Donald Trump made a mess out of US – European relations….
President Biden and Yes….
Russian President Putin has mended any problems that may have existed in the 4 years of Trump….
And helped the European Union stop bickering and row together….
And President Biden’s up front use of intelligence , a function of his aversion to using outright military force, has actually put Putin on the spot and saved the Allies TONS of money in moving only small amounts of troops around…the opposite of Putin….
Putin may also have inadvertently engendered unity. The UK may still – slightly neurotically – harp on about its leadership role, but it has also tried to stop being rude about the European Union. French and British defence ministers, for instance, met bilaterally this week in Brussels, ending their standoff caused by the row over the Aukus pact between Australia, the UK and US. David Miliband, the former foreign secretary, said: “The UK has been trying to run a foreign policy as if Europe did not exist. That is a problem when your closest ally, the object of your ardour, the US, thinks self-evidently the EU does exist.”
Boris Johnson even went so far as to congratulate the EU Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, for her cooperation so far over sanctions. The UK has also been forced, in the face of international ridicule, to wake from its slumbers about Russian dirty money circulating in London, going so far as to say that in the event of an invasion Russian firms will be unable to raise capital in London.
Differences still exist within the EU over the precise triggers that would launch the sanctions package, but something credible spanning energy and finance is now ready to go, even if it would require Viktor Orbán, the Hungarian prime minister, to withhold his veto.
In a concession to the US, Germany has made it understood that Nord Stream 2, the Russian-German pipeline, will not go ahead in the event of an invasion. Even if Scholz did not say as much on his visit to Moscow for legal reasons, US senators came away from private briefings with him the week before, happy with what they heard. Scholz is anyway losing patience with the former chancellor Gerhard Schröder, Putin’s placeman on the Nord Stream supervisory board and an increasing embarrassment to the country’s Social Democratic party.
All of this meant at the time of a maximum tension last Friday the US national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, was able to give a warning to the Kremlin that rang true.
“If Russia proceeds,” he said, “its long-term power and influence will be diminished, not enhanced, by an invasion. It will face a more determined transatlantic community. It will have to make more concessions to China. It will face massive pressure on its economy and export controls that will erode its defence industrial base. And it will face a wave of condemnation from around the world.”…
…
“Starting a full-scale war is completely not in Putin’s interest,” said Anastasia Likhacheva, the dean of world economy and international affairs at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow. “It is very difficult for me to find any rational explanation for a desire to carry out such a campaign.”
Even if Mr. Putin were able to take control of Ukraine, she noted, such a war would accomplish the opposite of what the president says he wants: rolling back the NATO presence in Eastern Europe. In the case of a war, the NATO allies would be “more unified than ever,” Ms. Likhacheva said, and they would be likely to deploy powerful new weaponry along Russia’s western frontiers.
At home, Mr. Putin has always been keen to project the aura of a sober statesman, overruling the nationalist firebrands on prime-time talk shows and in Parliament who have been urging him for years to annex more of Ukraine.
And while he casts himself as Russia’s guarantor of stability, he could face stark economic headwinds from Western sanctions and social upheaval if there are casualties on the battlefield and among civilians. Millions of Russians have relatives in Ukraine….
Note…
Putin’s nuclear weapons testing means absolutely nothing….
Nuclear weapons are NOT an issue in this…..
And they have no use really since America and even biggest NATO countries have them also….
Putin IS gonna have to make up his mind WTF he wants soon I’m guessing……
He can’t sustain all these military assets sitting around indefinitely….
There will be little sense of surprise dince Biden is fronting the West’s ability to listen to the Russian military’s internal communication networks….
BTW?
Fighting HAS already started in the Ukraine….
Small dustup’s