Please use this thread to continue discussing the war in Ukraine.
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Original thread:
A sense of self-importance perhaps.
Exactly. Putin will be pissing himself with glee. But why does Orban behave as if he is a Putin's lackey? Do Hungarians feel especially close connections to Russia? Would they want to submit to Russia themselves as they were forced to do in 1956? It seems somewhat unlikely.
He is also now going to visit Putin as the current EU president. There's some optics right there. "EU come crawling to Moscow in attempt to broker peace".
Who can explain to me the game Orban is playing? I mean, ok, he is an unprincipled opportunist, so I would understand why he would support Putin in February/March 2022 — it makes a sick kind of sense to side with a "sure" winner who would be taking over a neighbouring country soon. But now Putin is a lame duck. Ukraine will never surrender, and even if Russia somehow forces a ceasefire and the war is frozen in its current state, it is a lost game for Putin. His propaganda may say otherwise, but even most Russians won't consider it an acceptable victory for the huge losses Russia had already sustained. Putin will be blamed, inside Russia, for everything that went wrong, as soon as he is dead or overthrown.
So what does Orban get out of it, besides very angry Ukraine on Hungary's border?
Russian collusion leftovers reheated and slopped out for another cycle. Makes a change from Agenda 2025, should be grateful in some ways.
Sounds like the other side of the coin to the Biden/ Clinton conspiracies tbh. If there was any truth to it you'd think some of the mainstream liberal/ centrist media would have unearthed it by now.
Bigly.
His current wife is also said to have been kgb through her teenage years. She had a boyfriend but he said she was always very guarded with information. Then one day without warning she just disappeared and the next he knew she was with Donald Trump.
Maybe you're right and we do over-estimate them - the fear is that Xi does too-
The major fear is that he only gets told what he wants to hear , certainly no one dares disagree with him .
Maybe we overestimate the Chinese.
And maybe Xi is simply not the sharpest tool in the box.
Since he took over in around 2013(ish?), nearly everything is in a worse state.
When I was last there I was quite surprised by the feeling of hopelessness people have.
Yeah I think it's all bluff at the moment from the Chinese side regarding them attacking Taiwan too, but they won't want the Americans being able to focus their military might in the region and potentially trying to force their hand.
That’s my take on it. They won’t want Russia too weak, just as much as they don’t want it too strong. I’m not sure that Taiwan is on top of Xi’s mind at the moment though. For all his rethoric, China’s economy isn’t as stable as we might believe, from what I’m reading, the real estate sector in particular has the potential to tank much of the country’s economy.
By the same token China won't want Russia too weakened or Putin replaced by someone more open to the West. It's in their interest too to keep the war going and not let the US concentrate their attention on Taiwan
That is as far from China as I've ever heard.
That does sound plausible to me. I don't remember their statements right at the start other than I think they refused to condemn Russia at all (has not changed) or even call it a war or invasion (are they still talking of the Ukraine "crisis"?).
What I had been basing the "guess" on (it is totally idle speculation I admit) was my memory of the Olympics (where I think Putin attended and met with Xi) and the Russo-Chinese statements about their "unlimited friendship" etc. pre the invasion.
It struck me afterwards, in hindsight, as diplomacy that was meant to look and sound wonderful (for both of them) in light of a lightning Russian victory, a large (potential - sorry) EU accession state that had been drifting much closer to the West in recent years getting turned by force into a friendly Putin/Russian oligarch satrapy. The two big global autocracies marching forward hand in hand, land grabbing + imposing their will, and spitting in the eyes of the West etc.
Most likely in the Amur region of eastern Russia.
This is also a prolific gold mining centre. Probably not connected.
I honestly don’t think that Putin informed Beijing before making his move in Ukraine. My guess is that he wanted to present the world with a fait accompli with his lightning invasion of Ukraine. The first statements China issued after the invasion were pretty damning and it was only after the first weeks of the conflict had passed and it became clear that Russia wasn’t the massive juggernaut it had made itself out to be that China’s rhetoric began to change. For me, it looks like Beijing wanted to see how things played out before committing themselves. China and Russia are competing for influence in several areas, most notably in Central Asia, and a Russian victory in Ukraine would have the potential to embolden Putin to be more assertive in that region, endangering Chinese influence and assets there.
So for Beijing, the current situation is pretty much ideal. A competitor on their doorstep is in a weakened position and increasingly dependent on China, Russia’s former client states, some of which are pretty rich in resources, are pulling away from Moscow’s orbit and becoming more open to deals with Beijing, and meanwhile, the discord down by the war in Ukraine helps to keep Europe and the US distracted politically, whilst still keeping them accessible economically, something that Beijing needs to keep its own economy going.
In the 20th century certainly, but before that? Not really. Up until well into the 19th century, China was nearly completely closed off. It had its vassals and tributary states, sure, but beyond that, there was no contact with the outside. The only real attempt to open up to the outside world by imperial China, the famed expedition by Admiral Zheng He, was limited to a few decades and after the emperor who’d launched it had died, all traces of Zheng He’s treasured fleet were destroyed.
Trade missions by other countries, when they did arrive and were admitted, were treated as delivering tribute to the son of heaven and rather than trade, they were provided with gifts. But these were always one-time affairs, no proper trading relationship like you’d see between, say, Europe and the freshly independent United States, or non-Christian powers like the Ottoman Empire. It was only the shock of the opium wars in the early to mid 19th century that saw China begin to open itself.
But by then, the court bureaucracy had become so insular that they had no experience in dealing with the rising powers of Europe, as the very concept of a nation state was utterly alien to them. This type of institutionalised insularism and isolationism lasted until the end of the Chinese monarchy, and was actually one of the key drivers behind events like the Boxer rebellion. It was only after the Xinhai revolution of 1912 that China adopted a more sane approach to dealing with the outside world, not least to people such as Sun Yat Sen or Chiang Kai Shek.
Even with that though, that’s still millennia worth of tradition and precedents that’s you’re dealing with, something you can’t really shake that easily. I just thumbed through my dad’s old copy of Mao’s little red book while writing this (Yep, he was part of the far-left student protests in Germany in the late 1960s), and some of the passages in there are lifted straight from the works of Sun Tsu, Confucius or Lao Tsu, the same influences that Mao and the CCP were trying to eliminate. And while the current Chinese government certainly doesn’t see Europeans as simple barbarians anymore, they still believe in the approaches I outlined in my post.
It should go without saying by the way that all of this is highly simplified and an extremely high level overview. Whilst I’m certainly interested, I’m by no means an expert on China and I highly recommend that you, or anyone interested, should read up from more authoritative sources on the topic.
Fair enough, my main objection was to poster characterising them as some kind of quite ambivalent "neutral" (equivalent to India perhaps?) when they are nothing of the sort in my opinion, regardless of what they say. Neutral (on the side of Putin), paraphrasing Irish WW2 policy.
I am making a guess that Putin told the Chinese pre war it would be really easy to topple Ukraine, all wrapped up nice & quick with Zelensky out or killed and another Putin puppet leader in. The outcome they want is this promised Russian victory (impossible now I think) or a partial victory + end to the war that Putin can accept and be happy with (still achievable). Ukraine pushing them out of occupied territories, the Russian military running out of gear/men and suffering a kind of collapse etc. is not what they want, it might even unacceptable to them and and I think they may increase their support if this looks like happening.
You are right that they want Russia weak and dependent on them as a junior partner/resources supplier. However, Russia is not at the races as regards competing with them over territory, or posing much of a threat, even before their war in Ukraine inflicted serious damage. The US and China are the economic/technological/military superpowers with giant populations and Russia is not near that level at all, no matter how much Putin blusters and threatens. The current Russia - China relationship is totally inverted from the USSR - China one in the Cold war, as regards who is the leader, and who depends on whom.
Is this still in the evening news?
I don't think I've heard it mentioned in recent nights.
China has probably realised a long time ago that simply viewing all outsiders as ghosts and devils isn't realistic and doesn't work.
Russian ammo/oil burning
Russia has slipped out of the top 10 global economies, now behind Italy, Canada and Brazil.
Yes, you are correct…. I was going by the headline here under:- It was only when I checked it, I saw the date on the bottom of the post.
"Today's #protest in #StPetersburg, #Russia, where protesters blocked Nevsky Prospekt avenue:"
Today's
in
,
, where protesters blocked Nevsky Prospekt avenue:"
Russia is weak now (relatively) with most of the Western world at Ukrainian’s back. Do a deal where Ukraine is back in the Russian orbit would be hell on earth and a an act of treachery by a Ukrainian leaders… but, I don’t expect that.
Another power plant gets heated up
They did give up third largest nuclear weapons arsenal, destroyed planes and ran down military to a level where … Ireland out spent them
So yes not only Ukraine was neutral but they self disarmed
Which in hindsight was stupid, but it’s a lesson for others to stay as far away from Russia and their backwards colonial notions
I get where you're coming from, but I fear that your point falls into a trap I see western commentators on China make again and again. Namely, they see China's foreign policy through a western view point, which is of course understandable. The thing is that China is effectively unlike any other country on this planet. It has been a contiguous empire, more or less within its modern borders, since before the rise of the Roman Republic here in Europe. Unlike pretty much all other founding myths of great empires past and present, China's creation myth is not one of creation but of reunification, which would indicate at a history of empire even beyond the current records. And even when you take into consideration the numerous periods of internal schisms, the warring states period, etc., there was always a continuous tradition of administration & government going back to the mists of time. A country can't step away from several millennia worth of tradition, and even the CCP wasn't able to do so after they took power. Seriously, even Mao's little red book reads at times more like an old imperial text than a communist pamphlet.
As such, China's foreign policy is rooted just as much in the ancient imperial practice of "managing barbarians" as it is in the modern "realpolitik" that we're used to. It's been a while since I read Henry Kissinger's "On China" (Which is a very definite reading recommendation by the way), but as far as memory serves, China has always seen itself as the one real nation on Earth. The concept of Tianxia, roughly translated to "Under Heaven", holds that all of the lands on Earth were appointed to the Chinese Sovereign by divine mandate, with the Tianzi, or "Son of Heaven", or as we would know him, the Emperor of China standing at the center of this world. Concentrically outward from this nadir, you'd have the numerous levels of Chinese bureaucrats within the empire proper, the tributary states and finally the "barbarians". And while everyone who submitted to the "Mandate of Heaven" would be accepted as part of the Chinese worlds, those that remained outside it could never be seen as equals.
This is why, for much of Imperial China, foreign policy as a concept did not exist, because there simply were no other "real" countries. Right up until the fall of the empire in the early 20th century, China's approach to dealing with outside nations was akin to dealing with invaders coming in from the steppes of central Asia:
The latter had worked on numerous occasions as invading nomadic tribes had often been won over by Chinese society and eventually submitted to the Mandate of Heaven, although that concept obviously fell flat on its face once the Western European colonial powers showed up from the 1830s onwards.
Naturally, China's position towards other countries changed and evolved towards the latter years of the 19th century and in the 20th century, and both the Kuomintang and the CCP have taken a much more pragmatic approach to international politics. But as I said earlier, you can't just divorce yourself from several millennia of history and tradition, and for all their pragmatism, in many ways, even the CCP leadership subconsciously continue this tradition. I guess if one wanted to be extreme, you could consider the CCP just the next Imperial Dynasty ruling China, especially given that XI Jinping seems to be leaving behind some of the pragmatism of earlier post-Mao leaders and rekindling the concept of Tianxia.
That's from Jan 2021 no?
Incorrect dates, post deleted
The biggest problem with Russia is the same as when the USSR fell, no one wants to invest in a huge land area that spans 9 timezones. As is half of the Russian population lives in the western most 8th of the country. Putin has burned through what was left of the Soviet era military stock so basically Moscow's ability to retain control east of the Urals will be notional after the Putin era.
As is China has land leases in far east Russia for solar and mining, so while a weaker Russia means easier terms for China it makes more sense to keep Russia intact rather than letting it implode entirely.
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