Tornado Alley (PROG)

[fuagf]

Ukraine - Putin is the problem

"China has become the most important enabler of Russia’s war machine
[...][...]Dekleptocracy found that one Chinese company, Xinxiang Richful, now satisfies a large part of Russia’s demand, supplying up to 8m kg a month. Richful recently set up an office in Virginia. Blocking it, as well as a few smaller suppliers, would create a mechanical lubricant shortage in Russia, the group says."

----------
Related: Europe faces harsh realities in Ukraine as long war looms - Ash

The Ukraine war is now a ‘war of iteration’: the war could perhaps ultimately be decided by which side innovates, or iterates,
best in the drone/tech war. / bne IntelliNews
By bne IntelliNews September 18, 2025
Timothy Ash, senior sovereign strategist at BlueBay Asset Management in London, says European policymakers are belatedly waking up to the fact that the war in Ukraine is set to be prolonged — and that they alone may have to foot the bill.

“I cannot remember a period over the past 3.5 years plus when we appeared further from any peace,” Ash said after meetings with Ukrainian and Nato security officials. “There is dawning recognition here that a) Putin is just not serious about peace (if he ever was) and; b) If he was, the Trump administration seems to have so badly screwed up peace talks.” He argued that Donald Trump had “gifted Putin all the early leverage” and was now creating “obstacles, or excuses, to delay rolling out more sanctions on Russia.”

According to Ash, Ukrainians are resigned to a long conflict but determined to continue. “They know it is a zero-sum war for them — it is about survival,” he said, citing a KIIS poll showing that 62% of Ukrainians are willing to endure a protracted war, with only 14% favouring negotiations on Russia’s terms.

The financial burden is now falling squarely on Europe. “Europe has finally understood that with the cost of keeping up Ukraine’s defence against Russian aggression running at $100bn a year (I would argue that $150bn a year is needed), and the US not writing any cheques, that the full cost of supporting Ukraine has to fall on Europe,” Ash said. With European budgets strained and populist pressure to spend at home, “the harsh reality is that the only source of sufficient funds for Ukraine is now immobilised CBR assets.”
https://www.intellinews.com/europe-faces-harsh-realities-in-ukraine-as-long-war-looms-ash-401995/
----------

Timothy Ash
Dec 26, 2025

I agree with President Putin.

I feel a little dirty to be agreeing with something that this fascist, dictator, war criminal, genocidal maniac says.

But yes, to secure a lasting peace in Ukraine we need to address the origins of the current conflict. Putin is absolutely correct. Only the origins of the conflict are nothing that Putin suggests but actually Putin himself. Putin is the problem. Without Putin there would have been no war and without him the war could end now.

Putin even did us the service of writing a long essay over his grievances over Ukraine in July 2021, herein the link.

[Out a bit from link supplied: Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians are all descendants of Ancient Rus, which was the largest state in Europe. Slavic and other tribes across the vast territory – from Ladoga, Novgorod, and Pskov to Kiev and Chernigov – were bound together by one language (which we now refer to as Old Russian), economic ties, the rule of the princes of the Rurik dynasty, and – after the baptism of Rus – the Orthodox faith. The spiritual choice made by St. Vladimir, who was both Prince of Novgorod and Grand Prince of Kiev, still largely determines our affinity today.
P - The throne of Kiev held a dominant position in Ancient Rus. ]
http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/66181

--------
[Insert: Putin debunks his own propaganda by disarming Russia’s NATO borders
[...]To link a few
A message to all who see Christian vales under threat by naughty Democrats and others who support inclusivity of groups who have, for different reasons, been persecuted for a period longer than any of us have lived. Putin feels as you do. See excerpt from a post of December, 2022:
Vladimir Putin: a miracle defender of Christianity or the most evil man?
[...]
We have heard a lot of ranting from Putin about the threat to Russia from Nato encirclement and justifications for the invasion to denazify Ukraine .. https://www.theguardian.com/world/ukraine .. and stop their genocide of Russians. This is all propaganda and nonsense. What has been missed is the religious dimension in Putin’s thinking, although in delegitimising Ukraine, he did refer to it as an inalienable part of our own history, culture and spiritual space.
P - This spiritual space is an important clue often overlooked. In 988 Vladimir king of the Rus was the first Christian convert. In Kyiv he summoned the whole city to the banks of the Dnieper River for a mass baptism. Holy Mother Russia was born. In 2019 the Ukrainian church broke with the Russian church and declared its independence. But Putin and the Russian church will not accept this because it is the site of the imagined mother church for all the Rus.
[...]And in Putin’s mind it goes further.
P - Just as he probed me about Christianity .. https://www.theguardian.com/world/christianity .. in the west, he reportedly said in a speech in 2013: “We see many of the Euro-Atlantic countries are actually rejecting their roots, including the Christian values that constitute the basis of western civilisation. They are denying the moral principles and all traditional identities: national, cultural, religious and even sexual.”
P - Kyiv must be taken, in his mind, to preserve the Christian battle. And there may be many Christians in the west who agree with some of his sentiments.
P - A miracle defender of Christianity or the most evil man? Well, it is Ukrainian Christians among others whom he is now slaughtering indiscriminately and he has little understanding of Jesus, who said “blessed are the peacemakers”.
P - No, this is a power vision threaded through with nationalistic Christian theology. And evil is the
right word when a leader uses religion to justify in God’s name invasion, violence and annihilation.
* Tim Costello is a fellow at the Centre for Public Christianity in Sydney
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=171417034]
P - Tim Costello, in my mind, could be described as one of the 'good' Christians. A thoughtful, compassionate Christian.
P - Is Tim Costello Australia’s most misunderstood Christian?
[...]https://www.eternitynews.com.au/opinion/is-tim-costello-australias-most-misunderstood-christian/
Atheists Are Sometimes More Religious Than Christians
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=173915557]
--------

I always took the above as Putin’s call to arms to Russian troops for the subsequent full scale invasion of February 2022.

Essentially in this essay Putin deny’s the existence of Ukrainians, Ukrainian sovereignty and Ukraine’s very right to exist. For Putin the creation of Ukraine in 1991 was due to a huge historical mistake - a calamity - the collapse of the USSR which Putin has described as the biggest catastrophe of the 20th century. Bigger then than the Holocaust, the Holodomyr, WW1 & WW2, and the Stalin terrors. Putin invaded Ukraine in 2022 and continues his war on Ukraine as he sees this as his historical mission to reunite Russia and Ukraine. He will stop at nothing less. He might agree a peace deal with Trump over Ukraine but that would have to be such a deal so as to render Ukraine unsustainable - such a bad peace for Ukraine that he knows this will ferment such unrest in Ukraine as to create conditions for social unrest, even revolution akin to the Euromaydan and providing an opportunity therein for further Russian onslaughts against Ukraine. The only peace Putin wants is a bad peace for Ukraine and certainly not one which would give an independent and sovereign Ukraine any kind of security from inevitable future attack from Russia under Putin.

Putin simply cannot leave Ukraine to peace - he wants the full control and subjugation of Ukraine as in his mind there is no Russia without Ukraine.

But what about NATO membership, was not this one of they key reasons for Russia’s invasion? Was Putin not incensed by NATO’s constant enlargement East and the military threat from NATO to Ukraine.

No, this is a total fallacy.

First, back in 2014 when Russia annexed Crimea, then first invaded Ukraine through the Donbas, Ukraine and Ukrainians had little ambition to join NATO. Opinion polls showed single digit support, and the vast majority of Ukrainians supported Ukraine’s existing non aligned status. That soon changed in 2014 with the annexation of Crimea then the invasion of Donbas as Ukrainians realised that their non aligned status had got them nowhere - only invasion by Russia - and they hoped that NATO membership would have given them protection. As it was few NATO members had any desire to agree NATO membership for Ukraine as they knew that would have meant going to war with Russia. Russia was well aware that Ukraine had no realistic chance of joining NATO but launched the full scale invasion of Ukraine anyway - see above for Putin’s real motivations.

But was Ukraine not a threat to Russia’s military presence in Crimea - which explains the annexation of Crimea in 2014 and then the push in the full scale invasion in 2022 to build a land corridor to Crimea?

Again, no. I think best explained by the lack of Ukrainian resistance to the annexation. The Russian military took the peninsula in a matter of hours. Where was the Ukrainian capability/threat then. Indeed, back in 2014 Ukraine had a pretty threadbare military, one quarter its current size and with a military doctrine which looked West to the threat, not East.

Well, even if Ukraine was not a threat, what about the argument that NATO enlargement East was a huge threat to Russia, justification then for the invasion of Ukraine as a push back against that.

Again a pretty ridiculous argument, as in each round of NATO enlargement members have tended to spend less on defence. The feeling of collective security from enlargement saw less, not more defence spending by NATO. And this is the reason European NATO is in such a parlous state now. Prior to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 relatively few NATO members had met the 2% of GDP defence spend. Most had run down their militaries to skeletons, now hardly able to defend Europe against Russian attack, let alone attack Russia. Germany and the UK had cut the numbers of MBTs from thousands at the time of the Cold War to several hundred only and most of these were barely serviceable. The U.K. had the smallest number of troops since before WWI, and its navy is now struggling to put even one submarine to sea. Where is the threat?

The threat has instead come from Russia to Europe with invasions of Moldova, Georgia and Ukraine, and multiple drone, cyber and WMD attacks on NATO members. The threat from Russia instead explains NATO enlargement. Think the threat is now so great that committed neutral states like Finland and Sweden even recently joined NATO.

And don’t tell me that poor Russia felt isolated and felt threatened. Russia knew - through its enormous intelligence capacity - the limited military capability of European NATO. I would argue that it invaded Ukraine in 2022 as it assessed this capability to be limited and of little threat of coming to the assistance of Ukraine. Rather it was NATO’s lack of threat that gave Putin the opportunity to attack in 2022, and given his ambitions for Ukraine he could not resist. Putin saw weakness and the opportunity and acted.

In summary, it’s crystal clear from the above what Putin’s motivations were for the invasion and still are in his war against Ukraine. This is not about the military threat from Ukraine, or NATO. It’s not about just “territory” as Witkoff and the Trump administration keep banging on about. It is about the very survival of Ukraine. It’s binary, it’s a zero sum game for Putin against Ukraine. And Trump and his team totally fail to grasp this, or do but simply don’t care - Ukraine & Russia are either just business opportunities for the family or there is some grand vision at play - a great power land swap (Ukraine to Russia, Trump gets sway over the Western hemisphere including Venezuela and Greenland), a reverse Nixonian to ally the U.S. with Russia against China, or that Ukraine is just collateral damage in an alliance of autocratic regimes against a woke liberal Europe.

Trump does not care whether any peace deal assures Ukraine’s long term security or stability - that’s Europe’s problem. He wants to sell any peace he gets, however sustainable, as his Nobel prize pitch and to move on to business as usual - or highly unusual - with Russia. But I fear the deal currently being forced down Ukraine’s throats will not leave it secure - but subject still to constant attack and destabilisation from Russia. That’s a disastrous outlook for Ukraine but also Europe.

Thanks for reading @tashecon blog! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

https://timothyash.substack.com/p/ukraine-putin-is-the-problem