Thread by @pleasesaveour

Russian forces will thus be arrayed along Poland’s entire 650-mile eastern border, as well as along the eastern borders of Slovakia and Hungary and the northern border of Romania.

https://twitter.com/McFaul/status/1496182781810196482

(Moldova will likely be brought under Russian control, too, when Russian troops are able to form a land bridge from Crimea to Moldova’s breakaway province of Transnistria.)

The most immediate threat will be to the Baltic states.

Kaliningrad is the headquarters of the Russian Baltic Fleet. Since the Soviet Union broke up Russians have been able to access Kaliningrad only through Poland and Lithuania. Expect a Russian demand for a direct corridor that would put strips of the countries under Russian control

With Poland, Hungary and five other NATO members sharing a border with a new, expanded Russia, the ability of the United States and NATO to defend the alliance’s eastern flank will be seriously diminished.

Today, Putin seeks at the very least a two-tier NATO, in which no allied forces are deployed on former Warsaw Pact territory. The inevitable negotiations over this and other elements would be conducted with Russian forces poised all along NATO’s eastern borders and therefore amid

real uncertainty about NATO’s ability to resist Putin’s demands.

This takes place, moreover, as China threatens to upend the strategic balance in East Asia, perhaps with an attack of some kind against Taiwan.

These simultaneous strategic challenges in two theaters are like the 1930s, when Germany and Japan sought to overturn the existing order in their resp regions. Each benefited from the other’s actions

Long ago, US defense strategy was premised on the possibility of such a two-front conflict. But since the early 1990s, the US has gradually dismantled that force.

The was officially abandoned in the 2012 defense policy guidance.
sgp.fas.org/crs/natsec/R42…

Ukraine will likely cease to exist as an ind, democratic identity. Putin and other Rus have long insisted it is not a nation at all; it is part of Ru. It would be bad strategy for Putin to allow Ukr to continue to exist as a nation after all the trouble and expense of an invasion

After Russia installs a government, expect Ukraine’s new Moscow-directed rulers to seek the eventual legal incorporation of Ukraine into Russia, a process already underway in Belarus.
atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/belarusa…