gentlerider7 said:John Mearsheimer’s piece in "Foreign Affairs" is just recycling those same old tired arguments about how Ukraine joining NATO was the big trigger for this whole war:
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/ukrai...g-fire-ukraine
"Contrary to the common wisdom found in the West, Moscow didn't invade Ukraine just to conquer it and make it part of Great Russia. Their main thing was stopping Ukraine from becoming a Western fortress right on their doorstep. Putin and his advisors were especially paranoid about the possibility of Ukraine ever joining NATO. Back in mid-January, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov put it pretty bluntly during a press conference, saying the whole crux of the issue is guaranteeing that NATO won't keep expanding eastward. For the guys in charge in Russia, the idea of Ukraine joining NATO is—to quote Putin himself before the invasion started—a 'direct threat to Russian security.' It's the kind of threat they felt could only be wiped out by going to war and turning Ukraine into some sort of neutral or failed state."
"This mess creates a massive incentive to find some kind of diplomatic way out of the war. But honestly? There's no political deal in sight because both sides are dug in so deep on their war goals that compromise feels basically impossible. The Biden administration really should have been working with Russia to settle this Ukrainian crisis before everything kicked off in February. Now, we're past the point of making a deal. Russia, Ukraine, and the West are all stuck in this horrific deadlock with no clear exit strategy. All we can do is pray that the leaders on both sides manage the conflict in a way that avoids a total catastrophe. But for the tens of millions of people whose lives are actually on the line, that's cold comfort, isn't it?"
Here we go again with this guy and his mental diarrhea, despite having that fancy professor title.
http://en.kremlin.ru/events/presiden...anced-template
Of course, Putin completely ignores this whole essay where he rambles on about "historical unity," being "one people," and the supposed need for Ukraine to return to the motherland it supposedly "escaped from."
https://www.washingtonpost.com/natio...e-road-to-war
Now, this is an excellent article detailing how the U.S. was piecing together the fact that Russia was prepping for war, and how incredibly hard it was to convince Europe. Nobody wanted to believe Putin was actually that crazy; most people just thought Uncle Sam was blowing things out of proportion and trying to stir up trouble.
It also touches on how the US knew its own intelligence credibility was pretty shaky at the time. There was a huge political risk in coming forward with intelligence data to try and deter the attack publicly—because if the attack hadn't happened, nobody would have ever trusted us again, and everyone would have just said we were looking for a fight.
The article even mentions that in November 2021, as one of the last attempts to calm the Russians down regarding NATO (given all that noise about NATO being a threat), the U.S. offered to set up a joint group so the Russians could have access to data on NATO troop deployments in the East. I mean, what more could you offer than actual insight into how troops are positioned and what they're doing? But, predictably, they turned it down.
