Cross-posted from: https://feddit.de/post/9202260
Vladimir Putin will spark a third world war if the Russian president is allowed to declare victory in Ukraine, according to the boss of the country’s biggest private employer.
Yuriy Ryzhenkov, chief executive of Metinvest, which ran the sprawling Azovstal steelworks that became the site of a relentless Russian assault at the start of the 2022 invasion, warned of the consequences of a Kremlin victory.
“I don’t believe that if Ukraine fails, Putin will stop,” he said in an interview ahead of the two year anniversary of the war in Ukraine. “The Baltic states, Poland, Romania, Hungary, Slovakia are the next targets.”
That’s absurd, what is anybody’s source on this claim? America can end this war in a month by just strong arming Ukraine to surrender Crimea. And best of all, if the conspiracy theory is true, we will know immediately, because Russia will have already gotten what they say they want.
It is interesting to see how people seems to think that if Ukraine (the victim) surrender everything will be ok while nobody think that Russia (the aggressor) could just stop.
I’ve seen somewhere else… let me think… oh yes, in the 1930’s, just before WWII…
History maybe ?
It’s not the same situation. Obviously. Russia wants one small region that they lost custody of in their divorce. Germany wanted all of Poland, Belgium, and Netherlands. And it’s certainly not as if the reason WW2 happened was that Poland surrendered eventually. The sum total of similarities between the two scenarios is: both countries tried to take land.
It’s actually a better argument to say that taking Poland and Belgium by force allowed Germany to accelerate their war machine dramatically compared to their future opponents, and had they been surrendered to, might not have been able to pull off the massively complicated military feats that were 100% required to be done in the first few months of the war if they wanted to even have a chance to win it.
If you’re trying to stop a steamroller, your best possible course of action is to not let it get started. And there is no steam roller required vs a surrender.
This is how Czechoslovakia lost the Sudety region just before WW2. Germany also claimed that the German populace there is being mistreated and there is so much Germans living there that it should belong to Germany anyway.
Maybe this sounds a bit more familiar? Back then the West let them have it to maintain peace - funny how Russia and pro-Russians are calling for the same thing now…
Man, all these different countries Germany wanted to invade, almost as if that was a completely different situation.
There are multiple countries Russia would like to invade too - but they were stopped (or at least slowed down - depends on how it will develop) in Ukraine.
Just because it’s not the exact same situation doesn’t mean there aren’t paralels.
That claim is highly speculative at best. Russia hasn’t invaded anyone else in the last, what, 50 years?
You forgot about Georgia, Moldova, and Afghanistan… all of which Russian troops fully invaded (Georgia & Afghanistan) or at the very least sent core military forces to fight against in a primarily Russian-backed war (Moldova), all in the past 1 to 4 decades. Although in Afghanistan’s case, it wasn’t to take land or annex it or anything, it was just to overthrow the government. Still a blatant invasion though.
They’ve also stripped Belarus of most of its autonomy via installing a puppet government a few years after it gained independence, and have now effectively incorporated in into Russia in all but name via the Union State.
Azerbaijan and Armenia would have both likely been candidates for absorption by Russia in the future for various reasons, but that is entirely speculative, and the only ones which constantly are currently facing extreme encroachment on territory or independence by Russia are currently Belarus, Ukraine, and Georgia.
When the dictator and military leaders of a larger country are all talking about how the lands of their former domain (located in significantly smaller countries) are rightfully historically theirs and stuff, you know exactly what their goals are… It doesn’t matter if it’s Hitler, Mussolini, Horthy, Putin, or anyone else, their intentions are clear.
So they’ve invaded 4 places, all of which directly border them, in 40 years? That doesn’t seem very dictator-like or authoritarian to me. Why are we supposed to be inherently against former USSR abortion into Russia? Seems to me like it’d be a good thing for all involved