Russia and its “Special Operation” in Ukraine

[Xann]

34 minutes ago, HanoiVillan said:

How dare you bring any nuance to the discussion.

Same mugs are still mugs.

[chrisp65]

22 minutes ago, blandy said:

There’s quite a taint of fascism in a fair part of Ukraine’s military and militia , that’s the one part of the grifter’s tweet that is accurate. 

 

Yes, I disappeared down a bit of a rabbit hole on this, and fair to say it wasn’t the nicest rabbit hole.

Not easy to filter fact and fiction once you get off the more mainstream sites, but that’s one **** up part of the world.

 

I’m just bloody glad we have some heavy weights on our side that will be doing some deep diving in to the facts on this bit of the chess board. 

If you can trust anyone to get this right, it’ll be the U.S. Military, Johnson, and Truss.

 

[Rds1983]

42 minutes ago, HanoiVillan said:

For sure. I don't think I've seen people claiming that 'all the ethnic Russians in the Donbas want to be part of Russia', though maybe they have. There seems to be a range of different opinions within the Donbas, from those who reject the Russian presence and want full rule from Kyiv, to those who want to remain part of Ukraine but also have greater devolved power in a federal structure, to those who want direct rule from Moscow. It does seem likely though, that one of the latter two options would get more (not 'all') votes in a referendum. 

I'm not sure how much trust I'd put in the results of that vote. 

[HanoiVillan]

9 minutes ago, Rds1983 said:

I'm not sure how much trust I'd put in the results of that vote. 

I mean, fair enough, you're entitled to be suspicious. But it's not a big secret that Ukraine's eastern provinces have many residents who prefer alignment with Moscow over Kyiv.

[Rds1983]

1 minute ago, HanoiVillan said:

I mean, fair enough, you're entitled to be suspicious. But it's not a big secret that Ukraine's eastern provinces have many residents who prefer alignment with Moscow over Kyiv.

I'm sure there is. But I'd still suspect the actual would be manipulated in some way or other. 

[blandy]

57 minutes ago, chrisp65 said:

I’m just bloody glad we have some heavy weights on our side that will be doing some deep diving in to the facts on this bit of the chess board. 

If you can trust anyone to get this right, it’ll be the U.S. Military, Johnson, and Truss.

I take your point about the last 3, but I actually believe that "we" are pretty well informed and understanding of the nature of the Ukrainian mix of private and national military and militia.

What we do with that understanding is another thing, mind.

[KentVillan]

10 minutes ago, HanoiVillan said:

I mean, fair enough, you're entitled to be suspicious. But it's not a big secret that Ukraine's eastern provinces have many residents who prefer alignment with Moscow over Kyiv.

There’s been serious ethnic cleansing and Russian interference there for ages. Those regions are historically part of Ukraine, and there’s no real justification for Russia taking them other than realpolitik / military strategy. The parallels with Hitler’s Greater Germany are (for once) not too wide of the mark.

Putin has for a long time tried to equate “ethnic Russian” with “pro-Putin”, but if you look at countries with big Russian populations which have managed to escape his grasps (eg Latvia) it’s really not always the case. There’s nuance, and democratic politics exposes that nuance, while authoritarian quasi democracy does everything it can to hide it.

Putin is a far less popular figure than polls and election results suggest, as he manipulates all of them - because he is an old fashioned dictator. His supposed 80-90%+ popularity inside Russia is not reflected in Russian-speaking communities outside Russia. They may not speak out openly, but that’s because he’s a dangerous man to criticise, not because they rate his leadership.

Too many in the west fall into the trap of thinking that when Putin embarrasses someone we don’t like (Boris, Truss, whoever) that this is a feather in his cap, and not just them failing to stand up effectively to a dangerous autocrat.

The good thing now is a very wide range of different political positions in Europe are starting to align around a common position, and hopefully that unity will have a positive effect on the other political challenges we face post Covid.

Anyway, this is a really good piece:

https://samf.substack.com/p/putin-nato-and-european-security?utm_source=twitter
 

Quote

We don’t know the counter-factual of what would have happened if NATO and the EU had not expanded to the east but it is hard to believe that keeping so many states outside of established support structures would have been more stable and mutually beneficial. The Russian analysis of the current crisis implies that these countries might have stayed snugly in a Russian sphere of influence. But none of them wanted this. Because of the lengthy time horizon for joining the EU, membership of NATO was an attractive, quicker, option. They also had their own memories of betrayal not only at Munich in 1938 but also at the Yalta conference of February 1945 which is when they were consigned to the Soviet sphere. Efforts to achieve the benefits of a closer association without full membership through NATO’s Partnership for Peace’ faltered because it seemed too loose.

Worth reading the whole thing - he covers off a lot of the inconsistencies in Putin’s narrative, while also being honest about the west’s mistakes.

[HanoiVillan]

1 hour ago, KentVillan said:

There’s been serious ethnic cleansing and Russian interference there for ages. Those regions are historically part of Ukraine, and there’s no real justification for Russia taking them other than realpolitik / military strategy. The parallels with Hitler’s Greater Germany are (for once) not too wide of the mark.

I agree with you on much of this, and I don't support and would not support a Russian annexation of these provinces. The 'best' solution remains that that was agreed in the Minsk 2 agreement, that these provinces would adopt a more federal structure while remaining part of Ukraine. There has been backsliding from both sides on Minsk 2 and it is completely unimplemented, but it is important that both sides have contributed to the current situation; respecting some degree of autonomy in Russian-speaking provinces would obviously not involve summarily and extra-judicially closing Russian-language TV stations, for example.

1 hour ago, KentVillan said:

Putin is a far less popular figure than polls and election results suggest, as he manipulates all of them - because he is an old fashioned dictator. His supposed 80-90%+ popularity inside Russia is not reflected in Russian-speaking communities outside Russia. They may not speak out openly, but that’s because he’s a dangerous man to criticise, not because they rate his leadership.

Opinion polling is obviously unreliable in Russia, but Putin's personal popularity appears to rise and fall at different points in time. I don't place any weight in my beliefs or any part of my argument on the outcomes of Russian opinion polls.

What I do have here is a tiny amount of personal experience, which is not directly relevant, but nevertheless does guide my opinion. I lived for a short time in Crimea in 2010, before its annexation obviously, and it was very clear from talking to locals that identity is a very complex thing in this part of the world. When I talked to people in the town I lived (Yevpatoriya), they tended to prefer speaking Russian to Ukrainian (it wasn't uncommon to meet people who couldn't understand Ukrainian) and saw themselves as in some larger sense 'Russian'. Obviously not everyone felt that way. Nevertheless, my feeling from that experience was that while I have no doubt at all that the outcome of 2014 referendum was manipulated to get its fairly absurd 97% verdict, that the result would have been the same anyway (clearly closer, but probably not actually close) absent that manipulation. 

EDIT: Just to make it more explicit, the reason for this anecdote being that I have no difficulty believing that public opinion in the Donbas is also complex, on this topic. We have no particular way of being sure of specific proportions of the population who feel a particular way, but I don't think it is or should be controversial to say that as you travel east in Ukraine, and the population becomes more heavily Russian-speaking and of Russian descent, that political alignment with Russia increases, and with the current government in Kyiv decreases.

1 hour ago, KentVillan said:

Too many in the west fall into the trap of thinking that when Putin embarrasses someone we don’t like (Boris, Truss, whoever) that this is a feather in his cap, and not just them failing to stand up effectively to a dangerous autocrat.

Maybe they do, but this certainly has no part in the argument I'm making.

1 hour ago, KentVillan said:

https://samf.substack.com/p/putin-nato-and-european-security?utm_source=twitter

I agree that this is an interesting read.

Edited February 20, 2022 by HanoiVillan

[KentVillan]

Great post @HanoiVillanand all good point. Agree completely that Ukraine becomes more pro-Russian as you go east, but as I said, there’s a lot of nuance buried in that which is hidden by a lot of the “data”. The fact Putin’s numbers go up and down just means the data isn’t 100% bullshit, but doesn’t stop it from being 75% bullshit, for example. Re Donbas, IMO it’s not as simple as “these people invited Putin in” or “these people want to be part of Russia”. We need to disconnect Putin from Russia, anyway, when we talk about these subjects - he has impoverished, disenfranchised and murdered many ethnic Russians over the years.

[bickster]

18 minutes ago, HanoiVillan said:

respecting some degree of autonomy in Russian-speaking provinces would...

Russian is a minority (albeit large - 60/40ish)) demographic in the Donbas, the only area of Ukraine where it was a majority was / is Crimea. It is also split between Urban / Rural, the cities being mainly Russian speaking but nonetheless it is a minority. And as we can also imagine not all the Russian speaking people of the Donbas want to be part of Russia

[HanoiVillan]

28 minutes ago, bickster said:

Russian is a minority (albeit large - 60/40ish)) demographic in the Donbas, the only area of Ukraine where it was a majority was / is Crimea. It is also split between Urban / Rural, the cities being mainly Russian speaking but nonetheless it is a minority. And as we can also imagine not all the Russian speaking people of the Donbas want to be part of Russia

Per Wiki, on the 2001 census data:

'The population is largely Russian-speaking, although ethnic Ukrainians constitute a majority (58.0%). Among the minorities are native Russians (39.1%), Belarusians (0.8%), and others (1.4%). Ukrainians constitute the majority in all raions except for Stanytsia-Luhanska Raion and Krasnodon Raion, both of which are east of Luhansk. Ethnic Russians also constitute the majority in regionally significant cities, such as Krasnodon, Sverdlovsk, Krasnyi Luch and Stakhanov.

According to the 2001 Ukrainian Census, more than 68.8% of the population consider themselves Russian speakers, while 30.0% consider themselves Ukrainian speakers. The Russophone population predominates in the southern portion of the region and around the city of Luhansk, while the northern region is less populated, mostly agricultural and Ukrainophone.'

from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luhansk_Oblast

and:

'At the 2001 Ukrainian National Census, the ethnic groups within the Donetsk Oblast were: Ukrainians – 2,744,100 (56.9%), Russians – 1,844,400 (38.2%), Pontic Greeks – 77,500 (1.6%), Belarusians – 44,500 (0.9%), others (2.3%).^[11]

At the 2001 census, the languages spoken within the oblast were: Russian — 74.9%, Ukrainian – 24.1%.'

from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donetsk_Oblast

Note that your map there is measuring geopgraphical areas ('city, town and village councils') and that there is no reason to think that these areas are anything like equal to each other in population size.

One of the many problems of the Ukrainian state is that they have not managed to conduct a census at any point in the last 21 years, so to what extent this has changed since then is a bit of a mystery, though on the whole I think you would expect that since 2014, probably the composition of the population has become more pro-Russian or pro-separatist due to internal migration, but again there seems to be no way to really know this for sure.

[mjmooney]

Despite having studied the period up to (and beyond) university level, for the first time I think I now actually understand how people in Britain felt in 1938. With hindsight, everyone agrees that Britain and France should have stood up to Germany in 1938, instead of caving in at Munich over Sudeten/Czechoslovakia. But as Chamberlain said at the time, it was a "quarrel in a far away country, between people of whom we know nothing". Did the UK electorate want to get into a shooting war over it? No they didn't, despite the sickening feeling that even if we let this one go, Hitler wasn't going to stop there. 

So, do we call Putin's bluff, or not? I lived through the Cold War, from Cuba to 'protect and survive', Greenham Common, etc., and frankly this is more worrying than any of it. 

[KentVillan]

7 minutes ago, mjmooney said:

Despite having studied the period up to (and beyond) university level, for the first time I think I now actually understand how people in Britain felt in 1938. With hindsight, everyone agrees that Britain and France should have stood up to Germany in 1938, instead of caving in at Munich over Sudeten/Czechoslovakia. But as Chamberlain said at the time, it was a "quarrel in a far away country, between people of whom we know nothing". Did the UK electorate want to get into a shooting war over it? No they didn't, despite the sickening feeling that even if we let this one go, Hitler wasn't going to stop there. 

So, do we call Putin's bluff, or not? I lived through the Cold War, from Cuba to 'protect and survive', Greenham Common, etc., and frankly this is more worrying than any of it. 

I agree, we have been inured by decades of sabre rattling and huffing and puffing over relatively minor conflicts. This feels much more consequential than anything that has happened outside the Middle East in the last few decades. It would be a much bigger deal than the Yugoslavian wars.

We have to remember Ukraine is a country of 44m people that has a long border with the EU. It would trigger an enormous refugee crisis that would destabilise neighbouring countries, and there’s nothing to say Putin wouldn’t seize the opportunity to settle other scores around the fringes of Europe (the Baltic States, Poland, Moldova, Georgia, etc).

On top of that, how we react would be a clear signal to the Chinese of how we would respond to an invasion of Taiwan, and other military action around the South China Sea.

Imagine a world where Putin has seized Kyiv, China has taken over Taiwan, and Trump is then elected on a platform of “non interference” with other great powers’ “spheres of influence”. It’s the way we’d embolden anti democratic forces that would be most concerning. These tendencies don’t soften when you concede ground to them.

Of course one hope is that Ukrainian resistance would be so determined that Putin lost a lot of support internally - a bit like Afghanistan. But Ukraine isn’t a mountainous country like Afghanistan. Afghan resistance have always been able to make their wars very asymmetric… Ukraine is a plains country, which is one of the reasons Putin fears it becoming part of NATO.

It’s all very scary and very messy. I don’t envy the people trying to strategise this one. What is Putin’s long game here? Does he even have one? Are China being honest with us?

[blandy]

25 minutes ago, mjmooney said:

So, do we call Putin's bluff, or not?

It’s not foolproof but standing up to aggressive bullying, where you have the means to do so, is probably the better course of action.

My perception is that Putin doesn’t believe we will and this is encouraging his actions

[Awol]

US news sources reporting Russian formations have received orders that the invasion is on. 

Given the sanctions regime the west is talking about imposing on Russia the economic fall out will be big too, particularly if gas supplies to Europe are seriously disrupted. Inflation could really take off and then there’s the unknown of cyber attacks on infrastructure and critical systems, which it seems likely could be used by both sides - arguments over who did what first won’t really matter if it kicks off. 

[HanoiVillan]

20 minutes ago, blandy said:

It’s not foolproof but standing up to aggressive bullying, where you have the means to do so, is probably the better course of action.

My perception is that Putin doesn’t believe we will and this is encouraging his actions

What does 'standing up to bullying' look like, here?

Nobody is proposing that any NATO member state enters a direct military confrontation with Russia.

[chrisp65]

Really hope the Chinese nuclear power stations come on line before the Russian gas is turned off.

 

Security, eh.

 

 

[blandy]

50 minutes ago, HanoiVillan said:

What does 'standing up to bullying' look like, here?

Behind the talk from various western folks there have been some distinctly mixed messages. From Biden's mention of "incursions" not being challenged, to Germany's refusal to allow military overflights to Ukraine, to London's reticence to actually stop Russian money, to a whole bunch of other stuff, the West hardly looks determined and united in how we will respond. So I agree there's no will to be militarily involved in conflict, but we're a long way short of a united opposition and determination to really cause any serious repercussions in the event the Putin invades.

[KentVillan]

1 hour ago, HanoiVillan said:

What does 'standing up to bullying' look like, here?

Nobody is proposing that any NATO member state enters a direct military confrontation with Russia.

It’s a good question.

There are definitely more things we can do beyond current proposals, that don’t involve direct military conflict with Russia.

We can supply Ukraine with arms, intelligence briefings, diplomatic support, etc.

We can send troops to the Baltic States, Poland, Turkey and other NATO members threatened by this conflict to try and contain any expectations of taking this further.

And we can come up with much more aggressive economic sanctions than Russia has previously experienced. I thought Keir Starmer was right to talk about proactively addressing Russian funding of Western political parties and media organisations. If combined with sanctions on oligarchs and disruption of the oligarch class’s western economic interests, that would be fairly damaging for Putin I think.

I guess we are also engaging in (and can scale up) cyber warfare, which to date has been a reluctantly accepted part of the modern world order that hasn’t spilled over into military conflict (although maybe this will change).

If the Cold War is anything to go by, we may end up getting involved in a whole bunch of proxy wars, too, but history suggests they rarely achieve very much at all.

I imagine we’ll also be sending over “private contractors” to “train” Ukrainian resistance forces, but not sure what I think about the merits of that kind of stuff.

So yes plenty of stuff we can do, but it’s all a bit messy. Ideal scenario would be winding back the clock to 1990 and rethinking how we dealt with the breakup of the Soviet Union. This is all delayed payback for a lot of big mistakes.

[osmark86]

49 minutes ago, KentVillan said:

It’s a good question.

There are definitely more things we can do beyond current proposals, that don’t involve direct military conflict with Russia.

We can supply Ukraine with arms, intelligence briefings, diplomatic support, etc.

We can send troops to the Baltic States, Poland, Turkey and other NATO members threatened by this conflict to try and contain any expectations of taking this further.

And we can come up with much more aggressive economic sanctions than Russia has previously experienced. I thought Keir Starmer was right to talk about proactively addressing Russian funding of Western political parties and media organisations. If combined with sanctions on oligarchs and disruption of the oligarch class’s western economic interests, that would be fairly damaging for Putin I think.

I guess we are also engaging in (and can scale up) cyber warfare, which to date has been a reluctantly accepted part of the modern world order that hasn’t spilled over into military conflict (although maybe this will change).

If the Cold War is anything to go by, we may end up getting involved in a whole bunch of proxy wars, too, but history suggests they rarely achieve very much at all.

I imagine we’ll also be sending over “private contractors” to “train” Ukrainian resistance forces, but not sure what I think about the merits of that kind of stuff.

So yes plenty of stuff we can do, but it’s all a bit messy. Ideal scenario would be winding back the clock to 1990 and rethinking how we dealt with the breakup of the Soviet Union. This is all delayed payback for a lot of big mistakes.

I'm sure Chelski supporters would love this proposal.