Putin himself gave a long, rambling televised speech in which he strongly implied that he sees Ukraine as legitimately part of Russia.
Since the Minsk process was stalled out already and Russia already de facto controlled Donetsk and Luhansk, the formal recognition doesn't in itself change the real situation. But Russia is likely to send additional Russian troops there. And it publicly looks like Putin is rejecting indefinitely any possibility of adjusting the Russia position in the two breakaway republics, much less reversing the annexation of Crimea.
Presumably the NATO countries including the US will now start implementing an expanded set of sanctions against Russia. And there will surely be pressure from Poland, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania to reinforce the military position of NATO there. Russia is clearly implementing a policy shift that possibly does include an attempt to seize all of Ukraine. And the NATO countries will have to make an inevitably tricky calculation of how much escalation, diplomatically and militarily, they take in response.
It's safe to say that the latest developments is giving arms manufacturers new visions of dollars signs flying in front of them. And there will be an intensified debate in the US and Europe about which political sides are being "tough" enough or insufficiently so.
And that means more political barbs flying with varying degrees of conforming to reality. Like in the 1950s, mainstream Democrats and Republicans will accuse each other of being insufficiently tough on Russia, even as the Biden-Harris Administration has to come up with specific and immediate tactical responses to the unfolding developments and to propaganda hacks like Tucker Carlson gushing over Putin's manly manliness.
There's always a "blame game" in these situations. And since it's Russia that is committing obvious violations on Ukraine's sovereignty and international law in this situation, and is also positioning troops for possible a major invasion of Ukraine, mainstream commentators in the US end Europe will be grumpy about anyone insisting on critical reflections on Western policy.
But it's still important for people to try to walk and talk at the same time on this. And while reflecting on how we got here doesn't provide definitive solutions to problems of the moment, it's clear that some previous decisions weren't as carefully considered as they should have been. Both the Clinton Administration and Cheney-Bush thought NATO enlargement was essentially a freebie in terms of security risks. And a boon for the US military-industrial complex, although the latter should go without saying. But the corporate press in the US will rarely actually say so at all.
The incorporation of the former Soviet Baltic Republics Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania was especially risky, because in pure realist terms there was no way that Russia wouldn't regard that as particularly problematic. But, again, the US took that as freebie, effectively assuming that Russia would not ever push back on that in any substantive way.
Now with the Ukraine developments, the actual risk in the Baltics is more obvious. Ukraine is not part of the NATO alliance. The three Baltic countries are. And now the NATO countries have to worry about the fact that Russia has the option to create threats on the border there in the same manner as they are currently during in Ukraine. In other words, NATO is actually not prepared for a near-term invasion of one or more of the Baltic countries by Russia. Much less positioned to intervene in Ukraine to push back a Russian invasion there.
But, however much American arms manufacturers might benefit from wild threat inflation over Russia's current pressure on Ukraine, policymakers really do need to try to keep a grip on the realities of Russia's current situation. Russia has an impressive nuclear arsenal. But it's also a petrostate very dependent on oil and gas exports, many of which currently go to Europe. They have been building infrastructure to enable more exports to China, which is currently on very good terms with Russia, and definitely has the need and the renminbi to become a bigger customer. But that's definitely not an overnight substitute.
Russia has a lot of ground troops, not surprisingly for a country with the world's largest territory and longest land borders with other countries. But its currently military budget is roughly the size of those of Germany and France combined, and about a tenth of the US one. Which for media sloppiness on this. Russia's economy is about the size of that of Spain, the EU's fourth largest economy. That means to get its current size of armed forces, it has to be spend a far higher percentage of the GDP on defense that Germany and France have to spend to get a similar combined military budget. So arguments that Russia spends x% while Germany, France, or the US spends only y% of theirs are pretty meaningless comparisons if they don't include the actual comparative sizes of the military budgets.
Russia by almost any measure is taking a huge risk already, and an even bigger one if they really try to militarily take all of Ukraine. It's questionable whether even the 150,000 troops Russia has reportedly positioned near Ukraine now are anywhere near sufficient to carry out a full-blown conquest and permanent occupation of Ukraine. The grandiose, weird rambling of Putin's speech Monday could be partly ideological hot air. But there could also be a big element of arrogance and overconfidence in it, as well.
I recently re-read a 1938 essay by the psychoanalyst Earnest Jones from the period just after the 1938 Munich Agreement had been signed. ("How Can Civilization Be Saved?") He wrote there:
In more dictatorial countries than ours [Britain] the demand for omnipotence in rulers is so strong that the latter have to make constant efforts to meet it. This is the psychological reason why the position of dictators is so notoriously delicate, and why they are so sensitive to any loss in prestige, that the temptation to retrieve it by a violent coup may be overwhelming. lt is extremely difficult for a dictator to act this part for long without being captured by the belief itself and thus becoming megalomaniac. Even Napoleon lost, at the end, his usually close touch with reality. [my emphasis in bold]Whether we use "dictator" or "authoritarian" to describe Putin's current position of power, my own non-specialized guess is that something like that is actually going on with Putin now. What the NATO countries and especially the US need right now are realistic and practical views and evaluations of what is happening and not testosterone-charged fantasies and arms-manufacturer lobbyists' hype.
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