Thursday, April 21, 2022

Today's News: Doing the tell of history back

 


Artwork found here. 

Our daughter asked me today for a short re-cap of why Russia started this terrible war in the first place - did they really think their nation was in danger of attack by Nazis? Did they really think they were threatened by NATO? 
So to begin tonight's post, "I's looking behind us now into history back". 
First, I found this short BBC article from a few days ago that seems to summarize the history of it pretty well - Why has Russia invaded Ukraine and what does Putin want? 
... Launching the invasion on 24 February {Putin} told the Russian people his goal was to "demilitarise and de-Nazify Ukraine", to protect people subjected to what he called eight years of bullying and genocide by Ukraine's government. 
Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov spoke of freeing Ukraine from oppression. 
 ...The claims of Nazis and genocide in Ukraine are completely unfounded but part of a narrative repeated by Russia for years. Moscow even made wild allegations that Ukraine was building a plutonium-based dirty bomb.
 ...Russian officials continue to speak the fictional language of "denazification" but they are now focused on seizing the two big eastern regions and creating a land corridor along the south coast, east from Crimea to the Russian border. It is not yet clear if they hope to control the entire southern region of Kherson and capture more territory along Ukraine's Black Sea coast. 
.... US President Joe Biden has labelled [Putin} a war criminal and the leaders of both Germany and France see this war as a turning point in the history of Europe. 
Second, for a few more details, here is Mark Summer's article from three weeks ago:
...almost as soon as Vladimir Putin rose to power, he saw that Ukraine was a threat. It wasn’t so much having NATO on the doorstep that bothered the Russian dictator, it was the idea of a functioning democracy with a growing economy that bothered him. After all, many Russians and Ukrainians have close personal and familial links. How was Putin going to keep everyone in Moscow happy with an economy slogging forward under the burden of an authoritarian kleptocracy, if they were always comparing their lives to cousin Sasha’s thriving democracy? 
So Putin set out to end that.
Finally, here is this succinct description of Putin's rationale, which I had quoted in a post two weeks ago: 
 ... it’s not too hard to reconstruct at this point what was likely going through Putin’s mind as he gave the order to attack. 
First, he thought he could make a lightning strike at Kyiv and install a puppet. 
Second, he thought he could seize what he calls “Novorossiya” as far as Odesa and absorb Kharkiv, Dnipro, and Mariupol. 
Third, he thought that in those places, which are largely Russian-speaking, he would be welcomed.
Fourth, he knew that he could not conquer western Ukraine, and he never intended to try. 
 ...In sum, he counted on a quick, easy operation: strategic objectives achieved, equilibrium restored, done and dusted. 
 ...on this reasoning, Putin was not nuts, not deranged, not isolated, etcetera. It was all a reasonable bet—by his strange lights—except that every one of the premises turned out to be wrong. 
As to where it will end, we don't know. We just don't know. History is galloping riderless across the landscape now. 
"Time counts and keeps counting, and we knows now: finding the trick of what's been and lost ain't no easy ride, but that's our track. We got to travel it, and there ain't nobody knows where it's gonna lead."
In today's news, Russia said that any minute now they're going to REALLY start the Battle of Donbas and it will just rain shock and awe down onto Ukraine. 
Yes, any minute now.....
soon....
any time now... After seeing people like Malcolm Nance travel to Ukraine to join their foreign legion, I wanted to gather up some information of what other volunteers are also doing. Here's an example - there are dozens of other tweets like these now: Finally tonight, this new poem from tiny fairy tales:
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