"We can absolutely believe that the Third World War has begun"

The quote comes from Ukraine's former military Commander-In-Chief, Valery Zaluzhny

As many of us travel across the country to visit relatives and to indulge in some post-election crow, we mean turkey this Thanksgiving, the war machine is ramping up in the month and a half before Trump takes office. One gets the distinct sense that the governments of Europe (and the Biden administration), largely avowed enemies of Trump and all he represents, are trying to escalate the war in Ukraine. As we said last week in two of our posts, perfectly reasonable people can disagree about whether the US should be involved in any way in the Ukraine conflict. Reasonable people can disagree as to what drove the war in the first place. But it seems to us very hard to justify the outgoing administration allowing the Ukrainians to launch US-made missiles into Russia.

The truth is there were many people in the US who thought Trump colluded with the Russians (there are still some people today who cling to this manufactured nonsense) and so they saw the war in the Ukraine as an extension of the battle against Trump and Trumpism. These people thought anti-Trump “resistance” was “good”, and therefore US support for Ukraine was also “good”. They convinced themselves that deeply anti-democratic, oligarch ridden Ukraine was better than deeply anti-democratic, oligarch ridden Russia. (Which in fairness it likely is to a degree.) Both countries consistently were/are at the top of world corruption lists, often right next to one another.

Yet Putin DID invade and as such gave his critics (by the way we at ACC are very much anti-Putin who is a monster crony capitalist) every reason to support Ukraine despite being similar to Russia on the civil society front.

More importantly, and in the West this is almost never discussed, Ukraine is key to the security (as Brussels sees it) of the European Union. So settling the Ukraine question once and for all (or at least for a generation) is very much in the interest of the EU at large.

The thing is, Ukraine is also key to Russia’s long term security. Ukraine is mostly a broad plain (with some mountains in the far west) that stretches from Russia to the heart of Eastern Europe. It is across this plain that Hitler and Napoleon marched their armies in the quest for Moscow and total European domination. The Russians have not forgotten this. To Putin the EU looks very much like a de facto European empire. (This can be debated.)

Ukraine is basically a battlefield with periods of peace in between battles.

Why then were we at all surprised that the war happened?