So uh, do you guys think Putin will invade Ukraine or what

[Celalta]

San Francisco, although I think that whole section is just the Bay Area, not claiming either North or South.

[OldTimer]

Looks like the hawks are starting to pop out of the woodwork.

Aaron Rupar

[Vorian_Atreides]

@John.S.Mill

it’s not even close to a super power.

How are you defining “super power”?

Last I checked, 1938 Germany wasn’t ever considered a super power.

[colonelsmoothie]

I heard uh, there was um some big cyberattack going on

[SredniVashtar]

Sounds vague at this point. If it’s just a bunch websites knocked down, then who cares?

Also hearing from US intelligence, that Russia has placed saboteurs in the Ukraine, to bomb Russian speaking Eastern Ukrainians as a false flag operation, to justify the invasion. Which seems like an oddly specific accusation.

[colonelsmoothie]

Putin’s way of plz don’t join NATO pretty plz

[dr_t_non-fan]

@SredniVashtar

Also hearing from US intelligence, that Russia has placed saboteurs in the Ukraine, to bomb Russian speaking Eastern Ukrainians as a false flag operation, to justify the invasion. Which seems like an oddly specific accusation.

That’s so 1964.
Or 1898.

[EimonGnome]

US should step aside. Ukraine is of no strategic value. A case can be made that Europe and NATO have caused this situation.Putin/Russia have made it abundantly clear that Ukraine is vital strategic interest for them. Russia will not tolerate having them join the EU or worse NATO. And I don’t think we want them in either. Are we willing to send troops to defend UKRIN, LIKE Germany or France? Not hardly.

Does it make any sense whatsoever to put Putin into desperate mode? Virtually any plausible, purposeful tigger to nuclear wars entails one side seeing no other alternative. Why head down that path?

US foreign policy should focus on Asia. To do so we will need Russia’s help. Same for Syria and Iran. We need to work with Russia, not alienate them.

[AcademicActuary]

Russian apartment bombings

Really is more 1999.

[twig93]

From NYT’s The Morning:

Russia has stationed about 100,000 troops near its border with Ukraine. Vladimir Putin’s government has issued a list of demands that Western powers are highly unlikely to meet. And President Biden said yesterday that he expected Putin to send troops over the border. “But I think he will pay a serious and dear price for it,” Biden added.

Today’s newsletter offers a Q. and A. on the risks of war in Eastern Europe.

“The overall threatening rhetoric from the Kremlin and the movement that military analysts are seeing on the ground give us a lot of ground for concern,” Anton Troianovski, The Times’s Moscow bureau chief, told my colleague Claire Moses. “It’s a very serious situation.”

Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Russia’s foreign minister are scheduled to meet for talks tomorrow in Geneva.

Five questions

1. Why is Putin threatening war with Ukraine?

The honest answer is that most diplomats and experts aren’t entirely sure. “It’s not clear what Russia’s central demand is,” Blinken told reporters yesterday in Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital.

Even Putin’s top advisers may not know what he is trying to accomplish and how seriously he is considering an invasion, as Anton has written. “The expert opinion that I can authoritatively declare is: Who the heck knows?” said Fyodor Lukyanov, a Russian foreign-policy analyst who advises the Kremlin.

This murkiness allows Putin to declare the confrontation a success in multiple scenarios.

2. Why is the U.S. so alarmed?

A successful invasion would establish Russia as a dominant, expansionist power in Eastern Europe. It would make other democracies (like Taiwan) worry that they could be vulnerable to takeover by nearby authoritarian countries (like China).

3. What does Putin say his rationale is?

Perhaps the best-known statement of Putin’s 20-plus years as Russia’s dominant political figure came from an annual state-of-the-nation speech in 2005 at the Kremlin. The collapse of the Soviet Union, he said, was the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe” of the 20th century.

Ukraine was arguably the most painful loss for Moscow. It was the most populous former Soviet republic to form its own country apart from Russia. The two now share a 1,200-mile border, and Putin often cites their deep cultural ties.

But Ukraine has drifted toward the West in recent years. The U.S. and its allies have increased military aid to Ukraine and also said — albeit vaguely — that Ukraine will one day join NATO.

Putin has defended the troop buildup by saying it is merely a military exercise. Russia has also released its list of demands, including a NATO pledge never to admit Ukraine and a pullback of NATO troops in Eastern Europe (effectively to where they were in the late 1990s).

Biden, responding to a question from The Times’s David Sanger at a news conference yesterday, said Ukraine was unlikely to join NATO “in the near term.” But Biden ruled out the idea of removing NATO troops from Eastern Europe.

4. What isn’t Putin saying?

Some observers believe that the troop buildup is a mixture of bluff and distraction.

A group of Russia experts — including Frederick Kagan, who has advised U.S. military leaders in the past — made this argument in a recent report called “Strategic Misdirection.” A full-scale invasion of Ukraine could be bloody and expensive, they wrote, potentially damaging Russia’s economy and Putin’s political standing.

As Kori Schake explained in The Atlantic: “Half a million Ukrainians have military experience; 24 percent of respondents in one recent poll said that they would resist Russian occupation ‘with a weapon in hand.’ Russia might succeed in taking Ukraine, but it is unlikely to hold it.”

Another reason to be skeptical of invasion: So far, Putin does not appear to be preparing Russians to go to war. Russia’s deputy foreign minister continued this pattern yesterday, saying, “We will not attack, strike, invade, quote unquote, whatever, Ukraine.”

Putin may instead be trying to redefine what the West considers unacceptable behavior, Kagan and his co-authors argued. By making an invasion seem possible, Putin can try to win other concessions, such as a freer hand in Eastern Europe.

“In the worst-case version of this scenario, the West will be congratulating itself for having avoided a Russian invasion Putin never meant to launch while Putin quietly celebrates an important nonmilitary victory that the West does not even recognize,” Kagan and his colleagues wrote.

(Thomas Friedman, the Times Opinion columnist, argues that the threat of war also helps distract Russians from their economic problems.)

5. So the risk of war is low?

Not necessarily. Even skeptics like Kagan acknowledge it is possible, given the lack of transparency about Putin’s thinking.

A few analysts, like Melinda Haring of the Atlantic Council, believe war is the most likely outcome. Putin has lost patience with Ukraine, she has written, and believes the U.S. would not go to war over it. (Biden said yesterday that a “minor incursion” would not necessarily pull the U.S. into the fight.) Putin also craves a historical legacy that a territorial expansion could ensure, by helping reverse the catastrophe of the Soviet collapse.

“It’s very hard to gauge the probability,” Michael Crowley, a Times reporter who is covering Blinken’s European trip, told me from Kyiv yesterday. “This is going to require very creative diplomacy to resolve, if it can be resolved.”

[NormalDan]

This is really the thrust of Putin’s propaganda.

Ukraine isn’t close to joining the EU or NATO. Russia demanding veto rights to what happens in NATO is never going to happen so Putin demands that knowing it’ll be rejected. If we’re really the instigators here then what has happened in the last ~3 years that warrants this sudden buildup?

Most of Ukraine is happy not being Russia, hence the need for an invasion, that’s why Ukraine isn’t part of Russia. We’re already out of it. Russia invaded Crimea and no one did anything.

The real irony is now that Putin is doing all the sabre rattling it really makes it clear the need for the EU to get its act together militarily. If Brazil was threatening invasion of Colombia we’d probably be less quiet about it.

[funkingded]

Biden did a great job in his presser yesterday framing our public position. It was nice listening to a caring, intelligent, competent president.

• US troops in the Ukraine, nope. Military tools (sounded like intel gathering support) yep.
• No changes within existing NATO countries. Ukraine is far from becoming a NATO country.
• Economic sanctions if Putin does invade. Biden said major sanctions and hinted at money supply. I would not doubt he’s thinking of targeting the Oligarch money in the west.

[NormalDan]

The most perverse decision in all of this is the fact that Germany has shut down nuclear plants resulting in increased reliance on Russian gas. They could learn from the French!

[soyleche]

Why are Russia and NATO at such odds all the time? I get that NATO was set up as a “let’s protect each other from the USSR”, but the USSR has been gone for 30 years. So what if Ukraine joins NATO? Let Russia in too, IMO.

Note: I know nothing about international diplomacy.

[NormalDan]

NATO is basically a democracy club. Russia/China don’t want in because they’re still working on the effort to show that authoritarians do it better

[NormalDan]

Also, good on Biden to work with Germany to make the Nord Stream pipeline threat, that’s pretty big.

[Vorian_Atreides]

The only real difference between Russia and the USSR is amount of territory directly controlled.

Many of the nations between Russia and the rest of Europe are of Russian interest in that they are essentially the modern version of the Iron Curtain. Nations that Russian is looking to invade have resources that are vital to Russian interests and the nation isn’t “cooperating appropriately”; but I think in the case of the Ukraine, it’s the threat to dissuade them from wanting to join NATO.

These are the primary reasons why Russia doesn’t want those “satellite states” to join NATO (military buffer & resources).

And NormalDan hits the nail on the head wrt why Russia doesn’t want to join NATO. That and the current set up in that nation doesn’t satisfy NATO-joining requirements.

[colonelsmoothie]

My guess is the oligarchs can’t have Russia both join NATO and maintain their wealth and power at the same time.

[Nick_Papagiorgio]

Are we joining in on that effort.

[NormalDan]

I sure hope not