Russo-Ukrainian War 2014-23 and Invasion

[Josquius]

English sounds pretty native too.

[Tamas]

Interfax allegedly quotes Lavrov saying Ukraine has no right to sovereignty. I mean, that's pretty much what Putin said in the form of an hour-long rant but still 

[Admiral Yi]

Very impressive.  I had never heard Luxembourgeois before.  Sounds like less grumpy German. 

Is it related to Dutch?

[Sheilbh]

I keep coming back to it - now with English subtitles - because this clip with Putin and Naryshkin is extraordinary:
https://twitter.com/peterliakhov/status/1495851796782362628?s=20&t=4MWkyTiTGFcsMHp1WWWwbQ

Also Naryshkin was trying to obfuscate a bit at the start with the reference to it being Patrushev's idea - while Putin wanted them all to take ownership of the proposal. Patrushev, from my understanding, is the most hawkish and slightly unhinged guy around Putin - interestingly he's in Belgrade today for meetings with the Serbian government. I wouldn't be surprised if there will be a West Balkan point to this. As I say my view is that they view America/the West as in terminal decline and a lot of this policy is, to nick the Nietzsche line (which Dominic Cummings keeps using), to push what is falling - which they'll do in Ukraine, in the West Balkans, in Moldova and probably in the Baltics until they reach a point of resistance.

Not unrelatedly - Serbian tabloid today "UKRAINE ATTACKED RUSSIA":


UNSC statements looking interesting, fairly broad condemnation. India is interestingly still on the "both sides" need to show restraint and no mention of Ukraine's territorial integrity. Brazil, Mexico, UAE, Kenya, Ghana and Gabon all more condemnatory though with differing emphases and some not naming Russia. I think the Kenyan statement is particularly effective because it explicitly draws the comparison with the post-colonial experience in Africa in a powerful way.

On that it is interesting that at the MSC Johnson and the Japanese Foreign Minister were the only two delegates to explicitly make a link between Ukraine and the Pacific, particularly Taiwan. India explicitly said there is no link between Ukraine and the Pacific. As Japan has now come out and said they will work with the rest of the G7 to impose sanctions.

The UK bit of sanctions will be announced today in Parliament - not clear what they'll be and I assume they won't be the full package that's been prepared in the event of an invasion, but it sounds like entities in Russia as well as those directly linked to Donetsk and Luhansk.

[Tamas]

The vibe I am getting, especially with stock market futures recovering, is that the world is taking it on face value that the Russians will just take what already has been theirs (the current rebel-held territory) and call it a day. After Putin's speech, I find that extremely unlikely.

[Zanza]

Germany has stopped Nord Stream 2 now.

Edit: Explicitly a political decision based on geostrategy by the federal government,not bureaucratic shenanigans.

[The Brain]

Any delicious Schröder tweets?

[Sheilbh]

The vibe I am getting, especially with stock market futures recovering, is that the world is taking it on face value that the Russians will just take what already has been theirs (the current rebel-held territory) and call it a day. After Putin's speech, I find that extremely unlikely.

Agreed - Lavrov just today has said "Ukraine does not have a right to sovereignty". Putin's speech was not a peace or limited objectives speech - and there are lines I keep thinking about: "all responsibility for continued bloodshed will lay solely on the Ukraine leadership"; they know who the Ukrainian leadership are and will bring them to justice; they'll show "true de-Communisation" to Ukraine.

I really hope I'm wrong and this does basically stop at LNR and DNR - but I don't think it will. I think this is a lull because a big war is still a risk and Putin will take stock, I think he wants to see the reaction from the West and then maybe re-calculate/re-calibrate (which he can still do now but won't be able to if there's a full invasion of new territory) and I think he's starting to put into place the pieces to build Russian public support for war. As I say, I really hope I'm wrong.

Germany has stopped Nord Stream 2 now.

[jimmy olsen]

That's quite the amount of territory. 

[Tamas]

The vibe I am getting, especially with stock market futures recovering, is that the world is taking it on face value that the Russians will just take what already has been theirs (the current rebel-held territory) and call it a day. After Putin's speech, I find that extremely unlikely.

Agreed - Lavrov just today has said "Ukraine does not have a right to sovereignty". Putin's speech was not a peace or limited objectives speech - and there are lines I keep thinking about: "all responsibility for continued bloodshed will lay solely on the Ukraine leadership"; they know who the Ukrainian leadership are and will bring them to justice; they'll show "true de-Communisation" to Ukraine.

I really hope I'm wrong and this does basically stop at LNR and DNR - but I don't think it will. I think this is a lull because a big war is still a risk and Putin will take stock, I think he wants to see the reaction from the West and then maybe re-calculate/re-calibrate (which he can still do now but won't be able to if there's a full invasion of new territory) and I think he's starting to put into place the pieces to build Russian public support for war. As I say, I really hope I'm wrong.

Germany has stopped Nord Stream 2 now.

Yeah. If Putin came out last night and said look at the chaos and ethnic cleansing at the breakaways we have a duty to move in and secure the civilians - that would have been still BS but I would then be inclined to believe he has scaled down the plan to just make status quo official. But he -and now Lavrov as well- denied Ukraine's right to exist, basically, instead.

[The Larch]

That's quite the amount of territory. 

I don't really think that's a serious claim by DPR/LPR, it's basically the parts of Ukraine that fall within the "Novorossiya" label, and that have a relatively significant Russian speaking population.

And I don't really think that what Russia wants from this is territory (save for maybe particular concessions), but to wield political control over Ukraine one way or the other.

[Threviel]

I believe that Crimea, given a choice, would have voted to join Russia. I have no real proof, but I do remember all the problems during the partition of the USSR and I seem to remember that a majority identified as Russians.

Is it feasible that any other part of Ukraine would actually want to join Russia, if given a democratic vote on the matter? What about in '91?

[Sheilbh]

Is it feasible that any other part of Ukraine would actually want to join Russia, if given a democratic vote on the matter? What about in '91?

In the independence referendum in 91 Crimea went about 55% for "yes", Donetsk and Luhansk both went about 84% for yes. All six Presidential candidates were campaigning for a "yes" vote.

That might just have reflected the context of 1991 though. But all those regions were the most anti-independence.

But I've not seen anything to suggest there's a real significant group that want to join Russia (although I could be wrong especially given that chart from Tooze of the two economies since 1990). I could believe it for Crimea it seems like likely for Donetsk and Luhansk.

[Syt]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/02/21/vladimir-putin-recognition-ukraine-separatists-end-postwar-world/

Opinion: This is the way the postwar world ends

By Editorial Board

This is the way the postwar world ends, and the post-Cold War world, too: not yet with a bang, and not with anything close to a whimper, but with a rant. In an extraordinary soliloquy viewed live around the world Monday, President Vladimir Putin of Russia attacked and delegitimized not just independent Ukraine and its government but all facets of the security architecture in Europe, declaring both to be creatures of a corrupt West — headed by the United States — that are unremittingly hostile toward Russia.

By the time he was done speaking, Mr. Putin had not only broadcast his intent to disrupt institutions that have kept the peace in Europe, mostly, after 1945 but also laid out the ideological basis for launching a war — even if he did not quite declare it. The key point was to recognize two Russian-backed breakaway regions in eastern Ukraine, and thus to discard any pretense of respecting Ukraine's territorial integrity. More ominous, given his subsequent dispatch of "peacekeeping" troops over the border into the regions, was Mr. Putin's demand that "those who seized and hold power in Kyiv" cease hostilities, or else "all responsibility for the possible continuation of the bloodshed will be entirely on the conscience of the regime ruling on the territory of Ukraine." War looming, he had this warning to those who helped oust a Kremlin-backed regime in Ukraine in 2014: "We know their names, and we will find them and bring them to justice."

Rebutting Mr. Putin's arguments is almost beside the point — it's doubtful even he believes his wild accusations about Ukraine as a future platform for NATO aggression — but not entirely. The truth is that Ukraine is a member state of the United Nations, whose security Russia itself undertook to respect 28 years ago, in exchange for Ukraine's nuclear disarmament. Ukraine has not been waging "genocide" against a Russian-speaking ethnic minority, as Mr. Putin alleged, but defending itself from a 2014-2015 Russian destabilization campaign that created the breakaway regions and engineered the seizure of Ukraine's strategic Crimean region on the Black Sea. Mr. Putin's pseudo-history about the kinship of Russians and Ukrainians ignores those facts. His true reason for targeting Ukraine is not Russian national security but to preserve his own power in Moscow, which would be threatened by a successful democratic experiment in a former Soviet republic of Ukraine's size and cultural importance.

Mr. Putin's aggressive words and deeds followed a plea Sunday from Ukraine's president, Volodymyr Zelensky, to assembled world leaders in Munich, in which he chided the United States and Europe for their failure to counter Mr. Putin sooner. In that city where Britain and France cut a foolish and short-lived deal with Nazi Germany in 1938, Mr. Zelensky used the historically freighted word "appeasement." We would respectfully disagree, to the extent that after years of Western temporizing about Russia, President Biden has so far effectively rallied NATO to condemn and oppose Mr. Putin's aggression in recent weeks.

After Monday, it is unfortunately clear that Mr. Putin has not been deterred, war is likely, and there is no longer any reason to wait in imposing sanctions — even extending them beyond the breakaway regions, which the White House immediately targeted. That would be the first step in decisively responding to this geopolitical crisis, but it can hardly be the last.

[The Larch]

I believe that Crimea, given a choice, would have voted to join Russia. I have no real proof, but I do remember all the problems during the partition of the USSR and I seem to remember that a majority identified as Russians.

Is it feasible that any other part of Ukraine would actually want to join Russia, if given a democratic vote on the matter? What about in '91?

No idea about the ethnic composition of those regions, as it's quite a complicated topic, but following language, IIRC, Crimea was Russian speaking by far. Donetsk and Luhansk were also predominantly Russian speaking. Besides those, I don't think that any other region of Ukraine was so predominantly Russian speaking, although there are some in which Russian and Ukranian are more or less at parity, like in some other Eastern regions, and around Odessa.

IIRC, it more or less tracks with the voting results from past presidential elections.