“Duking it out economically” is not a zero sum game. In fact, it can benefit both parties. Sometimes metaphors can obscure reality.
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warplanes conducting raids in western ukraine would be a major trigger for the eu. it’s in their interest to preempt that
that show would be the biggest bomb in kiev tonight
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ukrainian MP quite frankly says this would help tremendously!
I’ll be shocked if this happens. It seems like a no-fly zone is going to immediately expand to bombings of air defense and/or runways by one side or the other and then who knows.
No.
No. See above.
Merkel isn’t even chancellor
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I hope Ukraine dominates ESC.
I don’t think no-fly zones will be happening but that means NATO and Russian planes are likely to end up in proximity to each other. An incident like the 2012 Turkish F-4 being shot down by Syria is a risk.
The official Ukrainian entry for Eurovision. Not bad.
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i believe turkey shot down a russian plane. what incident are you referring to?
I assume
Good article. Interesting points.
As it happens, Putin laid it all out in detail in his seminal July 2021 article, “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians.”
Here is my summary of it from The Nationalist Turn:
The capstone to the Nationalist Turn was laid by Putin in his seminal July 2021 article “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians“, in which affirmed that the Ukrainians are a colorful and distinct, but nonetheless inseparable, part of the All-Russian nation, drew a straight line between Ukraine as a de facto colony of Germany following Russia’s exit from World War I and its relation to the West today, repeated his long-standing view that the Bolsheviks laid a time bomb by including the right of secession in the 1924 USSR Constitution, and noted the coercive nature of “Ukrainization” as an ideological project aimed against “so-called” Great Russian chauvinism, thus securing at the state level “three separate Slavic Peoples” – the Russians, Ukrainians, and Belorussians – as opposed to the “large Russian nation, a triune people comprising Great Russians, Malorossiyans, and Belorussians.”
The article ends on an affirmation that Russians and Ukrainians are one people, inextricably bound to each other, and that opinion polls suggest that this is a point on which many millions of Ukrainians agree. He furthermore notes that the Ukrainians themselves do not benefit from allowing foreigners to make an “anti-Russia” out of the Ukraine, citing the economic failures of its post-Maidan years, and never have benefited from such experiments historically. He ends the article on a warning that Ukraine’s “path of forced assimilation” towards Russians within Ukraine is “comparable in its consequences to the use of WMDs against us.”
Incidentally, I strongly recommend you read Putin’s article in its entirety. It is as clear and unequivocal a manifesto of the “White Guardist” worldview that Putin seems to have developed over the past decade as anything else I ever saw, and as such, possibly the single most important article to understanding Putinism as it has developed into ethno-aware nationalism by the 2020s (having been previously defined by unideological technocracy and conservative retrenchment in the 2000s and 2010s, respectively).
Furthermore, note that Putin’s article was made required reading for Russian soldiers as part of political-military preparation.
According to Putin:
But the fact is that the situation in Ukraine today is completely different because it involves a forced change of identity. And the most despicable thing is that the Russians in Ukraine are being forced not only to deny their roots, generations of their ancestors but also to believe that Russia is their enemy. It would not be an exaggeration to say that the path of forced assimilation, the formation of an ethnically pure Ukrainian state, aggressive towards Russia, is comparable in its consequences to the use of weapons of mass destruction against us. As a result of such a harsh and artificial division of Russians and Ukrainians, the Russian people in all may decrease by hundreds of thousands or even millions.
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Yeah.
Well now they’re more in Europe than they’ve ever been.
When Ukraine wins this year, Russia will celebrate.
