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April 18, 2021:
"All-out War: Ukraine and Russia Surge as Troops ‘Ready for Assault’"
"Fears of all-out war between Ukraine and Russia are intensifying as front line troops described being "ready for the assault". Tensions between the two nations have risen after Ukrainian diplomats called Russia’s growing army “the largest troop movement since the Second World War”. US President Joe Biden issued a warning on Thursday, urging Russian President Vladimir Putin to de-escalate tensions and “refrain from military action.” In a statement, Mr Biden said: “If Russia continues to interfere with our democracy, I’m prepared to take further actions to respond. “Now is the time to de-escalate.” The US cancelled deployment of two warships to the Black Sea on April 14 in order to avoid an unnecessary escalation of the situation."
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"Putin's Ukrainian Judo" (Excerpt)
by Dmitry Orlov
"A terrible war is about to erupt on Russia’s border with the Ukraine - or not - but there is some likelihood of a significant number of people getting killed before project Ukraine is finally over. Given that around 13 thousand people have been killed over the past seven years - the civil war in the Donbass region of eastern Ukraine has gone on for that long! - this is no laughing matter. But people get desensitized to the mostly low-level warfare. Just over the past couple of weeks a grandfather was shot by a Ukrainian sniper while feeding his chickens and a young boy was killed by a bomb precision-dropped on him from a Ukrainian drone.
But what’s about to happen now is forecasted to be on a different scale: the Ukrainians are moving heavy armor and troops up to the line of separation while the Russians are moving theirs up to their side of the Ukrainian border, a position from which they can blast any and all Ukrainian troops straight out of the gene pool without so much as setting foot on Ukrainian territory—should they wish to do so. The Russians can justify their military involvement by the need to defend their own citizens: over the past seven years half a million residents in eastern Ukraine have applied for and been granted Russian citizenship. But how exactly can Russia defend its citizens while they are stuck in the crossfire between Russian and Ukrainian forces?
The rationale of defending its citizens led to conflict in the briefly Georgian region of South Ossetia, which started on August 8, 2008 and lasted barely a week, leaving Georgia effectively demilitarized. Russia rolled in, Georgia’s troops ran off, Russia confiscated some of the more dangerous war toys and rolled out. Georgia’s paper warriors and their NATO consultants and Israeli trainers were left wiping each others’ tears. Any suggestion of arming and equipping the Georgians since then has been met with groaning and eye-rolling. Is the upcoming event in eastern Ukraine going to be similar to the swift and relatively painless defanging of Georgia in 2008? Given that the two situations are quite different, it seems foolish to think that the approach to resolving them would be the same.
Is it different this time and is World War III is about to erupt with eastern Ukraine being used as a trigger for this conflagration? Do the various statements made at various times by Vladimir Putin provide a solid enough basis for us to guess at what will happen next? Is there a third, typically, infuriatingly Russian approach to resolving this situation, where Russia wins, nobody dies and everyone in the West is left scratching their heads?"
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