Ukraine’s president says Kremlin checking Europe’s capacity to protect its skies following new drone sightings
Vladimir Putin will expand his war in Ukraine by attacking another European country, Volodymyr Zelenskyy has predicted, and accused Russia of recent drone incursions that he said were an attempt to test Nato’s defences.
Speaking in Kyiv after his meeting with Donald Trump at the UN in New York, the Ukrainian president said Russia was preparing for a bigger conflict. “Putin will not wait to finish his war in Ukraine. He will open up some other direction. Nobody knows where. He wants that,” he said.
Ukraine’s president said the Kremlin was deliberately checking Europe’s capacity to protect its skies, after drone sightings in Denmark, Poland and Romania and the violation of Estonian airspace by Russian fighter jets. More drones were spotted on Friday night above a Danish military base, and over a Norwegian base on Saturday.
But why? They can’t even do one front well, Russia sucks at war
I have a pet theory that Putin is attempting to get a big reaction from NATO, so that he can then internally use that as an excuse why the war in Ukraine did not end well, and why they had to ultimately concede points they earlier held they wouldn’t in the eventual peace negotiations.
Not winning against Ukraine would be shameful for him, especially after all the messaging done about Ukraine not even being a real country.
Not winning against the entirety of NATO, on the other hand, sounds reasonable and understandable. But just saying that isn’t very persuasive. He needs imagery of destroyed Russian equipment in another NATO country or something concrete like that, to show that NATO truly is involved and waging war against Russia. That’s would also justify the initial reasoning for this misguided excursion — NATO is indeed warring against us, it was all justified! See these images of dead Russians in the Baltic Sea! The flaming Russian jets! See the havoc the big bad NATO wreaks on us poor Russians! We stand no chance, we have to settle for peace, those bullies are too strong now, and they are evil in their ways! In order to survive, we must concede a bit, lest NATO comes and bombs you and your family in the night like the thugs they are! gesturing at the constant dramatized imagery of destroyed Russian equipment in some NATO region
I’m convinced the economy, despite currently running on the war, is finally slowly collapsing to the point of it being visible to the peasants, perhaps showing inconvenient signs of that with the gas shortages across Russia, whatever else they are trying to keep under wraps. I think it’s starting to get embarrassing unless something changes and they can play victim to some bigger baddie yet again terrorizing good pious Russians. Maybe they have determined they can’t keep the effects contained no longer, and the seams will start to burst soon, so they need something that justifies the peace negotiations and conceding some of their strict conditions for the peace. Otherwise the people might just start seeing how fucked they are and rise up.
Nice take, I also subscribe to the theory that the Russian narrative is a lot more important than land gains. To be able to sell an “Underdog but growing empire despite evil holding us back” narrative would definitely be useful and a good exit strategy.
Not saying this is why… but in theory if he can go through another country to do an end around on Ukraine, he can trade that other country to keep Ukraine. Or even if nato needs to defend itself, it might not spend as much on defending Ukraine. Just guesses though. And they still seem like bad reasons.
He’s grabbing as much as he can for leverage, so he can trade back part of it for peace, but not all of it. Thus he still grows his empire despite having an army at its breaking point.
This doesn’t make much sense to me.
He’s really demonstrated Russia’s lack of capability to the world.
If a bull steals three kid’s lunches, you dont force him to give back 2 but keep the third.
Because if they say so people will get scared and not protest their tax money being gifted to the military industry.
Because they’re hoping to pull other “axis” countries into the fold. There’s a wider conflict on the horizon, and Russia has its side it is looking to pull in to assist them. Large scale maybe even world war looms around the corner.
Well, it’s obvious why Zelensky would say something like that. I don’t blame him, they’re at war after all. What’s less obvious is why Russia might be up to something like that. I don’t see any good reason.
Then again, I didn’t see a good reason to attack Ukraine. I distintively remember that before the invasion, there were these reports of 180k Russian troops amassing at the border and I was damn sure, that Putin won’t attack, 'cause…you can’t conquer Ukraine with only 180k soldiers. But here we are ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
So, who knows what that madman is doing for what reason.
Integrating Ukraine into Russia has been a core geopolitical goal of Putin and the Russian government for a very long time now. It’s not new, and while it might not make sense to us, it makes a lot of sense to them. And Ukraine seemed, at the time, like an easy target. They’d already stolen Crimea from them back in 2014 with nary a peep from the world, and Ukraine had basically no real defence agreements to call upon. While Putins plan for a three day war was laughable in hindsight, its easy to see why it was believable at the time.
OTOH, there are very few other European targets that aren’t already NATO members. He’s not going after Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Finland or Poland, because hitting any of them triggers a full scale war with NATO, and all of them have significant combined NATO forces already present. Any other targets are too far to realistically maintain supply lines. So I really don’t see what options there actually are for expanding the war.
We do know that Russia is trying to prepare, economically, for an increased scale of hostilities by 2030, but unless he can successfully jam up NATO in some big way that basically assures mutual defense is out the window I just don’t see what their options are.
You do know that Russia is going to increase hostilities by 2030 . From your crystal ball, I suppose. Still, no good reason for the opening claim which does not make sense at all. Just downvotes from the usual brigandists.
This is not reason, it’s bullshit.
Exactly.