/254/ Three Articles: Ukraine
Added 2022-04-12 06:00:04 +0000 UTC[Patreon Exclusive]
On US proxy wars, Russia's elite, Ukrainian neutrality.
'Three Articles' aims to provide serious political discussion on current affairs that we feel is lacking elsewhere, drawing out the logical conclusions of the three pieces' arguments.
Articles:
- A proxy war in Ukraine is the worst possible outcome — except for all the others, Sam Winter-Levy, War on the Rocks
- “Now we're going to f*ck them all.” What's happening in Russia's elites after a month of war, Farida Rustamova, Faridaily
- Zelensky’s muddled neutrality plan is not the answer for Ukraine, James Sherr, FT (attached)
Comments
Strange, I posted the comment below and it got deleted two times, perhaps due to bugs bugs on Patreon. Anyway: "Russia is essiantially reactive, lashing out to NATO expantion" - really though? Couldn't Russia be imperialist as well, and not just merely reactive? I know that Putin's goals are not entirely clear, and that this issue is debated a lot, but is it really all that inconceivable that Putin would have goals beyond just reacting to NATO expansion? Couldn't it be regional dominance, access to markets, and hence making Ukraine a puppet state? Not to mention the need for a reactionary consolidation of power inside Russia at a time of protests popping up in Kazakhstan and other places. Couldn't it be an agglomeration of goals and circumstances that made it worthwile to shoot the shot, so to speak, with the long term prospect being huge territorial gains for Russia (which is not to say that the west didn't have long term prospects with regard to Russia)? You do not even need to take the civilisational stuff seriously for that, although ideology might be playing some part here as well (e. g. Putin and his circle have repeated over and over again that Ukraine is a fake nation and a fake country). It is true of course that animosity between Russia and the west and the rise of Putin are to a large extent due to blunders of western leaders that go back to the end of the cold war, but isn't it the case that the genie has been out of the bottle for a while now and he has his own objectives? Also, what does "lashing out" mean here exactly? To me it sounds like a child throwing a temper tantrum or something, i. e. an irrational reaction. It is not impossible of course, that delusion or irrationality plays a part here, but wouldn't reducing it to that be a bit reductive? Or it's just toxic masculinity on the rampage again (joking).
Mykolas
2022-05-04 21:42:34 +0000 UTCoverall interesting discussion, but sitting as I do in Eastern Europe, my sense was that you really underplayed the sheer malevolence of the Kremlin kleptocracy -- on many dimensions (including how it treats its own citzens). Once you factor that in, it becomes a bit clearer why there is a sense that one is staring into an abyss, with no easy solutions.
Hans Gutbrod
2022-04-13 21:04:57 +0000 UTC
