Living in an ex-soviet Republic I am following this with interest (as in: wife and I are making what if plans on how we could move family somewhere safe if shit got real at this end of Europe).
And I think it deserves its own thread as we are teetering on war in Europe.
Only a couple days ago it turns out russian troops are now permanently stationed in Belarus. Sooooooo…doesn’t that give Putin an easy ride to take over Belarus as well? And what kind of tactic will he use? I think a long, protracted strangle is more his style rather than an all out ‘classic’ war. But what do I know?
What do people think will happen? Are you worried? Any forumers live near there?
Russia invaded the Crimea in what, 2014? They’ve already been fairly warlike in the region with no real comeuppance or actual developement
On the other hand. Russia is a massive fucking place with a huge population and heavily relies on the West for making and storing money. If it’s hit with economic sanctions it would be completely fucked and would collapse a la soviet republic
On top of that, Putin is going waaay out there politically. China is clearly not going to back him and if it all goes tits up he’ll finally lose his position
Family on her side in LT also very nervous. They’re a huge NATO stronghold, wouldn’t surprise me if they were packing the most heat in all of europe tbh. They border on Belarus and there’s a little Russian enclave called Kaliningrad which I think is also a big russian army base.
Basically if shit gets real, there’s potential for a lot of overspill. And even if it doesn’t spill directly into Lithuania, they’ll end up heavily involved. So yeah, not stoked.
All you able-bodied young men looking forward to bootcamp?
Russia have been trolling the west for years, last time when they invaded Crimea everyone was too scared to do anything about it.
These last few weeks they’ve been moving fuckloads of troops and armour along the border to Ukraine and in Belarus so everyone can see they’re either about to invade, or they want everyone to think they’re about to invade but they’re not actually going to.
Russian loyal rebels in Ukraine are already shelling buildings in the eastern regions and ordering evacuations etc to provoke a response, so it looks like it’s about to kick off big-stylie.
Ukraine is an ex-soviet state (along with the rest) that Putin believes should be once again part of mother Russia. Over the last few years he has slowly taken parts (annexing Crimea) and now it looks like Donetsk and Luhansk will fall.
Putin is the sort of maniac leader who believes everything that was once part of the USSR should again belong to Russia. Re owning a lot of these states would be beneficial because they’re decent economies that could really help Russia
However if Russia goes to war with the West they’ll only have China left to trade with so those new territories in Europe would look kind of stupid
Putin also knows Russia accounted for 26.9 percent of European Union crude oil imports and 41.1 percent of the natural gas imports in 2019 and the U.S. imported 12 million to 26 million barrels of crude oil and petroleum products per month from Russia in 2021.
Yeah, this isn’t a good development at all because (I think) it allows Russian troops to move around these new ‘recognised breakaway areas’ whilst being able to say it’s not an invasion of Ukrainian territory, at least technically.
It’s not calling them Russian soil, it’s calling those areas separate states to the Ukraine and Belarus. He could then say that those separate states want to be part of Russia and claim them “rightfully”
