The Warlord
RuSsIa iS BaD
- Aug 21, 2018
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- AFL Club
- North Melbourne
Surprised you didn’t mention the Jupiter missiles decision in Turkey preceding the missile crisis. Shares some similarities to the modern example, though they are quite distinct.
You probably already know most, if not all of this stuff.
It is a bit of a complicated history with Ukraine and NATO. There have been relations with NATO since 1994 and Ukraine started an action plan to later join in 2008, but it was never super popular amongst the populace. Yanukovych opted out and he was a bit more pro-Russian in his policies. Then we had the Maiden Revolution in 2014, which was precipitated by a free trade/association deal with the EU not being signed. The interim government said it would not join NATO as it was not super popular still and it only initiated joining it, likely with US insistence, after the Russian intervention in the Crimea and in eastern Ukraine, which broke a few treaties as well as international law. Popular support then increased for NATO following the invasion.
The way I see it, Putin took advantage of a crisis to seize Russian-majority speaking areas of Ukraine and redraw the borders, in a not too dissimilar manner to what the Soviet Union did to Poland and later Germany in the postwar period (without the ethnic cleansing this time around). Also, he lost a major political supporter in Yanukovych and had an EU and western-leaning Ukrainian government on his doorstep. He pulled a somewhat similar (distinct) stunt with Georgia with the South Ossetia conflict.
Based on all that, I would not say Putin has all the high ground. More so grey and muddled, as the Ukraine probably should not have possessed those territories in the first place, but both nations have historical and ethnic linkages to those areas. I don't think we can entirely blame Ukraine for being reactionary against a power that took their sovereign territory and has consistently deployed military assets in one quarter of your country for several years.
Nah, Russia has the high ground. One of the key commitments given to Gorbachev to get him to agree to dismantling the Soviet Union peacefully was that NATO would not expand east.
A lie.
Just like the Iranians were lied to when they did the nuke deal.