6) Why did Putin go into Ukraine in 2014 and 2022?
We have mentioned the role of the Obama hot-mic appeasement and Putin’s later invasion. We still do not know the U.S. role in the Ukrainian street violence of 2014 that drove out the pro-Russian but legitimately elected President Viktor Yanukovych.
Nor do we know to what degree the American multi-year, $5-billion investment in Ukrainian reform and the efforts of Victoria Nuland, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State, to pick and choose the members of the successor government, gave ammunition to a paranoid Putin. Did such interference energize Putin in fear that Ukraine, the former breadbasket of Russia, was forever lost and was being incorporated into European anti-Russian architecture of both the European Union and perhaps soon an envisioned NATO membership?
More immediately, the American disgrace and humiliation in Afghanistan—an abandoned $1 billion new embassy and a cast-away $300 million retrofitted huge Bagram Air Base, and a disastrous multi-billion-dollar abandoned lethal arsenal of American weapons, vehicles, and materiel that was left to the terrorist Taliban—likely encouraged Putin that the response to his aggression would be analogous to Biden’s flight from Kabul just six months earlier.
Then there was Biden’s earlier plea to Russia to spare American humanitarian institutions when he otherwise systematically waged unanswered cyber-attacks against U.S. institutions.
Furthermore, in January 2022, just one month before the Putin invasion, Biden was asked what the reaction to Russian aggressions would be, given at the time intelligence showed that the Russian Federation was starting to mass and prepare for offensive operations. He replied in Chamberlain style as follows:
“I think what you’re going to see is that Russia will be held accountable if it invades. And it depends on what it does. It’s one thing if it’s a minor incursion and then we end up having a fight about what to do and not do.”
Did Putin, rightly or wrongly, interpret that qualification that if he invaded Ukraine a month later Biden would not? But rather he would entertain an executive branch “fight about what to do and not do” over calibrating the attack as either minor or major. In other words, was Biden replaying Obama’s 2012 hot mic green-lighting of Putin? In any case, Putin did attack Ukraine in both those presidencies—and following their respective appeasements.
Finally, we forget another key and unfortunate appeasing signal to Putin. Obama put a hold on offensive arms to Ukraine. Biden did the same when he entered office in 2021. Trump, in contrast, who was impeached for leveraging foreign aid to Ukraine to demand investigations into the Biden family consortia and the Burisma pay-offs, was the only one of the three who did not hesitate to provide offensive weapons. And they proved critical in stopping the February 2022 effort to decapitate Kyiv.
7. Could Ukraine Have Cut a Deal after the Failed Russian Effort to Take Kyiv?
In February and early March 2022 Ukraine and President Zelensky were the toasts of the Western world for heroically repelling the attempted decapitation of Kyiv. From March to May there were peace talks to end the war that Ukraine was at least not losing. Four such efforts failed for a variety of reasons.
But one reported cause was that a giddy West assured Ukraine that it could get a better deal once Western arms poured in and was promised loudly by both Harris and Biden that it could enter NATO—a deal-killing offer. Do we remember the great “Spring Offensive” of 2023—a crazy idea to risk Ukraine’s limited resources in plowing against a huge, fixed line of Russian fortifications that bled Ukraine and ruined its prior reputation of invincibility after the heroic defense of Kyiv?
Mutatis mutandis, would the U.S. have allowed Castro’s Cuba, on our doorstep with a long history with the U.S., to have joined the Warsaw Pact during the Cold War? Of course not. So, the question arises why did Ukraine insist on that assurance, and was it signaled by Biden’s handlers that its spectacular pushback at Kyiv was only a foretaste of the massive impending “spring offensive” to come the following year, which we were told would get back all of Ukraine prior to 2014, given the stream of jets, armor, and artillery that would supposedly endlessly and quickly pour into Ukraine from the West?
But as the old Aristotelian adage goes, “One swallow does not make a spring” (μία χελιδὼν ἔαρ οὐ ποιεῖ).
And so, one heroic defense of Kyiv does not translate into a victory by Ukraine, any more than Napoleon’s initial numerous victories or the Wehrmacht’s summer and fall dash to the subway stations of Moscow, ended Russia.
Ukraine, remember, has only one-quarter the population of Russia, one-tenth of its GDP, and one-thirtieth of its area, which makes it difficult to defeat even an incompetent, corrupt, and ossified Russian military.
So where is the morality for those who support Ukraine—stop the killing and seek defensible borders and rebuild it, or pour in more weapons and see 2-3 million killed, wounded, or missing?
The post <span class="ultra-flag 4"><i class="fas fa-lock"></i>VDH Ultra</span>Ukrainian Bitter Realities and Visions of a Peace Deal? Part Three appeared first on VDH’s Blade of Perseus.