Now this is interesting:
Biden is trying to terrorize the Ukrainian president. It’s exactly what Putin is doing. We know why Putin is doing it. What about Biden?
Might be a total coincidence but this all started exactly at the time when the authorities in Ukraine handed out indictments to people (including the former president) who are involved in a major corruption plot at the time when Biden was Pres. Obama’s pointman on Ukraine.
Be that as it may, if the story narrated here is true, it’s absolutely shocking. The president of the US is bullying the president of Ukraine on behalf of another foreign leader.
There’s something real fishy happening here.
Clarissa's Blog 
I think you are definitely on to something. Let’s not forget President Biden’s son’s involvement in some very iffy monkey business in Ukraine.
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There’s something going on here for sure. It’s just bizarre that a president of a third country would so insistently announce a conflict between the other two. He also made a speech recently announcing a Russian invasion of Ukraine. It’s weird.
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“so insistently announce a conflict between the other two”
I really get the impression that Biden wants Russia to invade far more than Putin wants it*. The meta-message of what he’s saying is: Russia, you want to be important? Prove it! Invade! As much as I loathe Putin I will respect him a teeeensy amount if he can withstand the pressure…
*I have no idea how accurate this is, but one commentator said there’s not much about Ukraine at present on Russian state TV very unlike the lead up to Crimea which was months of carpet bombing hysterical propaganda about Nazis taking over Ukraine and killing Russians…
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Might even be a smart strategy. Invading would be a total disaster for Russia. Maybe the best thing is to call Putin’s bluff.
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I think a massive Russian invasion of Ukraine has the potential to bog down and bleed Russia for a long time. A real realpolitik would see this as very beneficial.
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“Let’s you and him fight…”
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Like everyone, I struggle to figure out the truth of what’s happening around Ukraine.
Western media is full of talk about Russia invading, the general implication being that the west must be ready to stop it. We know that the western media is always ready to talk about actual and hypothetical horrors committed by enemy states, and is full of ex-spies turned into commentators, and (sorry to use the word but it seems appropriate) Russophobes like Maddow; and that the actual government and deep state engages with this media milieu in order to prepare public mood and boost support for policies.
On the Russian side, up until recently, the focus has been on these “security demands” – don’t admit Ukraine to NATO, don’t place NATO troops near Russia’s border. The rhetoric has been that the west is completely untrustworthy in dialogue, engages in doubletalk and then keeps pushing closer to Russia. So first Russia developed its new weapons (hypersonic nuclear missiles, etc) in order to restore strategic balance (mutually assured destruction), and now has asked for a written treaty, not just verbal assurances; and if no treaty is forthcoming, there will be “military-technical measures”, the west will “talk to Shoigu rather than Lavrov”, etc.
If I just guess about the central strategic thinking of both sides… I feel like the Russian troop buildup near Ukraine might mainly be to stop the Ukrainian army from recapturing the Donbass. And I feel that the western media hysteria about Russian invasion, is somehow a response to the Russian ultimatum – that the west has been very comfortable with its position of public moral superiority combined with subversive provocation of “neo-Soviet” regimes in Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Russia, and certainly has no intention of agreeing to stop this.
Regarding your own commentary, I confess I don’t believe the purely psychological explanation of Russian desire to control Ukraine. Of course the historical relations between Ukraine and Russia play a part. But so does the history of Russia being attacked from the west. If Ukraine is part of a western alliance with an ideological hostility towards the Russian state, then Ukraine becomes a military and ideological threat to that state.
Now where does President Biden fit in? Well, I have heard that Ukraine was somehow Biden’s responsibility during the Obama years… I guess Obama’s “job”, in foreign policy, was to engage with the Muslim world and the non-European world, while perhaps Biden’s focus was European affairs. Perhaps he was surrounded by Brzezinski types who saw Ukraine as the ultimate geopolitical prize and guarantee of Russian geopolitical defeat… (It didn’t start with Obama; even when Bush was leading the fight against the axis of evil, Cheney’s people were still working to bring Georgia, Ukraine, etc into western alliances.) I may have the details wrong, but there is little doubt that Ukraine was seen as a great prize for the west to claim in 2014; it was pursued with such single-mindedness that even the prospect of a Russian-Chinese alliance in response, didn’t slow us down.
And now that guy is president, and despite all the other events since those years, presumably some of those same advisors and ideologues have power in his administration… Maybe it’s this simple: the Democrats hate and fear Putin; for them he’s enemy number one, and Ukraine is a tool to weaken and eventually overthrow him. That’s the framework in terms of which I would try to understand and predict events.
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The last time anybody in the West attacked Russia was in 1941 when Hitler invaded. And it wasn’t even Russia, it was the USSR
Since an actual Russian state was formed in 1991, the West has done nothing but beg, cajole, bribe and mollify. This century, both Bush and Obama practically crawled on their stomachs, groveling and coaxing.
In 2014, Obama shrugged when Russia invaded Ukraine. If Ukraine was a great prize, I wish somebody informed Obama.
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Zbigniew Brzezinski was one of Obama’s foreign policy advisers. He wrote in “The Grand Chessboard”: “It cannot be stressed enough that without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be an empire, but with Ukraine suborned and then subordinated, Russia automatically becomes an empire.”
In his book (actually, in a footnote), Brzezinki’s even supports the idea of partitioning Russia into three states. As you know, Brzezinski was very influential among American foreign policy makers from the Carter era until his recent death. All the US presidents since Carter more or less openly shared Brzezinski’s Russophobia. Even Bill Clinton did all he could to ruin Russia during the Eltsin years.
So, Joe Biden’s willingness to subdue Russia makes sense. Installing nuclear missiles near the Russian border, with a 7 minute fly time to Moscow, is a way of subduing Russia. But Putin has an ace in his sleeve: he can deprive Europeans of natural gas whenever he wants, with catastrophic consequences for European economy, social order, etc .
Putin sees us Europeans correctly as vassals of the USA. Do our masters in Washington care about us Europeans? No they don’t.
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This quote has been brandished by Russia for decades. They are using it as an excuse for everything. These fantasies about the US wanting to partition Russia are stale, boring, and childish.
In the early 1990s, Russians only had enough to eat because Americans sent food. Strangely, this is never remembered but some silly quote – amidst of oceans of other quotes – is brandished forever.
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I can’t really take Twitter messages quoting some anonymous source saying something happened. That’s like rock bottom credibility for me.
Some more credible sources, such as Michael Kofman:
https://warontherocks.com/2022/01/putins-wager-in-russias-standoff-with-the-west/
Are saying a war is likely.
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“I struggle to figure out the truth of what’s happening around Ukraine”
your ideas are way too complex,
My working hypotheses (I welcome contradictory evidence)…
Putin periodically masses troops along the Ukrainian border (one very pro-Putin Russian commentator a month or two ago diagnosed the current build up as the usual annual hysteria) and then slowly and quietly withdraws after making some point or two to his base (or the military establishment).
Biden (along with his crack-adled fail son) is up his eyebrows in Ukrainian corruption and would like to distract attention from that and has decided that trying to goad Russia into invading could achieve that goal….
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Just today read a post in Russian that Biden has a history of more assertive / aggressive foreign policy:
“it was Biden who was the very senator who consistently advocated the use of force against the Milosevic regime, for the arming of the Bosnian Muslims, for the bombing of the positions of the so-called Yugoslav People’s Army, which the Belgrade dictator turned into an army of genocide. And all this happened at a time when most of the American political establishment was strongly opposed to such an approach and intervention in distant European conflicts.”
https://vokintrop.livejournal.com/2693729.html
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