That can address things from Ukraine’s standpoint, but it doesn’t really resolve the broader political issue from the EU’s standpoint.
The fundamental problem is that there is a political dispute between Brussels and Orban related to political changes in Hungary. Brussels has decided to put pressure on Orban over it, to use as leverage against him, first with attempting to invoke Article 7 to strip Hungary’s voting rights in the EU, and then with withholding funds. Orban has decided to disrupt EU operations to use as leverage against Brussels.
Orban’s got a bunch of other things that he can block or disrupt. He could do the next EU FTA, say – there, it’s not practical for a subset of EU members to sign an agreement themselves, the way they could potentially do with Ukraine funds.
One way or another, they’re going to have to make a peace at some point.
I mean, I doubt that he’d move against NATO directly, but that’s got nothing to do with his statements. He spent years swearing up and down that he wasn’t going to attack Ukraine, too.
If he could get away with it one way or another, yeah, I think that he’d give it a try. I just doubt that he’s going to have a realistic opportunity.
Also, while it’s probably not ISW’s principal interest, Russia under Putin did start conducting assassinations on the soil of several NATO members, and I am not at all sure that Russia will refrain from that in the future.
You had the polonium and the attempted Novichok assassination in the UK. In the case of the attempted Skripal hit, I distinctly remember reading a quote from Mike Pompeo about how we had specifically warned Moscow to knock off the assassinations shortly before it went through. When that happened shortly afterwards, he said that everyone was pretty pissed off with Putin.
You had the attempted assassination of that Bulgarian arms dealer, Emilian Gebrev.
You had the assassination via shooting of Zelimkhan Khangoshvili in Germany.
You had – and the US did not release information on this at the time – an attempted assassination on US soil of Aleksandr Poteyev.
That’s stuff that was generally considered off limits during the Cold War. You do espionage, but you don’t do hits on each other’s soil. The CIA’s assessment in the mid-Cold War:
Since World War II, and especially in the years since Stalin’s death, assassination attempts abroad have become increasingly rare. Currently the emphasis in the executive action field is placed on sabotage and sabotage planning, rather than terrorism against individuals. The Soviets now apparently resort to murder only in the case of persons considered especially dangerous to the regime and who, for one reason or another, cannot be kidnaped.
In this connection, comments made by state security defectors Petr Deryabin and Yurv Rastvorov in 1954 about what the Soviets would or would not do are still of interest. Both believed that the Soviets would murder one of their officials on the verge of defecting if that were the only way of preventing the act. The same would apply to a Soviet official who had just defected, if thereby state secrets could be preserved, and if they believed that killing him would not bring about a more adverse situation in terms of politics and propaganda than already existed. Deryabin and Rastvorov doubted, however, that the Soviets would murder an official who had been in non-Communist hands long enough to have been exploited for intelligence and propaganda purposes. While both granted that in particular cases the Soviets might go to any extreme, they both believed, generally speaking, that the adverse propaganda resulting from such an act would negate its original purpose. On the other hand, Khokhlov, who might have been in a better position to know, has stated without qualification that the Soviets would continue to assassinate defectors in the future. The threat of Soviet executive action against defectors is also considered a real one by Reino Hayhanen, who defected from the KGB in 1957. A still more recent Soviet intelligence source also believes that standard Soviet practice is to mount a kidnaping or assassination operation “through all intelligence opportunities” against defectors from the Soviet intelligence services. Deryabin and Rastvorov further agreed that the Soviets, without hesitation, would forcibly return to the USSR someone on the verge of defecting at a mission abroad. This was borne out by the aforementioned Strygin and Zelenovskiy cases. Deryabin and Rastvorov also believed that the same policy would apply to a Soviet official who had just defected, or one who had been in non-Communist hands long enough to have been exploited for intelligence and propaganda purposes, if the capability existed for returning him physically to the USSR.
Lastly, Deryabin believed that the assassination of an Allied official would be highly unlikely and probably unprofitable. He also doubted that the Soviets would attempt to kidnap any U.S. officials unless they were particularly knowledgeable. Such an incident would not be worth the trouble for an average official, but an important person conceivably would have sufficient information to make it worthwhile.
I am embarrassed and infuriated that our abjectly shitty politicians are incapable of doing anything on this front, up to and including Biden straight up ordering 1st Cav in Germany to take their tanks and air defense systems and park them on the Ukranian border for the Ukrainians to pick up.
I hope European voters are paying attention to the fact that (to my deep dismay) we’re not really as reliable of a geopolitical partner as we once were, and that they act and vote accordingly.
We are waiting because rule of law is important. There is fear that if we do that other countries will stop putting assets elsewhere as the example has been proven that they will be (not just can) be confiscated on a whim. this lack of investment in each other long term harms the world even more. (both sides lose)
And that's only one half of it. Democracies where governments are able to easily confiscate money and use it for their own means tend to be gone (alongside the opposition that got all their money confiscated) not long after.
This is like decrying a wild fox for failing to protect the chickens in a henhouse. Like, yeah, it’s bad, but this is absolutely standard procedure for Russia, and it has been for centuries, through 3 wildly different incarnations of Russian government.
Russia has also been accused of funneling money to pro-Russian parties, and even allegedly planned an attempted coup to oust pro-European President Maia Sandu in an attempt to seize power in the country.
Ukraine_UA
Oldest
This magazine is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.