Vicious Rants of an Angry Yellow Man

 The war in Ukraine has started.  While it is easy to say this is all the doing of a madman, a brutal dictator or a thug, it would not be totally true.  Putin is all of the above but if we ignore the history that led to all of this, then we are likely to repeat this type of tragedies over and over again.  I am no historian and some of the facts I recall may not be 100% accurate.  I am also writing this as I am thinking about it and so I don't know how many blogs is going take me.  Hopefully this is coherent.

The USSR and the U.S. were allies in WWII along with Western Europe.  Post war the two sides went separate ways.  Just like we were proud of winning the war, the Soviets were proud of their victory.  The U.S. and the Soviets built the two biggest military powers in the world.  Unfortunately, they were no longer allies as they represent two opposite systems.  Both wish to destroy the other's system, believing that they would suffer if the other side wins.  The Soviets were able to match the Americans militarily but they failed miserably economically.  So unlike what Reagan supporters believe, we didn't win the Cold War due to strength.  We won because the USSR self-destructed economically.

So Gorbachev decided to make peace with the West.  The Soviets were going to change their system and try to imitate the West with the help of the West.  Gorbachev believed that if Germany and Japan can rise from the ashes of their defeat in WWII with the help of the West, surely the USSR can do the same.  But the help he needed never came.  Left on its own with poor leaders like Yeltsin, corruption within the government and no previous experience with capitalism, only a few oligarchs became rich.  The rest of the country became even more poor.

So the USSR started to break up.  The Warsaw Pact also collapsed.  The economically weak Russia could not do much to stop the bleeding.  By the time the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania left the bloc, there wasn't much left except for Ukraine and Georgia.

Ukraine was the closest of the former Soviet Republics to Russia.  There were and still are many Russians in Ukraine.  Most people in Ukraine can speak Russian.  Also we look at the map, you can draw a straight line from England to France to Germany to Poland to Ukraine to Russia.  Once Poland became part of the EU, Ukraine is the only buffer between Russia and NATO.  So you can see why Ukraine is so important to Russia.  Before the breakup, Ukraine actually had the third largest nuclear arsenal in the world.  When the deal was made to breakup,  Ukraine wanted continue Russian support and gave back the nuclear weapons.  

Ukraine, however, was split two factions.  Those west side of the country tended to favor Europe but the east side favor Russia.  Meanwhile the EU was snapping up all the countries west of Ukraine.  The EU wanted these countries to join so they can station troops and missile close to Russia, so the Russians reasoned.  The Western Europeans would say that they just want to spread democracy and improve the economic status of the Eastern European countries.  You can be the judge of who is right on this.  I would say that some of these countries are democratic in name only.  Economically, most of them are better off than when the Soviets dominated them but they are not anywhere near Western European level.  I think by incorporating them into the EU, Western Europe just got a source of cheap labor, something the Brits missed out since Brexit.

Well, I digress and getting tired so I will stop for now.  Next will go over how Putin's view on this and how he used it to his advantage and eventually took Crimea.