Comment by cmrdporcupine
2 years ago
The war will not end there. Just pause.
It will not "end" until Russia has installed a subservient client regime in Ukraine like it has in Belorussia.
If you doubt this, I encourage you to look at actual opinions within Russia itself. Interviews with Russians (the 1420 channel on Youtube for example), Russian media, Russian politicians. Their objection is far more than "there's Russian speakers being persecuted by Ukraine." Their national chauvinism leaves them unable to tolerate actually-sovereign nation states on their borders, especially one with an intertwined cultural-linguistic-political history like Ukraine.
"Split Ukraine into two and give the far western half to Poland and absorb the rest into Russia" is a commonly held "solution".
Those same people on 1420 will tell you that Poland and UK need to be denazified. It's just propaganda working, you can't mistake it for real strategic goals.
Absolutely, it's not scientific at all, but it shows the strong presence of a chauvinistic compliant population.
FWIW I think you could find similar nonsense on the streets of many (but not all) American cities. It's the kind of hubris that comes from being a huge country that is its own centre of gravity and a political leadership that runs around saying it's the "best country in the world" and stuff like that. That's how it looks from up here in Canada, anyways.
Anyways, you don't have to look at 1420, just the public pronouncements of Putin himself
I love how you all create these little side threads where you imagine people's views and then argue against them rather than taking the actually stated views of people in this thread at face value.
Putin says a lot of things. No, he's not laying out his grand strategy in front of you, he's saying what is politically useful at the moment.
You can't really know the Russia's strategic thinking from public proclamations. You need to read between the lines, and even then it's mostly guesswork.