Out of the three major nuclear powers, I’d say only Russia would ever get sanctions for invading and occupying land. When was the last time US got sanctions?
Iraq had a “coalition of the willing” but that was mostly a joke.
One million excess deaths in Iraq as a result. We removed the Baathists and put Shiites in charge instead. Baathists joined up with ISIS and gave them American tanks and humvees, which then spilled violence over into Syria, and other regions.
Invading and occupying was actually better than invading and leaving a failed state like Libya. There, ISIS and Boko Haram were able to establish strongholds and millions still live under violent gangs. At least we stabilized Iraq somewhat — until we also left abruptly.
The last time we occupied land with our army was 2 months ago, when we withdrew from Afghanistan (also extremely abruptly).
Hawaii? Philippines / Guam / etc? Guantanamo? Panama canal?
But I see Russia invading and occupying, not annexing (unless you mean stationing troops in the “independent” regions). They specifically disavow annexing unless the government refuses to negotiate and sign a peace agreement. They already did this exact playbook in the Russo-Georgian war, down to defending the two breakaway republics, the provocations, the “peacekeeping mission”, the invasion, and demilitarization (through defeating their army). And that war was also immediately after a NATO related escalation.
1) NATO countries didn’t send endless amounts of fighter jets and drones to Georgia
2) France helped broker a peace agreement
A few months later, Russia’s troops withdrew and Georgia is an independent country.
On the other hand, a lot of lessons were learned by USSR in Afghanistan — a quagmire for 10 years where USA trained Mujahideen against the Soviets. Russia+China+Pakistan returned the favor in Afghanistan with arming the Taliban when USA occupied it for 20 years and spent trillions. Afghanistan has never been defeated, but has become a war-ravaged country with a shitty economy.
As Ukrainians say: the West is ready to fight Russia to the last Ukrainian!
> I see Russia invading and occupying, not annexing
Crimea was unambiguously annexed in 2014 [1]. The U.S. hasn’t annexed territory since WWII (the Marshall Islands) or WWI (the Virgin Islands and Kingman Reef).
Grenada- response to a coup d'e´tat with a multinational force
Panama- technically Noriega declared a state of war first (not the brightest move)
Desert Storm - response to Iraqi invasion/aggression
Haiti - restore democratically elected president
Bosnia- UN sanctioned response to Serbian aggression
Afghanistan- response to Twin Towers - 9/11 aggression. The worst thing we did was actually trying to be 'virtuous' and nation build when we weren't wanted. Get in, decapitate government, make it clear we will rinse and repeat as necessary as long as they host terrorists, leave them alone, with maybe one air base to carry through on the threat if necessary.
Iraq take 2- this is the most questionable one and definitely the most unwise one. Iraq/Saddam had continuously been aggressive post Deseret Storm and hadn't abided by peace terms, so in a legalistic sense, this was justifiable, from pretty much every other sense, moronic.
Libya- National Transition Council was the recognized government at the time of Gaddafi's killing. Supporting any particular faction in the civil war before it played out though, was worse than useless.
Killing of OBL in Pakistan - considering we started an invasion of Afghanistan over him, going after him on Pakistani soil seems rather mild.
Generally it is a pattern of being the world's police and/or avenging attacks, not wars of aggression to capture territory.
Now if you're talking Cold War CIA, then the list of nasty manipulations justified by fear of what the 'bad guys' were doing is a long and not defendable list...
Gonna have to point out that both Korea and Vietnam were western installed dictatorships.
In the case of Korea at least, they were fighting off the Soviet installed dictator, but in Vietnam they were fighting off the longstanding indigenous anti colonial movement.
Wasn’t Hawaii given statehood in 1959? Is that not considered annexing?
Puerto Rico has referendums to join the US pretty often. Crimea had one and voted to join Russia. The international community could have placed more observers there, they just didnt do it in protest of the legitimacy of the very referendum itself. The international community just doesn’t recognize the principle of self-determination for any regions other than countries. That’s also why they accept Hong Kong being gifted top down by one empire to another.
Back during USSR days one guy (Khruschtchev) unilaterally gifted Crimea to Ukraine. Why is that more legitimate than an entire referendum? It’s not surprising how Crimea voted. It’s far more Russian than Ukrainian ethnically. If you want to blame anyone, blame Stalin who deported the vast majority of Crimean Tatars, otherwise they might have voted differently.
A territory becoming a state is not annexation. The US annexed Hawaii in 1898.
Puerto Rico is already part of the US.
The referendum in Crimea was run by Russia as a pretext after it had already invaded. It is extremely doubtful that it represents the actual views of the people living there.
The referendum was run while the region was being held at gunpoint by an invading force. There is no possible way to hold a legitimate referendum in those circumstances.
Either way regions are "held at gunpoint" by your definition. It's either going to be from one government or another. For example just a few years ago:
The key is whether the referendum actually got held and there was a large enough turnout that it was meaningful. No one was stopping more observers from coming and overseeing it, including whether coersion was happening. And anyway, what difference would guns make in how people voted? Because I don't see how the soldiers could possibly know the way people voted in a closed booth. So even if there were people with guns out there, that by itself wouldn't affect how people vote. The most they could do is try to force people to the voting booth, as they do in Australia for example, or try to keep them from showing up, as they do in Southern US states.
And besides, when it comes to Russia or Belarus, it doesn't matter that the legitimate government is dominant in the region instead of "an invading force", you don't trust the outcome of the referendums anyway. For example, Belarus just had one a week ago, do you trust the results?
Finally, a technical point: Russia had 25,000 troops in the Crimean peninsula, which it was allowed to have according to the Partition Treaty about the Black Sea Fleet, so it wasn't an "invasion" there: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partition_Treaty_on_the_Status....
That treaty bound Russia to "respect the sovereignty of Ukraine, honor its legislation and preclude interference in the internal affairs of Ukraine" and, furthermore, Russian military personnel had to show their "military identification cards" when crossing the Ukrainian-Russian border; Russian forces could operate "beyond their deployment sites" only after "coordination with the competent agencies of Ukraine."
Sending in masked troops without insignia to overthrow Crimea's Supreme Council, install a Russian puppet government and run a farcical independence referendum is as far as you can get from following the terms of that treaty.
There is a huge difference between having your troops stationed in military bases and hitting beaches and pubs in free time, and having them guns out on the streets.
So, the last time the US annexed land by force was the 1800s and the Spanish American war. That's probably why the US isn't getting sanctioned, but Russia is and China would.
Meanwhile, I look at Crimea and say Russia isn't shy about annexing. And this particular thread was trying to talk about if China could invade Taiwan without sanctions, using examples of Russia and the US as similar powers. My point is that wars of annexation are met with sanctions.
By your logic PRC "reunifying" with TW wouldn't be met with sanctions because it's a civil war where TW is de jure
recognized as part of Chinese territory, at least by parties who can do meaningful sanctions. After all PRC can't annex what's already legally hers.
Except sanctions will be driven by political decisions in democracies. I feel like most of the EU and US citizens would consider it an invasion - so sanctions.
It's not an international law driven by unflinching rules. It's a democratic choice, or a series of them.
I think people are viscerally responding to the invasion and bombings, less so the political status of a region. Annexation isn't the distinctive feature here. Lots of people protested the Iraq war, around the world, and it didn't have anything to do with annexation. Civilian lives is what matters.
> And that war was also immediately after a NATO related escalation.
What 'NATO related escalation' immediately preceded Russia's invasion of the Ukraine? I don't believe that there was one. As far as I can tell, Putin's casus belli is 'the Ukraine exists.'
This is obviously just speculation, but it doesn’t seem like the current invasion of Ukraine is about annexation. It’s rather similar to the US invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan in that respect. They’re widely speculated to be targeting regime change, installing a pro Russian puppet government.
by everyone else. if the US would be politically isolated, they might think over their preferred political form of fascism.
or they would just start bombing everyone.
Just yesterday I was thinking: What if others started to grab territory, which Russia claims to be its territory around the world now? Wouldn't that be fortunate timing and overload Russian army?
Today I read this.
I too have taken Russia's actions as both precedent and the distraction needed to make my own move. I declared the basement of my house (finished, furnished) complete with bathroom, sink and microwave, to be my own sovereign domain. The consequences for violating that territory will be such as none in my household have ever in their history experienced.
Sure, but when his family finally tires of his imperialist warmongering, they can just block his sewer line. Let's see him hold onto his territory then!
Just yesterday I was thinking: What if we piss off a nuclear power all around the world now? Wouldn't that be fortunate timing to solve global warming?
FTFY. I mean sure we only have another 50 years before the planet is unlivable for us, but why desperately try to accelerate it?
The planet will not be unlivable in 50 years. Larger areas of it will be, but most of the landmass will still be hospitable. There may be significant collapse of agricultural production, but again, that will affect the poorer countries mainly. I suppose some massive and unpredictable ecological collapse could conceivably happen by then, which would I guess have the potential of severely damaging food production, but I’m not sure if that’s considered especially likely.
sending waves of migration into the richer countries.
at some point we are all in this together.
> some massive and unpredictable ecological collapse could conceivably happen by then, which would I guess have the potential of severely damaging food production, but I’m not sure if that’s considered especially likely.
unlikely that we get an unpredictable ecological collapse.
predictable ones, however, are already taking place. Insect populations down 80%, bird populations down 50%, general extinction rate at levels that make me cry, ...
how long until this affects food production? Hell, at current rates of erosion, the US is predicted to run out of dirt by the end of the century.
> sending waves of migration into the richer countries
The richer countries still have the mass transportation in their hands. Its railroads, planes, ships and cars of richer countries which bring the migrants.
I can’t find the source right now, but nuclear winter is projected to drop temperatures by 20 to 40°C . Not a single country in the world has the infrastructure or reserves to deal with that.
I see, clever way to combat global warming … but nuclear winter will only last for about 10-20 years. And the warming hasn’t progressed enough that countries bombing the shit out of all major cities will cancel it out. Wait until 2100 before trying that.
PS: firebombing is more effective, more ash after all :-P
Is it though? Russian conventional army has clearly been devastated by corruption and bad administration, as the generals and staff didn't anticipate that it would actually be used in a real all-out war. What makes you think that nuclear forces are in better shape?
There's a significant chance their nuclear weapons are in absolute shambles, but who wants to call that bluff?
Additionally, even if their nuclear forces are in shambles, it really only takes a single launch to set off nuclear war. It's not like their entire nuclear force needs to function in order for the world to see a very bad outcome.
When I say "shambles" I don't mean "0% functional, can't even launch a missile."
The system would have to be minimally functional to at least launch something. But at that point, even if the warhead is a dud or the rocket explodes immediately after launch, or goes off target, etc - the genie is well and truly out of the bottle.
Search Bulava / Topol tests 201x, RU test fires ICBMs successfully every year. Reporting of current RU incompetence doesn't suggest anything deficient with their rocketry functionality except not much missiles were used, and a few precision strikes on runways were consistently off course by several meters and missed the runway, indicating user error. Several meters doesn't matter with nukes.
Putin is not the only one who could play this game, and make demands on historical grounds. More modern problems, like Chagos Island should really be solved though. The way UK is acting, and treating the Chagos exiles is quite ugly. IMHO.
To be fair, this is not something that just happened recently, nor just in Japan (nor just by Russia). Airspace of multiple nations gets violated multiple times per year by multiple nations, all the time. Although the timing makes it a bit suspected, I'm sure it's just a general test of "readiness", which happens often.
Also recently four Russian jets violated Swedish airspace during joint Finnish-Swedish exercises.
From the linked article, described by the Swedish airforce as '"particularly serious" given the current situation, [who] called the Russian actions unprofessional and irresponsible.'
As the sibling comment mentions, this happens constantly so I don't think it's as big news as some make it out to be. It's almost a weekly occurrence at this point.
The reports described above are almost all violations of actual territorial airspace, not ADIZs, including the recent Russian incursion into Swedish airspace. Most countries don't have an ADIZ at all, including most of Europe. In fact ADIZs have no legal foundation, and countries may not shoot down aircraft within them outside of wartime as they're still international airspace.
While Russia routinely violates the national airspace (not ADIZs) of European countries there are few to no similar cases of European (or even American) military aircraft doing the same to Russian airspace in the past 30 years. This is a very asymmetric escalation & intimidation.
Those are correct. But if you have to go back to the 60's and the core of the Cold War with the Soviet Union, I am going to think in the last 20 years there are not many events...
(I'd also note the article with the headline "Russian aircraft violated European airspace nearly 300 times" actually uses "flying close to NATO airspace" in the text. Russia's doing the same thing we do - fly close, violating ADIZs, and testing responses.)
The East China Sea Air Defense Identification Zone is an air defense identification zone covering most of the East China Sea...:-) to which China has no claim.
An ADIZ has no legal basis and is just international airspace, so no country is obliged to recognise it and no country may deny entry through one.
Mixing up ADIZs with national airspace muddies the waters.
Even if a number of those 300 occurrences were 'near' NATO airspace and only a portion were actual violations, that's still far more violations of NATO airspace by Russia than there have been NATO violations of Russian airspace.
> Mixing up ADIZs with national airspace muddies the waters.
Yes, I know. That's what I think the article is doing.
The same happens on coverage of China and Taiwan - the incursions always wind up just being going into the ADIZ (and Taiwan's ADIZ extends over mainland China, for extra complexity), but are breathlessly covered as if China's breaking the 12 mile limit.
As I said, most European countries don't have an ADIZ, and a number of those reported cases are of actual violations of national airspace. Not ADIZs.
I agree that media reports that mistake the Taiwanese ADIZ for airspace are wrong and should be strongly criticised, but you're wrong to assume the same context is true for Russia and Europe.
> As I said, most European countries don't have an ADIZ, and a number of those reported cases are of actual violations of national airspace. Not ADIZs.
Articles should distinguish between them, then. A headline of "Russian aircraft violated European airspace nearly 300 times" with "flying close to NATO airspace" in the actual copy is irresponsible journalism.
The imprecision's of some journalist's pale, comparing to the irresponsible behaviours that endager the security of others. Can you imagine any European country doing actions like:
"Tactics typically deployed by Russian pilots include a practice of deliberately failing to report flight plans, ignoring civilian air traffic controllers and switching off their on-board transponders that NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg refers to as "flying dark" an approach which he said was inherently unsafe and poses a serious risk to civilian air traffic."
> Military aircraft are not required by international law to file flight plans with a country’s Air Traffic Service before flying through their Flight Information Region (FIR)...
> The quickest route away from the Russians took them into Swedish airspace. The U.S. official acknowledged that was done without Swedish military approval.
> As a result of this incident, the United States is discussing the matter with Sweden and letting officials know there may be further occurrences where American jets have to divert so quickly they may not be able to wait for permission.
> A U.S. Air Force aircraft electronically impersonated a Malaysian plane while flying over the South China Sea this week. The RC-135W Rivet Joint reconnaissance aircraft flew off China’s Hainan island on Tuesday, coming within 55 miles of the Chinese mainland.
That may be so, but it wasn’t the question the OP asked, which was about whether NATO was doing to Russian airspace what Russia has so often done to NATO airspace.
In your response you wrongly asserted that was the case and you did so by confusing ADIZs with airspace.
It’s not a terrible failing to be mistaken, but refusing to acknowledge an error is the wrong approach.
> Not saying they do not happen, just that I can't recall any. Do you have some examples?
You're gonna have to search for news from those countries instead. Try "нарушение воздушного пространства россии" on yandex, or "侵犯中国领空的行为" on baidu. English news hardly ever write about English-speaking countries violating other countries airspace, while the opposite is true too, you won't find news about Russians violating other countries airspace in Russian news.
Tried as you suggested. All I found was propaganda, and one YouTube video that talked about NATO violating Russian airspace. It looked more like the marketing video you send to an Arab Sheikh or African dictator when trying to sell Russian arms.
Yes, it looks like Japanese government just reminded about the position they always had that southern Kurils were occupied by Russia illegally. But the timing of the reminder is interesting.
I didn't realise it was such a big thing until I visited a festival in Hokkaido a few years back and there was a very large and busy stall soliciting signatures for a petition over the Kurils and with lots of photographs and maps.
It seemed slightly delusional (but mostly harmless) to me at the time, but now - who knows?
It's pretty delusional even in Japan, nobody seriously expects Russia to return them. Early in the post-Soviet era there were some serious-ish proposals about Russia handing them back in exchange for massive financial aid, but ever since Putin took the reins it's been obvious that this is just not going to happen.
I don't think even the Japanese government wants them back at this point, Hokkaido (the nearest big island) is already rapidly depopulating and having to administer a bunch of semi-frozen islands with random Russian pensioners and no resources aside from fish would be a logistical nightmare and permanent drain on the treasury.
I'm not a fishing expert but I think officially owning those islands would affect their Exclusive Economic Zone. If the fishing there is good they could turn a profit even if administering the islands costs some yen.
Fair enough, but the geopolitics are quite different: China and Russia are (wary) allies and the agreement was more about agreeing where to draw the line than handing over war spoils.
It’s like Argentina and the Falklands. To this day you’ll find people trying to say they are Argentinian when they would only be by proximity. I’m Argentinian and I’d love for them to be, but they are not. Uruguay is just as close and it’s a different country, why not take that too?
> Although by the terms of Article (2c) of the 1951 San Francisco treaty, Japan renounced all rights to the Kuril Islands, the treaty did not apply to the islands of Kunashiri, Etorofu, Shikotan and Habomai since they are not included in the Kuril Islands. Also, the Soviet Union did not sign the San Francisco treaty.
On the one side, it is easy now to bring up those old conflicts in a moment when Russia is weak and distracted. On the other side, it could be an attempt at supporting Ukraine, as to draw out the efforts of Russia even further and give a clear signal to anyone, especially the high ranking military, that Russia might be stretched between a lot of competing crises, if they can't make peace in Ukraine.
With so much of their military tied up in the boondoggle on their western front I guess now would be the perfect time to pounce on disputed territory. Knowing your enemy distracted.
Article 9 doesn’t really mean what it says, at least in practice. If Japan is attacked the state won’t just roll over and die - it’ll try to defend itself (hence the JSDF).
You can read it as forbidding offensive war, but if Japan has claimed that those islands are part of Japan for a while then there’s enough of an argument for it being defensive war that no one will much care.
Yes, current the constitution of Japan is very hard to change so it had never changed. Still govt need to do some military-ish operation so they changed how to interpret multiple times.
The current situation is already a catastrophe as it is. The best possible outcome at this time is that this war is ended as soon as possible even when this means handing a few victory points to Russia. It is the only way at lot less Ukrainians will die and then I'm just ignoring the potential outcome of further escalation. Nothing the West is doing right now is working towards this outcome. We still seem to believe that at the end of the road there is some 'win' against Russia with tolerable costs for ourselves. The economic sanctions just boomerang with a comparable net loss to the West. Then there's millions of Ukrainian refugees who will need to be offered a somewhat humane existence in Europe at huge initial costs. The War in Syria already stretched Europe's capability to absorb refugees to the limit. Ukraine has more than twice the number of citizens. The Western leaders has got to stop this pretense of "we got this" and "we can hurt Russia more than it can hurt us". We don't have this.
> best possible outcome at this time is that this war is ended as soon as possible even when this means handing a few victory points to Russia
why for the love of god would the West support Russia and not the wishes of the Ukrainian people?
I don't understand this reasoning and have even heard it among some of my ultra-religious friends or extended family members. None of them has any skin in the game other than steep gas prices and lot of fear, so they just parrot "war is bad please stap!". But none of them contributes how that would impact the people. If you force them to comment it always turns out to be a trolley-problem that they have pulled the lever on for others: with silly arguments like we must do it because "claiming 100K dead people is still better than 10MM".
And this is where this hypothesis gets hairy because that decision is easier to make for others but a lot harder to say: "I and my partner with 2 toddlers will volunteer to be in the pool of those who die."
I'm only speaking for myself but there isn't a thing in the world I wouldn't do if I'd have to defend my own family even that means wiping out half of humanity. If I'd think very hard about I'd even wipe out part of my own blood to ensure survival of my own offspring. Luckily this is only a hypothetical scenario. Sure I'd never recover from it emotionally or psychologically but it is what I would do. This is obviously flippant and hypothetical but no better way to illustrate the hypocrisy at play here.
> why for the love of god would the West support Russia and not the wishes of the Ukrainian people?
First, the people of Ukraine are free to decide to do what they think is best and "we", as in the West, are free to decide to do what we think is best. Those things do not need to coincide.
Secondly, two million Ukrainians have already decided to forfeit the game outright rather than stay and/or fight. All throughout history a minority decides on war and a majority either huddles or flees. So you tell me what it is that "the Ukrainian people" wish.
>two million Ukrainians have already decided to forfeit the game outright rather than stay and/or fight.
Mostly women, children, and the elderly. All Ukrainian men aged 18 to 60 are prohibited from leaving the country.
>All throughout history a minority decides on war and a majority either huddles or flees
2 million is far from a majority of Ukrainians. I don't know if this includes the number of people held up at border crossings, and doubt it includes those waiting for transportation. But it's still unlikely the majority, even if counting those groups.
>So you tell me what it is that "the Ukrainian people" wish.
They tell us. Right before the invasion, very few Ukrainians wanted to join Russia[0]. Another poll[1] conducted last week showed:
>>Only 11 per cent of Ukrainians agreed “if I could leave Ukraine safely tomorrow for another country I would.” Nearly seven in 10 (69 per cent) strongly disagreed. Only one in 20 (five per cent) of those aged 65 or over said they would leave if they could.
And:
>>Indeed, 67 per cent said they would be willing to take up arms to defend the country against Russian troops, with a further seven per cent saying they were already doing so. 85 per cent of men and 63 per cent of women said they had already taken up arms or were willing to do so.
How many of those two million are children and mothers, who want to take care of their children? That doesn't necessarily mean those mothers want Ukraine to surrender (on the terms disallowing Ukraine to join NATO or EU).
Aside from that, while 2 million refugees is a lot, it's still very far from a majority in a country of 45 million people.
There is a dead (why?!) sibling comment: most of the refugees are women and children. Male Ukrainian nationals between 18 and 60 years old aren’t allowed to leave the country.
> I'm only speaking for myself but there isn't a thing in the world I wouldn't do if I'd have to defend my own family even that means wiping out half of humanity. If I'd think very hard about I'd even wipe out part of my own blood to ensure survival of my own offspring.
The Russian army has no interest in harming your family. It wants to achieve a set of political aims using violence, and to achieve those aims they are perfectly willing to harm your family. So it's those aims you need to make up your mind about, while considering the possible harm to your family that you will likely be unable to stop.
The Russian army has interest in harming their families in order to achieve their political goals, that include harming their families further.
I also need to remind you, that even Ukraine's combatants that would be deemed non-civilians were forced to fight by the invasion, and are therefore also innocent, and are also "families".
It was proven over and over again, that the more you give to Russia, the more they will take next time. We have to stop them now or never. War is already on going between Russia and the west (Putin himself and his chief of spies already said, that they deem sanctions akin declaration of war), hiding from this fact won't help.
The realpolitik of it is, Russia has blundered into a catastrophe (or, if you prefer, the West provoked it by expanding NATO). Like the Soviets in Afghanistan, it will turn into a grinding, unwinnable quagmire. The thought is that the war will help pull down the Putin regime, like Afghanistan hollowed out the Soviet Union. It also invites anyone with a territorial dispute with Russia to push hard on it now, like the Japanese are doing.
It will be awful for Ukraine, and for the Russian soldiers sent to fight it. But the West's only alternative would be to encourage Ukraine to surrender, which would only tee up Putin's next invasion (Moldova, then the Baltics, then Poland).
It's just a declaration of core claim, it's not like Japan will actually do something about it at this point. When Japan is finally free from the shackles of western hegemony and able to build up militarily like it used to, then it might do something about it. Remember, geopolitics is about perception of power and "alliances", nothing to do with morality or freedom
Japan is one blink of an eye of passing from the "shackles of Westerner hegemony" (that among other things at one point made it the 2nd largest economy on the planet for a country only 50% bigger than Romania...) into the loving arms of the Chinese juggernaut.
Be careful what you wish, because it might come true :-)
Many people are tempted to compare the claim to the Russian argument in Dombass: it’s a much smaller claim (20k inhabitants), a consistent one since 1945. The population is notoriously isolated, too.
it depends on the Japan's proposition. If they will propose to guarantee jobs for every new citizen with typical for Japan salary - it will be enough because the exchange rate of Russian ruble is dropped by more than 100% in the last 5 days.
0.0091, down to 0.0075 is far from 100%
by the way, a drop of 100% or more would imply the currency is below zero no matter its previous value.
so what we see here is a 20%, max 25% drop of the rubble to the dollar. bringing people's view towards reality is a difficult but much needed change to wish for.
Considering how much discrimination japanese Koreans and especially Ainu has faced, it's hard to take this proposition at a face value. "Would you like to have an average wage of our country as a second-class citizen".
Here’s a good heuristic: if the only people alive for the past change of hands are old enough to physically be incapable of being the ones sent to fight for it, the dispute is over as-is. (Why send the young to fight over something that’s never been an issue for them?)
Would save us a whole lot of historical grievances, revanchism and war by retconning the past centuries into a new issue.
As someone who was born under de-facto Soviet occupation, almost 40 years after the end of WWII may I suggest you go stuff yourself with your suggestions?
Suggesting that "it's never an issue for them" is just ignorance of the highest order.
Back? You must've missed Ukraine, Nagorno-Karabakh, Georgia, Israel-Palestine, the Cyprus issue, Taiwan, Western Sahara, need I go on? You can settle old tinderboxes while ensuring fidelity current boundaries for the indefinite future.
> The state of war between the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and Japan shall cease on the date on which this Declaration enters into force and peace, friendship and good-neighbourly relations between them shall be restored.
From the same reference you provided, a declaration was made and it was
about regulation of trade and other activities.My Japanese and Russian are
a bit rusty. Original is below but do you have French or English version?
"...no peace treaty has yet been signed, and the islands remain under Russian administration"
Edit: Ok. Per this reference it seems the view of the Japanese government is that they ended the state of war.
"...The Joint Declaration by Japan and the USSR of October 19, 1956 ended the state of war and reestablished diplomatic and consular relations between the two countries. In the Joint Declaration, Japan and the USSR agreed to continue negotiations on the conclusion of a peace treaty after the reestablishment of normal diplomatic relations, and the USSR also agreed to hand over the islands of Habomai and Shikotan to Japan after the signing of a peace treaty..."
"A peace treaty is an agreement between two or more hostile parties, usually countries or governments, which formally ends a state of war between the parties"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peace_treaty
>>President Vladimir Putin on the next day.[11] However, the dispute persists,[12][13][14][15] no peace treaty has yet been signed, and the islands remain under Russian administration
When asking the question “what is the value of those islands/rocks-in-the-sea?” the answer is always 'EEZ boundaries'. I.e., having extra bits of land in the middle of the sea enlarges your exclusive economic zone where you can exploit resources in the ocean and below the ocean bed (oil) significantly. Which is why so many disputes exist over really boring bits of rock jutting out of the water.
See also: Rockall, a rock in the North Atlantic which is "25 metres (80 ft) wide and 31 m (102 ft) long" all of which gets wet in a storm. The UK claims it as territory.
"In 1984, the Danish Minister for Greenland planted the Danish flag on the island and left a little message saying "Velkommen til den danske ø" (English: Welcome to the Danish Island).[12] It is also said he left a bottle of brandy;[12] however, this seems to have been Schnapps,[13] which, unlike brandy, is a traditional Danish spirit. It is commonly told, internally in the Danish Navy, that it was specifically a bottle of Gammel Dansk, which translates literally to 'Old Danish'. The Canadians have reciprocated with their own sign, the flag of Canada and a bottle of Canadian Club.[14]"
None whatsoever. But that is exactly the point of reaffirming their claim now. Russia can choose to climb down over something insignificant in order to gain a potential ally. Japan would thereby become a credible broker for peace.
I'm doubtful about Japan becoming allies with the Russians. Japan is an American ally, depends heavily on them for military defense, and the public sentiment is very much against Russia right now.
Russian bombers, fighter jets, missiles launched from those Iislands can reach Hokkaido and/or Tokio much quicker than when launched from more northern islands, leaving less time for countermeasures. Same for ground troops.
Even in the worst days for Russia during the German invasion, when it seemed like Moscow would be overrun, the Soviet Union kept substantial forces on the border with Japanese-occupied China. Although the two countries having a nonaggression pact, the Soviets remained fearful of the Japanese invading from the east. By 1945 the situation had changed, of course, with the Soviets being the ones to abrogate the pact and then formally entering the war against Japan in August 1945.
tl:dr - Nothing New. The message has been the same since WWII.
Just an opportunity to remind the world about it while Russia is getting all the negative press. It wouldn't even beep in the world of PR if they had said it any other time.
This is different because we like Japan but we don't like Russia. If Russia didn't want the entire world to turn on them, they shouldn't have illegally invaded Afghanistan.
Afghanistan was bad, but they were almost forgiven internationally, especially as one could pretend "that was the Sovjet Union". But with the invasion of the Ukraine, that is all washed away, Russia is as ugly as the old SU.
The US & allied invasion of Afghanistan after 9/11 is a pretty non-controversial case of legitimate self defence amongst international law scholars. There are some contrarians who dispute it, but it's not a mainstream view.
That's quite different from the 2003 invasion of Iraq which was on much shakier grounds.
I view them through the lens of how they exist today, not decades before nearly everyone in the world was alive. I acknowledge their history but do not judge the current leaders or population by it.
Do you think that, given the opportunity, they would commit the same atrocities as their ancestors?
Can those traditionalist views be separated from those atrocities or do those views, given no restraint, inevitably lead to the atrocities? If they would, would that Japanese people allow them to stay in power if they undertook steps in that direction?
Important questions that would need answers before I would revert my opinion to one I might have held if alive 80 years ago.
Absolutely I think that they would commit the same atrocities if given the chance. Fortunately as you say their people hopefully don't agree.
That is what I was alluding to when I mentioned that they do not admit their wrongdoings even today. Disputes with e.g. South Korea prove that they still believe they own places they invaded during the war. Educating their citizens on the past and rebuilding trust with the countries who suffered under them would be signs they have changed as a government. Neither of those things take place.
Excuse me while my eyes roll a loop in their head.
Japan's only crime is speed-running the "major nation of Europe" experience.
Develop central government, industrialize, colonize, fight "real wars" with other "real nations", etc.
Europe is just as bad. They just spread it out over 400yr instead of 80yr so the history textbook gets a chapter of feel good stuff to isolate the genocidal religious wars from the hand cutting and the opium.
There's a joke about the difference in work ethics in there somewhere.
It might not seem like much compared to other world events, but it means everything to the people concerned. No real punishment to the perpetrators, and a very late, reluctant, and muted acknowledgement from the Japanese government.
Japan paid out $800M in compensation to the South Korean government in 1965. However, Korea was a military dictatorship at the time, so they used it for funding random projects instead of actually compensating the people who suffered.
Did Kubrick invent "me love you long time" or was it a thing in Vietnam?
Two atomic bombs dropped on civilians and their capital city burned down to hashes with hundreds of thousand of casualties in few hours doesn't sound as "No real punishment" to me...
West likes Japan enough to overlook that she has maritime disputes with everyone of her neighbours, including EEZ drama. Which is pretty incredible for 1) and island nation and b) a loser of WW2 that should have territory prescribed through treaty. Including Kurils which USSR annexed and "should" be entitled to as war spoils being a WW2 winner but US/USSR geopolitics got in the way. Also west now: would be good idea Japan remilitarizes despite all these disputes.
Yeah, even decades ago my history books in the US were pretty blunt about US' horrible mistakes. The lack of acknowledgement is disturbing. Not that teaching our children about our genocides, soldiers shooting college students, or propping up dictatorships to fight proxy wars seems to change our behavior, but being aware that we are jerks just seems aesthetically preferable to pretending we are perfect, it at least opens the door for growth.
In the case that Russia actually collapses as a state ... which is not likely, but cannot be ruled out if they lose this war badly (lost wars are an enormous stress test for authoritarian regimes where the ruler gets all the blame, just look at the collapse of Tsarist Russia in 1917) ... a lot of territory would be up to grabs.
Kaliningrad could transform to a puppet state of the EU, removing a serious gap in its territorial contiguity.
Various Kavkaz ethnicities could vouch for independence.
Tuva (ironically, where Shoigu comes from) is a Buddhist nation that fits into the Mongol-Chinese cultural sphere better than into Russian one.
Vladivostok used to be a Chinese fishing village once, and the Chinese hate the old Unequal Treaties.
Sakhalin is a part of the Japanese archipelago.
Vyborg (Viipuri) and Pechenga (Petsamo) are formerly Finnish territories and even though the irredentism has subsided, they could still be valuable economically. Vyborg is a major port and Pechenga gives access to the Arctic Ocean. Their reconstruction would be a huge money sink, though. Much like reconstruction of the DDR after reunification of Germany.
This would require military action by Moldova/Georgia/Ukraine because the territories you mention are ethnically different and do not want to be part of those countries to start with.
Abkhazia fought a war in the early 90s to split from Georgia. South Ossetia also fought several wars to become independent. So both those territories might strive to become fully independent but will absolutely refuse to be re-absorbed by Georgia.
Moldovans are actually a minority in Transnistria, which has also seen open tensions since the fall of the USSR.
Lastly, Crimea, which was Russian until 1954, will definitely require a war and ethnic cleansing if Ukraine want to take it again and to keep it.
> This would require military action by Moldova/Georgia/Ukraine because the territories you mention are ethnically different and do not want to be part of those countries to start with.
Curious that, at least in the case of Georgia and Ukraine, those territories only decided they didn't want to be part of their countries when Russian troops rolled in and made totally non-threatening offers.
Well, from the Wiki: "a militia composed of ethnic Georgians who lived in Abkhazia and Russian-backed separatist forces".
Sure, there may be a slice of population that wants to leave but how can that be gouged properly when Russia keeps influencing the people and supplying weapons to separatists? There's a cause and effect here.
The fact is that Abkhazians haven't been fans of the idea of being part of Georgia, even before they were forcibly incorporated into Georgia by the Soviets, and the ethnic strife started before the collapse of the SU, and before the armed conflict (and Russian military assistance) has started. In Spain's Catalonia separatist sentiment can be gauged properly, but does that help with an actual realization of that sentiment? Not much. And that's a highly developed European country, from which Georgia is still very far institutionally, and was even farther in the 90ies.
Crimea could turn into an independent, mostly Russian speaking, fully demilitarized country living off tourism. Possibly joining the EU later.
I bet they would be much richer than today. Being a part of Russia sucks from the economic point of view. IDK if Crimean Russians are so nationalistic that they would rather live in a semi-starved, heavily sanctioned, economically isolated country.
Why can't they remain part of Russia like they historically were (well, I mean since Russia took over form the Tatars, of course) and seem to want?
It's not because Russia has taken Crimea back in a rather cavalier way that they should be split again just to weaken Russia. This can only perpetuate resentment and problems.
Speaking only as an American, I don't think we really know what Crimeans want. Russia isn't well-known for legitimate democratic voting, and the Crimean referendum has never been acknowledged by Western Democracies.
I would not be starkly opposed to Crimean independence, nor even Russian-integration, but in essence it looks like Russia took Crimea and then held a fake referendum to legitimize it.
But the question always goes - where do we draw lines. Should we support the concept of the Confederate States of America seceding from the United States? If California or Texas wanted to secede, should we support it? Wales? Okinawa? Quebec?
How should governments determine actual stake and determination over a specific part of land?
> Should we support the concept of the Confederate States of America seceding from the United States? If California or Texas wanted to secede, should we support it?
Yes. The Tenth Amendment reads, 'The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.' There is no power delegated to the United States by the Constitution to eject states, therefor the power to leave the union is reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.
Secession was and is perfectly constitutional. The fact that the Confederate States did so for a truly bad reason doesn't change that fact. The right thing would have been to … let them go.
Brexit is a great example of how things should work: a state freely decided to leave a suprastate body, and that body let it.
It's a great example of handling a peaceful exit from a political union, but in terms of maintaining the existence of "The United Kingdom" it remains to be seen. There was no civil war, but it was polarising enough that it could well have lit the fuse that ultimately tears the country apart over time.
Scotland voted against its independence referendum in no small part due to fear-mongering about an independent Scotland being barred from joining the EU. The independence issue was then considered absolutely settled for a generation at least. However post-Brexit that has rightly called this into question, with still strong SNP support Westminster will have to reckon with that soon enough. Irish reunification isn't something I'm too familiar with the intricacies of, but they were pro-EU too and the Irish Sea border doesn't exactly strengthen the unionists case.
Crimea it at least 70% ethnic Russian and was Russian until moved to Ukraine without consultation.
So I think this is a case where Putin's actions did align with what the people actually wanted even if that's too hard for the West to acknowledge publicly (I'm sure that they accept that Crimea is not going back to Ukraine).
So are parts of Ukraine who are vigorously resisting the Russian invasion.
Identity is tricky. Many once ethnic and/or linguistic Russians may choose to identify differently, to be governed differently, and that’s their right. The modern “Russian” ethnicity, as one distinct from e.g. Ukraine, is only a few hundred years old [1].
>So are parts of Ukraine who are vigorously resisting the Russian invasion.
To be pedantic, Ukraine's regular military forces are vigorously resisting the Russian invasion, not parts of Ukraine. Regarding the ethnic and identity composition of Ukraine's military forces -- I have no idea.
> Ukraine's regular military forces are vigorously resisting the Russian invasion, not parts of Ukraine
There is widespread protest and limited insurrection in occupied cities, together with mass enrolment by the population in the military. The Ukrainian people, perhaps more than the state, are repelling this invasion. (In strong alliance with Moscow’s military incompetence.)
> I would not be starkly opposed to Crimean independence, nor even Russian-integration, but in essence it looks like Russia took Crimea and then held a fake referendum to legitimize it.
> But the question always goes - where do we draw lines. Should we support the concept of the Confederate States of America seceding from the United States? If California or Texas wanted to secede, should we support it? Wales? Okinawa? Quebec?
Why drawing a line? It's either you allow everyone to choose their country, or noone. Allowing Crimea but not California, or allowing Kosovo but not Mexico and allowing Slovakia and not Catalonia is the worst solution. Right now, it's completely arbitrary, and this arbitration is what leads to wars and conflicts.
I would say, let them all decide for themselves.
Do you want to allow Ukraine to be independent? Then also allow Donbas republic to be independent of Ukraine, and consequently allow cities in Donbas that wish to stay in Ukraine to secede from Donbas. And even within those cities, allow neighbourhoods that want to stay in Donbas to stay.
Why not, if that's what people want? And that would mean no war. Yes, it may be complex in an administrative way. Who wants to show passport to cross the street and go to the store. Or to cross borders twice when going to work? Or to apply for a work permit? But exactly that complexity would quickly lead to different agreements and territorial rearrangements if people decide it's better for them. Again, why not? If they agree, they can change the state every year or so. If you let people power to decide, they will be more responsible for purely selfish reasons. That's how capitalism works, why not politics?
As soon as you draw a line who can and who can't decide, you are creating a conflict that may or may not lead to war and other atrocities.
Wanted to edit the previous comment, but it won't let me anymore. I usually don't comment about downvotes, but here I'd really like to know the reason?
What is so controversial about giving the right of self-determination to everyone?
If everyone, regardless of the colour, race of gender has equal right, why some people should, and some should not determine if they want to live in one country? You can even choose your gender now, but can't live in an independent state?
Maybe I am missing something obvious. I Would really like a counterargument here instead of simple downvotes.
I didn’t downvote but one glaring issue is that you’re well of the mark here:
> Allowing Crimea but not California, or allowing Kosovo but not Mexico and allowing Slovakia and not Catalonia
Slovakia had a popular recognised referendum and decided to vote for the velvet divorce
Catalonia had an informal referendum that was not legally recognised, but afaik there is still technically a path to do so.
Kosovo - I do not know a great deal about Kosovo.
California can secede and there doesn’t seem to be a huge interest in doing so.
Mexico … idk where you’re going with this one.
But importantly in Crimea the Russian “little green men” showed up, took over, hastily ran a referendum that was very dubious and happened to just coincidentally deliver the result that said exactly what the Russians wanted. It was a fix.
I think you know this though, and that you’re engaging in what’s known as “sealioning” :-)
Thanks for the clarification. In my previous comments, I assumed that everyone should have the right to organize a referendum and show a clear will for the independence, but didn't write the assumption down. And the examples are a bit unrealistic.
> I think you know this though, and that you’re engaging in what’s known as “sealioning” :-)
I learned a new word today. Thanks, although I don't think I'm engaged in it, since I idealistically think that everyone, with the accent to everyone, should have a right of association and disassociation with willing partners, and that our current state system is not the healthiest way of governing humans.
On what basis are you fantasizing about demilitarization of a nuclear state? How would that work? I hate Putin as much as the next person, but nothing will happen to the Russia proper -- they'll start throwing nukes, tactical first, then strategic.
Counties sign such peace treaties when they lose hard enough to start losing their territory proper, or they are forced to capitulate, are occupied. How would a nuclear state lose their territory proper? There were indeed various peace treaties in the past, but not a nuclear state losing their territory proper.
I don't know much about Crimea and its situation but I've spent considerable time in both Abkhazia and Transnistria; I have a number of businesses that I have based out of Tiraspol and Sokhumi. While far from a fan of Russia's interventions in both regions, I have long felt, form talking to as many people as possible in both nations, that the majority (although not necessarily an overwhelming one) support the countries being independent from Tbilisi and Chișinău, respectively.
I'm more than happy to have my priors re-adjusted here.
This is inaccurate information, Russia fought both wars in Georgia, currently Abkhazians and Ossetians are Russian citizens (they grabbed Russian passports as soon as they become available) so they will go back to their motherland Russia, Georgia will re-absorb it's own historical territory.
Looks like you are spreading Russian propaganda in bad faith.
Abkhazians and Ossetians aren't "Russians" ethnically, culturally, or linguistically though. Why would they want to go "back" to Russia (not their homeland)? The whole point of their struggle is ultimately to get their own countries just as other ethnic groups have. They merely accepted Russian aid and citizenship as a way to get out of Georgian rule. Which of course may ultimately be going from the frying pan into the fire.
You are confusing the motivation of Russia (which was indeed to build military bases) with that of the oppressed minorities. Again, these people are not "Russians". They are traditionally Muslim peoples who speak languages completely unrelated to Russian.
There are gazillion of people in Russian federation who are not "Russians" culturally, Abkhazians speak Russian and South Ossetians are invaders into Georgia from North Ossetia which is... Part of Russia.
Also, there are no "oppressed minorities" in Georgia, never was. That would be part of Russian propaganda.
Abkhazians speak Abkhazian (a Circassic language) and Ossetians speak Ossetian (related to Farsi). Sure, many of them may speak Russian too. But so do Georgians. All these areas were part of the Soviet Union which imposed Russian as the standard language. But people still kept their native languages. The point is that these people want to live where they do, speaking their own languages -- they have no desire to go "back" to Russia, but on the other hand they have no desire to be assimilated into Georgian culture either. Why is this so hard to understand?
They speak both, but Abkhazian and Ossetian is dying language, they are Russian citizens and speak Russian first.
Georgian language on other hand is the most widely-spoken of the Kartvelian languages and serves as the literary language or lingua franca for speakers of related language.
Before Soviet Union, it was Georgian territory for thousands of years, South Ossetia - is Russian name, in fact it is named Samachablo, Ossetians migrated there from North Ossetia en masse during Soviet Union times and re-named area to South Ossetia to give it impression as if two Ossetia's where same area.
The point incorrect, Chechens do not desire to go back to Russia and fought war over it, but they lost because Russians committed their genocide.
You can not simply settle somewhere and then want to break-away, Why is this so hard to understand?
Oh so you're saying that Georgia wants to forcibly take those territories and go full ethnic cleansing (That's how I read what you wrote, I'm not trying it on)? If so, they might indeed prefer to have the Russian army around...
I've hosted Ossetians (well, my mother did) back in the days. There is actually a huge diaspora in France, and even when they are deeply religious, they do hate Russia with a passion I've never felt with anyone else. So I'm quite disbelieving this kind of statements, maybe my vision is skewed by my experience.
Is there any particularly strong desire within Abkhazia to return to being part of Georgia proper? I'm sure in the event of a Russian collapse it would likely be reintegrated by Georgia anyway, but my naive understanding was that they'd always considered themselves a distinct people and separate territory and that being allied to Russia was convenient for both (with the Abkhaz being able to largely self-rule on paper at least, and Russia getting a pliant neighbour it can exert a lot of power over and perhaps annex at a future convenient date)
> Lots of countries are obviously positioning themselves to (re-)integrate some territory just in case.
Can anybody confirm this? I haven't seen any state official talking about getting Königsberg or Karelia back. Where has this positioning been hinted? I might have missed something.
I haven't heard an official statement about Kaliningrad either, but I am acquainted with a few MEPs and their assistants, and there is some excited backroom talk about it.
The Kaliningrad exclave is a huge territorial and security headache for the EU.
Germany isn't going to take it back. It already had the chance, I believe, during the 1990s in exchange for a large sum of money but refused. Germany's eastern boundaries are formally set by treaty. Germany does not want jokes about the "return of German revanchism" and "East Prussia". More seriously, Germany would not want to absorb so many Russian speakers.
A small, Russian-speaking nation under EU's influence (and presumably future EU member) would be a good thing for the EU, to show off to the world (and specifically to Russia, as a positive example).
> Vladivostok used to be a Chinese town once, and the Chinese hate the old Unequal Treaties.
Could you provide some links? I would like to learn more about that. As far as I knew until just now the treaties between russia and china aren't all that old and the PRC has no claims on any currently russian land. But I am not well informed about the topic at all.
(After some research: The ROC and freer press were quite unhappy with the treaty and ROC still formally claims those areas if I understand it correctly.)
Overall it is an interesting (albeit very unlikely) scenario, maybe because it reminds me so much of old EU4 matches I had.
I corrected that. Apparently, there was just a fishing village there.
As of March 8, 2022, China has no claims on Russian land, but history shows that if a juicy opportunity turns up, countries start to come up with claims that were previously forgotten.
Yes, this scenario is unlikely. But not beyond reasonable doubt. Multinational empires have imploded and disintegrated before (Tsarist Russia, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire), and a lost war was the usual cause.
Vladivostok/Primorsky Krai is ethnically Russian though. If Russia ceases to exist as a mutli-ethnic empire, it would unlikely be the part that breaks off.
There are many Chinese citizens present in Vladivostok.
I guess that a potential takeover of the territory would look more like the takeover of Tibet in 1950. A fait accompli executed on a very short timeline.
How many? One thousand? Two thousand? According to the 2010 census there were 2446 ethnic Chinese individuals, right behind 4192 Koreans. Let's suppose it's 5000 now. It would still be less than 1%
All this talk about taking over Russian territory is just pure fantasy. Russia, on a liberal / anti-imperialist wave, even in a bankrupt, extremely weakened state could only become kind enough to detach Yakutia, Caucasus, and some other distinctly ethnically different autonomous regions, but it won't allow anything to happen to the ethnically Russian regions, nor these regions themselves could imaginably see themselves separate. Russia would still be a nuclear power, and I doubt the Chinese would risk a world apocalypse for a piece of tundra.
That would have lot of interesting consequences. The big question is what happens to siberian oil.
What happens if western russia gets politically split off from siberia and can't be a petrol state anymore? Who gets the nukes? Can they even keep track of the nukes?
Siberia is enormous and closer to china. An oil rich china sounds scary.
IF the breakup happens (and I personally think this is very unlikely) in the near term it will likely be contracted to oil major that gives highest bribes. Which should be a minor change to the outside world. My 2c.
>Kaliningrad could transform to a puppet state of the EU, removing a serious gap in its territorial contiguity.
EU is not a country and to my knowledge none of the neighbors wants to join that territory. It's quite a poor region with Russian population... Germans effectively left in the late 40s'
>>and to my knowledge none of the neighbors wants to join that territory
Well, let me expand that knowledge then - Poland would love to integrate that bit of land, because currently the fact that the only entrance to the Polish port of Elbląg is controlled by Russia is a major ballache that stops the development of the region, enough so that the Polish government has agreed to spend billions of Polish zlotys to dig a canal that will allow ships to skip going through Russian controlled waters.
Poland has not expressed any wish to integrate that, nor any other territories. I can imagine it getting separated from Russia and even joining the EU at some point, but only as a sovereign entity.
EU is not a country, but it has its own economic and security interests.
The region is poor, but adding a statelet with 1 million people into a union of 450 million is a negligible burden. And local economy is already sort-of semiintegrated with the Lithuanian and the Polish one. There used to be quite a lot of cross border trade in peace times there.
I still can't imagine Lithuania agreeing to have a massive influx of Russians with an open border. In certain regions in Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania the population speaks Russian exclusively.
"Germans effectively left in the late 40s" - Germans quickly evacuated in the face of the Red Army, because bad things happened to the ones who didn't.
My father-in-law's family considered themselves very lucky to have had distant relatives in Niedersachsen (West Germany) and to have gotten out of Tilsit (now called Sovetsk) at all. He's never been back.
Kaliningrad is of strategic importance for holding the Suwalki corridor, a.k.a. NATO's most vulnerable choke point. It doesn't matter whether it's poor or not.
I don't know about that. A lot of anti-Brexit folks really seem to have felt loyalty to it the way others feel to their states. It sends ambassadors to other states, so it has its own foreign policy. It doesn't have its own military, yet, but it does have a common defense framework. Seems to me that it is at least a semi-state.
Not a direct reply but I read a fantastic book about post-WW2 Europe that basically argued the wholesale redistribution of populations after the war turn Europe from a mixed, multiethnic set of countries to a group of countries dominated by specific ethnic groups.
Konigsberg (Kaliningrad) being a great example with Germans fleeing/being expelled and replaced by ethnic Russians wholesale.
I am reading Iron Kingdom, a history of Prussia, and was struck by how often it gained and lost territories. After every war (and Prussia fought a lot of wars), it won/lost chunks while also gaining/giving up chunks elsewhere. Silesia, Hanover, Saxony ... the various states that it absorbed/traded lands with are difficult to keep track of. Heck, "Prussia" was originally the term for land east of the original land, centered around Berlin, that the Hohenzollern monarchy ruled; after annexing it the term for that bit of new land somehow became applied to the country as a whole.
The Silesians, Hanoverians, Saxons, etc. all viewed themselves as different people from the Brandenburgs/Prussians and each other. As toyg said, ethnic-based nationalism—viewing themselves as "Germans" and thus deserving a single German nation—is a 19th-century phenomenon; further, the various German states (not excluding Prussia) viewed and suppressed such nationalism as subversive. Mutual cooperation nonetheless grew during the century, notably the customs union.
It's something that really started mid-XIX century, with the emergence of the concept of ethnic-based statehood in France and Prussia. The process continued unabated for about 100 years, until the populations were divided "cleanly enough" in most of the continent. The end of WW2 was just the last chance for big moves in that direction, and some countries grabbed it with both hands.
Obviously the EU is not a country legally but one of the things that makes this invasion into a spectacular geopolitical backfire is that Putin's war in Ukraine seems to have suddenly made the "EU" kick into life over defense.
> lost wars are an enormous stress test for authoritarian regimes where the ruler gets all the blame, just look at the collapse of Tsarist Russia in 1917
This just brought to mind the idea that it's remarkable that America has weathered at least one and possibly three (depending on the definition of success) lost wars in the past 50 years without severe political consequences: Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. It wasn't without consequence but it did not cause anything like Russia in 1917 or Germany in the 1930s. The worst we got was a shirtless jackass wearing horns on the Senate podium.
The reason is probably because the average American didn't go hungry because of the loss. Also, Americans are, for all their diversity, fairly mixed and culturally similar.
OTOH, if you commit a behemoth like Austria-Hungary where 40 per cent of the country belongs to disadvantaged minority ethnicities and then you lose the war and the population is reduced to digging roots from the ground and making soups out of leather boots (I am not exaggerating), there isn't any reason to continue the existence of such a structure left. Only fear that the uprising may get you killed, but if the soldiers are demoralized too, they won't shoot.
Just out of curiosity, are there a fair number of democratic countries (outside of the US) deciding to go to war and then lose it ?
On the contrary it looks like democracies have a hard time even deciding to defend themselves, because people will never decide risk a war on their country. And Putin is exploiting just this, IMO.
In the last decades, no. If they enter a war, it is usually because it is forced upon them by an external power.
But many important Western European countries were at least flawed democracies since approximately the last quarter of the 19th century. For example, Italy was a democracy when it launched an abortive attempt to conquer Ethiopia in 1896.
A big part of this is due to them not being military losses. In each engagement the American military closed with and destroyed the enemy repeatedly. The nation building part failed in Vietnam and Afghanistan.
Iraq did a bit better in that respect, but it isn't a new Japan.
A quick glance at Tuva specifically on Wiki has an extremely short period of time in Russia’s political sphere. I’m not sure if the predominately Buddhist parts of Russia have that deep of a Russian history.
Well, just look at any US area, and you'll notice an extremely short USA history, compared to the Native American history and population. And yet, not a single person in the USA talks about Native Americans claiming back their historical and cultural territories. Why? The only reason that comes to mind is Native Americans being effectively extinguished by the USA, while Buddhists/Mongols in Russia are integrated and accepted as a part of the society.
I wouldn't count on it. It may have been possible in the past that a failing empire implodes and let the incumbents grab their parts around, but today, it may be very dangerous.
I don't think Russia is even unique here, all major nuclear powers, that have an ability to destroy the whole humankind multiple times, would rather see the whole humanity disappearing, then only their empire collapsing.
Russia, as any empire can be dissolved only from within, by the wish of Russian people. But that's dangerous too, since instead of one nuclear power, we would end up with 5, 6 nuclear powers all having the ability to destroy the whole world.
Let's not forget all the territories Russia invaded and currently occupy: Abkhazia and South Ossetia in Georgia, Easter Ukraine and Crimea in Ukraine, Transnistria in Moldova and so on.
According to a video I found linked on another thread (https://youtu.be/b4wRdoWpw0w?t=119) Russia has moved around 75% of its principal combat units to the Ukraine border. The Ukraine invasion appears to be using a significant portion of their conventional military power.
They are using the fraction of their power that they are capable of supporting and supplying, and that is not needed to guard their long borders and coast.
Five million reservists called up into barracks are useless if you cannot transport them into the theater and keep them supplied.
We are using our aviation too accurate for conventional war. As result, we've lost some (2..4) of our decent aircrafts. What supply chains do we need to use more (not ~15) bombers on higher altitudes, e.g. sacrificing precision for being protected from almost-dead Ukrainian ADS ("Buk"s or Stingers, maybe some S-300 near Kyiv)?
AFAIK, they are resupplied with Stinger ADS only, if you know more, pls tell me.
Yesterday we lost 1 aircraft in Kharkiv, which was bombing on terribly low altitude to preserve precision.
Two days ago we lost one AC in Chernigyv, same situation here.
Oryx reports 11 lost aircrafts during war, there are some listed whose nobody can prove (IMO about a half). Im not telling you that its a fake, but that resource definitely sometimes agrees with official Kyiv information.
I guess it depends on how you define "losing". I don't see any scenario where Russia actually "wins". Thus, in turn, I think it's ok to say they will definitely lose this.
This will very likely end by both parties pronouncing they are the victors here.
For Ukraine the victory might be that Russia will most likely be unable to take Kiev and need to "withdraw" closer to their own borders i.e. the victory is not submitting in the "heroic" sense. However with a staggering economic loss and loss of life (including the refugees that might never return).
For Russia their victory will be claiming they "secured" the 2 rebel republics/Crimea. Also at a staggering loss - some of it army but mostly incredible economic sanctions. It remains to be seen if Putins regime will be able to survive that in the long run.
In terms of the classical definition I guess you could call it a stalemate - don't see how either of them can win - everybody loses. Who loses less - arguably I'd say economic sanctions still do not hurt as much as the decades Ukraine will need to rebuild. And Russia still has a huge amount of natural resources that others need and are willing to pay for.
I don't doubt that once this is over, the US and the EU will launch a generous reconstruction plan. Ukraine may end up with much better infrastructure in place of the destroyed one.
This could be financed from seized oligarchs' wealth. No need to spend taxpayer money. And Western construction companies will like those contracts, doubly so after Covid.
Way more than a fraction. The true proportion? I have no idea, but the losses seem to be way too high for this to be just a few guys who were sent to Ukraine for a laugh.
Some of those losses are the Russian military revealing itself to be incompetent and quasi-unequipped, but the number of losses is just too high.
They are already using 100% of the forces they originally lined up on the Ukraine border.
This appears to be something like 75% of their total operational power, with obvious, serious problems, like relying on civilian GPS, being evidently wholly unprepared for the mud, the fact that there's no comms chain back so they rely on Ukrainian comms networks staying up, the lack of a supply chain, the fact that the domestic population is finally catching on to the fact that Putin is illegally using his conscripts on the front line, the consequent astonishing rate of desertion from an army who weren't told they were invading until they crossed the border to "keep peace", the death of two generals, more aircraft losses than they expected, etc.
It's quite a big fraction of their power and what is very striking is that they appear unable to fully support it
The only people really surprised by this attack appear to be essentially all ranks of the Russian army -- an army spoiled by corruption and grift.
The bigger question is which ends first? The war, or Putin?
When I was at the military we "learned" that encrypted communication makes no sense when the transmitted content effects events no longer than half a day into the future as the opponent cannot take effective countermeasures anyway.
The Russians confirmed the death of air-force general Andrei Sukhovetsky. The Ukrainians claim to also have killed army major general Vitaly Gerasimov.
>> The intelligence arm of the Ukrainian defence ministry said Maj Gen Vitaly Gerasimov, chief of staff of the 41st Army, had been killed outside the eastern Ukrainian city of Kharkiv, along with other senior officers.
>> Andrei Sukhovetsky was the commanding general of the Russian 7th Airborne Division and a deputy commander of the 41st Combined Arms Army, and by far the most senior Russian figure to have died in the conflict so far.
>> Mr Putin confirmed that a general had been killed in a speech updating the Russian people on the progress of the conflict, eight days into the deadly invasion.
You are either misinformed or lying. Even relying on Russian sources it is clear that they have a substantial commitment in Ukraine. Trying to label it as a tiny fraction is honestly ridiculous.
What is happening is quite opposite to what you propose.
NATO will increasingly be seen as an ineffective formulation for security of Europe as it has been demonstrated by Russia to Europeans. (The choices [it affords] are roll over or start a nuclear war. That's not a 'security' framework.) Sovereign European states will definitely (re)consider reaching 1-to-1, direct, security and treaty arrangements with Russia. Some may object to my prognosis here, and we'll soon find out after the Baltic States matter takes center stage. (Yes, imo Ukraine will surrender and accept terms.) NATO may actually go the way of Warsaw Pact sooner than you think.
US Dollar dominance has been, apparently by US itself, dealt a fatal blow. UK's ill-gotten "oligarch" wealth safe kitty has also suffered. The Swiss too pissed on their neutrality. Powerful entities and individuals will be seeking alternative safe havens. What many Americans fail to recognize is that US Dollar dominance is what permits this nation to manage stupendous levels of debt. What they also fail to recognize is that non-American elite in US orbit were OK with the political arrangements as long as they got to get a cut of the global financial arrangement and lived in "security", but being forbidden to invest in other countries and a rapidly shrinking non-sanctioned global pie is most certainly affecting these long standing calculations.
The intelligence services of the West have also suffered a huge blow. They still have no idea of where this will stop as far as Russia is concerned, and far more importantly, US apparently has NO IDEA as to the level of agreement between China and Russia. They keep probing and asking. No one knows! Yesterday there was literally a flurry of articles in WSJ, FT, Asiatimes, etc. directly addressing China. Asiatimes did its best to put the fear of being cutoff from EU in top article.
Biggest losers in all this will be us little people in every country. Heavy handed security posture by states, surveillance, economic stress, and even greater jingoistic media in guise of "journalism" will be the order of the day. Looks like the 1984 vision was ultimately chosen over Brave New World.
You're not saying things that make sense to me. The only currency that has depreciated lately is the Ruble and the Lira (4x that of the 3rd place). So to say that USD has suffered a "fatal blow", sounds to me like propaganda, either by being convinced by it, or generating it. It should be easy enough to look at this data for yourself.
When nations are forced to trade around Dollar sanctions for strategic resources that they need, they will use alternative currencies and alternative trade and financial mechanisms. I said nothing about the Ruble, which is a local national currency. We're discussing global reserve currency and mechanisms for global trade.
> propaganda, either by being convinced by it, or generating it
A rather cheap shot. You prove my final point about even greater pressures coming to bear on free speech and exchange of ideas.
I mean. By all means, explain further what is meant by "death blow", and how that somehow applies to the currency used by the global market. The rest of the world will be able to trade just fine, as far as currency exchange is concerned. The only issue is for those who have halved their buying power.
The the rest of the world clearly disagrees with your assessment, as if they did not, it would be reflected in the evaluation of the USD.
What it doesn't mean is a "collapse", which is how you are framing it. It won't be overnight. I assume you are a fellow geek so picture moving a huge infrastructure off of AWS and/or going "multi-cloud". It's not a switch that you flip and definitely not something upper management would want unless AWS keeps crashing and its fabled SLAs don't hold up. Assurances.
Entire supply chains (and everything that goes to make such things happen between nations and international corporations) have substantial inertia built in and will require adjustments. My prognosis is a terminal trajectory ("death blow") unless Russia collapses first, which would then force the hand of China, India, and the rest of fence sitters (which also include Mexico, Brazil, Israel, UAE, KSA, btw.)
"unless Russia collapses first". Yes, that is the very likely outcome indeed.
You are aware that the GDP of Russia is less than that of several individual European countries? And I mean individual. Germany alone has twice the GDP. You are woefully overestimating the Russian economy in the first place.
I know little about Russian economy but note that when sanctions were announced some in this forum were predicting Ruble going to 0 within a day. That said, my thoughts on this have factored in a limited time window for Russian Federation. A lot hinges on how the situation in Ukraine is finalized. Will UN mechanisms like JCPOA, UN peacekeepers, lifting of sanctions etc. be on the table? All TBD. US will prefer a long enough period to deploy conventional defenses. Russia a bit less, but long enough for it to address the giant holes in its economy.
But the global economic picture really requires understanding of how China decides to act. People tend to view the world according to their own civilizational context, so for example, the Western geopolitical analysis du jour posits a “Thucydides‘s Trap” vis a viz US and China. Chinese, on the other hand, have their own ready and applicable historic paradigms to apply to the global order. The ‘Three Kingdoms’ period of Chinese history is how the Chinese view the world. You will also need to understand that the fabled Chinese “century of humiliation” includes Russians in the list of offending nations. It’s a complex and subtle calculus for the Chinese leadership and having a very aggressive and successful RF on their border is not entirely in their interest in the long term. [but p.s. going “multi-cloud” definitely is what they want.]
I'm just confused. I feel like I'm having a conversation with a cnn text generator. Neither half makes much sense, and the latter half isn't contextually relevant.
Point to the "some in this forum were predicting Ruble going to 0 within a day". I don't buy it for a second. Or, I'm sure someone could have said it, but that too would be ridiculous. And, what is your point? Like, you said that the USD received a "death blow", which is bonkers. It makes zero sense in the global scale of things. And you can verify all of it. The index has had no short term negative effect, and the longer trend is still rising. That was the discussion. Some kind of ridiculous talking point about the dollar being unstable. I was keen to hear your thoughts regardless.
What I instead get is impressively, a complete board of geopolitics bullshit-bingo in a couple of sentences:
"civilizational context", "du jour posits a “Thucydides‘s Trap”", "ready and applicable historic paradigms", "global order", "‘Three Kingdoms’ period of Chinese history", "complex and subtle calculus for the Chinese leadership"
What on earth are you talking about? From your post history, it seemed like you were very interested in Russian economy, and Putin for that matter. Which is why I mentioned the Ruble. As for the other ramblings, if it wasn't auto generated, I don't know how that is relevant to anything. But, you do you.
Dugin has no power or influence on the Russian elite. Only clueless westerners post links to this book. Putin's imperialism is of his own biographical origins, and there is no shortage of other nationalist/pro-imperialist authors. Dugin is just one of the more intellectual ones, which isn't actually helpful in getting him popular among the Putin's "elite".
Whether it was influential or merely representative of a Eurasianist Russian Idea, the book has been prescient as a guideline for over 23 years. I wouldn’t expect it to be directly held contemporary doctrine. After all, the world is a bit different than it was back then.
This does not rely on any current influence by Dugin, who did not write the book entirely on his own.
> Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, bots, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.
It's a fact that Russia's military is still superior to Ukraine's. A plausible outcome of the current war is
* Ukraine formally acknowledging its loss of Crimea and the Russian-heavy east, all under Russian occupation since 2014
* Ukraine formally declaring neutrality (i.e., no joining NATO)
* Rump Ukraine's borders formally guaranteed by Russia/US/NATO
This gives Putin something that he can plausibly sell to Russians as a win, and codifies US/Western military intervention on Ukraine's behalf (not just the current flow of supplies) from further Russian revanchism, while not losing any/much territory that wasn't already out of Ukrainian hands before the invasion began.
Now, if the indications that Russian logistics have broken down and Russia's losses are unsustainable are true, that's a different story. But I am not ready to conclude that yet.
Ukraine's been unable to take it back in eight years of conflict. Formally ceding it might be the sort of concession that lets Putin claim enough of a win to end the conflict. Right now, he's got no ability to save face, and that risks continued escalation.
From the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan: https://www.mofa.go.jp/region/europe/russia/territory/overvi...