TrueTexan wrote: Tue Jan 25, 2022 1:08 pm
As for the Ukraine region, that has been in and out of Russian control for centuries. Well back into the days of the Tsars. Just like the other region that Russia took from the Ukraine, the Crimea.
The notion that Ukraine is not a country in its own right, but a historical part of Russia, appears to be deeply ingrained in the minds of many in the Russian leadership. Already long before the Ukraine crisis, at an April 2008 NATO summit in Bucharest, Vladimir Putin reportedly claimed that “Ukraine is not even a state! What is Ukraine? A part of its territory is [in] Eastern Europe, but a[nother] part, a considerable one, was a gift from us!” In his March 18, 2014 speech marking the annexation of Crimea, Putin declared that Russians and Ukrainians “are one people. Kiev is the mother of Russian cities. Ancient Rus’ is our common source and we cannot live without each other.” Since then, Putin has repeated similar claims on many occasions. As recently as February 2020, he once again stated in an interview that Ukrainians and Russians “are one and the same people”, and he insinuated that Ukrainian national identity had emerged as a product of foreign interference. Similarly, Russia’s then-Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev told a perplexed apparatchik in April 2016 that there has been “no state” in Ukraine, neither before nor after the 2014 crisis.
https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lseih/2020/07/0 ... n-history/
Ukraine is an independent country and we've always supported the right of self determination by people around the world. Ukrainian territory was fought over just like Poland and the Balkans and during WWII Poland was divided by Hitler and Stalin. That's one of the problems in the Middle East, western countries divided up the Ottoman Empire and we living with their map drawing.
The reason for NATO was to protect Europe from any further Soviet/Russian incursion. NATO has military plans and secrets and the US, UK and France have nuclear weapons in different locations in Europe, why would we admit Russia and then give her that information? Russia's window of democracy was short lived and then Yeltsin the drunk appointed Putin as his successor.
I agree, Obama could have done more over Russia's occupation of the Crimea.
"Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts." - Daniel Patrick Moynihan