NATO member countries didn’t really want Ukraine, Ukrainian citizens really didn’t want NATO, but in 2008 Bush vowed to press for both Ukraine and Georgia to join NATO.
Saakashvili of Georgia (who is now in jail for corruption) also had two breakaway republics at the time — Ossetia and Abhazia — and he engaged in a war with them and kept hoping NATO would come. Back then Putin wasn’t even president, it was Medvedev. Anyway, the same exact war started happening back then, with Russia invading Georgia with tanks moving slowly to the capitol, Tbilisi. Their goal was to intimidate them into agreeing to stop shelling the two breakaway republics and leave them alone. (Georgia and Armenia, in turn, had been protected by Russia from Ottomans, much the same way).
The difference in that war was that it ended in a week, because Nicolas Sarkozy (the French president) negotiated a peace agreement successfully. Since then Russia hasn’t invaded Georgia further, simply protected Abhazia and Ossetia, in fact Georgia has been normalizing relations with Russia and opened up direct flights and tourism last year etc. A great outcome for all civilians, compared to what could have been a senseless war. I was in Georgia last year and saw it firsthand.
Meanwhile, after the regime change revolution in Ukraine in 2014, the CIA had 8 years to build up weapons and paramilitaries etc. Same exact playbooj that ravaged Afghanistan w the mujahideen (Arabic for “jihadists”) and Afghan Arabs, masterminded by Zbignew Brezhinski. This time it was CIA in Ukraine: https://news.yahoo.com/cia-trained-ukrainian-paramilitaries-...
So in 2022 when Russians tried the same playbook (intimidate Kyiv into not shelling the two breakway republics) they didn’t expect the Ukrainians to walk away from the negotiating table. They waited for them in Belarus under Lukashenko (where they had signed the Minsk accords years earlier, endorsed unanimously by the UN security council) but the Ukrainian negotiators kept delaying and venue shopping, and the SBU (Ukrainian KGB) even killed one of them as “a traitor” for being too eager to negotiate, a man appointed by the President himsdlf and who the Ukrainian state department called “a hero”.
I personally spoke to David Arakhamia (the guy w the hat) on Facebook Messenger in the first days of the war, he had many Ukrainians on his FB wall begging him to make a deal and avert the war. I tool screenshots and the pleading posts are still there. He privately told me he agreed w me. But when the negotiators entered the room they left after 2 hours. We don’t kmow what happens in closed rooms — whether Baker promised “not an inch” to Gorbachev, or whether the Ukrainian or Russian negotiators ever negotiated in good faith. But the civilians, the people deserve better representation. The war continued, and the tanks found themselves around Kyiv and major firefights in Bucha vs Azov and other armed groups with RPGs shooting at tanks. Kind of like the red triangle videos of Hamas vs Israeli tanks. It’s really unfortunate and was avoidable. Russia expected it to go like the last war, it didn’t.
Naftali Bennett was the Israeli PM and he could have played the role of Nicolas Sarkozy did with Medvedev (Russia) and Saakashvili (Georgia). He has a tell-all interview in Hebrew about how he had negotiated peace DIRECTLY between Putin and Zelensky, and had them both make major concessions — eg Ukraine wouldn’t join NATO, and Putin promised not to kill Zelensky. In his interview he said that Zelensky double-checked this and then came out to record his famous video “I am not afraid, I am here” and saying he needs ammunition, not a ride.
Why did Bennett not succeed? He said he “coordinated everything to the smallest detail” with the US and UK, he “doesn’t do as he pleases”, and they told him he MUST stop the peace deal. He said he “thought they were wrong” and still does. That peace is worth a shot. But he didn’t continue, and the war didnt stop 2 weeks into it.
Erdogan luckilh WAS able to negotiate a year-long grain export deal in the midst of a war, which likely saved millions of lives — Yemen had been very dependent on Ukrainian grain and had a famine from yet ANOTHER proxy war (this one between Iran and Saudis w US weapons, same kind of war but with roles reversed). But no one seemed to care about Yemenis, despite millions being in far more dire hunger conditions than Ukrainians ever were.
The world is complex, but Bush had started the stupid push into NATO, even as NATO members were slowwalking him. My guess is he was angry at Putin’s Munich speech in 2007 NATO, calling out USA for invading Iraq and violating international law. Back in 2001 Putin was the first president after 9/11 to call Bush and offer condolences and they made a joint anti-terrorism initiative. Putin wanted to join NATO back in 2001, he asked the NATO heads but was always rejected. Since 2002(!) Russia tried to stop the invasion of Iraq in the security council and every other way it could but Bush couldn’t be stopped. That is when I think Russia realized that after Kosovo and Iraq, that NATO isnt purely defensive and USA isnt going to be constrained by international law. Putin’s speech in 2007 made Bush want to flip Russia’s neighbors (about which every ambassador said it was a red line for anyone in Russia, “not just Putin”) so the result was predetermined:
Right - Bush "pressed for" Ukraine's membership, but he wasn't successful. And in fact Putin had executed (what he should have seen as) a successful containment strategy by that date, via purely diplomatic means. Sanity prevailed, reason prevailed -- but Putin invaded anyway. That's the key takeaway here.
As to the other tangents, briefly:
(1) No, the Georgia conflict was not "the same exact war". It bears a certain surface similarity, but for what should be obvious reasons, the analogy stops there. In particular Putin's attitude toward (and obsession with) Ukraine is in an entirely different universe from his attitude toward Georgia (the former he sees as basically a part of Russia; the latter merely as a buffer territory).
The situation in Georgia's breakaway regions is also entirely different; the violent aspects of these conflicts there go pretty far back (to the early 20th century, with major flare-ups beginning immediately after the dissolution of the USSR, and major atrocities inflicted by both sides).
There is, simply put, no analogy to be made with the situation with the regions of Ukraine that Putin is attempting to annex - which never saw any violent separatist conflict prior to Putin's invasion via proxy forces in 2014.
In short, there are huge, categorical distinctions between the two conflicts -- describing them as "the same exact war" is really quite silly.
(2) Re: Arakhmiya - your spin here is that the Ukrainians could have just walked away by making basically symbolic concessions (like agreeing not to join NATO), and all would have been well; and that we just don't really know happened because it was all behind closed doors.
This is a false characterization. By now we do have a pretty good idea of what happened, because the proceedings were quite famous and have been thoroughly investigated (for example in the Foreign Affairs article linked to in the thread below). In a nutshell, the concessions the Russians were demanding were not purely symbolic; rather they were demanding not only those, but drastic reductions in force that would have effectively left Ukraine without viable security guarantees of any kind. Against this backdrop there were also the atrocities happening on the ground in Bucha, Irpin and Mariupol, which in addition to providing a certain chilling effect, persuaded the Ukrainians that relying on Russia's good word for their security would not be in their best interest.
(3) There's no analogy between the Ukraine's paramilitaries and jihadists of any kind; that's just scare rhetoric. Once Russia invaded in March 2014, all bets were off -- and any help provided to Ukraine after that date was purely defensive, by definition, end of story.
I am making that analogy, there are so many elements in common, and the analogy to other proxy wars like Yemen too.
You could argue Brzezinski and CIA arming the mujahideen was also “purely defensive”, or Soviets arming the PLO a decade earlier was “purely defensive”. Both are nonsense, of course!
And of course, after Yugoslavia and Libya we know that NATO isn’t a “purely defensive” organization, and its member states like USA sometimes form coalitions to go invade other countries, like Iraq or Afghanistan, and occupy them for years just like the Soviets.
You must not know the history of cold war proxy wars very well to ignore all the parallels and the patterns that repeat and repeat.
Isn’t it a bit silly to just say “period, end of story” and just deny it? This is how people solve problems — by looking at similar situations around the world. You don’t fix a refrigerator by refusing to look at every other refrigerator and treating it as a special snowflake. Same here.
You could argue Brzezinski and CIA arming the mujahideen was also “purely defensive”, or Soviets arming the PLO a decade earlier was “purely defensive”.
One could, but it'd be silly as you already know, and no one is doing that.
Well, they shouldn't do it here either then. The analogy is quite deep since history repeats itself:
CIA training paramilitaries against Russia/USSR
Increasing the chances of Russia invading
Giving ever more weapons to the "freedom fighters"
Country ravaged and destroyed by war
Lots of dead combatants & civilians (needlessly)
Of course the war in Ukraine is like other proxy wars (in Yemen, Afghanistan etc) and can be analyzed by comparing them. For example, Iran did the same with Houthis in Yemen, as US CIA did with far-right paramilitaries in Ukraine. If you call Putin an unelected dictator who bombs a neighboring country to maintain their influence and hegemony rather than let a rival take it over, then what do you call the Saudi monarchy doing that in Yemen? And now that country is ravaged by a decade of needless fighting in a proxy war. In any case, the Ukraine war is not a special snowflake, at all. It's very similar to many other proxy wars.
It's also a war in which Russia invades a country in an attept to bring it to the negotiating table to agree to permanently stop shelling two breakaway republics, very much like with Georgia, so we can see what happened in Georgia (i.e. Russia didn't continue to take over the country, at all) rather than invent fantasy scenarios that Russian orcs want to genocide all Ukrainians, or will go and take over the rest of Europe if they succeed in Ukraine, etc. It is quite reasonable to look at similar situations to infer what the motivations were. And it's NOT reasonable to say "it's all Putin" when every US ambassador said every Russian leader (including Medevedev with Georgia) would react the same way to the "red lines". 73% of the Russian public supports the Ukraine war just like 73% of the US public supported the Iraq war. Public support wars. Similarities matter, and they matter most of all because they help us understand how to prevent and end wars.
For example with Georgia, despite all the similar motivations, and nearly the same actors in similar circumstances, the motivation to say "there is no analogy AT ALL, period, end of story" is that you can then claim Russia will be emboldened and continue its rampage further, if a peace agreement was reached. Most civilians want peace, and don't want carnage, so to justify continued carnage (resulting in 2 million dead civilians in Afghanistan, for instance), you need a narrative that is even worse than sending people to die in wars. So people bring up all kinds of claims (Russia will invade Europe if not stopped here etc.) So if a counterexample is brought up (e.g. Russia didn't continue past 1 week in Georgia) you have to shut it down very quickly. But the analogies are there, and the public's reactions on both sides is similar too:
In the case of Ukraine -- OSS training of partisan forces against the Wehrmacht would be an infinitely closer analogy.
The thing is, you seem to assume axiomatically that the CIA's training of stay-behind forces (a.k.a. "paramilitaries") in Ukraine after 2014 was intrinsically offensive, i.e. was done just to get up Russia's backside, for whatever nefarious purpose.
Well, I don't buy that axiom, the simple reason that after 2014 Ukraine had every right to defend itself, and creating stay-behind forces is just a standard way of doing that. Just as France, Italy, Poland, Yugoslavia, Greece and all the other countries in Europe had a perfect right to resist occupation by Nazi Germany via whatever means necessary and available to them, including the development of partisan forces.
as US CIA did with far-right paramilitaries in Ukraine.
Which "far-right paramilitaries" are you referring to? You seem to be confusing the stay-behind forces described in the article with quasi-independent militias like Azov. The two are entirely different, sharing nothing in common other than the slightly scary-sounding keyword "paramilitary" you keep latching onto.
Yet in your mind, they've fused into one and the same entity. Why is that?
It's also a war in which Russia invades a country in an attempt to bring it to the negotiating table to agree to permanently stop shelling two breakaway republics
Again, the Ukrainian regions on Putin's smash-and-grab list were never "breakaway republics" in the mold of Ossetia and Abkhazia, as has already been pointed out. There was no violent "conflict" of any kind in those regions until Putin's little green men began arriving in March 2014. There's just no analogy here. Doesn't matter how often you attempt to simply repeat it.
Nor did the 2022 invasion have anything to do with "stopping the shelling" in those regions -- that's just another talking point that people read somewhere and keep repeating and repeating, with no idea of what they're talking about, because there's simply no substance to it. In any case, it's definitely not why Putin launched the full-scale invasion.
Rather than invent fantasy scenarios that Russian orcs want to genocide all Ukrainians,
It's a fantasy scenario in your own head, because no one has ever suggested that Russia intends to "genocide all Ukrainians". That's just a straw man, with simply no substance behind it.
With that, I'm going to have to bow out, and let you figure this stuff out on your own. It's one thing to have different viewpoints about what these big awful governments and their respective agencies are up to. But we're nowhere near that kind of discussion. I just have the sense that you're extremely careless in your research, or are reading from very propagandized sources, or just not pausing to think critically about whatever stuff it is that you do read.
https://www.reuters.com/article/world/bush-to-press-for-ukra...
Saakashvili of Georgia (who is now in jail for corruption) also had two breakaway republics at the time — Ossetia and Abhazia — and he engaged in a war with them and kept hoping NATO would come. Back then Putin wasn’t even president, it was Medvedev. Anyway, the same exact war started happening back then, with Russia invading Georgia with tanks moving slowly to the capitol, Tbilisi. Their goal was to intimidate them into agreeing to stop shelling the two breakaway republics and leave them alone. (Georgia and Armenia, in turn, had been protected by Russia from Ottomans, much the same way).
The difference in that war was that it ended in a week, because Nicolas Sarkozy (the French president) negotiated a peace agreement successfully. Since then Russia hasn’t invaded Georgia further, simply protected Abhazia and Ossetia, in fact Georgia has been normalizing relations with Russia and opened up direct flights and tourism last year etc. A great outcome for all civilians, compared to what could have been a senseless war. I was in Georgia last year and saw it firsthand.
Meanwhile, after the regime change revolution in Ukraine in 2014, the CIA had 8 years to build up weapons and paramilitaries etc. Same exact playbooj that ravaged Afghanistan w the mujahideen (Arabic for “jihadists”) and Afghan Arabs, masterminded by Zbignew Brezhinski. This time it was CIA in Ukraine: https://news.yahoo.com/cia-trained-ukrainian-paramilitaries-...
So in 2022 when Russians tried the same playbook (intimidate Kyiv into not shelling the two breakway republics) they didn’t expect the Ukrainians to walk away from the negotiating table. They waited for them in Belarus under Lukashenko (where they had signed the Minsk accords years earlier, endorsed unanimously by the UN security council) but the Ukrainian negotiators kept delaying and venue shopping, and the SBU (Ukrainian KGB) even killed one of them as “a traitor” for being too eager to negotiate, a man appointed by the President himsdlf and who the Ukrainian state department called “a hero”.
I personally spoke to David Arakhamia (the guy w the hat) on Facebook Messenger in the first days of the war, he had many Ukrainians on his FB wall begging him to make a deal and avert the war. I tool screenshots and the pleading posts are still there. He privately told me he agreed w me. But when the negotiators entered the room they left after 2 hours. We don’t kmow what happens in closed rooms — whether Baker promised “not an inch” to Gorbachev, or whether the Ukrainian or Russian negotiators ever negotiated in good faith. But the civilians, the people deserve better representation. The war continued, and the tanks found themselves around Kyiv and major firefights in Bucha vs Azov and other armed groups with RPGs shooting at tanks. Kind of like the red triangle videos of Hamas vs Israeli tanks. It’s really unfortunate and was avoidable. Russia expected it to go like the last war, it didn’t.
Naftali Bennett was the Israeli PM and he could have played the role of Nicolas Sarkozy did with Medvedev (Russia) and Saakashvili (Georgia). He has a tell-all interview in Hebrew about how he had negotiated peace DIRECTLY between Putin and Zelensky, and had them both make major concessions — eg Ukraine wouldn’t join NATO, and Putin promised not to kill Zelensky. In his interview he said that Zelensky double-checked this and then came out to record his famous video “I am not afraid, I am here” and saying he needs ammunition, not a ride.
Why did Bennett not succeed? He said he “coordinated everything to the smallest detail” with the US and UK, he “doesn’t do as he pleases”, and they told him he MUST stop the peace deal. He said he “thought they were wrong” and still does. That peace is worth a shot. But he didn’t continue, and the war didnt stop 2 weeks into it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0yma0LxyVVs
Erdogan luckilh WAS able to negotiate a year-long grain export deal in the midst of a war, which likely saved millions of lives — Yemen had been very dependent on Ukrainian grain and had a famine from yet ANOTHER proxy war (this one between Iran and Saudis w US weapons, same kind of war but with roles reversed). But no one seemed to care about Yemenis, despite millions being in far more dire hunger conditions than Ukrainians ever were.
The world is complex, but Bush had started the stupid push into NATO, even as NATO members were slowwalking him. My guess is he was angry at Putin’s Munich speech in 2007 NATO, calling out USA for invading Iraq and violating international law. Back in 2001 Putin was the first president after 9/11 to call Bush and offer condolences and they made a joint anti-terrorism initiative. Putin wanted to join NATO back in 2001, he asked the NATO heads but was always rejected. Since 2002(!) Russia tried to stop the invasion of Iraq in the security council and every other way it could but Bush couldn’t be stopped. That is when I think Russia realized that after Kosovo and Iraq, that NATO isnt purely defensive and USA isnt going to be constrained by international law. Putin’s speech in 2007 made Bush want to flip Russia’s neighbors (about which every ambassador said it was a red line for anyone in Russia, “not just Putin”) so the result was predetermined:
https://theconversation.com/ukraine-war-follows-decades-of-w...
As for why Bush did it — I will let Bush say it in his own words: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MTX5uvZWu3Q