Well, they have been bullshitting for loooong time if that is the case. I recall watching a video of Gorbachev talking to the US Congress and warning about NATO/US expansion. This was in 1997.
There is no credible threat of a NATO invasion but there is the First-Strike issue now that hypersonic missiles are being developed. Putin has been moaning about this for a while now. A security-conscious/pragmatic state models "what is possible" vs "what is probable". If it seems likely that future Finland could host hypersonic missiles pointed at St.Petersburg, well it becomes incumbent on Moscow to attempt to prevent that. It seems unwise to dismiss their concerns if said dismissal would lead to Ukraine 2.0.
Lots of people seem to think that the Russian unwillingness to flatten Kiev means they could not do it.
How many people have to die for Finns to feel like they stood up to a bully?
> Russia does not want to engage in conflict with a NATO country. If Finland joins NATO then Finland will be at piece for the next century, guaranteed.
Russia has not engaged in conflict with a NATO country, so far. If the stakes are raised high enough, I don't think this will continue to hold.
> Russia has very little reason to invade Finland now, and if Finland joins NATO, it cannot.
I would go so far as to say that if Finland applies to join NATO, they'd have to. That is, if it is truly part of their doctrine that NATO/US is an existential threat to the Russian state.
Following the Kremlin's logic, the advent of hypersonic missiles and the neoconservative bent of US/EU politics, it is seemingly inevitable that war is here.
It is better to call Putin's bluff now rather than wait for Ukraine to fall which might force cooler heads to prevail. Also a dual ascension dares Russia to go to war on two perhaps three fronts?
Of course nations should be free to choose their own path. No-one is arguing against that.
Mearsheimer argues that when the path that a country chooses comes into conflict with a great power's security interests, those interests become the overriding concern of both parties. He points out that Cuba was not allowed to ally itself with USSR with nuclear war being put on the table.
I can't help but wonder what the US would do if Mexico signed a security pact with China to put a military base on its soil.
As a minor example consider the Solomon islands brouhaha[1].
I don't see how Ukraine being democratic is an existential threat to Putin in any meaningful way. This situation has been almost 14 years in the reckoning since April 2008.
The NATO-US acting from Ukraine possibly attempting to foment "color" revolutions in Russia, NATO missiles on Ukraine soil, an increasingly belligerent leader in Ukraine renewing the push to join NATO and NATO-US arming and training Ukraine troops. These seem to be more likely factors in the invasion.
Given that the "West" has been frothing around the mouth for his ouster (he did once ask to join NATO btw), one could conclude that "He who goes first wins" was a viable strategy for him.
No, I am saying that I had not taken Russia's threat model into account. Given that threat model, Ukraine is an existential issue for them and the resolution of the uncertainty that has been in place since 2004 was just a matter of time.
I was wrong. I admit that. I spoke from a position of superficial knowledge at the time as I ignored the wider context of the situation and was commenting from a position of received wisdom as I was unaware of what a parent post mentioned regarding a widely known fact that NATO was in Ukraine providing thousands of weapons, I was not aware of that and was only commenting on the basis of "received wisdom" on a particular situation.
I have examined my bias against mainstream media and still find them completely warranted, thank you.
> - My touchpad is recognized as "PS/2 Generic Mouse" by libinput, so I can't have touchpad scrolling.
I have the same issue. Different Dell laptop though. It's been an issue for a looong time. Scrolling reliably fails at least once a week forcing a reboot.
They are in dire need of a RESF. There is precious little current material on youtube about the language and it seems to have sunk into obscurity which is making me hesitant to pick it over TS.
The diplomatic ultimatums as well as the Belarus deployment are in response to the mainstream media's assertions of imminent attack and could also be interpreted as Putin trying to leverage the situation to his advantage to try for concessions of some sort to further his agenda. At this point in time, to be fair, one could argue for invasion but that calculus is so grim for Russia that it seems far-fetched.
Anyway my point is that the initial clamour of "imminent invasion" was unwarranted based on the evidence at the time based on historical troop movement at the border. Therefore there must be another reason underlying the media's outcry which is beyond my ken.
There is basically no escalation from Russia. The troop deployment on the Ukraine border mirrors a similar deployment in April last year[1].
It is just convenient (Biden's domestic issues/Nordstream 2/other unknown reasons) to claim imminent invasion and the media is incentivised to fuel that narrative since it seems to have captured the attention of the populace at large (perhaps based on the Russophobia that is prevalent in mainstream media).
Mortality rate (p.50) and hospital admissions (p.44) muddy the picture quite considerably. Would love to see similar figures for other countries in Europe.