and south are Russian.
Putin "explains" what he wants to force down the throats of others.

Ukrainians=Russians=Belorussians=same people/same ethnicity

 

[CaughtInThe]

Yea, has nothing to do with the vegetable we have at the helm. Nah....

I know that's the way you're gonna try to sell it. I bet Tucker Carlson is doing the same thing.

Maybe you guys can vacation together in Russia.