by English Outsider
lifted from a comment
Ma Laoshi – grateful to you for finding that Scott Ritter piece.
First things first. Ritter’s no fool and, as you’d expect, identifies the trigger that set off the SMO:
“… a rejuvenated Ukrainian military, specifically trained and equipped by NATO, positioned itself to resolve the Donbas question through military force. This in turn triggered the Russian intervention in the form of the Special Military Operation.”
It’s not trivial that Ritter does that. Any discussion of this war is bedeviled by the fact that most of those opposed to Western policy in Ukraine get the reasons for the Russian invasion of Ukraine wrong. They think the SMO resulted from a decision in the Kremlin to finally put a stop to NATO encroachment, not, primarily, from a decision to pre-empt a Kiev incursion into the Donbass.
That may seem a simple point but you’ve no idea how disabling this error is. The influential opponents of the war with Russia in the US, Germany, UK, have a gaping hole at the very centre of their argument. We see this, as one example, with Diesen. One of the finest and most level-headed opponents of the war that we have in Europe – but all over the place when it comes to explaining why the Russians are fighting us!
Professor Diesen joins Professors Roberts and Mearsheimer and a host of other authoritative sources who get that Russian invasion of Ukraine wrong. Seriously wrong, as most of the big names do. According to Diesen, that Russian invasion was a “war of aggression with unpredictable consequences”, an “egregious violation of state sovereignty”. The fact that the last thing Putin wanted to do was send his tanks across the border, went to considerable lengths to avoid doing that, and in the end was given no option but to act fast to prevent the Kiev forces running amok in the Donbass, has passed unnoticed by many of the big names and I suspect always will.
That’s a hole a mile wide, therefore, dead in the centre of the argument against current Western policy in the Ukraine. “The Russians were in the wrong starting the SMO but are in the right at the same time because NATO.” No wonder the authoritative dissident figures in the West get so little traction with the general public. On the one hand they state that the Russians were 100% in the wrong starting a “war of aggression”. On the other they argue that the Russian cause is just. That’s a real mess of an argument that you might expect to get away with with an audience already sympathetically inclined. Joe Public can smell a rat a mile off and is having none of it.
Ritter’s got more sense. He doesn’t twist himself into knots arguing that black is white. He’s a direct and forceful man and if he thought that the Russians were in the wrong starting their SMO he’d be saying so load and clear, not trying to pretend they were in the wrong and at the same time in the right. But he knows the reason for the SMO – one that so many of the others fail to grasp – and is therefore able to put forward a coherent argument condemning Western policy in the Ukraine. …
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b here:
The above is a very important point. Russia did not want to invade Ukraine. It did its best to prevent an escalation of the smoldering conflict in the Donbas. But by mid February 2022 the Ukrainian troops, prepped and fired up by NATO, were only days and hours away from invading the Donbas republics.
At that time this blog pointed to the rapidly increasing artillery fire on the ‘rebel’ republics in the Donbas. The observers of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) at the zero-line reported way more Ukrainian artillery impacts on the Donbas rebels than vice versa. Anyone with a tiny bit of military training could predict the next step that would come after such an artillery preparation – a full fledged armor attack on the Donetsk and other rebel held areas.
The Russian intervention was launched to prevent that.