NATO

Reality strikes back! The real Ukraine invasion came a week later

As most will no doubt be aware by now, Russia launched a "specialy military operation" in Ukraine on the 23rd of February. Most of us would call it simply an invasion. This came a week after the official invasion date pronounced by the U.S., which was supposed to be the 16th of February.

I must admit that I thought the news of the invasion was a hoax. I am not, however, completely willing to abandon that idea. 

Russia has large military drills on its Western flank every year, almost always in conjunction with Belarus. Every time they have had those drills over the past few years the West has warned of an invasion but nothing has come of it. Of course, it could be that they had been plotting an invasion all this time, and I cannot rule that out. 

However, when I look at how the U.S. officials were behaving before this happened, it's difficult to conclude that even they saw talk of a Russian invasion as anything else than a way for Biden to play tough on Russia for an invasion which they were convinced would never come. If you had wanted Russia to invade Ukraine, you would have done exactly everything that the Biden administration and NATO did prior to the 23rd of February. 

Russia had very clear lines and since I have been following the Ukraine situation for a long time, I think I can pretty much narrow it down to these two:

  • Ukraine must not be a member of NATO or host NATO weapons systems.
  • Ukraine must not attempt to take the Donbass by force.
Any violation of these two conditions are red lines which Russia had said would result in a military solution. Well, all the rhetoric prior to the invasion was of Ukraine some time later perhaps entering NATO and that Russia should not get to decide who was to be in NATO. Then they decided to ship massive amounts of lethal weapons to Ukraine under the cover of repelling a Russian invasion.
 
On top of that it is now very obvious that Ukraine had a lot of forces surrounding the Donbass region and that there had been a military escalation there with preparations to retake the areas. This would explain why Ukraine doesn't seem to have had any forces defending its border with Belarus.
 
The real trigger for me was when Zelensky in the weekend before the Ukraine invasion whent to the Munich Security Conference and more or less demanded that Ukraine should be allowed to join NATO, or else they would develop nuclear weapons. As soon as he said that I felt sick in my stomach. I realised things were looking ugly and given that shelling in the Donbass by that point had increased 6-fold over the previous weeks, it seemed to me as though we had crossed aline.
 
When Vladimir Putin then recognised the break-away republics I thought that might offer some respite, but the shelling continued. On top of that, the West responded with the most ridiculous sanctions to that event to the point where if I was a Russian leader I may well have wondered "what is the point of holding back now"?
 
We shall never know whether the invasion was planned all along, but all I can write and say is that had one wanted an invasion of Ukraine by Russia, one could hardly have done more to bring it about than what the puppet rulers of the West and the Ukrainian leadership did in the run-up to the war.
 
Now that the war has started, I think the military result is a foregone conclusion. It will either be a relatively quick Russian victory or if others intervene, possibly a world war.
 
I hope for the latter, for the sake of Ukrainians and all the world, and hope to have more to write on this later.

What is certain is that the fantasy of the West, of their non-existent-in-practice values, has met the reality of Russian weapons and been found to be nothing but a castle built on sand - or perhaps that should read quick sand.

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