Kyiv & Muscovy 'Rus Today
Putin’s theory of victory must be a bet on attrition, not maneuver. IMHO, the right strategy to go for is appeasement with teeth: Appeasement with teeth: acceptance of Russian conquests, EU for Ukraine, taxes on Russian energy exports for reparations, NATO “trainers.” in Ukraine. For it is now a conventional military situation of drones, rubble, and no quick victories either by frontal assault or, now, maneuver. And so with modern firepower Benjamin Franklin’s maxim that there “never was a good war, or a bad peace” is more true than ever…
What Kamil Kazani says here is very true:
Kamil Kazani: On the Russian-Ukrainian War<https://kamilkazani.substack.com/p/on-the-russian-ukrainian-war>: ‘The behemoth [Russian] military machine had been built, once, for a thunderbolt strike towards the English Channel. Whatever remained from it, is now decimating itself in the useless battles over the useless coal pits of the Donetsk Oblast…. On February 23, 2022, Putin considered Ukrainians as Russians. Perfectly integratable, assimilatable and draftable. By the twist of fate they ended up in a separatist entity, he thought, and, well, that can and should be fixed…. Now the next generation of Russian leaders will not see Ukrainians as Russians anymore. The integration of Ukrainians into Russia proper will not be seen as either possible, or even desirable. It will be seen as a hostile foreign country, and a hostile foreign population, that cannot be realistically integrated into Russia. So, this may be the most important final result of this war…
The Muscovy ‘Rus military is now engaged in battles in places where Graf Grigory Aleksandrovich Potemkin-Tauricheskiy and his soldiers fought for Tsaritsa Vsekh Rossiy Yekaterina II Alekseyevna dom Romanov late in the 1700s. It is a mighty retreat from the days in 1815 when Tsar Aleksandr I Pavlovich dom Romanov and his soldiers danced in Paris.
Over and above that unwinding of 250 years of Muscovy ‘Rus expansion, Kamil Kazani rightly, I think, judges that Vladimir Putin has transformed the people of Kyivan ‘Rus into effective Poles, as far as their view of Muscovy ‘Rus is concerned. Four generations of Tsarist Russian occupation of Poland and all officials could do in the way of education and propaganda did not turn Poles into Russians. In fact, the reverse. And that was reinforced by two generations after World War II as a satellite of the USSR.
Back up: Ukraine ‘Rus thought that it had struck a deal in Budapest in 1994 to be Finlandized <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budapest_Memorandum_on_Security_Assurances>.But as I see it, that possibility of Finlandization went off the table with Putin’s conquest of Crimea. And so in 2022 Putin thought it was time to demonstrate that the post-Crimean conquest drift away from Finlandization was not to continue—that Ukraine was at best a satellite, and perhaps a breakaway province to reabsorbed; with perhaps a fallback position of partition along the historic Borderland-New Russia line, with the western half of Ukraine then re-Finlandized.
And so the war came.
Now for years I have been, relative to the great and good of the foreign-policy establishment here in the United States, a relative appeaser on Ukraine ‘Rus.