Quote:
Originally Posted by TheDaddy
Was listening to Barnier on the Andrew Marr show earlier and he said Guy Verhofstadt said without Brexit he didn't think Russia would have invaded Ukraine last year, interesting that everything we were warned about is coming true and none of the things we were promised are coming to fruition and no one is being held accountable for their promises
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Guy Verhostadt holds a special loathing for all things British, and has done for a great many years. He was infamous in his speeches in the European Parliament long before Brexit was a thing. I wouldn’t raise anything he says in support of any argument you might want to make. It doesn’t strengthen your position.
With particular regard to Ukraine, it takes a special sort of strategic idiocy (which to be fair Verhostadt appears to have in spades) to still be obsessed with the idea that 2022 was the inflection point in this crisis. Putin invaded Crimea and the Donbas in 2014. That in turn was preceded by similar adventurism in Georgia, with similar justifications, in 2008. Meanwhile the West gave every indication that it no longer had any interest in intervention in other people’s wars by refusing to back rebels against the Assad regime in Syria in 2011. The Western response has been tardy in the extreme but for Putin this is a continuity of planning that has been ongoing for a long time.
Yes, Russia’s geopolitical strategy is to divide western democracies because it calculated it was stronger, in its will to succeed and in its military ability to do so, than any of them acting alone. But Putin is informed by a vision of a renewed imperial Russia and has been playing an exceedingly long game. Ukraine is the jewel in the crown because many of Russia’s cultural and religious origins are actually in Kyiv, not St Petersburg and certainly not Moscow. It was always going to end here (and in fact, if Russia is not resoundingly beaten in Ukraine and kept under sanction for a very long time, it *will* flare up again).
In the 18th century, Russia invaded Crimea repeatedly and took 80 years to finally secure it and forcibly incorporate it into its empire. That’s the portion of Russian history that informs Putin’s motives and his timescales. The invasion of *more of* Ukraine in 2022 has absolutely, literally feck-all to do with Brexit and you oughtn’t to make yourself sound as much a chump as Verhostadt does on a daily basis by claiming otherwise.