A favourite endeavour of mine. And this video is really worth watching. Periodically, we have visitors around here who side with the pro-Russia narrative to a really striking degree. Well, watch and learn, from someone - Serhii Plokhy - who is genuinely expert. (Yeah yeah, he lived in Ukraine as a boy. So what? Check out what he says, & then read it up for yourself.) And finish it off with the block quotation at the end of this post.
We might all note, in particular, Plokhy's comments on how Russia can, at the same time, be performing really badly in Ukraine (see this blog passim since 2023) but also be a genuine threat to Europe. So often we get - from Aaron Bastani in this vid, and from some of ourNote also how the good Bastani keeps learning things he should maybe have already known, and is consequently amazed by - in this vid, and in others of his excellent interviews. You might wonder why I regularly cite and link to Bastani's Novara Media, a bunch of supposedly irredeemable progressive lefties, as they would see themselves. Well, the highly articulate** leadership triumvirate of this bunch are, on their better days, definitely open to argument; and their slow, inchingly slow march to the right since 2017 has been amusing and instructive to watch. They might even, somewhat reluctantly, admit it. Bastani in particular is quite clearly a social conservative, and more so with each passing year (marriage, a family, home ownership, and moving out of London can have that effect ...)
[Their problem is, they have so much empty space in their heads where some genuine knowledge of the real world should be, that they - particularly AB again - are inclined to swallow almost anything they are told by people who seem to know. Their suckering by Gary Stevenson, "once the no.1 [self-styled] trader in the world" (my arse) is highly amusing: and AB has also been well taken in by, e.g., Brett Christophers and that old hippy-rogue Dale Vince: he laps up their stuff in a culpably uncritical way, because it's all so new to him & he has no relevant frame of reference or ability to reality-check it. All that said, they present some really thought-provoking stuff and, as I said, some of it clearly rubs off on them.]
Ho hum. Just watch the video when you have 90 mins to spare. And for good measure, let's add the following, from the remarkable commentator Kamil Galeev, which fits very neatly:
The Soviet American war was supposed to be fought to somewhere to the west of Rhine. What you got instead is a Soviet Civil War happening to the east of Dnieper. If you said that the battles of the great European war will not be fought in Dunkirk and La Rochelle, but somewhere in Kupyansk ... you would have been once put into a psych ward, or, at least, not taken as a serious person. The behemoth military machine had been built, once, for a thunderbolt strike towards the English Channel. Whatever remained from it, is now decimating itself in the useless battles over the useless coal towns of the Donetsk Oblast
You would understand the course of this war much better, if you consider that on February 23, 2022, Putin considered Ukrainians as Russians. Perfectly integratable, assimilatable and draftable. Take control over Ukraine, and increase your Russian population by over 1/3. Now the next generation of Russian leaders will not see Ukrainians as Russians anymore. The integration of Ukrainians into Russia proper will not be seen as either possible, or even desirable. It will be seen as a hostile foreign country, and a hostile foreign population. So, this may be the most important final result of this war. The unity of Soviet world, only partially affected by 1991, is now firmly and irreversibly shattered. Too much blood spilled, too much mutual hatred & suspicion arisen. Return to how it used to be is no longer possible
That said, recall Plokhy's salutary point above: all this can be true, and yet Russia can also still be a threat to Europe. Make that 'is'.
ND
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** Again, on their better days
6 comments:
"The behemoth military machine had been built, once, for a thunderbolt strike towards the English Channel."
In a second hand bookshop I stumbled on an excellent history of the "Miracle on the Vistula". In 1920 Lenin's Red Army marched west with the intention of reaching the Rhine and securing Germany for Communism. Happily the Poles defeated it en route and drove its remnants east.
And now I've found this. Ironic, eh, the anti-bolshevik descent of the Communistic Chancellor?
"The origins of General Haller's 'Blue Army' were equally voluntary. Raised in France in 1917-18, it topped the 100,000 mark, drawing partly on Polish Americans, who sailed the Atlantic to join the colours, and partly on Polish POWs captured by the French from the German and Austrian armies. Dressed in their French uniforms, its men came to Warsaw after campaigning in 1919 in East Galicia. Typical among them was Ludwig Marian Kazmierczak (1896-1959), a Polish Catholic from Poznan, a conscript to the German Army, a prisoner on the Western Front, and a volunteer, who joined the 'Hallerczycy'. He was the paternal grandfather of Chancellor Angela Merkel."
Mind you, there seems to have been a change of surname there.
https://www.theoldie.co.uk/blog/the-miracle-on-the-vistula-100-years-on
"a change of surname" How dim of me: she got married.
Very interesting. I can't see TACO Trump frightening Putin very much - which should worry us. Remember those old Yes Minister sketches. One on nuclear war tells us no one is going full tonto over just one measly little city - unless it is NYK. The Americans have got nothing to worry about, but France, Germany, Poland, the UK possibly. Do one, wait 3-5 years, do another. And I dont think our missiles would be going very far unless Donald likes the idea.
One day maybe China and India and Pakistan could co operate to take the US down. They could eventually have enough and could afford the human losses. The US is a very nervy place and it would not take very much run up the white flag. But bad for business, don't go there and why bother - there is money to be made.
Ultimately inside say 100 years the whales have all gone belly up and the human population is decimated - a measly one in 10. Nothing to worry about if you have land in a temperate region. Three cheers for Mr Putin, he has Ukraine, the breadbasket of central Europe and Asia. Robot tractors do as they are told. Mr Trump's successor has the great plains, France still has the Midi and we have got Lincolnshire. Yum Yum, potatoes. Food and migration will be (are) the new weapons, nukes not so useful. Think long term.
Will make our rubber boat problem look a nothing burger - our dinner for the week.
The Russia that is out of tanks, won't risk it's planes, with equipment for the troops plundered before it reaches the front line and likely possessing nukes that don't work (not tested and probably no fuel for the rockets) - is this the threat to the West you're worried about?
Why assail the walls when you can flood the foundations and wait? Why expend fuel and effort when you can find the greedy, the desperate, the foolish, and the treacherous on the other end of a messaging app to do your dirty work? Who needs to launch EMPs, when accelerant and matches can achieve much the same, exchanging a reduced attacked area for deniability.
Russia isn't much more adept at hybrid warfare than us, they're just a lot more willing, and know they just need to use the word nuclear to unleash the Chicken Littles.
CH
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