Thread by @GastroOneIndia

#UkraineRussiaWar @ravikanths_

PUTIN’S CHESS. CLEARLY HE IS NO GRANDMASTER!
Russia might have good reason for it or even just cause. In this Oped piece in The Hindu Rakesh Sood, a former diplomat and a well regarded one at that, analyses what led to the present situation.

He lays the cards out neatly. But could Putin have handled it better? He didn’t state his objective and grievance clearly and loudly enough. This he made it appear like a bolt out of the blue attack.

Could there have been another way of forcing NATO to halt, and to tell the West that it’s unilateral days and ways are over? No more Iraq or Libya or Syria.

“After 1945, this is the second time that national boundaries are being redrawn by force; the first was the 1999 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) air strikes on Serbian forces that led to the creation of Kosovo.

Russian and Chinese protests about NATO undertaking “out of area operations” without United Nations Security Council approval carried little weight.

In the post-Cold War world that promised a rule-based liberal international order, clearly the message from Thucydides’ Peloponnesian Wars still held — “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must”.

In 2022, Russia has fired the first shot but NATO is not blameless either. The Ukrainian crisis has been in the making for over a decade. After the fall of the Berlin Wall in late-1989, then U.S.

Secretary of State James Baker was meeting Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev in Moscow in February 1990 to help ease the way for German unification.

He assured Mr. Gorbachev that NATO understood the “need for assurances to the countries in the East”, adding that even with Germany a part of NATO, “there would be no extension of NATO’s jurisdiction one inch to the east”.

By end-1991, USSR had broken up into 15 countries; Mr. Gorbachev faded into history and a change in the White House was under way. Rather than look for a new European security framework, the newly independent Baltic and central European states sought security in a U.S.-led NATO.

The old caution that the cost of expansion goes up as it reaches closer to the Russian border was discarded and NATO adopted an ‘open door’ policy.

Beginning in 1999, NATO has added 14 new members in stages. At the NATO summit in 2008, at U.S.

President George Bush’s urging, an in-principle opening for Ukraine and Georgia was announced, though France and Germany, conscious of Russian concerns, successfully opposed defining a time frame. It was a bad compromise and the damage was done”

thehindu.com/opinion/lead/p…