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Originally Posted by Damien
There was also an alternative outcome to this in Putin's head where Ukraine falls quickly, the West has a divided response and imposes weak sanctions and Putin secures Ukraine as a puppet state looking like a genius in doing so. Another Crimea.
The West was weak in Russia when he annexed Crimea and it was weak when he deployed a biological weapon on British soil. He probably didn't expect that this would be the line when the West has had enough and finally imposes biting sanctions. There is so much news that it's hard to keep up but Germany has abandoned decades of reticence about militarisation, Switzerland appears to be willing to abandon neutrality and sanction Russian bankers and the West has united to impose the biggest set of sanctions it's ever applied to Russia. A week ago people were saying Putin had sanction-proofed the Russian economy because of the foreign reserves he built up, so we just sanctioned them.
Most importantly Ukraine proved more resistance than I think anyone outside of Ukraine predicted. That has also been a reason the West has rallied around sensing that this time we can stop him.
The way the West has finally woken up and showed it's strength is one positive to take from all of this.
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The more I read, the more I discover that we’ve been arming and training the Ukrainian army for years now. We’ve had special forces in country for ages, and I hear talk of strategically hidden arms dumps designed to support the tactics the Ukrainians have deployed this past week, letting the Russian spearhead pass by and then taking out the supply lines behind them.
I’m beginning to think that this was long expected, long prepared for, and long hoped to be the line in the sand, and the open sharing of intel and weapons was offered as a final way out for Putin, who clearly had been planning this exact operation for many months. And I’m convinced we knew it too.
Even so, the leading nations of the western alliance can barely have hoped for such a massive, united response. Modern Germany finding itself capable of militaristic thinking is quite something. Khazakstan waking up to what being a Russian puppet state might feel like, and refusing to back Putin only months after relying on Russian force to put down an insurrection, is amazing.