Losing a country is worse than losing a war but Russian President Vladimir Putin warned that may happen to Ukraine.
President Putin proclaimed Saturday that Ukraine might lose its statehood “if they continue doing what they are doing,” according to a report in “The New York Times”.
Only the Russian president really knows what his real goals are for postwar Ukraine but many political and military experts doubt he wants to annex the entire country.
Taking choice parts of a country like the Crimea peninsula that was absorbed by Russia in 2014 is one thing. Swallowing a whole nation would be something else entirely because most conquerors eventually suffer severe indigestion. It’s easier to take a country than it is to keep a country.
Some observers envision Putin installing a Russian-friendly Ukraine puppet government. Other experts opine he intends to add a bigger chunk of eastern Ukraine into Russia than the Donbas region while letting the Western part of the country become a slimmed-down Ukraine 2.0, that includes guarantees against it becoming a future NATO member. Putin has already pulled off bold, in-your-face moves with Crimea and the “people’s republics” of Donbas, so he may see no problem with gobbling a slightly bigger piece of the country.
Annexation of one sovereign state by another has not happened often since the end of WWII and the few attempts at it mostly failed. Think Iraq’s 1990 annexation of Kuwait, Indonesia’s 1975 annexation of East Timor and Ethiopia’s attempt to gobble up Eritrea, in 1962.
Putin escalated rhetoric around the Ukraine invasion when he declared Western sanctions against Russia as “akin to a declaration of war,” according to the Times report.
“Weaponizing migration & attacks on nuke plants are akin to a declaration of war too,” declared Senator Marco Rubio (R-Fla.). “The problem is NATO would quickly annihilate #Russia’s conventional forces & Putin would then use chemical, biological & non-strategic nukes to freeze the conflict.”
Ukraine has governed independently for more than 30 years since the breakup of the Soviet Union.
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