I've been wrong about how far Putin would go before, so I won't make any predictions. I think it's too early to call this a "lebensraum" maneuver, and as I keep saying, the costs of conflict are so high, that it's perfectly sensible to pursue a cautious approach, even at some cost (even to human life). Minsk 2 was somewhat dictated by Russia, but it wasn't a hugely onerous protocol, and the causes of its failure don't lie entirely with Putin -- meaning this invasion was not a fait accompli. Also, let the dust settle and see if it's more like the 1st Iraq War/Gulf War, where "just" the military and infrastructure are cruelly decapitated.
And Russia today is a middle power like the UK or France, not a great power like the US. If your analogy is apt, it could be soundly defeated in a conventional war.
It's not a Lebensraum maneuver, of course. It's reclaiming their Sudetenland, almost explicitly so if you've read the essay Putin published about Ukraine.
That’s fair, I have read that and he is pretty explicit so that analogy is appropriate. I still think Minsk 2 had a decent chance of success though.
And my experience has been that when people make allusions to Hitler, even if giving specific time ranges before his worst actions, they are making the analogy in order to say that “whatever has happened so far, it is only the beginning”. I still don’t think it will develop into “lebensraum”. Maybe you didn’t imply that, but that was largely what I thought I was responding to.
I don't think it'll develop into "lebensraum" for the simple reason that Russia doesn't have a shortage of land - on the contrary, it has a shortage of people to develop the land that it already has. Far East and Siberia offer a vast frontier for expansion, and will continue to do so for many decades to come.
What Russia is doing is reassembling its historical empire - and this is an ideological goal, not an economic one. But if it does that, it'll also want Eastern Europe as a buffer, for the same exact reason Soviets did.
The main reason why I brought up 1938 is not because I think that Russia is ideologically similar to the Nazis here, but rather that the immediate consequences will be similar to what happened back then: if Russia is allowed to invade and occupy Ukraine, it has a long list of other territories it has issues with, and there's no clear reason why it shouldn't just keep ticking things off it.
I've been wrong about how far Putin would go before, so I won't make any predictions. I think it's too early to call this a "lebensraum" maneuver, and as I keep saying, the costs of conflict are so high, that it's perfectly sensible to pursue a cautious approach, even at some cost (even to human life). Minsk 2 was somewhat dictated by Russia, but it wasn't a hugely onerous protocol, and the causes of its failure don't lie entirely with Putin -- meaning this invasion was not a fait accompli. Also, let the dust settle and see if it's more like the 1st Iraq War/Gulf War, where "just" the military and infrastructure are cruelly decapitated.
And Russia today is a middle power like the UK or France, not a great power like the US. If your analogy is apt, it could be soundly defeated in a conventional war.