Yeah I've repeatedly seen you haven't the gonads to put your money where your squawking mouth is, much less the ability. Do you still feel ill or have recurring Nightmares when you read or think about what Merkel actually said and its context ?
Enjoy the read below anyway ...wrong thread I know but I thought you'd really enjoy it to make up in a small way for your Banishment from the thread ? You must tire of swimming in the sewers of X to scoop up all those bottom shelf toxic and inflammatory antisemetic jewels you circulate with your less than impressive accompanying commentary as a Agitator ?
Conclusion
In late February 2022, Putin set about to orient Kyiv’s direction by force. He succeeded, in manner of thinking, but certainly not in the way he intended. In direct contrast to Russia’s frightful trajectory, the world is witnessing the full-throated and inspiring political birth of a Ukrainian nation-state, its founding myth strengthened by the shared trauma of conflict and common hardships. Ukraine is clearly now a nation with an inarguably separate identity to Russia that seeks a westward orientation, a goal apparently now reciprocated by Western countries who aim to embrace Ukraine as one of their own culturally and morally, even if membership in institutions like the European Union and NATO aren’t immediately on the table. Unlike the annexation of Crimea in 2014, which provoked divided loyalties in many parts of Ukrainian society (Sharkov, 2017), Putin’s latest invasion has hardened and consolidated Ukraine’s national resolve—arguably creating the very thing he sought to strangle at birth, a politically confident and culturally separate nation, through his own reckless actions.To search for useful historical comparisons, one may need to look to the last century to find a strategic own goal as detrimental to one’s own country as Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. It is, potentially, the greatest geopolitical blunder since Adolf Hitler invading Russia in 1941 after violating the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact of 1939, and essentially ensuring the Third Reich’s defeat as a result. Even Britain and France’s ill-judged misadventure in Suez in 1956 did not cause such catastrophic results to the invading powers—the withdrawal from Suez at U.S. and Soviet insistence cementing imperial decline, but not causing either to lose much of their military capabilities or to become reviled as a pariah state. Moreover, while the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 was fundamentally misguided, causing great death and destruction and destabilizing the region for years hence, that invasion did not substantially weaken American military, economy, or civil society, and America’s reputational place in the world recovered rather quickly.By contrast, Putin’s miscalculation in Ukraine has weakened Russia at an elemental level, setting it back decades across all measurable and intangible axes of political, military, and economic power, hobbling Russian statecraft and strategic action for decades. Even if Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov were to dust off his famous “reset” button with the West, there is no going back to the status quo ante-bellum. Russia will, likely for a generation, remain a pariah state removed from the Western world. Russia will still limp along, albeit outside of most Western initiatives and fora. On the contrary, Chinese and Indian responses to Putin’s actions have been discouraging for those who wish for norms and ethical considerations to inform and guide international relations. Luckily for Putin, their actions may attenuate the effects of sanctions to a degree by throwing Russia some economic lifelines. Russia may yet find some ways to muddle through the coming decade, but the rump of a once-powerful empire is now subjected to perpetual decline, so long as Putin helms the ship of state, under the weight of its faltering economy, crumbling military, chastened intelligence services, toxic international brand, dwindling demographics, and terrorized civil society.What is ultimately so striking about Putin’s gamble is that, in the end, the geopolitical world order it will help to create is almost exactly the opposite of the one he sought to avoid by invading Ukraine in the first place: a diminution of the Russkiy Mir. Gains and losses at the operational level in Ukraine are at this stage almost wholly irrelevant to the future of the Russian state. Putin cannot stitch together enough tactical victories in Ukraine to translate his war into a strategic success, and certainly not at a cost bearable by the Russian state. His blunder has caused catastrophic harm to Russia across every facet of statecraft in the short term, and, moreover, has imperiled Russian development and prosperity in the medium term. For the long term, Putin has set the conditions for Russia’s great leap backwards.
