Russia and Ukraine

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

BrianSoddingBoru4:
 
- This isn’t the late 19th early 20th century anymore. “Empires” have all disintegrated. India and Pakistan left the British Empire in 1947. Between 1954 and 1962 France did everything it could to stick to just one piece of its colonial empire and it lost. In 1954 France lost its presence in what used to be known as “Indochina”. The US wanted to prevent the North Vietnamese Russia and China backed communist from taking power in the region. But this effort was also proven to be in vain. If anything was left of the colonialist empires ideology it ended in 1975 with the fall of Saigon. Even the Soviet incursion into Afghanistan was perceived as a form of imperialism of some sort and led to serious resistance from all parts of the Afghan population.
 
   So those days are gone. In fact Russia is lucky to have all of eastern Russia that are basically empty lands that were colonized by Russia starting from the 18th century.
 
   Russia has enough oil and gas to keep its economy running even if it produces nothing else. There is nothing for them in Ukraine.
 
   Back to 1962: The French President then has declared that “Frances power now lies within its borders”.
That is: It doesn’t really matter to militarily control a region anymore. Today China is building ports and other infrastructures in the regions it wishes to colonize. Then it sends its companies to exploit mineral or other resources to increase its presence in those regions. (And it uses countries like North Korea and Russia to distract Western powers in its bid to take back regions like Taiwan for instance)  
 
   Without Vladimir Putin, Russia was on a very good path. Yes there was the Mafia and there was a very corrupts state. But they had secured energy deals with Europe. Many companies from my country went to invest in Russia because there were many good business opportunities. Russia had become had become an important economic pole on its own. That’s why D. Trump wants to end the war and take back everything to where it was before 2014.
 
   Since February 2022 some 650,000 Russians have just left the country. Many people say hat Putin needs this war just to stay in power. And there is also the Russian media or state propaganda. It forces Russians to live in this alternate version of reality or face the consequences. And this is pure madness.
 
   I’ve just finished a book from Neil deGrasse Tyson in which he talks about an utopic society called “rationalia”. In Rationalia “all policies should be based on the weight of evidence”.

   https://neildegrassetyson.com/commentary...ationalia/

    Putin’s regime is the opposite of rationalia: Everyone has to believe whatever is the opposite of observation, rational thinking and common sense.
 
    So it’s the empire of the irrational and in my book that is pure madness
 
Meanwhile, Ukrainians are now using training aircrafts (YAK-52’s) from the 1980’s from which they are shooting Russian drones with ordinary shotguns and rifles:
 
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/ukra...01194.html
 
In terms of military history this is set to be one of the conflicts that reshaped the methods and tactics of modern warfare.

If you think empires are a thing of the past, you’re very much mistaken. Even if you weren’t, it wouldn’t alter the fact that Putin thinks of himself as an empire builder.

Boru