This is something that has been bothering me from the start of the so called SMO. Europe relied on gas flowing through Ukraine pipelines. Couldn’t Russia just have stopped the flow, and forgone the war?
This is something that has been bothering me from the start of the so called SMO. Europe relied on gas flowing through Ukraine pipelines. Couldn’t Russia just have stopped the flow, and forgone the war?
Well he is planning to make many Ukrainians into new Russian citizens and also permanently hold the lands, it would be counterproductive to treat Ukraine too harshly. The kinder Russia is, the easier it is for Ukrainians to return their self-identification back into a pro-Russian cultural context, similar things apply to the ROC and PRC. The westerners never planned that for those countries. Burn it all down and seize everything they got, that was the mission. Libya and Iraq got invaded because they were too sovereign, too powerful, too noisy.