Tusk: Right now, 500 million Europeans are begging 300 million Americans for protection from 140 million Russians who have been unable to overcome 50 million Ukrainians for three years
The Russian playbook for post Cold War dominance was literally publicly published a long time ago, and the final phase is getting close. After getting the US to break away from the rest of the west, everything was being carved up for their allies.
It’s all written in The Third Empire: Russia as it Ought to be. Almost all the steps have been completed and invaded Europe is coming up.
prominent foreign policy experts (former senators, military officers, diplomats, etc.) sent an open letter to Clinton outlining their opposition to NATO expansion back in 1997:
George Kennan, arguably America's greatest ever foreign policy strategist, the architect of the U.S. cold war strategy warned that NATO expansion was a "tragic mistake" that ought to ultimately provoke a "bad reaction from Russia" back in 1998.
Jack F. Matlock Jr., US Ambassador to the Soviet Union from 1987-1991, warning in 1997 that NATO expansion was "the most profound strategic blunder, [encouraging] a chain of events that could produce the most serious security threat [...] since the Soviet Union collapsed"
Even Gorbachev warned about this. All these experts were marginalized, silenced, and ignored. Yet, now people are trying to rewrite history and pretend that Russia attacked Ukraine out of the blue and completely unprovoked.
It's been invaded precisely because the US refused to publicly state that Ukraine would not joined NATO and wanted to maintain ambiguity on the matter while arming Ukraine. Nice of you to try and twist that around though. Gold star for mental gymnastics.
Nope, US clearly said no to NATO for them already in 2009, much before the Russian invasions.
Dude, this stuff you're telling is at least three yo. It's been largely debunked.
All the ex Warsaw hate Russia even if they've slavic roots in common like Poland or Ukraine, just take a look on what that people state and do. This should tell you much about how much this people want to avoid Moscow's influence.
After three years in Ukraine, it's obvious to anybody with a minimally functional brain that Russia is not going to be able to invade Europe. However, what Russia will absolutely do is exploit the political instability in Europe caused by massive austerity needed to massively ramp up defense. Why invade the idiots when it's far cheaper to do political capture.
What is also obvious to anybody with a minimally functional brain is that Russia would invade if they thought they could. Therefore ramping up defence is a good idea to dissuade Russia from thinking it's a good idea. Even with that deterrence, those not covered by this (Moldova, Georgia, as mentioned) are still vulnerable.
It is a reasonable point that there needs to be a balance, as throwing the entire economy into the military by pulling societal investment will fan anti-EU pro-Russian sentiment, so a balance needs to be struck. From the tone, I doubt you're the right person to discuss the nuance though.
The opposite is obvious actually because Russia has a huge land area with a low population. Trading people for more territory would make absolutely no sense for Russia. Maybe time to check the functioning of that brain of yours, cause it's clearly not firing on all cylinders.
We could also say that war over there actually started in 2014.
But as you also stated, a lot of people were surprised since there is not a neo-liberal side against a communist side anymore since there is no communism anymore in Russia (Do you agree with this? Apart from the single-party political structure which can be called with various names, the economy is maybe watched by the gov but still liberal).
The fact that Russia is no longer communist and NATO has continued to expand and surround Russia is a clear demonstration that this has never been an ideological conflict. And that illustrates that Russia does indeed have legitimate security concerns, because it's clear that the goal of NATO expansion is to contain Russia.
Yeah that was supposed to be the big prize, and then they could plunder Russia and surround China from the west. Didn't really work out though, and now all the western fash are seething.
If not for someone to stop him, yes Putin would march all the way back to East Germany. As it is, he's most likely going to get stuck before touching Poland. And touching Poland would be the end of Putin almost immediately.
Would it be the end of him even now, when he's backed by the US? That changes the dynamic and puts all of Europe in a tough spot. Europe against Russia is a piece of cake. Europe agaist Russia + US.. not so much.
They are trying to. And the BS about needing defense is actually the traditional European fantasy of invading Russia, or now openly inviting nuclear annihilation of Europe to spare the US from non nuclear winter consequences.
Europe thinks it can serve the CIA in opposition to Trump, but there natural continuation of CIA sycophancy is more desperation to serve US empire. Increasing the stupidity level to 10, with mass military programs and nuclear threats, makes it easy to go to 11, with mass imports of US weapons when they conclude that they simply weren't stupid or lying enough on Russophobia.
Tusk/Poland do have another option for building up an army. At start of Ukraine war, there was Polish media endgame where Poland took a big chunk of western Ukraine. Russia may not care, except that Polish-Russian peace works just as well as a Ukraine-Russia peace for denazification.
Any crackhead in Europe who doesn't know they helped whitewash the US/Ukraine provocation. is a culpable idiot who want's war on Russia no matter how badly it has turned out so far.