Opinions on Ukraine

[Anomalocaris]

What are your opinions about Ukraine and their current civil war? who is right? who is justified? who's the victim? who benefits?

I wonder if a solution to the crisis is just to accept two Ukraines, one in the west where the people want independence and a western part that is either annexed by Russia or a pro-Russian Ukraine, as seems to be popular sentiment there.

This would be a peace proposal that would not play well in the American media, especially if a Democrat is the one to propose it, but it does seem to be the most fair solution based on the limited information I have.

Please note my heavy disclaimer that I'm hardly an expert on that part of the world and would welcome correction if I'm wrong on anything I just wrote.

I don't believe any 2 Ukraine solution attainable and acceptable now could be stable. Russia has shown itself to be both more subtle and more ruthless than any other player in this contest. Russia will never let any settlement stand which does not contain loopholes to allow Russia to continue to try to constrain and destabilize the pro-western half and expand the pro-Russian half. And Russia will ruthlessly exploit any loophole to do these things.

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...And it's situation is being unstable ever since - to the point where the Ukranians actually supported the German invasion of 1941 until they saw the Germans hadn't come to liberate them from the Soviets but to keep them as slaves.

A "what if" scenario I have imagined is what if the Germans had not tried to annex any territory when they attacked the Soviet Union but instead offered to the Ukrainians and Baltics their own independent countries, no strings attached, if they helped in the fight against Stalin. Germany would have destroyed its only rival power on the continent and the Ukrainians and various Baltic people would have gotten their independent countries.

Of course, such a scenario precludes the Nazi mentality that the Germans were the master race destined to rule the world and thus precluded the whole second world war in the first place.

Hitler wouldn't have attacked Russia if total subjugation of Ukraine, as in all Ukrainians having been starved or worked to death over about 20 years so Germans could claim the land as exclusive inhabitants, had not been one of Germany's fundamental war aims.

For Hitler lebensraum trumped even anti-communism.

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Ukraine, the prelude to a new cold war.

Putin hankers for the "old days".

I don't think Putin wants a cold war. I think Putin is determined to stop Russia from keep on losing the post cold war. What Putin is hankering for is Russia holding her ground, which is a rather understandable thing to hanker for.

It is the United States that is tore between the seeking comforting self-righteous purposefulness of a new cold war with china, and being able to buy cheap electronics in Warmart and potentially export to a billion newly middle class consumers.

Russia as the fallen power is no longer strong enough, or its strength appear durable enough, to form a long lasting opponent capable of exciting existential fears in the US needed to support a real cold war.

China, on the other hand, is a rising power with realistic possibilities of displacing the US from the position of the leading power in the world. For a power accustomed to do whatever it liked whereever it liked this is an existential crisis.