Russia - threadbanned users in OP

What is the preferred move if Russia does invade the Ukraine? Sanctions or war? Ukraine is not a NATO country, why should Europe get involved? Russia will not subsequently invade a NATO country.

Where will the resulting millions of refugees be housed and who will pay for them? The answer will be the EU and EU taxpayers.

Once again no matter what happens there will be no consequences for the US or American taxpayers.

A military response cannot be contemplated because of the unfortunate reality of the thermonuclear weapons, of which both Russia and NATO have thousands, each one pointed at a city you know, on hair trigger alert, and which, once launched, cannot be aborted.

People discuss these geopolitical scenarios (e.g. Ukraine and Taiwan) as though nukes don’t exist and would never be used. They can’t fathom that the most likely trigger for a nuclear war is panic, a mistake, or nervousness during a period of conventional tension. It’s understandable, I suppose, because it’s hard to accommodate the idea of a real doomsday event - where we, our spouses and children all either vaporize, burst into flame, or die of radiation within a few short weeks - but one would hope that the leadership isn’t quite so obtuse and ostrich-like.

I don’t think Ukraine is worth the end of the world. If the shoe were on the other foot and Canada and Mexico were on the road to joining the Warsaw Pact, the US would never stand for it. I don’t like Putin or Russia, but I recognize that Russia is a great power with legitimate security concerns.

The only longterm solution to all of this is to make war illegal and destroy all nuclear weapons. Is that ever going to happen? It is becoming Increasingly easy for our world to be ended; top thinkers in existential risk such as Nick Bostrum, Toby Ord and William Perry believe we have never been closer to the end of the world.

Looking at these as 'planters' is neither helpful nor very accurate. There were no clearly defined borders in the central and eastern European empires. Travelers along a road in the HRE, for example, would pass through a German-speaking village, then a Polish one, then a Czech one, then a Polish one, then a German one, then a Slovakian one, then a Czech one, then a German one.

After the last war, around 12 million Germans were simply uprooted from lands where they had lived for 700 or so years -- cities like Konigsberg, Breslau; regions like Silesia; and tracts of modern-day Lithuania, Poland, Czechia, etc. In no sense were their high medieval forebears 'planters'; in many cases they were individual families moving into virgin territory in an act of organic 'wandering'.

It was very much the same in the lands where the Baltics, Belarus and Ukraine are today. In the middle ages, the eastern lands were very sparsely populated, so local Lords often encouraged clearance of forests, settlement, and the establishment of villages, regardless of language. In short, there was no clear border between the various ethnicities in the East. This is a feature of the geography of eastern Europe -- it's wide open, flat, militarily indefensible, and hence ethnic groups didn't really have their own fixed territory, bounded by natural barriers.

That's not to say that the Soviets didn't deliberately move people around in the 20th century, or that Putin today isn't weaponizing the Russian passport. But that doesn't mean that Russian interests in Ukraine are based solely on plantation, because they certainly aren't.

Comparisons between Ireland's experience and the continental experience don't work for me. I find the Irish experience, grievances, and situation incredibly mild by comparison. Insular thinking, as one might expect.

I like that analogy, with Russia being the 'English' of the east -- but far more brutal I would say.

I think you could also say that Ukrainians have been a little bit like the Scots (or maybe the Welsh): in enthusiastic participation with the Russians for some periods, very reluctant at times, brow-beaten at others; with elements that were always - or are now increasingly - bent on going their own way, particularly those in the west.

I think that's where the analogy breaks down a bit -- but basically the genesis of the Russian and Ukrainian nations is Kievan Rus' -- a loose medieval federation of Slavs that encompassed contemporary Ukraine, Belarus and 'Muscovy' -- i.e the Russian heartland centered on Moscow.

Even today, 80% of everyone in the Russian Federation lives in the flat, featureless steppe land sandwiched between the Urals in the East and Ukraine / Belarus and the Baltics in the west. This area remains the Russian heartland and you cannot understand Russian paranoia and aggression without appreciating the ferocious invasions of Russia in previous centuries, all of which, from the West, came through the Baltics, Belarus and Ukraine; and the neurotic mindset that the Russian leadership adopted in response.

On these boards, I have been scoffed at for 'justifying' this Russian paranoia, as though by highlighting the fact that it is historically justified in the Russian mind makes me a Russian apologist. It is further pointed out that there is zero chance of an invasion of Russia from the west today and that the Russians are, therefore, insane to see the westernization of its western buffer states as a threat. Okay. Well, we can all agree that the Great Famine in Ireland was bad and poisoned British-Irish relations immeasurably, to the point that when Priti Pratel raised the possibility of a ban on food imports to Ireland from Britain a few years ago, it reminded many Irish people of the British attitude to the Famine in the 1840s, even though there was zero chance of Patel causing a famine in Ireland today. It boiled the blood regardless because of the insensitivity of her statement. But today, Russia is appalled by the potential loss of its influence in Ukraine and its admission to NATO and the attendant insensitivity in terms of what this means for Russia psychologically, geographically and historically. And if in the future Belarus were to democratize and westernize, Russia would respond with unspeakable rage and aggression, even moreso than in the case of Ukraine. But why is this? Why should Russia care what other, sovereign countries do?

The answer lies in the origin, geography and political structure of Russia.

In Kievan Rus', Muscovy grew pre-eminent but was militarily vulnerable to invasion owing to the flat land of the Great European Plain / Eurasian steppe, occupying a territory where the only natural defense was the winter cold. In the time of Elizabeth I, Ivan the Terrible in Moscow formulated and initiated a policy of expansion, the purpose of which was to create buffer space, to protect Muscovy from invasion, first from the south-south-east (Turkic peoples, the Ottomans, Persia and the Khanate remnants of the Mongol Empire); the Far East (central Asian nomadic hordes) and not least the West (against Balts, Germans, Swedes and the French). Despite a turbulent start, the acquisition of buffer space gradually gained traction and paid off particularly in 1812 and 1941-1944.

But, big territory creates big problems for Russia. Because with such a vast area of non-heartland territory, dissolution (and thus re-exposure of the Moscow heartland) is an ever-present threat. This is tackled by Russia in several ways:

1) You keep the Russian interior and far east dependent on Moscow. These regions would struggle to survive alone anyway due to the weather and short growing season. But you also keep the transport links mainly east-west, i.e. all roads lead to Moscow, rather than north-south, which would encourage links with rival powers such as China and Iran.

2) You maintain an authoritarian surveillance state to keep tabs on potential points of fracture. This incidentally is why Russia is unlikely to ever embrace western standards of democracy. When it did loosen its grip in 1990, look how much territory it lost! It's not going to make that mistake again any time soon.

3). You treat your neighbours with deep suspicion because if they are not trying to undermine your territorial integrity, their bad habits (such as, in the case of the Baltics and now maybe Ukraine, a pitch to western-style democracy), threaten your own (from the Russian perspective necessary) authoritarian model, which, if undermined, threatens the unity of the Russian federation.

For Russia, bruised and scarred by centuries of invasion, one of which let us not forget - in living memory - was utterly genocidal, the westward democratization of Ukraine represents an existential threat to the structure of Russia. Russia is and always will be concerned about a conventional invasion (Napoleon slept in the Kremlin after all), and Hitler would have got there too if he hadn't wasted 5 weeks in Yugoslavia first). Clinton assured Russia that there was nothing to worry about regarding NATO -- then NATO enveloped the Baltics, at a time when Russia was weakest and flat on its back. This demonstrated to Russia that it cannot trust anything the west says. The west says "what's the problem? Have a big mac and let the democracy wash over you". The Russians neurotically hear "I will accidentally on-purpose fatally undermine your state and destroy your geopolitical matrix, which has ensured your survival for the past 400 years".

Regardless, all of this is moot because of nuclear weapons. My fear is that people -- including leaders on both sides -- deceive themselves into thinking that a conflict, should it arise, could be managed and stay conventional. I think this is an enormous error with world-ending implications. Don't needlessly poke the rabid bear who has 6000 hydrogen bombs. Sooner or later, it will result in our mutual extermination.

I am perfectly happy to concede that Russia is a geopolitical sociopath. Nevertheless, it has a thermonuclear arsenal and feels itself surrounded. If it didn't have nukes, you might consider slugging it out as in the days of yore, confident of ultimate victory. But since we can't safely do that anymore, it behooves everyone to stand back and ask, do the Russians have even a scintilla of a point in this particular case? And any fair-minded person would have to say that they do, even if the reason they do, is because they treated neighboring states badly in the past. This is a geopolitical feedback loop of the worst kind.

I don't think there is any point saying morality was on your side if the result of the moral effort is that your civilization was bombarded into an irradiated wasteland, knee-deep in the ash and charred bones of what was once your population. This is not a rhetorical flourish. This really, truly, could happen at any time - most likely as a result of nervousness, a glitch, or false information during a period of heightened tension such as the one we're in now.

People like William J Perry hold that a nuclear exchange is as close to happening now as at any time in the Cold War. We should all be very worried, not for Ukrainian democracy as such, but for the survivability of our species.