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| NATO, Nazis, Satanists: Putin is running out of excuses for his imperial war |
| 2022-11-09 |
| [Atlantic Council] Why did Vladimir Putin invade Ukraine? The answer to this question really depends on when you’re asking. In the months leading up to the invasion, the Russian dictator focused his ire on NATO and sought to blame rising tensions around Ukraine on the military alliance’s post-Cold War expansion. As his troops crossed the border on February 24, Putin changed tack and declared a crusade against "Ukrainian Nazis." More recently, he has sought to portray Ukraine as a "terrorist state" while insisting that Russia is in fact fighting against "Satanism." None of these arguments stands up to serious scrutiny. Instead, the various different narratives coming out of the Kremlin reflect Moscow’s increasingly desperate efforts to justify what is in reality an old-fashioned colonial war of imperial conquest. Putin has long sought to use NATO expansion as an excuse for his own aggressive foreign policies. This plays well with the Russian public and also resonates among segments of the international community who believe the United States has become too dominant since the end of the Cold War. However, Putin’s attempts to position the invasion of Ukraine as a reasonable response to NATO encroachment have been comprehensively debunked by his own actions. According to Reuters, Ukraine informed Russia during the first days of the invasion that it was ready to meet Moscow’s demands and rule out the possibility of future NATO membership, only for this offer to be rejected by Putin. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy went public in the following weeks with similar proposals to abandon Ukraine’s NATO ambitions, but Russia chose to continue its invasion. The entire notion that Russia views NATO as a credible security threat was further undermined in summer 2022 when Moscow passively accepted neighboring Finland’s historic decision to join the military alliance. Putin has repeatedly cited Ukraine’s deepening NATO ties as justification for his invasion, but the prospect of imminent Finnish membership provoked no meaningful security response whatsoever from the Kremlin. If Putin genuinely believed a NATO invasion of Russia was even a remote possibility, he would surely have reinforced the Finnish border. On the contrary, in the months following Helsinki’s decision to join the alliance, Russia dramatically reduced its military presence close to Finland and the nearby NATO member Baltic states in order to bolster the invasion of Ukraine. Whatever Putin may say in public, he clearly understands that NATO poses no threat to Russia. Russian myth-making about "Ukrainian Nazis" is even older than complaints over NATO expansion and dates all the way back to Soviet World War II propaganda. For decades, Moscow has exaggerated wartime cooperation between Ukrainian nationalist groups and the Third Reich while conveniently ignoring the far more consequential Nazi-Soviet Pact. By conflating Ukraine’s centuries-old liberation movement with Nazism, generations of Kremlin leaders have sought to render Ukrainian national identity toxic in the eyes of domestic and international audiences alike. Putin’s enthusiasm for the "Nazi Ukraine" trope is very much in line with his broader efforts to place the Soviet World War II experience at the heart of modern Russian identity. Over the past two decades, Putin has turned traditional Russian reverence for the generation who defeated Hitler into a quasi-religious victory cult complete with its own feast days, holy relics, and doctrinal dogmas. This has enabled him to whitewash the crimes of the Soviet era while attacking contemporary adversaries as the spiritual successors to the Nazis. In Putin’s Russia, accusations of Nazism are a routine feature of the public discourse and have been leveled against a dizzying array of individuals, organizations, and entire countries, but Ukraine remains by far the most popular target. The effectiveness of these tactics has always depended heavily on outside ignorance of Ukraine and Russia-centric reporting by Moscow-based international correspondents. Unfortunately for Putin, his invasion has shone an unprecedented media spotlight on Ukraine that has done much to debunk the whole "Nazi Ukraine" narrative. |
| Posted by:Shamp Snurt3261 |
| #4 Re #1: Russian, what a warped world view you have. In the west that would be called a persecution complex, a mental illness. If yours is the typical Russian outlook, no wonder Russia is sinking fast into fascist morass, has no friends or allies. Only a few hellhole client states. Your problems are your own making because you can't see others past your own nose. The solution is also staring at you in the mirror. Open your eyes, learn to filter the truth from the lies you are told and be able see others from their viewpoint. Otherwise your neighbors will continue running to the west as fast as they can and your society will become more isolated, poorer and keep going back in time. |
| Posted by: Shamp Snurt3261 2022-11-09 22:51 |
| #3 Poor Russia! Someone's always picking on it. |
| Posted by: Matt 2022-11-09 21:44 |
| #2 |
| Posted by: ACA JOE 2022-11-09 21:30 |
| #1 Oh, the Atlantic Council. Boy, talk about honest brokers! I bet they aren't engaging in motivated reasoning at all! Vladimir Putin is himself a result of US foreign policy. If you pretend history started in February 2022, then yes, Russia “started” this war. 1: This war is a result of NATO aggression. 2: This war is a result of the CIA funding and arming nazis in West Ukraine for decades. More recently they launder this process through the National Endowment for Democracy. 3: This war is a result of the US-backed Yeltsinite shock therapy that destroyed the Russian economy. 4: This war is a result of the NATO-backed, CIA-backed, IMF-backed coup on Ukraine in 2014 that put Poroshenko and Yatsenyuk in power, and put the Ukrainian economy into the hands of the west through IMF structural adjustment programs. It’s amazing how Atlantic Council noticed Russia’s “imperialism” of waging a war on their own borders against a CIA-backed gang of nazis shelling their own countrymen since 2014 but didn’t notice the deep state's decades-long imperialism of arming and training those nazis in the first place. "US/NATO Provoked Ukraine War Say Most Experts On Russia" "Politicians and members of the media have nearly universally expressed shock and dismay at Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but their incredulity is belied by the fact that numerous Russia experts and historians have been predicting these events practically since the fall of the Berlin Wall, pointing out that a Russian response to ongoing NATO incursions was virtually inevitable." |
| Posted by: Spike the Hairy6811 2022-11-09 02:53 |