More thoughts on Ukraine

Most people sympathize with Russia or are indifferent, Ukrainian NATO membership is the 'brightest of red lines' within the Russian elite (not just Putin)

I wrote a little bit on the Ukraine Russia stuff earlier, here are some more thoughts which hopefully will give you a different perspective on the situation.

I haven’t been following the news much but I have been speaking to people about it and watching television, and whenever I mention to my friends how the West has done lots to provoke this crisis by expanding NATO and promoting Ukrainian integration into the West it is the first time they have ever heard anything like this, so I want to create a blog post with some further reading for those interested.

Dominic Cummings has done a lot of work with the UK Ministry of Defense and lived in Russia for a number of years so he is better informed than most on the topic, including myself. I encourage you to read his blog post on the topic, which is a bunch of easy to read snippets. I’ve highlighted some of my favorites here. (stuff with orange lines next to them are direct quotes from the blog, everything else is my own writing.)

Many of the old Cold War warriors who actually won the Cold War and argued for more aggressive action against the Soviet Union — people such as Richard Pipes and Nitze — argued in the 1990s that NATO expansion was ‘a historic mistake’.

It’s reasonable to believe all of:

a. Putin is mafia, Russia is a mafia government, London should not be the laundry.

AND

b. NATO expansion was a historic mistake, we should have aimed for a UKR that’s neutral and prosperous, with NATO completely off the table.

AND

c. Putin bears most responsibility for the deaths in UKR.

AND

d. Zelinsky’s diplomacy before this war was shockingly bad and has been a disaster for UKR.

AND

e. People in UKR have the right to vote for who they want but it’s sensible to consider carefully what Russia wants given it’s nuclear-armed and Putin does not care about civilian casualties and elements in D.C are happy to fight Russia to the last Ukrainian…

Highly recommend this and generally following Steve’s blog. He is one of the smartest people in the world. Unlike many very smart academics he also understands politics well.

https://infoproc.blogspot.com/2022/03/on-ukraine-return-of-multipolarity-and.html

PS. As I said yesterday, the educated hysterics are cheering the idiocy below because their minds operate a barely conscious heuristic: ‘Russia is white so it’s not racist to cheer’. Students are being thrown out of universities — even though students in the west are literally the most anti-Putin demographic. Anti-war chess players are thrown out of tournaments. Russian restaurants — staffed by Ukrainians! — are attacked. The ‘Russia is evil’ meme is sweeping the graduate class. Remember what it looks like. These are the same people constantly babbling about ‘racism’, and they’re doing this with no cognitive dissonance. They think they’re the good guys. Substitute ‘Russia’ below with ‘Pakistan’ or ‘Congo’.

In July 2021 Putin wrote a long article (Russian links aren’t working for me today so dunno if this will work). It got very little attention at the time. Even now it seems also largely ignored.

There’s a striking passage about how significant it would be for Russia to lose UKR (bold added):

But the fact is that the situation in Ukraine today is completely different because it involves a forced change of identity. And the most despicable thing is that the Russians in Ukraine are being forced not only to deny their roots, generations of their ancestors but also to believe that Russia is their enemy. It would not be an exaggeration to say that the path of forced assimilation, the formation of an ethnically pure Ukrainian state, aggressive towards Russia, is comparable in its consequences to the use of weapons of mass destruction against us. As a result of such a harsh and artificial division of Russians and Ukrainians, the Russian people in all may decrease by hundreds of thousands or even millions.

Bluff? Do you feel lucky? Is Ukraine this important to you?

Don’t forget that since the collapse of the Soviet Union the US has been the only global superpower, that’s about to change as China rivals the US much like the Soviet Union did after WWII. Who’s side do we want Russia to be on? All these sanctions are pushing Russia towards the east and forcing them to form closing ties with China (that’s not to say we shouldn’t be pursuing sanctions against Russia, it’s just pointing out that we should not have provoked Russia into this situation for the past 2 decades). Do you think the US are taking this seriously? What about after watching this video? (skip to 21:50).

Nazism in Ukraine is a much bigger deal than you’d think. This report from Freedom House in 2020 described Far-Right Groups in Ukraine as ‘Professionalized with Mainstream Visibility‘. ‘In electoral politics, the Svoboda (Freedom) party is considered the most developed political arm of Ukraine’s far right. The party’s greatest political victory came in 2010, when it received 10 percent [!] of the vote in parliamentary elections and several ministerial positions in the Ukrainian government.’ Ukraine isn’t alone; literal neo-nazis entered parliament in Greece after the EU fucked the country into oblivion a few years ago (cf. Yanis Varoufakis’s great book ‘Adults in the Room’ detailing his experience as Finance Minister for Greece during most of the crisis).