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President Emmanuel Macron of France, who has positioned himself at the center of Europe’s furious diplomatic maneuvering over Ukraine, said on Monday that the continent was at a “critical crossroads” as he met in Moscow with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.

Amid fears over Russia’s military buildup surrounding Ukraine, Mr. Putin and Mr. Macron met at the Kremlin, sitting some 20 feet apart at a long table to maintain social distancing. In televised opening remarks, the Russian president spoke to his French counterpart using the informal form of address, and praised France for trying to resolve the “fundamental questions of European security.”

Mr. Macron said that he hoped the meeting would begin a process of de-escalation, adding: “This dialogue is absolutely essential, more than ever, to ensure the security and stability of the European continent.”

Later, President Biden was scheduled to hold his first meeting with Germany’s new chancellor, Olaf Scholz, in the hope of strengthening Western nations’ response to Russia. Mr. Putin is demanding a rollback of NATO’s presence in Eastern Europe, and has massed troops near Ukraine’s borders — about 130,000 according to U.S. and Ukrainian officials, in what they say appears to be preparation for a full-scale military assault.

With the Biden administration staking out a hard line against Moscow, Germany so far lying low and Mr. Putin seemingly determined to force a solution to Russia’s security grievances, Mr. Macron has emerged as a key player in Europe’s attempts to ease one of the continent’s gravest security crises since the end of the Cold War. He was scheduled to continue his diplomatic outreach on Tuesday with a visit to Ukraine and a meeting with President Volodymyr Zelensky in Kyiv.

Mr. Macron has urged a more conciliatory approach toward Mr. Putin than the United States and Britain have taken, and the two presidents have spoken several times recently by phone.
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2022/02/07 ... raine-news

We'll see what Macron can do. The first round of the French presidential elections is this April, if his diplomacy succeeds it would advance his chances of being reelected to another 5 year term.

President Biden will meet with Olaf Scholz, the new chancellor of Germany, at the White House on Monday, a visit designed to publicly shore up a key link in the Western alliance amid concerns that Germany has not been a forceful enough partner in calming tensions between Russia and Ukraine.

It has been a rocky first few months on the job for Mr. Scholz, who took over from Angela Merkel, a politician who had worked with four U.S. presidents. Berlin’s reluctance to join its NATO allies in outlining consequences for Russia if it invades Ukraine has strained relations to the point that last week the German ambassador in Washington sent a warning home that many in the United States see Germany as an “unreliable partner.”

The situation represents a diplomatic pivot for Mr. Biden, who extolled his relationship with Ms. Merkel in a meeting at the White House in July: “Good friends can disagree” on matters including how each conducted relations with Russia, he said at the time. More than six months later, Mr. Biden is determined to present a united NATO front in the Ukraine crisis; administration officials say that the Russian military has already assembled 70 percent of the forces it would need to mount a full-scale invasion.
Mr. Biden and Mr. Scholz are also likely to discuss the contentious $11 billion Nord Stream 2 pipeline, a natural gas conduit being built between Germany and Russia. The pipeline has been assailed by Mr. Biden and his advisers as a coercive tool against Ukraine and other allies, even though the president agreed last year to waive sanctions related to the project.

The pipeline is on hold as European Commission officials investigate whether the project, designed by Gazprom, Russia’s most prominent energy company, is in compliance with European energy policy. There are growing calls among U.S. lawmakers to shut down the pipeline if Russia mounts an invasion into Ukraine. U.S. officials have said that if Russia did invade, the project would not move forward.

Mr. Scholz has been vague about whether he would agree to terminate the pipeline project. But he told The Washington Post, in an interview published on Sunday evening, that Germany’s response with its allies to such an invasion would be “united and decisive.”

Mr. Biden and Mr. Scholz will hold a news conference on Monday afternoon after their meeting.
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2022/02/07 ... raine-news

Olof Scholz is not Angela Merkel, he was elected with an ambitious agenda of social and economic programs and this crisis is messing up his agenda.


To end the Cuban missile crisis, JFK made a secret deal with the Soviets/Russians.
In a separate deal, which remained secret for more than twenty-five years, the United States also agreed to remove its nuclear missiles from Turkey. Although the Soviets removed their missiles from Cuba, they escalated the building of their military arsenal; the missile crisis was over, the arms race was not.
https://www.jfklibrary.org/learn/about- ... was%20not.

Who know what deals will be made behind the scenes to get Putin to withdraw his forces.
"Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts." - Daniel Patrick Moynihan

Re: Biden says Russia will invade Ukraine.

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French President Emmanuel Macron said Tuesday that Russian President Vladimir Putin told him he would not further escalate the Ukraine crisis in their marathon talks in the Kremlin a day earlier.

Macron’s remarks on a visit to Kyiv came after the Kremlin denied reports that he and Putin struck a deal on de-escalating the crisis. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that “in the current situation, Moscow and Paris can’t be reaching any deals.”

Macron met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy amid mounting fears of a Russian invasion of its southern neighbor. Moscow has massed over 100,000 troops near Ukraine’s borders, but insists it has no plans to attack.

The Kremlin wants guarantees from the West that NATO will not accept Ukraine and other former Soviet nations as members, that it halt weapon deployments there and roll back its forces from Eastern Europe — demands the U.S. and NATO reject as nonstarters.

At a news conference after his meeting with Zelenskyy, Macron said Putin told him during their more than five-hour meeting Monday that “he won’t be initiating an escalation. I think it is important.”

According to the French president, Putin also said there won’t be any Russian “permanent (military) base” or “deployment” in Belarus, where Russia had sent a large amount of troops for major war games that are about to kick off.

Peskov said withdrawing Russian troops from Belarus after the war games was the plan all along.

Macron said both Putin and Zelenskyy confirmed to him that they were willing to implement the so-called Minsk agreements aimed at ending the separatist conflict in the eastern Ukraine. The 2015 peace deal is “the only path allowing to build peace ... and find a sustainable political solution.”

Macron said the presidential advisers of France, Germany, Russia and Ukraine will meet Thursday in Berlin to discuss the next steps. Dialogue is the only way to ease tensions, yet “It will take time to get results,” he said.

Western leaders in recent weeks have engaged in multiple rounds of diplomacy in the hope of de-escalating the tensions and preventing an attack. High-level talks have taken place against the backdrop of military drills in Russia and Belarus. On Tuesday, Russia’s Defense Ministry said six large landing ships were moving from the Mediterranean to the Black Sea for exercises.

Macron said he did not expect Putin to make any “gestures” on Monday, saying his objective was to “prevent an escalation and open new perspectives. ... That objective is met.”

Macron said Putin “set a collective trap” when he initiated the exchange of written documents with the U.S. Moscow submitted its demands to Washington in the form of draft agreements that were released to the public, and insisted on a written response, which was leaked to the press.

“In the history of diplomacy, there was never a crisis that has been settled by exchanges of letters which are to be made public afterward,” he said, adding that is why he decided to travel to Moscow for direct talks.

Putin said after the meeting that the U.S. and NATO ignored Moscow’s demands, but signaled his readiness to continue talking.

NATO, U.S. and European leaders flatly reject the demands that they say challenge NATO’s core principles, like shutting the door to Ukraine or other countries that might seek membership; but they have offered to talk about other Russian security concerns in Europe.

Putin warned that Ukraine membership in NATO could trigger a war between Russia and the alliance should Kyiv move to retake the Crimean Peninsula, which Moscow annexed in 2014. In that case, he said, European countries would be drawn into a military conflict with Russia where “there will be no winners.”

U.S. President Joe Biden has said that any prospect of Ukraine entering NATO “in the near term is not very likely,” but he and other NATO member nations and NATO itself refuse to rule out Ukraine’s entry into the alliance at a future date.

Biden met in Washington on Monday with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who also will travel to Kyiv and Moscow on Feb. 14-15.

Biden vowed that the Nord Stream 2 Russia-to-Germany gas pipeline, which has been completed but is not yet operating, will be blocked “if Russia invades, that means tanks and troops crossing the border of Ukraine again.” Halting the pipeline’s operation would hurt Russia economically but also cause supply problems for Germany.

Scholz warned Moscow that “a lot more could happen than they’ve perhaps calculated with themselves” in case of an invasion.

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson warned Russia that an invasion of Ukraine will only make NATO stronger, but said he still believes “principled and determined diplomacy” could defuse the crisis.

Writing in The Times of London, Johnson urged allies to finalize plans for heavy economic sanctions that would come into effect if Russia crosses the border into Ukraine.

He said the U.K. is ready to bolster NATO forces in Latvia and Estonia as he prepared to meet the Lithuanian prime minister in London on Tuesday to show support for the Baltic nations.

Johnson said he was considering dispatching RAF Typhoon fighters and Royal Navy warships to southeastern Europe. Britain said Monday it is sending 350 troops to Poland to bolster NATO’s eastern flank. It already has sent anti-tank weapons to Ukraine.

More than 100 U.S. military personnel have arrived in Romania ahead of a deployment of about 1,000 NATO troops expected in the country in the coming days, Romania’s Defense Minister Vasile Dincu said, adding that “it won’t be long before the rest of the troops arrive.”

U.S. officials have said that about 1,000 alliance troops will be sent from Germany to Romania, a NATO member since 2004. Romania borders Ukraine to the north. About 1,700 U.S. soldiers from the 82nd Airborne are also going to Poland.

U.S. officials have portrayed the threat of an invasion of Ukraine as imminent — warnings Moscow has scoffed at, accusing Washington of fueling tensions.

Russia and Ukraine have been locked in a bitter conflict since 2014, when Ukraine’s Kremlin-friendly president was ousted, Moscow annexed Crimea and then backed a separatist insurgency in the east of the country. The fighting between Russia-backed rebels and Ukrainian forces has killed over 14,000 people.

In 2015, France and Germany helped broker a peace deal, known as the Minsk agreements, that ended large-scale hostilities but failed to bring a political settlement of the conflict. The Kremlin has repeatedly accused Kyiv of sabotaging the deal, and Ukrainian officials in recent weeks said that implementing it would hurt Ukraine.

After meeting Macron, Putin said without elaboration that some of the French president’s proposals could serve as a basis for a settlement of the separatist conflict, adding that they agreed to speak by phone after Macron’s visit to Kyiv.

Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said Kyiv was “open to dialogue,” but would not cross its own “red lines.”
https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukrai ... cb1c81bddb

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And IIRC, Japanese negotiators were still talking in Washington when their imperial navy attacked Pearl Harbor.
"Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts." - Daniel Patrick Moynihan

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Putin saying Russia won't initiate anything means nothing if you buy into the false flag idea.

The problem here is that NATO envisions itself as a defensive alliance, not offensive - and Putin doesn't buy it. Of course, if you start from a revanchist perspective that holds the Baltics, Ukraine and Belarus - not to mention Finland - as historical Russian territories, suspicion comes easily. Kaliningrad is encircled and indefensible. Lithuania - and later the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth - has fought Muscovy back to the days of the khans.

Tangent - the distancing thing and Macron not taking Russian PCR tests for fear of the FSB getting a hold of his DNA? So, dude. You were there. You met with them in person. They've got it already. Whether they lifted a hair off a pillow or diverted his toilet into a separate holding tank, doesn't matter. You can assume that any intel service has a detailed DNA sequence of any world leader they take an interest in these days. The tech is just too widespread.

Re: Biden says Russia will invade Ukraine.

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US President Joe Biden has called on all American citizens remaining in Ukraine to leave the country immediately, citing increased threats of Russian military action.

Mr Biden said he would not send troops to rescue Americans if Moscow invades Ukraine.

He warned that "things could go crazy quickly" in the region.

Russia has repeatedly denied any plans to invade Ukraine despite massing more than 100,000 troops near the border.

But it has just begun massive military drills with neighbouring Belarus, and Ukraine has accused Russia of blocking its access to the sea.

The Kremlin says it wants to enforce "red lines" to make sure that its former Soviet neighbour does not join Nato.

UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson said on Thursday that Europe faced its biggest security crisis in decades amid the tensions.

The US State Department urged Americans in Ukraine to leave immediately.

"American citizens should leave now," Mr Biden told NBC News.

"We're dealing with one of the largest armies in the world. It's a very different situation and things could go crazy quickly."

Asked whether there was a scenario that could prompt him to send troops to rescue fleeing Americans, Mr Biden replied: "There's not. That's a world war when Americans and Russia start shooting at one another. We're in a very different world than we've ever been."

Other nations, including the Netherlands, Japan and South Korea, have banned travel to Ukraine and urged their citizens in the country to leave as soon as possible.

World leaders, meanwhile, continued their frenzied diplomacy to defuse the current crisis over Ukraine.

Russia and Ukraine announced late on Thursday that they had failed to reach any breakthrough after nine hours of talks with French and German officials aimed at ending the separatist conflict in eastern Ukraine. Ukrainian envoy Andriy Yermak said while there were disagreements "there is a will to continue and there is a will to negotiate".

The current tensions come eight years after Russia annexed Ukraine's southern Crimea peninsula. Since then, Ukraine's military has been locked in a war with Russian-backed rebels in eastern areas near Russia's borders.

Earlier, the UK prime minister said he hoped "strong deterrence" and "patient diplomacy" could find a way through the crisis but the stakes were "very high".

In a joint news conference in Brussels with Nato secretary-general Jens Stoltenberg, Mr Johnson said he did not believe Russia had yet taken a decision on whether to invade Ukraine but the UK's intelligence "remains grim".
Meanwhile, Ukraine accused Russia of blocking its access to the sea as Russia prepares for naval exercises.

Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said the Sea of Azov was completely blocked and the Black Sea almost fully cut off by Russian forces.

Russia's naval exercises were due to take place next week in the two seas to the south of Ukraine, the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov.

However, Ukraine's Border Guard Service said on Friday that Russia had told them it had cancelled its drill in the Sea of Azov, an internal sea bordered by both Russia and Ukraine. Two areas of the Black Sea will still be closed off for six days from Sunday.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-60342814

News reports are that 5 Russian battle ships entered the Black Sea.

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"Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts." - Daniel Patrick Moynihan

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The US and Israel telling their citizens to evacuate Ukraine because “stuff” is also a perfect way to troll Russia in this new social media driven environment. They say “intelligence” as if there is some grand secret invasion plot afoot. All the while Russia has been upfront in making political demands for its border security and visibly saber-rattling to get heard.

Nothing is hidden. Everything Russia is doing is above board and out in the open. The US and NATO are unwilling to meet those demands and instead goes at Russia sideways with fear-mongering and playing innocent like some gaslighting narcissist. There is historic precedent here. This is getting old.
"It is better to be violent, if there is violence in our hearts, than to put on the cloak of non-violence to cover impotence. There is hope for a violent man to become non-violent. There is no such hope for the impotent." -Gandhi

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Bisbee wrote: Fri Feb 11, 2022 5:56 pm The US and Israel telling their citizens to evacuate Ukraine because “stuff” is also a perfect way to troll Russia in this new social media driven environment. They say “intelligence” as if there is some grand secret invasion plot afoot. All the while Russia has been upfront in making political demands for its border security and visibly saber-rattling to get heard.

Nothing is hidden. Everything Russia is doing is above board and out in the open. The US and NATO are unwilling to meet those demands and instead goes at Russia sideways with fear-mongering and playing innocent like some gaslighting narcissist. There is historic precedent here. This is getting old.
Agree.
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"Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated!" Loquacious of many. Texas Chapter Chief Cat Herder.

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The longer we've been watching this, the more I think we're underestimating the western intelligence community. And that's inclusive of their tracking Russian military movements thus far.

In the past two months, we've seen an extraordinary campaign in diplomatic space, in which NATO members have predicted - in detail - the coming invasion of Ukraine. Maybe Putin intended to, maybe it was just an exercise, maybe he was fishing for leaks and testing NATO intel capabilities. Doesn't matter. We appear to have driven the cultural wedge between Russia and Ukraine deeper than Putin managed with the invasion of the Donbas and Crimea. That's saying something. We appear to have united the EU against the threat of Putin's Russia to the extent that Finland and Sweden are reconsidering their historical neutrality. We have prepared a raft of economic sanctions and countermeasures unthinkable just a few years ago. All the while explicitly maintaining that we will not send in our troops, that we will not get involved with boots on the ground.

Putin is well fucked. We've painted him into a corner where he bloody well can't not invade without looking weak, but he can't do it as a fait accompli, without consequence. He has been cornered into invading a country the size of Afghanistan, with as many people, bordering NATO allies and prepared for his troops. They have the literal worst nuclear disaster site sitting on his doorstep and could blast the damn thing to poison every single soldier he sends across the border if it comes down to Strangelove time. All this talk about taking Kiev in two days ignores the potential for the government to retreat to the doorstop of Poland while Russian soldiers get bogged down in block-by-block urban guerilla warfare to make Chechnya look like a walk in the park. Once Putin commits to Ukraine he is stuck and embedded and his army will never, ever go anywhere again in his lifetime. The Russian people will watch a generation of young draftees bleed out the way they did in Afghanistan, and they will curse Putin's name into the ages.

Or he can walk away. Biden looks like he stared Putin down, the West is united on his doorstep, and better prepared for his next military adventure. He had better have been playing the counterintelligence game here, because he has shit to show for it otherwise.

Nope, my money's on stupid now.

Re: Biden says Russia will invade Ukraine.

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Satellite images collected on Wednesday and Thursday reveal new deployment and positioning of Russian military equipment and troops in multiple locations around Ukraine, including Crimea, western Russia and Belarus, adding to an already ominous buildup that has fueled invasion fears.

The new imagery, released by a Colorado-based space technology company, Maxar Technologies, shows new or additional deployments in three locations in Crimea, the Black Sea peninsula that Russia seized from Ukraine in 2014. Those deployments include troops, vehicles and other equipment in Novoozernoye and Slavne near the western coast, and more than 550 new tents for troops and hundreds of vehicles at a disused airfield in Oktyabrskoe, near the center of the peninsula.

The satellite images also show additional military assets were moved to the Kursk area in western Russia. That puts them near the strategic city of Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest, which has a large Russian-speaking population.

Russia is also conducting naval exercises in the Black Sea and the adjoining Sea of Azov. Ukraine strongly criticized the naval maneuvers on Thursday, with the defense minister, Oleksiy Reznikov, claiming on Twitter that Russia was blocking international waters.

For weeks, Russia has been sending military forces into Belarus, saying the deployment was for joint military drills, including units near Ukraine’s northern border. The exercises began on Thursday and are scheduled to continue for 10 days.

Satellite imagery also shows the arrival of new troops and equipment at the Zyabrovka airfield in Belarus, 14 miles from the Ukraine border. The area showed little activity until the end of January, according to analysis of radar imagery by The New York Times, but the satellite images released on Thursday show the airfield bustling with helicopters, vehicles, troop housing and field hospitals.

The images suggest that Russia has increased its military readiness in the region. That would allow Russia to mount an offensive on short notice should President Vladimir V. Putin decide to do so.

U.S. and NATO officials have said that Mr. Putin appears to be preparing for a full-fledged invasion. Russia continues to dismiss that suggestion, insisting that all troop and equipment movements are for ordinary exercises.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/10/worl ... orces.html

White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan said on Friday that a Russian military invasion of Ukraine could begin at any time and urged Americans in Ukraine to leave now.

"We are not saying that a decision has been taken," Sullivan said, declining to get into intelligence details beyond that new Russian forces are arriving at the Ukrainian border. He spoke to reporters after President Biden spoke with trans-Atlantic leaders about the situation and potential response.

"I do want to be clear: It could begin during the Olympics despite a lot of speculation that it would only happen after the Olympics," Sullivan said.

Officials told the Associated Press late Friday night that the U.S. was set to evacuate its embassy in Kyiv ahead of a possible Russian invasion.

Biden is expected to speak by telephone with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Saturday morning.

A senior U.S. military official later Friday added insight to the warnings for Americans to leave Ukraine.

The official said that as of Friday evening "We do not have evidence that Putin has made a decision." However, the U.S. has been monitoring Russian troop deployments and the official said something was detected in recent days that sharply heightened concern that an attack is coming.

The latest information might not be a smoking gun so much as an accumulation of information over time.

Russian troops have yet to move toward Ukraine's borders and Russia has insisted they are only performing exercises. However, the official said the troops are positioned in such a way as to strike toward Kyiv and along several other routes where they would massively outnumber Ukrainian defenders.

The official nonetheless asserted that Putin is very close to making a historic mistake, that it would be far easier to invade Ukraine than to leave the country.
Sullivan would not predict when a Russian military attack might occur.

"We can't pinpoint the day at this point, and we can't pinpoint the hour," he said. "But what we can say is that there's a credible prospect that a Russian military action would take place even before the end of the Olympics." The games in Beijing are slated to conclude Sunday, Feb. 20.

Asked about past U.S. intelligence estimates that were proved wrong, including in the runup to the Iraq War, when Bush administration officials claimed that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, Sullivan said things are different this time.

"In the situation in Iraq, intelligence was used and deployed from this very podium to start a war. We are trying to stop a war, to prevent a war, to avert a war," he said.

Meanwhile, a defense official confirmed with NPR that the Defense Department will send an additional 3,000 U.S. troops to Poland in the coming days. This is in addition to some 3,000 U.S. troops the administration is dispatching to Poland and Romania and some 8,500 already on high alert to be deployed to Europe if needed. U.S. forces in Poland are expected to help those Americans who have left Ukraine in anticipation of an invasion, and they would not play any kind of combat role in Ukraine.
https://www.npr.org/2022/02/11/10801643 ... s-sullivan

We could hear from Biden tomorrow after he talks with Putin.
"Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts." - Daniel Patrick Moynihan

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With Russia carrying out a massive military buildup near Ukraine and the West roundly rejecting Moscow’s security demands, the window for diplomacy in the crisis appears to be closing.

But even as Moscow continues to bolster its forces and holds sweeping war games, Russian President Vladimir Putin says he is open to more negotiations in what appears to be a calculated game of brinkmanship intended to persuade Washington and its allies to accept Russia’s demands.

The West fears that a Russian invasion of Ukraine may be imminent, while Russia maintains that it has no plans to invade but wants its security concerns addressed.

Here is a look at the Kremlin’s strategy in the standoff:

Demands and responses

Russia wants the U.S. and its allies to keep Ukraine and other former Soviet nations from joining NATO, refrain from putting any weapons near Russia and roll back alliance forces from Eastern Europe.

Washington and NATO reject those demands as nonstarters, but they also are offering to discuss possible limits on missile deployments, a greater transparency of military drills and other confidence-building measures.

Putin has yet to deliver Moscow’s formal response to the Western proposals, but he has already described them as secondary and warned that he would not take “no” for an answer to his main demands. He countered the Western argument about NATO having an open-door policy by arguing that it threatens Russia and violates the principle of the “indivisibility of security” enshrined in international agreements.

Military muscle-flexing

With the West rejecting its key demands, the Kremlin has raised the stakes by massing more than 100,000 troops near Ukraine and carrying out a series of military maneuvers from the Arctic Ocean to the Black Sea.

As part of the show of force, Moscow has moved trainloads of troops, tanks and weapons from the Far East and Siberia to Belarus for joint war games, drawing Western concerns that Russia could use them as a cover for an invasion.

Washington and its allies are raising the prospect of unprecedented sanctions in the event of an invasion, including a possible ban on dollar transactions, draconian restrictions on key technology imports such as microchips and the shutdown of a newly built Russian gas pipeline to Germany.

President Biden’s administration also has deployed additional U.S. troops to Poland, Romania and Germany in a show of Washington’s commitment to protect NATO’s eastern flank. The U.S. and its allies have delivered planeloads of weapons and munitions to Ukraine.

Calculated escalation

By concentrating troops that could attack Ukraine from many directions, Putin has demonstrated a readiness to escalate the crisis to achieve his goals.

“Putin appears overconfident and is exhibiting a high level of risk-tolerance,” said Ben Hodges, who served as commanding general of the U.S. Army Europe and now works at the Center for European Policy Analysis. “He seems intent on applying maximum pressure on the West in this self-manufactured crisis, in hopes that Ukraine or NATO will eventually make concessions.”

Some observers expect Putin to further ratchet up tensions by expanding the scope and area of the military drills.

Fyodor Lukyanov, who is head of the Moscow-based Council for Foreign and Defense Policies and who closely follows the Kremlin’s thinking, predicted that a Western refusal to discuss Russia’s main demands would trigger a new round of escalation.

“Logically, Russia will need to raise the level of tensions,” Lukyanov said. “If the goals set are not being achieved, then you need to increase pressure — first of all through a demonstration of force.”

Lukyanov said that while invading Ukraine is not what Putin wants, he may challenge the West by other means.

“The whole idea as envisaged by Putin ... was not to solve the Ukrainian crisis by means of war, but to bring the West to the negotiations table about principles of European security arrangements,” Lukyanov noted. “The moment Russia starts a war against Ukraine, the whole previous game will be over and the new game will happen at an absolutely different level of risk. And all we know about Mr. Putin is that he is not a gambler. He is a calculated player.”

Potential paths for compromise

While Putin and his officials have insisted they expect the U.S. and NATO to bow to Russia’s demands — a prospect that looks all but impossible — some Kremlin-watchers expect Moscow to eventually accept a compromise that would help avoid hostilities and allow all sides to save face.

Even though Western allies won’t renounce NATO’s open-door policy, they have no intention to embrace Ukraine or any other ex-Soviet nation anytime soon. Some analysts floated an idea of a potential moratorium on expanding the alliance.

Gwendolyn Sasse, a Carnegie Europe fellow who heads the Centre for East European and International Studies in Berlin, voiced skepticism, saying that “the worst would be to signal that there are divisions in NATO,” noting that Putin might not be satisfied with it either.

Another possibility is the “Finlandization” of Ukraine, meaning that the country would acquire a neutral status, the way Finland did after World War II. The policy helped it maintain friendly ties with the Soviet Union throughout the Cold War.

Such a move would represent a sharp revision of Kyiv’s course toward NATO membership and likely fuel strong domestic criticism, but the Ukrainian public could eventually welcome the policy twist as a lesser evil, compared with a Russian invasion.

Asked about the “Finlandization” idea, French President Emmanuel Macron told reporters Monday that “this is one of the models on the table,” but he backtracked the next day when he visited Kyiv.

Another potential compromise would likely include steps to defuse tensions in eastern Ukraine, which has been controlled by Russia-backed separatists since a rebellion flared up there in 2014 shortly after Moscow’s annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula.

Russia has urged the West to press Ukraine to fulfill its obligations under a 2015 peace deal that was brokered by France and Germany and required Kyiv to offer self-rule to the rebel-held territories. The deal has been seen by Ukrainians as a betrayal of the country’s national interests, and its implementation has stalled.

Macron this week described the agreement as “the only path allowing to build peace ... and find a sustainable political solution.”
https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/st ... -diplomacy

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Tanks and armored vehicles on the move during Belarusian and Russian joint military drills in Belarus.
(Russian Defense Ministry Press Service)
"Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts." - Daniel Patrick Moynihan

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tonguengroover wrote: Sat Feb 12, 2022 10:22 am "Security provisions"?
Hell, least they don't have Mexico and all of So. America invading their country!
Crybabies. :sarcasm:
But the Mexicans, the Central and South Americans are just paying us back for what we have done to them for the last 186 years.
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.-Huxley
"We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both." ~ Louis Brandeis,

Re: Biden says Russia will invade Ukraine.

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He Knows Putin Well. And He Fears for Ukraine. The Finnish president, Sauli Niinisto, has carved out a vital role as interpreter between East and West, and he is not optimistic about the prospects for peace.
As the threat of a new Russian invasion of Ukraine grew, the European head of state with the longest and deepest experience dealing with Vladimir V. Putin fielded calls and doled out advice to President Emmanuel Macron of France and other world leaders desperate for insight into his difficult neighbor to the east.

“‘What do you think about this about this, what about this, or this?’ That’s where I try to be helpful,” said Sauli Niinisto, the president of Finland, as the harsh light gleaming off the snow and frozen bay poured into the presidential residence. “They know that I know Putin,” he added. “And because it goes the other way around Putin sometimes says, ‘Well, why don’t you tell your Western friends that and that and that?’”

Mr. Niinisto, 73, said his role was not merely that of a Nordic runner, shuttling messages between East and West, but of borderland interpreter, explaining to both sides the thinking of the other. The departure from politics of Angela Merkel, who for years as Germany’s chancellor led Europe’s negotiations with Mr. Putin, has made Mr. Niinisto’s role, while smaller, vital, especially as the drumbeat of war grows louder.

But Mr. Niinisto is not optimistic. Before and after his last long conversation with Mr. Putin last month, he said, he had noticed a change in the Russian. “His state of mind, the deciding, decisiveness — that is clearly different,” Mr. Niinisto said. He believed Mr. Putin felt he had to seize on “the momentum he has now.”


He said it was hard to imagine that things would return to the way they had been before. The opposing sides disputed the Minsk agreement that the Russians insisted be honored. The remaining options boiled down to Russia pressuring Europe and extracting demands from the United States for the foreseeable future, or, he said, “warfare.”

Such plain speaking has made Mr. Niinisto, in the fifth year of his second six-year term, wildly popular in Finland. He is compared by some to Urho Kekkonen, who took power in 1956 and ruled Finland for 25 years, during the so-called Finlandization period of the Cold War.

“We love him,” said Juha Eriksson, as he sold Reindeer pelts, canned bear meat and smoked salmon sandwiches in a market next to ice shards in the bay. “My generation had Kekkonen and he was the father of the country. And he is a little something like that. It’s a pity that he must leave office soon.”

Mr. Niinisto plays down his near 90 percent approval rating as consistent with his predecessors and dismisses the hyperbolic talk of his being some kind of Putin whisperer. “It’s an exaggeration that I somehow know more about Putin or his thinking,” he said. He is clearly cautious about upsetting a relationship he has nurtured over a decade, including many meetings, countless phone calls and a game of ice hockey. Asked who was better, he responded diplomatically, “I’ve been playing all my life.”

But he did point to some concrete benefits. After gaining support from Ms. Merkel, he said that he asked in 2020 if Mr. Putin would let Aleksei A. Navalny, the Russian opposition leader who accuses Russian operatives of poisoning him, to be flown to Germany for medical treatment. Mr. Navalny’s office later thanked Mr. Niinisto.

“He is a good person to call when you want to understand what is happening in the northeastern corner of Europe and especially if you want to understand the thinking of President Putin,” said Alexander Stubb, a former prime minister and foreign minister, who has accompanied Mr. Niinisto in meetings with Mr. Putin. “He’s a mastermind in power politics and in finding the right balance.”

That Mr. Stubb was so effusive about the president itself said something about Mr. Niinisto’s overwhelming popularity, and political dominance, in Finland, as political tensions between the two are widely talked about here.

Mr. Niinisto derives his power from a critical national security meeting that he runs and from the Constitution, which states that foreign policy is “led by the president of the republic in cooperation with the government,”

“It’s the president — pause — who is leading in cooperation,” Mr. Niinisto explained, making it clear who came first.

Finnish officials say that Mr. Niinisto sheds his diplomatic modesty in private, and is known for his long political memory, cutting style and mission creep. “I have been sometimes criticized for remembering too much my old history as minister of finance,” he said with a smile.

Domestic policy is the territory of the prime minister, currently Sanna Marin, a 36-year-old former cashier and climate change campaigner who raised Mr. Niinisto’s ire in January, according to Finnish political observers, when she told Reuters that it was “very unlikely” that Finland would apply for NATO membership while she was in office.

“I still say only that I see no major damages,” he said, with visible restraint. Asked if her statement was constructive, he said “I just repeat, no damages.”

The NATO option mattered in Finland as a strategic tool to manage Mr. Putin. In a country with an abundance of sayings about the incorrigible nature of Russians (“A Russian is a Russian even if you fry them in butter”) Mr. Niinisto recalled one about Russian soldiers, saying, “The Cossack takes everything, which is loose, which is not fixed.”

Despite recalling that Mr. Putin once said the friendly Finnish neighbor would become the “enemy soldier” if it joined NATO, Mr. Niinisto, who boasts about Finland’s impressive artillery, frequently asserts Finland’s right to become a member of the alliance. “I have said it to Putin too, very clearly,” he said.

Mr. Niinisto has also spoken directly to other leaders he suggested were threats to democracy. In a memorable joint news conference at the White House in 2019, he looked squarely at President Donald J. Trump and said, “You have a great democracy. Keep it going on.”

“He doesn’t respect institutions,” Mr. Niinisto said of Mr. Trump in the interview, whether it was the European Union or NATO. And the Finn considered the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol building a worrying sign for American democracy.

But in dealing with Mr. Putin, Mr. Niinisto tried to give Mr. Trump some pointers before a summit in 2018 in Helsinki, “actually behind that wall,” he said pointing across the room. Before a solicitous public performance that was widely considered a disaster for Mr. Trump, Mr. Niinisto told Mr. Trump that Mr. Putin “respects the one who is fighting back.”

Mr. Niinisto has said he told Mr. Biden something similar ahead of Mr. Biden’s call with Mr. Putin over Ukraine last month.

Besides the difficulty of dealing with Mr. Putin, Mr. Biden and Mr. Niinisto share another, and tragic, history. In 1995, Mr. Niinisto’s first wife died in a car accident, leaving him to raise his two young sons.

“I know his history,” Mr. Niinisto said quietly, adding that he might bring it up to the American president, who also lost his wife in a car crash as a young politician, “someday maybe if I had the possibility of having a longer sit with him.”

Mr. Niinisto also picked up the pieces. In 2009, then the speaker of Parliament, he married Jenni Haukio, then a 31-year-old director of communications for the National Coalition Party and now a poet. They have a 4-year-old son, and their dogs have become beloved national mascots.

Before the couple met, he was engaged to Tanja Karpela, a former Miss Finland who was a member of Parliament in an opposition party. They broke up in 2004, and Ms. Karpela now trains scent detection dogs that track Siberian flying squirrels.

The year of their breakup coincided with the devastating tsunami in Thailand, where he was vacationing with his sons and was nearly swept away. He survived by clinging high up on an electric pole for more than an hour. The traumatic event still seemed to shake the staid president, who lost a hundred countrymen that day. “People who were sitting beside you at breakfast,” he said.

That was a natural disaster. Now he hoped his relationship with Mr. Putin, and the “small moves” it might create, would help his partners avoid a man-made one in Ukraine.

“Dangerous times,” he said.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/13/worl ... -nato.html
"Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts." - Daniel Patrick Moynihan

Re: Biden says Russia will invade Ukraine.

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Ukraine has called for a meeting with Russia and other members of a key European security group over the escalating tensions on its border.

Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said Russia had ignored formal requests to explain the build-up of troops.

He said the next step was requesting a meeting within the next 48 hours for transparency about Russia's plans.

Russia has denied any plans to invade Ukraine despite the build-up of some 100,000 soldiers on Ukraine's borders.

But with the US saying Moscow could begin with aerial bombardments "at any time" more than a dozen nations have urged their citizens to leave Ukraine.

Ukraine's ambassador in London, Vadym Prystaiko, has backtracked on comments he made to the BBC in which he said Ukraine was willing to be "flexible" on its ambition to join Nato, which would have been be a major concession to Russia.

But in a subsequent interview he said that Ukraine had a constitutional commitment to join Nato and it depended on the "readiness of Nato itself" whether Ukraine would be admitted.

British Armed Forces Minister James Heappey said the UK would support whatever Ukraine decided to do.

Ukraine has made a request via the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) for Russia to explain its build-up of troops. Under the Vienna Document, of which Russia is party to, OSCE members can ask for information on a member's military activities.

"If Russia is serious when it talks about the indivisibility of security in the OSCE space, it must fulfil its commitment to military transparency in order to de-escalate tensions and enhance security for all," Mr Kuleba said.

However, Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky, who criticised the "panic" that could spread from such claims, said he had seen no proof that Russia was planning an invasion in the coming days.

On Sunday, he spoke for nearly an hour by phone with US President Joe Biden. The White House said President Biden had reiterated US support for Ukraine, and that both leaders had agreed on "the importance of continuing to pursue diplomacy and deterrence".

Ukraine's statement of the call said its president had thanked the US for its "unwavering support" and that, at the end, President Zelensky had invited the US leader to come to Ukraine. There has been no comment on the invite from the White House.

An hour-long call between President Biden and Russian leader Vladimir Putin the day before failed to yield a breakthrough.

In the latest attempt to find a diplomatic solution, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz has meetings scheduled with President Zelensky in Kyiv later on Monday and with President Putin in Moscow on Tuesday.

The chancellor, who took over the leadership of Germany from Angela Merkel in December, has warned of severe economic consequences for Russia if it should launch any invasion, echoing statements by other Western nations and members of the Nato military alliance.

But Berlin officials have downplayed any expectation of a breakthrough.

Meanwhile, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson plans to hold fresh diplomatic talks across Europe to bring Russia "back from the brink" of war.

In Washington, President Biden's National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said an invasion could begin "any day now".

Mr Sullivan said the US is closely monitoring for a potential "false flag" operation by Moscow as a pretext for a full-scale invasion so it can claim it is responding to Ukrainian aggression.

Russia contends that its build-up of troops along the Ukraine border is its own concern, within its own territory. On Sunday, senior foreign policy official Yuri Ushakov characterised the US warnings of imminent invasion as "hysteria has reached its peak".
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-60370541

Latest estimates are that Russia has 130,000 troops on Ukraine's borders. Without doubt, the US has intelligence on Russia that it isn't sharing with Ukraine because it's very likely Russia has spies inside the Ukrainian government.


Russia may be on the cusp of invading Ukraine, but it's the Taliban's advance on Kabul shaping much of the U.S. response.

Why it matters: After being branded incompetent and seeing their popularity ratings plummet after the Afghanistan debacle, President Biden and his team have decided to overshare information, coordinate closely and publicly with allies and tell Americans to leave the embattled country — now.

"There will not be a military evacuation in the event of an invasion," National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan told CNN's "State of the Union" on Sunday.

It was one of the clearest delineations from Afghanistan, where the administration worked furiously to evacuate tens of thousands with an airlift from Hamid Karzai International Airport.


The big picture: Biden's approach to Ukraine has been defined by a daily blizzard of meetings and calls among top U.S. officials and European counterparts.

Almost all are accompanied by formulaic readouts emphasizing allied support for Ukraine's sovereignty and territorial integrity — leaving no divisions or doubts for Russia to exploit. The president — an avowed multilateralist — was criticized for not doing enough to coordinate with allies during the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan.

Another lesson learned was heeding warnings about the potential for a country to be overrun.

An Army report about Afghanistan obtained last week by The Washington Post said "senior White House and State Department officials failed to grasp the Taliban’s steady advance on Afghanistan’s capital." The end result was a situation "placing American troops ordered to carry out the withdrawal in greater danger."

Sullivan said Sunday the U.S. government is being so blunt in its warnings to U.S. citizens because a Russian attack is expected to be brutal. "Innocent civilians could get caught in the crossfire or get trapped in places that they could not move from," he said. "That is why we are being so clear and direct to American citizens that while commercial transport options are still available, they should take advantage of them."

Go deeper: It's not just Afghanistan shaping the administration's response.

It's also the handling of Russia's 2014 invasion of Ukraine, which involved many of the same people while they worked for the Obama administration, as Axios reported last week.

During that assault, Russian President Vladimir Putin duped onlookers by dressing up Russian soldiers in plain uniforms and sending his "little green men" into Crimea while the West was paralyzed with confusion. The Biden administration has responded this time with preemptive intelligence announcements.

"Fundamentally, our view is that we're not going to give Russia the opportunity to conduct a surprise here to spring something on Ukraine or the world," Sullivan said.

"We are going to make sure that we are laying out for the world what we say as transparently and plainly as we possibly can, and share that information as widely as we can."

Yes, but: Ukrainian officials have expressed some frustrations about what they see as U.S. alarmism, saying it's caused unnecessary panic and damaged Ukraine's economy.

President Volodymyr Zelensky, who spoke to Biden by phone Sunday, responded to U.S. warnings: "The best friend for enemies is panic in our country. And all this information, that helps only for panic."
"It doesn't help us."
https://www.axios.com/how-the-afghan-fa ... d7b7f.html

German business has a lot of ties to Russia, perhaps Scholtz can pressure Putin, but he's not Angela Merkel.
"Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts." - Daniel Patrick Moynihan

Re: Biden says Russia will invade Ukraine.

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The Lesson Stalin Could Teach Putin About Invading a Neighbor

Earlier this month, American officials made a stunning allegation: Moscow had begun production of a “graphic propaganda video” that would show the aftermath of an alleged attack on ethnic Russians inside Ukraine. The video, featuring clips of corpses and actors in mourning, would justify the need for Russian troops to invade to stop a supposed “genocide.”

The existence of such a video is still under debate, and more recent intelligence assessments from White House officials indicate that a Russian invasion might come as early as this week, preceded by a barrage of missile strikes and cyberattacks. Still, there’s little reason to think Russian officials wouldn’t have at least considered a false flag attack as a pretext for an invasion that has been preemptively condemned by much of the West. This is a regime that has all but perfected disinformation operations over the past decade, from pumping lies about Russian responsibility for the destruction of passenger planes to hiring actors in 2014 to claim Ukrainians had “crucified” a young boy.

Nor would Putin’s regime be the first dictatorship to resort to a false flag attack to cloak its aggression abroad. In the early 1930s, Japanese forces detonated a stretch of railway in northern China, blamed it on the Chinese and used it as a pretext to invade Manchuria. A few years later, in 1939, the Nazis faked a Polish raid on a German broadcasting tower as a predicate to launching a full-scale invasion of their eastern neighbor, sparking the Second World War in Europe in the process.

That same year, though, there was another false flag attack that was, at least at the outset, just as successful as the Japanese or Nazi variants. This attack hasn’t gotten nearly the attention it deserves, but there are lessons buried in it for officials in both Kyiv and Moscow if they want to avoid a looming catastrophe.

In late 1939, Joseph Stalin stared at a map of the USSR’s northwestern borderlands, feeling buoyed by recent developments. The Soviet despot had recently inked a nonaggression pact with Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler, keeping the bellicose Nazis at a distance. He’d also held Japanese forces at bay in the east, stabilized his southern flank, and begun gobbling up the Baltic States. But there was one security concern that was top of Stalin’s mind: Finland.

The Finnish border was less than 20 miles from Leningrad’s outer reaches, well within range of a potential assault. Technically, the Soviets and the Finns had reached a formal agreement recognizing Finland’s independence; the border had been established in 1917, as the Russian empire convulsed in the civil war that resulted in communist victory. For Stalin, however, the Finnish presence near the Soviets’ only Baltic port, an area that housed about one-third of Soviet military industry, was unacceptable. And he was determined to change it.

Representatives of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia in Moscow, Aug. 23, 1939, after signing a 10-year nonaggression pact. | AP
As Stanford scholar Stephen Kotkin’s recent biography of the Soviet leader illustrates, Stalin hardly cloaked his desires. “We cannot do anything about geography, nor can you,” Stalin declared to one Finnish official. “Since Leningrad cannot be moved, the frontier must be moved farther away.” (Not that the Finns had any misconceptions about Stalin; as Kotkin writes, “To the leaders of Finland’s parliamentary democracy, Stalin was a gangster.”)

Efforts at diplomacy predictably failed, not least because of Stalin’s intransigence. “Is it your intention to provoke a conflict?” the perplexed Soviet foreign minister asked Stalin at one point. Stalin only smiled in response. The answer quickly became clear.

But one question remained: how to manufacture a reason for invasion. The Soviets and Finns, after all, maintained a nonaggression pact, and no one would credibly look at the Finns — with a population of only 4 million, against the Soviet Union’s 170 million — as aggressors. With state propaganda outlets pumping out anti-Finnish propaganda, and with Soviet officials in the Kremlin purring that Soviet troops would conquer Helsinki in as little as three days, Stalin spied a solution.

On Nov. 26, five shells and a pair of grenades blasted a Soviet position along the Soviet-Finnish border. Four died, including multiple Soviet soldiers, along with nine others injured. Though a Finnish investigation promptly fingered Soviet troops as the ones who’d fired upon — and killed — their own troops, the Soviets moved just as quickly. Claiming they were coming to the defense of “democratic forces” against a “fascist military clique” running Helsinki, Stalin immediately announced support for a new “People’s Government,” headed by a hand-picked Finnish communist. Over 100,000 Soviet troops rolled in, facing off against a country without an air force, with hardly any armored vehicles, and without even any wireless technology at its disposal. Left adrift by Western partners, the Finns stood alone. And Stalin stood ready to carve up the country as he desired.

It was, Kotkin wrote, Stalin’s “first genuine test as a military figure since the Russian civil war.” And it was a test he would fail, in spectacular fashion.

The first signs that the Soviet incursion would not be as easy as Soviet leaders had promised came early.

Following the formation of a puppet government, Stalin assumed he could rally the Finnish working class to the Soviet banner — an assumption that almost immediately collapsed. (As one Soviet reporter wrote, “This [Soviet-backed] government exists only on paper.”) Instead of bowing to a new puppet regime, Finns of all backgrounds rallied around a national identity that had coalesced in response to the Soviet incursion. Rather than a war about Moscow’s specific border claims, the war, to Finns, suddenly turned on the question of Finland’s national existence.

Finns acted swiftly. In the country’s east, directly in line of Soviet troops, Finland constructed the so-called Mannerheim Line, a stretch of pillboxes, bunkers and buildings with armor-plated roofs, all of which combined to slice apart Soviet regiments struggling through Finnish bogs and marshes. Elsewhere, fleeing Finns left behind booby-trapped radios and gramophones, which impoverished Soviet conscripts raced to — and promptly died trying to loot. Ingenious civilians glued portraits of Stalin to assorted buildings, spinning Soviet troops into confusion about their targets. Other Finnish resisters targeted Soviet tanks with Molotov cocktails. “I never knew a tank could burn for quite that long,” one Finn quipped.

Most remarkably, the Finns used their knowledge of local terrain against the invaders. Maneuvering on skis, the Finns would “climb the pine trees, conceal themselves behind the branches, pull white sheets or camouflage garments over themselves, and become completely invisible,” a shocked Stalin said. Elsewhere, Finnish snipers became known as “White Death.”

All of this Finnish national unity, this Finnish ingenuity, this Finnish resilience — knocked the Soviet giant on its heels. At home, citizens’ confidence in the Kremlin, which viewed the Finns as something hardly worth a fully mobilized war, collapsed. Soviet corpses, frozen and frostbitten, continued to pile up. After two months of battle, little Finland pushed its gargantuan neighbor to the brink of defeat, and to the edge of catastrophe.

Eventually, even Stalin realized he’d overestimated his supposedly inconsequential neighbor. Unleashing a so-called wall of fire artillery bombardment, the Soviets finally broke the Finnish line months after they’d originally planned. The Finnish government called for talks, which the bleeding Soviets were happy to oblige.

In negotiations, the Soviets finally, formally grabbed the territory they sought — about 10 percent of Finland’s total territory — pushing the border dozens of miles west and giving Leningrad breathing room. But the price Moscow paid was a terrible one, even given all the horrors of the following years: five times as many dead, nearly 400,000 casualties in total in just three total months, and an even higher daily casualty rate than legendarily horrific WWII battles like Stalingrad. And this isn’t even considering the broader geopolitical contex

Instead of ending up occupied by Soviet forces — a fate that befell Finland’s Baltic neighbors, smothered by the Soviets for the half-century that followed — the Finns stiff-armed Stalin’s forces and avoided becoming a Soviet satellite state, both during World War II and the decadeslong Cold War. Retaining its independence, Finland emerged as a European David against a communist Goliath. Likewise, thanks to Soviet intransigence, the League of Nations promptly voted to expel the Soviet Union — the only time the infamously feckless league opted for such a tack.

“Finland — superb, nay, sublime — in the jaws of peril, Finland shows what free men can do,” British Prime Minister Winston Churchill said. “The service rendered by Finland to mankind is magnificent.”

To be sure, there are whole range of differences between the Finland of the late 1930s and the Ukraine of today.

At its broadest, Europe is incomparably more stable in the 21st century than it was 80 years ago, as the continent barreled toward genocide and megalomania during the era of Stalin, Hitler and Benito Mussolini. And the goals in staving off Russian aggression are different; where Finland stood isolated, just hoping to hold on to whatever independence it could, Ukraine is tacking toward a mutual security pact with a range of other European and North American partners. And to his limited credit, Stalin hardly ever claimed that Finland was a core, constituent part of the Soviet project. Putin, on the other hand, has claimed Ukraine and Russia are “one people,” and that Ukraine is “not a real country.”

But peel past the broader differences, and the similarities between Ukrainian and Finnish attempts to counter Moscow’s imperialism are surprisingly aligned — and, perhaps for Putin, concerningly so.

Both states are smaller, post-colonial neighbors on Moscow’s western flank, having only recently declared independence from the Kremlin — an independence Soviet and Russian leaders see as something optional, and gained only when Moscow was at its weakest. “The status quo which was established 20 years ago, when the Soviet Union was weakened by civil war, can no longer be considered as adequate to the present situation,” one Soviet official said shortly before the Finnish invasion. That language parallels Putin’s recent claims that the West took advantage of Russian weakness in the aftermath of the Soviet collapse — and that the time for revision of that post-Cold War arrangement is nigh.

And then, just as now, there is a mixture of arrogance and chauvinism emanating from the Kremlin, which sees its newly independent neighbors as effective vassals, as states whose sovereignty remains conditional, and which can be easily steamrolled by a revamped Russian military. The Finns, though, quickly disabused Stalin of the notion that anything about invasion would be easy — or that anyone would flock to a puppet regime propped by patrons in Moscow.

There’s little reason to think anything would be different in Ukraine. Thanks in large part to Russia’s initial 2014 invasion, this past decade has seen an unprecedented burst of a kind of civic nationalism in Ukraine, of a rallying to a Ukrainian national identity. Any dreams of broad swaths of Ukrainian populations welcoming Russian troops are long buried — a reality that Putin, cosseted among hard-line advisers, doesn’t seem to have registered. Assuming an easy conquest of Ukraine, a country 10 times the size of 1939’s Finland, is a fool’s errand. (Indeed, one European Union diplomat downplayed the likelihood of an imminent invasion this way: “It would be such a mistake by Putin. War is costly, Ukraine will fight them with everything.”)

Maybe most importantly, just as with Finland, any incursion into Ukraine would only drive the country further toward other Western partners. Just look at the results of Moscow’s 2014 invasion; where less than one-third of Ukrainians backed NATO membership a decade ago, a clear majority of Ukrainians now favor joining the alliance. Just as Soviet aggression against Finland created a clear adversary on its western flank, Putin’s irredentism in Ukraine is forging not only a renewed national identity, but a country driving firmly into Western partnership.

And maybe that shouldn’t be a surprise. Whether overseen by Stalin or Putin, Moscow’s lurch toward imperialism, targeting populations who’ve previously escaped the Kremlin’s settler-colonial embrace, has consistently resulted in those border countries opting for partnerships elsewhere. Save for anomalies like Belarus, with a dictator backed by Moscow, Russia’s western reaches are now lined with adversaries and antagonists of Moscow’s own making. Even modern Finland, which has become an effective stand-in for the notion of neutrality, is now making noise about joining NATO.

And why wouldn’t they? “The same things always happen,” one Finn quoted in a recent New York Times piece said, discussing Russian belligerence on its western border and the similarities between Finland and Ukraine. All of which means one thing. Putin, just as Stalin over 80 years ago, might launch an invasion of a western neighbor, and use a false flag to do so. But if he does, he could well be met with embarrassment, disgrace, and strategic failure.
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/ ... d-00008519

You would think the Russians would have learned lessons from their days trying to subdue Finland, Afghanistan, and much of eastern Europe that is now part of NATO You might get away with it for a little while but it will turn and come back to bite you where it really hurts. You're better off trying to have trade and commerce pacts that benefit both countries rather than trying to conquer them.
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.-Huxley
"We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both." ~ Louis Brandeis,

Re: Biden says Russia will invade Ukraine.

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Ukraine said it had been hit by a cyber attack on Tuesday, appearing to blame Russia, as Moscow's statements about a partial troop pullback were met with Western skepticism.

U.S. President Joe Biden warned he would move with allies to respond to the cyber hacks and said a Russian attack remained a possibility.

East-West relations are facing one of their deepest crises in decades over Ukraine, post-Cold War influence on the continent, and energy supplies.

Europe and the United States want Moscow to reverse the build-up of more than 150,000 soldiers near the Ukrainian border, according to U.S. estimates. They have suggested arms control and confidence-building steps to defuse the standoff.

On Tuesday, Russia published footage to demonstrate it was returning some troops to base after exercises. Biden said the United States had not verified the move. "Our analysts indicate that they remain very much in a threatening position," he said.

Ukraine did not say who it believed was responsible for the cyber attack, but a statement suggested it was pointing the finger at Russia.

"It is not ruled out that the aggressor used tactics of dirty little tricks because its aggressive plans are not working out on a large scale," said the Ukrainian Centre for Strategic Communications and Information Security, which is part of the culture ministry.

Ukrainian bank Privatbank users reported problems with payments and a banking app, while Oshadbank said its systems had slowed down.

Russia's Federal Security Service did not immediately reply to a request for comment from Reuters.

"If Russia attacks the United States or our allies through asymmetric means like disruptive cyber attacks against our companies or critical infrastructure, we're prepared to respond," Biden said in televised remarks from the White House.

One European diplomat said the hacking was concerning because a full military attack on Ukraine would likely be preceded by a cyber attack.

"It could mean a physical attack is imminent, or it could mean Russia is continuing to mess with Ukraine," the diplomat said, on condition of anonymity.

The cyber attack was marked by distributed denial-of-service attacks, when hackers flood a network with unusually high volumes of data traffic to paralyze it. Such incidents are difficult to attribute but the European diplomat said there was no doubt that Russia was behind it.
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/ma ... 022-02-15/


Earlier reports said Ukraine's Defense Ministry and banks were hit by the cyber attack.

The FBI and DHS warned yesterday of possible cyber attacks.
https://news.yahoo.com/exclusive-fbi-an ... 16786.html
"Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts." - Daniel Patrick Moynihan

Re: Biden says Russia will invade Ukraine.

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The problem with this sort of “projection” is that several nations, indeed individual hackers, currently have the capability to strike critical infrastructure targets. Blaming something like hacking on Russia and calling it a prelude to war is like when in the late ‘70s nuclear defense satellites misinterpreted natural “superbolt” lightning strikes as small yield nuclear weapons explosions in Europe. Dangerous precedents exists for these kinds of scenario during a Cold War.

BTW, some TV ads during the SuperBowl overloaded the servers of their companies when too many viewers with nothing to do during commercials decided to check out these websites. Which is to say DoS attacks may not be attacks at all and sometimes are natural.
"It is better to be violent, if there is violence in our hearts, than to put on the cloak of non-violence to cover impotence. There is hope for a violent man to become non-violent. There is no such hope for the impotent." -Gandhi

Re: Biden says Russia will invade Ukraine.

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And THAT, friends, is what this game is all about.

Investigative journalist, Greg Palast, also suspect this is all about the price of oil. And that...
The only way to contain a black belt in judo like Putin is to attack in a place he doesn’t expect. If the US and Europe simply end the insane, unjustified embargo of Venezuela, the price of oil will collapse, Germany can then get its natural gas from the Caribbean and Putin will leave the Russian Orthodox in Ukraine to fight it out on their own.
So yeah, the Crazy Ruskie has already achieved his aim in shooting the price of oil over $100 a barrel by rolling tanks onto the border and having the Prez of the USA go bonkers warning Americans to leave Ukraine. We done been played, gentlemen.
"It is better to be violent, if there is violence in our hearts, than to put on the cloak of non-violence to cover impotence. There is hope for a violent man to become non-violent. There is no such hope for the impotent." -Gandhi

Re: Biden says Russia will invade Ukraine.

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Bisbee wrote: Tue Feb 15, 2022 8:24 pm And THAT, friends, is what this game is all about.

Investigative journalist, Greg Palast, also suspect this is all about the price of oil. And that...
The only way to contain a black belt in judo like Putin is to attack in a place he doesn’t expect. If the US and Europe simply end the insane, unjustified embargo of Venezuela, the price of oil will collapse, Germany can then get its natural gas from the Caribbean and Putin will leave the Russian Orthodox in Ukraine to fight it out on their own.
So yeah, the Crazy Ruskie has already achieved his aim in shooting the price of oil over $100 a barrel by rolling tanks onto the border and having the Prez of the USA go bonkers warning Americans to leave Ukraine. We done been played, gentlemen.
Perhaps but one thing is certain, if russia doesn't make the mistake and move into Ukraine(which would give putin a BIG bloody nose), it's pretty much guaranteed that Ukraine will join NATO..This russian folly has done more to solidify NATO/Europe than anything in the recent past.

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