Except that now we have Ukrainian chief negotiator having come out and openly admitted that Russia and Ukraine were on a verge of making a deal back in last March before Boris Johnson sabotaged it.
Source? Because the only “deal” I can find is basically a surrender of Crimea and the Donbas in 2022.
Now we’re seeing this massively backfire with western economies going into a recession while Russian economy is now growing.
Again, source? Sure, this is true if you look at single numbers, but there are huge difference between Europe shifting away from over a decade of quantitative easing and into repair mode, and Russia who is nationalizing businesses left and right and forcing companies to sell them foreign currencies at a discount to prop up the ruble. The need for foreign capital is so massive, due to capital flight, you can land 15% interest in Russia right now.
The three things propping up the Russian economy are the high oil price, China and massive government intervention.
even NATO officials now admit that the west lacks industrial capacity to keep up with Russia even in basic things such as shell production.
Because lobbing shells at eachother is Soviet doctrine, not NATO. NATO doctrine is to bomb the everloving shit out of someone with massive air superiority. If NATO decided to send 200 F35s to Ukraine, there would be no need to more 155mm shells.
And because it’s not doctrine, nobody really wants to build more artillery factories that will sell great now, and get mothballed in 5 years. If Russia steps into NATO territory, those factories will sprout like mushrooms, but it’s simply a bad business decision to do so now.
He wanted us to remove our military infrastructure in all Allies that have joined NATO since 1997, meaning half of NATO, all the Central and Eastern Europe
And tell me, when a dictator known for annexing other countries demands appeasement, how effective has that been historically? I don’t even need Czechoslovakia for this example, although it’s a classic. Did Russia stop after, say, two Chechen wars, Georgia, Abkhazia?
“There wouldn’t have been a war if putin got what he wanted without one” is a shit take