Cross-posted from: https://feddit.de/post/9202260
Vladimir Putin will spark a third world war if the Russian president is allowed to declare victory in Ukraine, according to the boss of the country’s biggest private employer.
Yuriy Ryzhenkov, chief executive of Metinvest, which ran the sprawling Azovstal steelworks that became the site of a relentless Russian assault at the start of the 2022 invasion, warned of the consequences of a Kremlin victory.
“I don’t believe that if Ukraine fails, Putin will stop,” he said in an interview ahead of the two year anniversary of the war in Ukraine. “The Baltic states, Poland, Romania, Hungary, Slovakia are the next targets.”
The problem with that, beyond the moral one, is that if that happens, it basically establishes a world order where the only guarantee to any kind of territorial sovereignty are nuclear weapons and the will to use them.
The deal with Ukraine was that they agreed to give away their nuclear weapons in exchange for guarantees to its territorial integrity. Russia went back on that promise, if the US would follow suit, that means a global arms race for nukes.
Ukraine and Russia had an agreement and Russia leased Sevastopol from them. Then after the Euromaiden protests / ouster of the Russia friendly regime they wanted to join Nato. So they’d either lose Sevastopol, their Fleet HQ for Russia in the Black Sea, or have it surrounded by Nato weapons. What use is a naval HQ if it’s surrounded by the enemy?
Here is a pretty good article why this war started: https://jacobin.com/2022/02/maidan-protests-neo-nazis-russia-nato-crimea
And no, I don’t like Putin at all or make any excuses for Russia, but the invasion wasn’t quite willy nilly or makes him Hitler.
Nobody should want American nukes in Ukraine, any more than we should want Russian nukes in Cuba. So Russia went back on their word, that’s not actually relevant to anyone else. I can assure you that going forward, people will definitely continue to lie, especially concerning global politics/war
Ukraine had Soviet nukes, not American ones.
If they knew the Russians were lying, they would have never given up their nuclear weapons. And it’s because Russia lies as a matter of course that nobody takes CSTO seriously as opposed to NATO.