I woke up this morning to the news that I had been dreading.
Russia launched a wide-ranging attack on Ukraine on Thursday, hitting cities and bases with airstrikes or shelling, as civilians piled into trains and cars to flee. Ukraine’s government said Russian tanks and troops rolled across the border in a “full-scale war” that could rewrite the geopolitical order and whose fallout already reverberated around the world.
In unleashing Moscow’s most aggressive action since the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, President Vladimir Putin deflected global condemnation and cascading new sanctions — and chillingly referred to his country’s nuclear arsenal. He threatened any foreign country attempting to interfere with “consequences you have never seen.”
Ukraine’s president said Russian forces were trying to seize the Chernobyl nuclear plant, site of the world’s worst nuclear disaster, and Ukrainian forces were battling other troops just miles from Kyiv for control of a strategic airport. Large explosions were heard in the capital there and in other cities, and people massed in train stations and took to roads, as the government said the former Soviet republic was seeing a long-anticipated invasion from the east, north and south.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine shows how having a big military capability can seduce a country’s leaders into thinking that they can achieve by force what they cannot achieve otherwise. We see this over and over again.
Whatever historical reasons Russia’s president Putin may give for saying that Ukraine is not a genuine country but one of recent creation, or that the western powers and NATO seek to bring it into an anti-Russia alliance so as to circle that country, it is the case at some point a new country becomes a fait accompli and trying to reverse that result by force only leads to needless death and destruction.
Putin is not alone in harboring dreams of lost empire or in trying to rebuild them by redrawing new borders in the present day. Much violence around the world seems to stem from similar sentiments held in other countries: The aggressive foreign policies of China, Turkey, Iran, and Serbia, as well as other modern states built from the ruins of past empires, appear to be similarly fixated on restoring historic territories to which they feel they have been deprived in the present day. Though less explicitly irredentist at the moment, some Western European countries also seem to feel a sense of ownership over territories they formerly controlled, most notably France in the Sahel region of Africa and in Lebanon.
…The United States has criticized Russia for violating another nation’s sovereignty. But given its own track record of invasions, assassinations, and torture of foreign citizens, it may not be the best messenger. Instead, at what’s certainly a dire moment for Europe, it is the words of the [Kenyan Ambassador to the UN Martin Kimani] that best embody the high principles of liberal internationalism and multilateral cooperation that now seem mortally endangered.
“We believe that all states formed from empires that have collapsed or retreated have many peoples in them yearning for integration with peoples in neighboring states. This is normal and understandable. After all, who does not want to be joined to their brethren and to make common purpose with them? However, Kenya rejects such a yearning from being pursued by force,” Kimani said. “We must complete our recovery from the embers of dead empires in a way that does not plunge us back into new forms of domination and oppression.”
Since Russia has overwhelming military power on its side, we can expect to see the same result we have seen elsewhere when a big military power invades a smaller country: a quick military victory followed by a long war of attrition as it faces ongoing resistance in its attempts to get a stubborn local population to accept their new overlords. The invasion will very likely end in failure. The main question is how long it will take before Russia ‘declares victory’ and leaves, as has happened with so many other invasions, leaving behind a devastated country. Ultimately, the invasion of Ukraine, rather than being the triumphant capstone to Putin’s long tenure as leader of Russia, may well turnout to be a catastrophe that leads to his downfall.
The wrinkle here is that there are some deep historical and cultural connections between Russians and Ukrainians which it makes it different from (say) the US and Russian invasions of Afghanistan and the US invasion of Vietnam. It is a war between relatives and not strangers.
In the end, as with all wars, the people who suffer the most are the ordinary people just trying to live their own lives in peace. One has to hope that the country will not be as ruined by the war as other countries have been.
I guess you mean that Ukraine and Russia have close cultural and linguistic links, and a shared history. But it’s also literally true. Many Russians have Ukrainian relatives. And many ethnic Russians in Ukraine identify as Ukrainian.
That the Russians and Ukrainians are closely related won’t make any difference.
The worst wars are usually civil wars.
Look at what just happened in Iraq and Syria with their civil wars or in South Sudan, Lebanon etc..
Look at what happened between the US North and South in the Civil War. Which never really ended to this day.
Terrible news 🙁 I was hoping that there wouldn’t be a war
I think the second negates the first. This is not like Gaza, or Lebanon, or Gaza, or the West Bank, or Iraq, or Afghanistan, or Haiti, or Iraq, or Panama, or Grenada, or Lebanon, or Vietnam, etc. etc. etc. At least, not on some levels. In most important respects for the people living there, though, it’s just the same or worse, because it’s happening to them. I’d hate to try to predict how it will pan out, though, not least because I honestly thought Putin was trolling the West and had no real intention to invade. I hate to be wrong.
Putin has been, and is now proving once again, that he is a murderous thug. The world exists in the shadow of potential nuclear annihilation caused by just this sort of reckless action. If the reporting of widespread Russian anti-war demonstrations is any indicator, then perhaps someone will soon ‘remove’ the vile dictator…
“I’d hate to try to predict how it will pan out”
On a general level the outcome will always be the same: we’re back at an international political system comparable to the 19th Century. And that’s bad news. The west (read: EU and USA) could have avoided this by understanding the Russian near-paranoid desire for a safety zone (this is why Stalin ordered Molotov to sign the infamous pact of 1939 -- the “champ of freedom” called USA invaded Russia in 1918 for instance) instead of flirting with Ukraine to become member of EU and NATO.
Disclaimer: nothing above can serve as a justification of the invasion that’s going on.
The good news for Dutchies like me is that the frontier is much farther away -- iso the German/French border it’s now the (Bela-)Russian/EU and NATO border. The bad news is that the Fourth WW will be fought with sticks and stones according to the MAD doctrine.
Short-term military wins usually turn out to be long-term political losses. Even if Putin pulled back his forces today, will you believe him, when he promises not attack again?
Or as the famous space trader Salvor Hardin put it, violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.
Lassi @7:
The question is: Why has anyone believed anything Putin has said in the last 20 years?
Hindsight is 20/20. I now think that Putin has learned from history.
2008 Georgia
2014 Crimea
2015 Syria
What were the negatives from those? Were there any? I look at the version of myself that thought the troop build-up for the Ukraine invasion was all posturing and curse myself for a fool. The signs were blatantly there for all to see. Yet again I’ve fallen for thinking that reason ought to win out.
I have learned a little from this though. No doubt there will be more cutting lessons coming my way.
-- Sanctions are no counter-threat
-- China is absolutely supporting Russia by asking for “peace” while refusing to denounce Russia. That kind of peace can only ever be achieved through prompt Ukrainian capitulation
-- Ukraine’s biggest mistake was abandoning its nuclear deterrent in exchange for promises of protection of Ukrainian sovereignty. We see now what those promises were worth
-- China will be learning from this. The only thing that dissuades it from taking Taiwan immediately is the knowledge that it absolutely, without repercussions, can do it at any time. Any reason to feel any sort of discomfort at Taiwan’s existence, and it will lazily reach out a paw and seize it, and then with the tail dangling from it’s mouth tell the world “we told you this would happen.” The idea of targeting China with sanctions is simply laughable. Then with Taiwan gone, the political wheels will slowly spin until another neighbour falls under scrutiny. Japan perhaps? Why not? It will never be a nuclear power. Not in ten, twenty, thirty years, maybe in a hundred or two hundred years or more, but China knows how to play a long game.
Hmm, please ignore what I wrote from “Japan perhaps?” onwards. I drew my bow so far the string snapped.
At times like these, this perspective is well worth remembering.
Russia speaks total lies. That doesn’t diminish America’s half-truths
Why didn’t that “a” reference work? When I click on it it takes me to a “page not found” area of the Guardian site because it it suffixed my link with %E2%80%9D. But I didn’t put any weird characters like that in my href clause. What gives?
Actual link is
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/feb/26/russia-lies-america-half-truths
@11,12, actually there *is* a weird character. Your href ended on a “smart quote” (UNICODE U+201D RIGHT DOUBLE QUOTATION MARK), not a plain ASCII double quote (ASCII 34).
Thus the HTML parser didn’t recognise it, appended it’s own closing quote, and the smart-quote gets treated an part of the URL, which the server doesn’t recognise.
(The start of the URL also appears to be href=”//www.theguardian… rather than href=”https://www.theguardian…, which suggests that it also started with a smart quote, and the parser went *really* nuts trying to figure out what to do with that…)
Note that the same is true in comment 12 (“Why didn’t…”) where all your quotes appear to be smart quotes. I suspect either your browser editor or the comment submission script is trying to be “helpful” by auto-converting all quotes, but that doesn’t work for syntactic HTML stuff which absolutely requires the non-smart base characters. I note that right now for this comment in the text entry widget I’m getting normal quotes, but in the comment preview they’ve been smart-ified. If they remain smart after I post, then yeah, the comment submission system is deliberately breaking any hope of entering correct HTML…
I don’t think Ukraine would have been allowed to nationalize the soviet nukes stationed in the country. Russia controlled their command/control system and would have been able to sieze them forcefully if necessary, with relatively low risk. No other power would have interefered.
The US is allegedly careful to only host warheads with permissive action links on other countries (e.g.: Turkey) but I also imagine it would be resolved politically or militarily in the time it took a breakaway to develop its own command/control that was not backdoored to hell and gone.
That seems slightly less likely than it did two days ago. Putin’s problem is that it does not look as though the Zelinskiy government is going to fall apart, or the Ukranian army surrender, at least, not quickly. Putin may well have believed his own propaganda and counted on a quick collapse. But if he orders his forces to pulverise Ukraine’s cities, as they could certainly do, it will expose the lie that this is a “special military operation” to “demilitarise and de-Nazify” Ukraine (a country with a freely-elected Jewish President), rather than the war of conquest it actually is. And as the body bags come home, it will be increasingly difficult to downplay the war as Russian official media are now doing. Meanwhile there has been far more courageous opposition to the war in Russia than I (or, AFAIK, anyone) expected, and the financial and political costs abroad have already been considerable, and will grow rapidly if Putin cannot bring the war to a swift (no pun intended!) close.
BTW, I am confident China will not take advantage of US preoccupation with Ukraine to attack Taiwan, because Xi will not want any parallel drawn; Ukraine is an internationally recognised sovereign state (including by Russia itself), while almost all the world (including China and, officially, Taiwan itself) colludes in the “one China” fiction which Xi would rely on as justification if and when he does decide to invade.
Thanks xohjoh2n, that explains it. Anyone know of a workaround?
file thirteen, no need for a workaround. I just type my anchor tags in the combox.
(The preview is not what is processed)
I just type my anchor tags in the combox.
I don’t understand what that means. Generically, I write:
<a href=”link”>Description</a>
in the comment box.
As xohjoh2n said, the douhle quotes are replaced by smart quotes, screwing things up. What are you suggesting I do instead?
[meta]
Nothing, file thirteen. That’s exactly what I type, too — though I add the title=”whatever” parameter to it so vision-impaired people have access to the alt-text. That works absolutely fine.
Again: the post-processed preview you get is not what the parsing engine uses for the markup.
In short, it’s not (as xohjoh2n speculates) the comment submission script breaking anything.
That part works fine. The preview is a bit broken — for example, paragraph breaks don’t show properly, but that’s certainly not it.
I just looked at the source and your problem is evident to me: this is what you entered:
<a href=”//www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/feb/26/russia-lies-america-half-truths”” >
So, you did not put the protocol portion of the link in (that breaks it right there) and you put in two quotation marks as the end of the href parameter delimiter. And that there is your problem.
@19
If you look a little more closely *AT YOUR OWN COMMENT* you’ll notice that what you almost certainly typed and intended to be standard ASCII double quotes have in have within that posted comment been converted into smart quotes.
I think you may need to re-evaluate your perception of the problem at this point.
xohjoh2n, mate! I gave an example @17, and they were not converted because they were the source, not the display. Yes, in #19 they were converted, because they were displayed.
BTW, the angle brackets weren’t angle brackets in the input, either — they were the HTML entities < and <, which are displayed as < and > respectively.
Anyway… file thirteen can either take your advice and remain bewildered, or take mine and fix the problem. You’re the classic case of someone with a little knowledge.
I didn’t enter two closing double quotes John, but let’s humour you and enter it again.
Here it is.
Now it’s totally clear to me that I’ve entered that line correctly, without two closing double quotes. Let me check again -- yup. And again… yep. So when I post this, there are two options:John:
-- your suggestion works, you are a genius, and xohjoh2n and I are simple at best
-- your suggestion doesn’t work, because you are a know-nothing blowhard
I look forward to discovering which it is.
Looks like I am simpke! Lol.
Simple
Just one more thing to check. I just want to ensure that things don’t change when I preview first. Here goes…
Test with preview
Still worked. Well, I am floored.
😊
Don’t discount: 1) weird contextual issues introduced by some previous comment, 2) administrative action in the background, 3) the specifics of your own comment -- the original anchor text itself included smart apostrophes, I can’t replicate that causing a problem in the preview but it’s possible it introduces something on comment submission since we know preview is not the same as what actually gets posted…
Hmm. After a bit of experimentation, if you mis-paste the URL such that it contains either extra or missing non-whitespace characters (so zhttps:// or ttps://) then the URL sanitizer will erase everything up to but not including the double-slash. (That kind of damage is extremely common -- I see it on a lot of sites.) The same is not true of leading or trailing whitespace, which looks like it is just ignored. I still can’t figure out any specific input that causes it to automatically add the trailing smart quote though.