At a recent event in St Petersburg, Putin compared himself to Tsar Peter the Great, saying:
Peter the Great waged the great northern war for 21 years. It would seem that he was at war with Sweden, he took something from them. He did not take anything from them, he returned [what was Russia’s] … When he founded the new capital, none of the European countries recognised the territory as Russian. They all recognised it as Swedish territory. The Slavs together with the Finno-Ugric people had always lived there. Moreover this territory had been under the control of the Russian state … Why did he go there? He went there to take it back and strengthen it, that’s what he was doing. Well, it seems it has also fallen to us to take back and strengthen
This has led various commentators to claim: “See, we told you Putin’s invasion had nothing to do with NATO or the West. Now even he admits it’s just an imperial land grab!” As someone who has claimed that NATO and the West are partly to blame for the war in Ukraine, do I now have to admit that I was wrong? No. And I’ll explain why.
The first reason is that Putin’s ‘Peter the Great’ comparison doesn’t tell us anything we didn’t already know. So if I thought my position was wrong, I would have said so by now.
In other words, there’s quite a bit of evidence that Putin’s an ‘imperialist’ – that he believes Ukraine, or at least parts of Ukraine, rightfully belong to Russia. The most significant piece of evidence in this regard is his rambling 2021 essay ‘On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians’.
So even I admit Putin’s an imperialist – that’s surely case closed? Not so fast.
Saying that Putin’s an ‘imperialist’ isn’t actually a very strong claim. Many people around the world are ‘imperialists’ in this sense. There are Spaniards who see Gibraltar as part of Spain. There are Argentinians who see the Falklands as part of Argentina. There are Mexicans who see Texas as part of Mexico.
The key question is this. When a country’s leaders see a particular foreign territory as, in some sense, part of their own, under what circumstances will they accept the status quo – rather than resorting to conquest? The answer is simple: they will do so when the benefits of accepting the status quo outweigh the costs.
Let’s apply this logic to Russia and Ukraine. What were the costs of invading? There was the possibility that a lot of Russians would die in a bloody war, as well as the possibility that other countries would impose crippling sanctions on Russia’s economy.
And what about the benefits? Aside from the advantages of having a larger territory and population, as well as access to certain natural resources, there were the costs of not invading. And here’s where NATO and the West come in.
Since the end of the Cold War, Russian leaders (not just Putin) have continually expressed their opposition to NATO expansion. And they’ve made clear that NATO membership for Ukraine is an absolute red line. Even the great Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn believed this, telling Der Spiegel magazine:
The situation then became worse when NATO started to spread its influence and draw the ex-Soviet republics into its structure. This was especially painful in the case of Ukraine, a country whose closeness to Russia is defined by literally millions of family ties among our peoples, relatives living on different sides of the national border. At one fell stroke, these families could be torn apart by a new dividing line, the border of a military bloc.
Then comes the reply: “Ukraine wasn’t a member of NATO, and even if it were, what threat would it pose to Russia?” But this is disingenuous.
Ukraine and the US had already made substantial inroads towards NATO membership. And in any case, whether Ukraine eventually joined NATO is less important than the fact it was in a close military alliance with the US – an alliance that formed after a Western-backed coup that toppled a pro-Russian president.
The ways in which this alliance threatened Russian interests (including its security interests) are obvious, and I have outlined them before. To quote myself:
In opposing a hostile military build-up in Ukraine, Russia was behaving in exactly the same way as Australia did after the recent security deal between China and the Solomon Islands. The Australian Prime Minister announced that China must not build a military base “on our doorstep”, and that doing so would be a “red line”. Is this threat an egregious violation of the Solomon Islands’ sovereignty, or is it a predictable reaction to Australia’s regional interests being threatened?
Returning to the main point of this article, a major cost of not invading was the possibility that threats to Russian interests would actually materialise. And it is this cost (i.e., benefit of invading) that could have been eliminated had the West followed a different policy from 2014 onwards.
For example, the West could have not supported the ‘Revolution of Dignity’. It could have not recognised the post-Maidan government (almost a quarter of whose ministers were from a party the EU denounced as “racist, anti-Semitic and xenophobic”). It could have insisted that Ukraine respect the rights of its ethnic Russian minority. And above all, it could have recognised that Ukraine would be best served by a policy of neutrality.
There’s a second reason I don’t have to admit that I was wrong. If you’re going to take Putin’s public statements (in this case, his ‘Peter the Great’ comparison) as evidence of his motivations, then you have to consider all his public statements. And the simple fact is that he has mentioned NATO or the West over and over again.
‘NATO’ appears 40 times in his February 21st speech, and another 9 times in his February 24th speech. The latter even clarifies that “the question is not about NATO itself”, which “merely serves as a tool of US foreign policy”. What’s more, since the start of the invasion, Russia has called for legal guarantees that Ukraine will never be allowed into NATO.
I do not dispute that Putin is an ‘imperialist’ who believes Ukraine, or at least parts of Ukraine, rightfully belong to Russia. My claim is simply that if the West had followed a different policy, Putin would not have acted on this belief by launching his brutal and illegal invasion.
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“Governments don’t stay in power if they make people cold and poor”. They do if there is no coherent opposition to vote for.
And even if they don’t stay in power and get replaced, the next lot just carry on in the same way, so it makes no difference.
And they are rewarded with gongs for failure.
Which confirms what I keep repeating on here – our governments are NOT running the country.
Pitchforks.
Petrol bombs while we still have access to it.
All the petrol pumps have been damaged by climate zealots.
Pointing out the costs and suffering won’t put an end to insane climate policies.
The policies stem from the idea that burning fossil fuels leads to climate catastrophe and destruction.
In most peoples’ minds, a bit of suffering is better than catastrophe and destruction.
Years and years of brainwashing need to be undone.
But that isn’t going to happen without telling everyone that the whole CO2 climate catastrophe story is a giant hoax.
Too many people who try to argue against climate policy on the basis of the unacceptable costs don’t dare to challenge the broader narrative and that’s a big problem.
I think this is true for the Guardian readers I know, but I also talk to quite a few people much more grounded in reality and I am sure they would be more than happy to forget about the climate crisis if their bills went down.
People are saying that “the whole CO2 climate catastrophe story is a giant hoax” but they do not try to prove it. Probably they do not know enough to be able to.
The UN and WEF will be delighted that their planned destruction of the UK …. at the hands of the British Establishment and puppeticians is going so well.
Only a small percentage of the Earth’s surface has direct temperature reading instruments of varying accuracy and from which these averages of averages are calculated.
The result is numbers, not data.
Net-zero common sense for decades. And all because the earth has supposedly warmed 0.8 deg C since 1860 when records began at the low point after a little ice age.
To physicists, that’s an increase of 0.3% from 288 to 288.8 degrees Kelvin. Meanwhile the difference in average temperature between London and Manchester is 1.2 deg C. Go figure.
A simpleton’s yarn debunked over a decade ago by a Nobel Physics Laureate…
https://mediatheque.lindau-nobel.org/recordings/31259/the-strange-case-of-global-warming-2012
“…In this talk I will explain why I became concerned about the climate, and terrified by the one-sided propaganda in the media, In particular I am worried about all the money wasted on alternate energies, when so many children in the world go hungry to bed.”
Twelve years on, the Climate Theatre of the Absurd just runs and runs.
Thanks for the link.
Climate activists are average people
No, I think most of us would consider them below average retards if there answer to a lack of wind generation is just to build more of it. 1 + 1 still only equals 1 when it is the percentage of output from your windmills.
Energy, supply and demand.
The article covers comprehensively the supply end, or lack of it, but leaves out the zooming demand. According to the (fake) statistics, the population of Greater London in 2024 was 9,748,000, 1% more than 2023. Nevertheless, going by measurements of water consumption and sewage production, the real figure is close to 12m. And this is the curious thing. The NetZeroist fanatics also support enthusiastically open borders, ignoring the fact that increasing population levels lead to huge greenhouse gas emissions.
Friends of the Earth’s Tony Bosworth said, “We have an abundance of natural resources like wind and solar,” he says. “They’ll go on forever, and we won’t be reliant on expensive gas and oil.”
Bosworth ought to be sent, along with the Just Stop Oil filth who have just desecrated the grave of Charles Darwin, to Texas, to be instructed by the Texans about what happened to their wind & solar during the terrible “Polar Vortex” Blizzards in 2021. The wind turbines froze solid, the solar panels were covered with snow, and the people froze to death.
“The Texas Winter Storm And Power Outages Killed Hundreds More People Than The State Says”
“A BuzzFeed News analysis shows the catastrophic failure of Texas’s power grid in February killed hundreds of medically vulnerable people.”
“The true number of people killed by the disastrous winter storm and power outages that devastated Texas in February is likely four or five times what the state has acknowledged so far. A BuzzFeed News data analysis reveals the hidden scale of a catastrophe that trapped millions of people in freezing darkness, cut off access to running water, and overwhelmed emergency services for days.”
“The state’s tally currently stands at 151 deaths. But by looking at how many more people died during and immediately after the storm than would have been expected — an established method that has been used to count the full toll of other disasters — we estimate that 700 people were killed by the storm during the week with the worst power outages.”
“This astonishing toll exposes the full consequence of officials’ neglect in preventing the power grid’s collapse despite repeated warnings of its vulnerability to cold weather, as well as the state’s failure to reckon with the magnitude of the crisis that followed.”
Texas’s Winter Storm Killed Hundreds More Than Reported
Until the mainstream media stop repeating the net zero lies, it will remain difficult to get the honest message such as this article, through.