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Casey Michel 🇰🇿 Profile picture
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Feb 17 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
Way too many people still think the latest Russia crisis is only (or even primarily) about Ukraine potentially joining NATO.
Does Ukrainian membership in NATO play a role in Russia’s security posture/threats of invasion? Sure. Is it the primary motivator? Hardly—otherwise a simple question of Ukrainian security neutrality would abnegate the bulk of the current/forthcoming crisis.
This remains the best thread on why the Kremlin’s designs—colonialist, revanchist, geo-economic—on Ukraine go far, far beyond NATO membership.

And why the solution of a “neutral Ukraine” is somewhere between myopic and a dangerous canard.

This same dynamic arose in 2014: a gaggle of “realists” parachuted in, claiming Russia invaded Ukraine because of NATO-related security concerns.

Even though Ukraine was still a neutral country.

And without any considerations of, say, the Eurasian Union, or broader kleptocracy.
I am *begging* realists to read Putin's 2021 screed about how Ukrainians and Russians are "one people—a single whole."

Putin wrote 7,000 words(!!) on the "historical unity" of Russians and Ukrainians—and NATO is mentioned a grand total of *two times*.

en.kremlin.ru/events/preside…
Mearsheimer has been impressively, consistently wrong about this since 2014, when Ukraine was still a neutral country.
These numbers really are staggering, consider where things were just a decade ago.

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More from @cjcmichel

Casey Michel 🇰🇿 Profile picture
Feb 16
The time has come: We have to pass legislation barring former Western politicians from working with authoritarian regimes, and their related proxies.

Me and @BLSchmitt in @ForeignPolicy: foreignpolicy.com/2022/02/15/ger…
Gerhard Schröder is arguably Putin’s greatest lobbyist. But he’s no longer unique.

Former British and French PMs, Polish presidents, US senators, an entire range of Austrian leaders—all have raced to become shills for kleptocrats after leaving office.

foreignpolicy.com/2022/02/15/ger…
The first step: a joint Western statement announcing that the practice of former officials working for authoritarian or kleptocratic regimes or their related proxies after leaving office must end.

Announce—publicly and jointly—that the norms have changed. Image
Read 4 tweets
Casey Michel 🇰🇿 Profile picture
Feb 14
A false flag attack. A revanchist dictatorship in the Kremlin. An unprompted invasion of a western neighbor—and a bloody failure for the entire world to see.

My longread for @POLITICOMag on what the Soviet invasion of Finland can teach us: politico.com/news/magazine/…
The most striking statistic from the Soviet-Finnish Winter War:

The Soviet Union—which planned the time and place of the invasion—still had over *five times as many casualties as the Finns*, with a higher casualty-per-day rate than later battles like *Stalingrad*.
Stalin thought grabbing territory from tiny, prone Finland would be easy. He thought invasion would be a cakewalk.

He was impressively, incredibly wrong.
Read 7 tweets
Casey Michel 🇰🇿 Profile picture
Feb 13
Great read from @Russian_Starr on why progressives (especially in the U.S.) should be fully on board with supporting the defense of Ukraine from Russian neo-imperialism: foreignpolicy.com/2022/02/11/pro…
One thing that *feels* different from 2014 is that the U.S. left seems far more unified on backing Ukraine—and that differences are relegated only to policy (i.e. certain arms packages, certain sanctions crafting, etc).
Both the Jill Stein wing of US-as-root-of-all-evil foreign policy and the Chapo-style version of cynicism over everything seem effectively dead on the U.S. left, at least in terms of any influence on foreign policy and Ukraine. (Which are both fantastic developments.)
Read 6 tweets
Casey Michel 🇰🇿 Profile picture
Feb 12
Two things I’d like to see more of:

1) Those arguing that the West offered a “pledge” to forego NATO expansion grapple with the fact that Yeltsin and Putin both openly flirted with joining NATO in the 1990s/early 2000s.
2) Self-proclaimed realists digest the clear reality that the (post-colonialist) Kremlin’s designs on Ukraine go far, far beyond the simple question of Ukrainian NATO membership.
+1 Not nearly enough grappling with what would have happened if NATO actually *had* stopped expanding. (Polish nuclear program? Hungarian irredentism? A far, far, far worse security landscape on Russia’s western flank?)
Read 6 tweets
Casey Michel 🇰🇿 Profile picture
Jan 26
The raid of Rep. Henry Cuellar shows just how deep Azerbaijan’s tendrils of illicit lobbying (still) reach in the US: newrepublic.com/article/165140…
Azerbaijan has spent years launching illicit lobbying campaigns across the West—and not just targeting politicians.

And there’s a strong argument they’ve been most successful in the US, on both sides of the aisle.
'Allowing foreign powers to meddle in America without serious consequences is the new, dangerous normal.' responsiblestatecraft.org/2022/01/17/in-…
Read 4 tweets
Casey Michel 🇰🇿 Profile picture
Jan 22
If Moscow thinks it could somehow “install a pro-Russian leader in Kyiv,” Putin’s even further down the rabbit-hole than assumed. gov.uk/government/new…
The notion that the Kremlin could somehow(?) successfully install a “pro-Russian leader” in Ukraine reminds me of Yanukovych’s dreams he could return and somehow “reunite the country”: Image
Would be a good time to revisit Putin’s recent jeremiad that Russians and Ukrainians are “one people—a single whole”: en.kremlin.ru/events/preside…
Read 6 tweets

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