Putin is entirely to blame, legally and morally, for the invasion of Ukraine. It is worse than a crime, it's a blunder.
I don't necessarily think America wanted to humiliate him and I don't think (some do) that the State Department wanted to provoke a war, but this was what they did.
I think, as with the outbreak of the two world wars, it was bad diplomacy on all sides that led us here.
As AJP Taylor said of Hitler, Putin is a rational, though no doubt a wicked statesman.
Everything happens for a reason. Putin's reason for invading Ukraine was the series of colour revolutions backed by the CIA, including the 2014 Ukrainian one and the inchoate one in Moscow in 2011, which he considered a pattern of American aggression.
He is utterly a KGB man, but too young to have learnt the wisdom of KGB chiefs like Andropov.
I did not realise for some time the role of the neo-cons in Ukraine, but this article on 'Europe’s Eerie Silence', by the sometimes loopy but often insightful Alastair Crooke, is interesting.
I'm not in favour of blaming Putin unequivocaly for everything. The west, essentially the US and EU, have repeatedly funded revolutions and regimes against Russian influence in Ukraine.
ReplyDeleteUkrainian forces have also tormented, attacked and killed ethnic Russians in the eastern provinces over the last 8 years.
Putin might have made the decision for war, but others are not blameless in the mess.
My apologies for not seeing your comment. I agree with most of that. Causation is complex and the Americans and Zelensky or whoever controls him have been very foolish and deserve a lot of blame. But I feel the fighting in Donbass from 2014 can be blamed on the people (first the Russian firebrand Igor Girkin and afterwards the Kremlin) who created the two self styled republics. I do agree that the Kremlin gave many warnings of its unhappiness and I do agree mostly with John Mearsheimer's 'realist' reading of events. I would add though that everyone in the Kremlin and in the Russian 'power structure' sees geopolitics in Mearsheimer's way and yet everyone was shocked by Putin’s decision to invade. We know this from the reactions at the meeting of the Security Council that he called.
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