Putin Told Bush Ukraine Was “Part of Russia” Decades Before Full-Scale Invasion, 2001 Transcript Shows

‘Oh that’s great Vlady and hey, that reminds me, Iraqs actually part of the US Virgin Islands. You see, the ocean just dried up around that one’ – Bush’s reply (probably)

The West needs to stop viewing Russia through a Western lens. Russia will never change. It’s an imperialist state that’s eternally hungry for new territories and doesn’t care how it gets them. It has never accepted its defeat in the Cold War and will keep trying to reclaim its former sphere of influence. Russia cannot be turned into an ally. Nothing will change after Putin is gone, because Russian imperialism is much older than him. And unlike in 2001, Russia is no longer pretending to be a somewhat Europeanized country. It now openly demands that Europe and the US submit to its imperialist demands as a precondition for any normalization of relations. The West can either keep deluding itself that Russia can be fixed or fully support a true ally like Ukraine and provide it with the means to defeat Russia. Unless the West wants Russia to remain a constant pain in the ass, always probing how far it can go in its hostility toward Europe, it will choose the latter option.

This definitely wasn’t a sudden shift in thinking then

NATO EU Nazis Russian minority something something bull…

It was always about territorial pretension

All of the cool USSR stuff was built in Ukraine, so it figures.

Everyone knew Russia viewed Ukraine as within their sphere of influence. Everyone knew Russia would use military means to maintain this. Ukraine being a potential theatre of conflict has been pondered since the end of the Cold War – it was mentioned in the clash of civilisations as a fault line in like 1993.

This is exactly the point. The EU pursued the eastern partnership and association agreement with Ukraine knowing this. The collapse of the Ukrainian government and the purging of pro-Russians from the Ukrainian civil service was always going to lead to a war.

So the true question of the conflict is whether the EU expanding eastward is worth the death of hundreds of thousands of people? 

Let’s not pretend expansion into Ukraine hasn’t been a consistent foreign policy objective of middle Europe since the formation of Germany. From the treaty of Brest Litovsk to Nazi ambitions of lebensraum to the eastern partnership. The foreign policy goals of states remain consistent regardless of forms of government. 

Putin says and said many things. How is this news?

Western Russia is in Europe’s sphere of influence and eastern Russia is in china’s. This is an easy game to play.

“Vlad, for chrissakes, I’ve got two planes hitting a skyscraper tomorrow, that’s kind of priority one.” “Da, da, I will-wait a minute.”