Did the USA play a significantly negative role in events leading to Ukraine invasion?

I think there’s a complicated set of reasons that aren’t all conspiracy theories and corruption, but some of it is. Particularly the massive facilitation of oligarchy through certain financial centres, London being a major example but there are lots more.

Things were a lot more forward looking and despite everything, there was a lot of hope Russia was going to just evolve or at least not be a threat.

If you go back to 2012, NATO and Russia were even hosting minor joint exercises. It was an extremely different atmosphere.

If you go back further than that there were all sorts of hopes and optimism about Russia becoming a lot more normal and friendly.

Companies went into Russia because they saw opportunities, but also because they were being optimistic and not seeing a massive issue with an impending authoritarian dictatorship.

Germany and plenty of others bought Russian energy. Finland, Turkey and several others have bought Russian VVER nuclear reactors and western companies have worked with them to adapt and improve safety.

Nokia (and most of the companies it absorbed), Ericsson, Siemens, and countless other European and American companies worked in Russia, sold them infrastructural equipment etc.

Closer to home Aer Cap and others leased billions of euro worth of aircraft to Russian airlines and Aughinish Alumina is Russian owned since the early 2000s. ESB used Russian coal at Moneypoint.

ESA, NASA and others worked with the Russian space agency and Russian companies, on really amazing projects like the ISS, missions to Mars etc etc

My point is that while Russia is undoubtedly highly corrupt a lot of companies, organisation, politicians and others genuinely did try to build relations and open things up and normalise things. They didn’t look at it through a lens of paranoia. A lot of normal Russians did the same.

However, the Russian government seems to spend its time plotting, scheming, imagining hostile empires at its borders and pointing missiles at neighbours, while hosting and conducting cyber attacks, spewing weird propaganda and deliberately trying to destabilise countries.

We have unfortunately been taken for a long ride by an authoritarian regime that seems to want us all either under its control or dead. Every outreached arm seems to be met with a punch in the face.

I think we’ve been far too soft and ignored and fed the elephant in the room because of primarily optimism and a desire to normalise things.

The west is doing exactly the same with China - investing, kick starting and trading and it seems rather like it’s another authoritarian regime that takes a very dim view of democracy and western values.

Be as cynical as you like, but democratic systems work and there’s a lot to be said for stable democratic countries in terms of quality of life, freedoms and prosperity.

Trade has to come with T&Cs and willingness to accept basic values and freedoms. Otherwise, what’s the world going to be like in a couple of decades? Something like the 19th century with high technology? Maybe we all end up nuked or some unimaginably big scale threat emerges.

I mean what’s next for Russia? Continue wallowing in the myth of propaganda and threatening people, sort of like a big North Korea? I can’t really see that ending well.

I think it did blindside a lot of people to be quite honest. A lot of European countries have a tendency to normalise Russia for trade and there’s a long history (because it worked) of trying to bring people into the club by trading and interconnection. That’s always been a huge aspect of postwar European diplomacy and soft power.

A lot of people also saw the US position as perhaps trying to sell gas rather than be genuinely concerned. Let’s be fair, if Donald Trump told you your house was on fire you’d probably assume it was some daft nonsense or a sales pitch.

German politics is also a lot more like Ireland in terms of how it works. The PR system is complicated and decision making is highly distributed and shared. It’s all about consensus finding. The same applies at the European institutional level. Things can drift along and decisions can be slow in normal times.

I think tbh an element of Russia just sees everything as a weapon be it trade or nuclear weapons. I mean look at how they behaved around the pandemic? They strutted around about Sputnik V, when they didn’t even have sufficient capacity to produce it for their domestic market. They then spewed propaganda against other vaccines and all sorts of crazy politics and power plays went on. Even in Ireland you’d one politician demanding we get the Sputnik V in, same in Italy etc while European supply chains were just ramping up and would ultimately have huge capacity.

It kept happening and it’s fairly obvious they’ve had a big hand in opportunistically pushing conspiracy theories and weird politics in multiple countries, very much with some kind of aim to destabilise.

Russia very much seems to operate in some kind of weird Orwellian paranoia and it’s unfortunate as I think there was a possibility of something far more positive emerging after the Cold War. A lot was mishandled, primarily in Russia itself - and I would suspect in large part because you can’t expect a country with no history of democracy, accountability, transparency or any of those things to snap its fingers and suddenly change into something that evolved over hundreds of years in the “West.”