Putin beordrar styrkor att gå in i Ukraina - INVASION NU (2022-02-24)

🗞️Ukrainian forces defending #Sievierodonetsk received an order to withdraw, says the head of Luhansk Administration Sergeiy Haidai.
#UkraineRussiaWar

Ukrainska soldater tvingas nu dra sig tillbaka från Sievjerodonetsk, rapporterar ukrainska kanal 24.

Serhij Hajdaj, chef för militären i Luhansk, säger att situationen är svår och att soldaterna därför beordras att lämna staden för att omplaceras.

– Att stanna kvar på positioner som slagits sönder i månader, bara för att stanna, är inte vettigt, säger han till kanalen.

/.../The collapse of the Soviet Union entailed a host of potentially explosive issues, the main ones being the withdrawal of Soviet forces from Eastern Europe simultaneously with the reunification of Germany as a NATO power. Further complicating the situation, the former Soviet “republics” all started declaring independence within borders that were often just artifacts of Soviet policy. Among the many resulting problems, the newly born Ukraine suddenly found itself in possession of sizeable nuclear forces as well as the Soviet Union’s vaunted Black Sea Fleet, neither of which Ukraine knew what to do with. Preferring the devil it knew to the one it didn’t, the U.S. pressured Ukraine to transfer the nukes and the fleet to the Russians.

But there was another major problem, one that has unfortunately escaped the notice of American diplomats to this day: Ukraine had declared independence within borders that left it in possession of far too much of historical Russia. As long as Ukraine was a Russian puppet, the location of their mutual border didn’t matter. But should Ukraine ever seek real independence or, even worse, NATO membership, its borders would have to be adjusted to avoid creating an existential conflict with Russia; the only question was whether the adjustment would happen by negotiation or by war. Simply put, Ukraine was born within borders that were totally incompatible with a truly independent state.

For as long as Russia itself had existed, Ukraine had been a part of it. Ukraine actually predated Muscovite Russia by many centuries, but as Putin rightly points out, the administrative entity known today as Ukraine was created by Vladimir Lenin after Germany cleaved it from Russia in the widely condemned diktat of Brest-Litovsk in 1918.

The Soviet Socialist Republic of Ukraine thus wound up with tens of millions of Russians, but Russian Communists didn’t care because the Soviet Union was a unified totalitarian state. It certainly was not with Ukraine’s national independence in mind that Nikita Khrushchev, himself a Ukrainian, transferred the Crimean Peninsula to Ukraine, along with the Black Sea Fleet and Russia’s most important naval base in the world, at Sevastopol. It didn’t matter to him that Crimea had never been considered part of Ukraine or that few ethnic Ukrainians had ever lived there. It was a propaganda exercise meant to give the utterly false appearance of multipolarity within the Soviet Union, Potemkin’s villages reenacted for a global audience.