It is important to note when things are not normal. Putin actually invading Ukraine was a very unexpected move.
Unfortunately, we as people are very good at rationalizing after the fact "oh of course this was coming", shrugging our shoulders and just moving on as if nothing happened. "It is what it is, this too shall pass".
With Ukraine's entry into NATO appearing increasingly imminent, they likely felt they could force matters with a semi-bluff thinking they could catch Ukraine by surprise. Then the West jumped in thinking they could catch Russia by surprise. In the end nobody was really "surprised" and so we got a war that I expect nobody, especially in hindsight, really expected, let alone wanted.
Say what? AFAIK, Ukraine wasn’t even eligible for entry due to the organization’s rules on contested territories.
It feels very much like the intent was to provoke, especially when this largely parallels the Cuban Missile Crisis with roles reversed. When the USSR wanted to expand their military reach to Cuba, we nearly started a nuclear war over it. And in that case, Cuba doesn't even share a border with the US! So it's not like we simply lacked the ability to understand why they might have a genuine concern here.
The reason I backdated the article is because when you read that it sounds exactly like Russia is making their intentions of an invasion, if a compromise cannot be reached, rather unambiguously clear. And so if you read it, with hindsight, one might think it was edited with that outcome in mind.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ukraine%E2%80%93N...
Things were obviously headed to a climax rapidly. It was likely going to be war or NATO, or perhaps both.
HMS Defender was sailing from Odessa in southern Ukraine to Georgia. To get there, it passed south of the Crimea peninsula, which Russia annexed from Ukraine in 2014 in a move that has not been recognised internationally. While Moscow claims the peninsula and its waters are Russian territory, the UK says HMS Defender was passing through Ukrainian waters in a commonly used and internationally recognised transit route.
Was it? The scale was surprising, but troop build ups were noted ahead of time and Russia had been fighting in Ukraine for many years.
Am I misremembering?
Buildups were happening repeatedly in the past under the guise of exercises.
Eg. here tanks and ~80k soldiers in 2018: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/15/world/europe/ukraine-russ...
Here was one example: https://www.rferl.org/a/russia-ukraine-invasion-predictions-...
See also: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/2/21/why-ukrainians-dont...
The US government warned everyone the invasion was really going to happen, the Ukrainian government warned everyone the invasion was really going to happen, and the Russian government warned everyone the invasion was really going to happen. The mainstream media warned everyone the invasion was going to happen, and the financial markets responded.
Some people don't have the sense to come in out of the rain.
Those people included almost all western governments who had blithely assumed Russia was not threat, did not react to the previous invasion (and some took the stance Russia had the support of the inhabitants of ethnically Russian areas), did not react to the invasion of Georgia, and generally just assumed it would be OK - which Russia took as a signal the west would be fine with an invasion of the rest of Ukraine.
Quite contrary, the Ukrainian government was publicly saying that it was all bluffing.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-60174684
Zelensky repeatedly said that the West was creating a panic. Ukraine's repelling of the attack was heroic and legendary, but the truth is that if it wasn't for the astonishing incompetence of the Russian assault, where there was a massive traffic jam almost all the way from Belarus to Kyiv, it really would have been a quickly conquered nation.
>and the Russian government warned everyone the invasion was really going to happen
But they didn't. Russia kept portraying the build-up as drills with Belarus.
https://news.sky.com/story/ukraine-crisis-putin-says-militar...
Western intelligence predicted Russia's plans perfectly, but a lot of people were very in denial about it.
Regarding Russia: did the strange televised meeting of Putin's war cabinet (whatever it would be called), wherein everyone went around the room and voted "yes" to invasion even though a couple of them looked like they were in a hostage video, happen before or after tanks rolled into Ukraine? In my mind that's a "prewar" thing but maybe I got the sequence of events wrong? (I'm finding it hard to google this even though it was a fairly important event. Weird.)
> Western intelligence predicted Russia's plans perfectly
I remember thinking the white house handled communications surrounding the invasion very well, kind of a rare foreign policy bright spot for them. Too bad it didn't make a difference.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8B0mWzB4GOQ
(I recalled it as well and with normal searching could not find it, even with date winnowing, but asking Gemini 2.5 Pro and it immediately gave me that resource)
This meeting happened just before the invasion. Far too late for anyone to really do anything, and long after most of the "are they/aren't they?" discussions happened. Up until that point Russia was repeatedly denying their "special military operation". Just as they denied their invasion of Crimea and their little green men in the Donbas.
As an aside, that absolutely bizarre security council meeting is virtually indistinguishable from the North Korea-style Trump administration meetings that we now see weekly, where it's a circle of embarrassingly laughable platitudes and servitudes by a cowed and pathetic administration.
>I remember thinking the white house handled communications surrounding the invasion very well
They did.
> As an aside, that absolutely bizarre security council meeting is virtually indistinguishable from the North Korea-style Trump administration meetings that we now see weekly, where it's a circle of embarrassingly laughable platitudes and servitudes by a cowed and pathetic administration.
To be fair there was a lot of this during the first Trump administration, only moreso near the end when plenty of the cabinet secretaries weren't real secretaries, just "acting" secretaries of various sorts. It's just that now they're all operating on that level.
I still have no idea if it was serious, or a fake "look at us helpless and not preparing at all". It was reported in media that he was given early warnings and briefings from the US about the incoming attack. There are so many cases like that that were may never learn about for sure...
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-64664944
It is just shocking incompetence by Russian forces that Kyiv wasn't taken in days. Russian units faced negligible resistance right to the outskirts of Kyiv, where their own lack of training, planning and logistics stalled their efforts.
https://kyivindependent.com/opinion-russias-failure-to-take-...
Ukraine is now a potent military force and Zelensky is a bonafide hero, but they were in a profound state of denial and got incredibly lucky in those early days.
As always, westerners leave in an information bubble. Chechnya was always a part of Russia. It was a civil war. Ukraine was always a part of Russia until 1991, btw, there was never a separate country called "Ukraine" before 1991 - you can easily find that even in Western history books, although I'm sure they'll be rewritten in some way soon, if not already.
Georgia launched attack in 2008, it is easily confirmed by:
1. News from that time (there was a several days delay between Georgia attack and when Medvedev decided to respond, during that time Putin called a press conference and said: "Georgia has started an attack and is bombing civilians, but Western press is silent about it". You can still find recordings of that press conference on video hosting sites, I believe.
2. There was an independent EU investigation that also confirmed that Georgia started the attack in 2008.
3. Last year Georgian government itself confirmed that they were attacking first.
It never cease to amaze me in what distorted information reality people live.
BTW, it's for the best, because it was the reason why West could coerce Georgia into starting a war in 2008. All the population, including the top politics lived in an alternative reality, so they basically said to Georgia: "Russia is weak and corrupt, they have no army, no weapons, they have only shovels, and even their shovels are rusty. So you'll easily get what you want without any resistance."
Actually, more or less the same repeated in 2022. Just read HN comments from 2022: "Russians are surrendering by tens of thousands a day, they don't want to fight with warm and welcoming and kind Ukrainian soldiers", "Ukraine burns thousands of Russian tanks and armored vehicles a day: here's a photo proof", etc, etc.
So this distortion of reality works the other way round, when West bases its actions on it. There are lies from top to bottom, and then everyone makes all kinds of decisions based on those lies.
Countries are not a fact of nature. They change, come and go for a large number of reasons. The Ukrainian people are constituted in a country and have repeatedly expressed they don't wish to be part of Russia. If you want to force them to be at gunpoint, at least be open about it instead of hiding behind a historical pseudo-argument.
Also Russia as an independent state ceased to exist in 1922. So it’s hardly that different. Both Russia and Ukraine only became independent countries in 1991 when they decided they to leave the USSR.
Russia is allegedly entitled to own half of Europe due to some deranged reasons. Everyone who disagrees with that is supposedly a nazi or something similar.
The concept of hypocrisy is entirely foreign and incomprehensible to anyone who honestly supports Russian imperialism..
Königsberg(Kaliningrad) was always German. Kuril islands were always Japanese.
While Russian army is distracted - Germany and Japan should get their territories back now.
No it wasn't. Here's a quick timeline of Estonia.
1219–1346 (127 years): Danish Kingdom
1346-1561 (215 years): Livonia, Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth
1561–1710 (149 years): Swedish Empire
1710–1917 (207 years): Russian Empire
1944–1991 (47 years): SovietsRussians are good at creating false narratives.
By your standards there was no separate country called Russia between 1918 and 1991. So how is this different?
Also absurd argument. There was no country called Belgium until the 1830s. So what?
> So this distortion of reality works the other way round
So your justification for distorting reality is that other people are allegedly doing that so it’s fine for you to engage in that as well?
Btw that is simply not true. There has been independent Ukraine few years by the end of WWI. Unfortunately, eventually they lost the war to the red army and been occupied by Moscow .
People underestimate what a clusterfuck of ethnicities pre WW2 Eastern Europe was. Resettlement after WW2 created much cleaner ethnic maps and arguably the reason we had 80 years of mostly peace (Yugoslavia was last country with mix of ethnicities and wars in 90ies cleaned up it too).
While this is categorically not true (WWI, the Ukrainian SSR), it's also irrelevant. There wasn't an independent Czechia or Albania either, or Turkey, or Greece, or Italy, or Germany, until there was. Historical non-existence of a state doesn't mean that with the rise of nationalism in the 19th and 20th century those states didn't become entities people wanted to belong to.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronology_of_Ukrainian_langua...
Here's a chronological list of various supressions of the Ukrainian language. There has been a semblance of a Ukrainian identity long before the 1990s.
> Georgia launched attack in 2008, it is easily confirmed by:
Interesting, the timeline does not add up with the independently sourced Wikipedia article on the topic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russo-Georgian_War
Is it wrong? Feel free to update it.
> 2. There was an independent EU investigation that also confirmed that Georgia started the attack in 2008.
link?
> "Ukraine burns thousands of Russian tanks and armored vehicles a day: here's a photo proof",
Yeah, where are the Russian battle groups? Where are the modern tanks? Why did last year's 9th of May parade have so few armoured vehicles?
For very limited definition of "always" - Ukraine existed in different forms since like 9th century, including being a part of Duchy of Lithuania, and then Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, until 1795. Then in 1918 western Ukraine became part of Poland again. Ukraine with the borders as we know them today (OK, pre-2014) was created after WWII, as a part of Soviet Union.
So no, Ukraine was never "a part of Russia", excluding the short periods when Russia conquered them by force.
>India
Interesting how in one case it's the leader of the country doing the invading and in the other it's the country doing it without the leader behind it mentioned.
Putin had already attacked multiple countries before. Georgia, Chechnya, and leads a vast network of para militaries that are fighting all over Africa as well.
Heck, Putin had literally attacked and conquered a whole area of Ukraine itself not even a decade ago.
Anyone who was saying Putin would not attack Ukraine either had no knowledge at all about how Putin operated or was willfully misleading.
India has shown no such imperial intentions that Putin has demonstrated and spoken about multiple times both before and since his attempt to take over Ukraine.