Ukraine War = Putin + Dresden, without NATO at all.

Both Russias and both Germanies.

                          

        The genesis of the current war in Ukraine dates from the end of the era of the two German states and of the predecessor of Russia, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR / CCCP). Less than a year after German reunification during a family trip to Berlin, I saw the withdrawal of some of the last battalions of the Red Army, trucks full of ethnic Mongolians. The process of removing vestiges of the old regime was still ongoing - the last few segments of the Berlin Wall and Stalinallee was renamed to Karl Marx Allee.

        The former Soviet embassy on Unter den Linden became the Russian embassy, with the statue of the bust of Lenin either hidden underneath a large wooden box or replaced by it.

         The most appropriate alteration to the Russian embassy is also the most recent. A T-72 1B tank, destroyed during the conflict in Ukraine was left outside the embassy shortly after the first anniversary of the invasion. Using the term "Special Military Operation" as means of pretending it is not an invasion is pathetically disingenuous. 

Putin, Dresden and the dissolution of the Soviet Block.

Ministry council of the German Democratic Republic;

Ministry of State Security;

District Administration

            The KGB headquarters in the German Democratic Republic (the laughable official title of East Germany) were in Dresden. They also coordinated many of the modus operandi of the Stasi (East German secret police), in which a certain Vladimir Putin also had an official position, in addition to being a KGB agent. 

         The Stasi conducted industrial-scale spying on its own population. Letters were steamed open along with hours a tape recordings of phone conversations, so that (almost) every single citizen used to have a file. Popular unrest had been widespread throughout most of 1989, culminating in travel restrictions ending on November 9, with dramatic scenes at the Berlin Wall. 

        Less than a month later in Dresden, the Stasi had its reckoning with its dark past when angry crowds stormed Stasi HQ. They were rummaging through files, yelling phrases such as "this belongs only to us, not to the secret police!" Furthermore, demonstrators headed the KGB HQ itself. Having phoned a Red Army tank unit, the answer he received was that nothing could be done without orders from Moscow. The exact words "Moscow is silent" have haunted KGB Agent / President of the Russian Federation ever since. 

       Having witnessed first hand part of the collapse of the Russian/ Soviet empire, his viewpoint of what he believes it should be now is as inaccurate as to what he believes was its true nature back then as well. The Warsaw Pact was only ever a vehicle for Soviet domination over satellite states. Use of tanks to repress public opposition to dictatorship most graphically in Budapest, Hungary in 1956 and Prague, Czechoslovakia in 1968 was demonstrative of its genuine nature. 

       It is a significantly sweet irony that the beginning of the end of the Warsaw Pact and its gradual dissolution along with that of the USSR began in Poland. The Solidarity trade union was the foundation of the democracy movement in Poland, with the general secretary Lech Wałęsa later becoming Poland's first elected president. The most prominent strike took place at the Gdańsk shipyard (also known as Danzig in German, having previously been a pre-war German city). 

    It was sublime poetic justice given how Joseph Stalin had mistreated Poland starting with the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact. This culminated in him ordering the Red Army to stop advancing at the end of 1944. This was in order to prevent the Warsaw Uprising which started because the Polish Home Army had been expecting liberation by the Red Army. Instead, there were massacres committed by the SS. Stalin's warped sense of morality in ordering this would mean that the forthcoming Soviet empire would be easier to control. The fact that Putin admires Stalin really says it all.

        Having started in Poland, the communist dictatorships of eastern Europe tumbled one after another. Headlines on a seemingly weekly basis were along the lines of "another one has gone." Even the builder of the Berlin Wall, Erich Honecker, could only stay temporarily in the Soviet Union. Honecker lived the remainder of his days in self-imposed exile in Chile. Reunification of East Germany, the base of the highlight of Putin's KGB career, with West Germany after which it became a full member of NATO, has been and still is the core of his motivation and personality. It is most suitably portrayed by the lyrics of Hit the Ground Running by Smog: "Bitterness is a lowest sin. A bitter man rots from within."

North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)

         Mentioning and constantly namechecking NATO as a cause of the war in Ukraine is an extreme misnomer. It is an alliance in the full sense of the word. Whereas, calling the former Warsaw Pact an alliance and the USSR itself a Union are absolutely a load of complete bollocks. Bad loser syndrome keeps the labels coming from Russian propaganda and disinformation, as well as from Putin himself. Statements such as these from Vladimir are a waste of hot air. 

         NATO is a genuine alliance in which the biggest economy and therefore military is that of the USA. It was not and still is not what Putin claims it to be. His bad loser syndrome has led to self-delusionary interpretations of the past as well as the present. The Cold War was not a matter of NATO defeating the Warsaw Pact in the slightest. The USSR, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland, and Romania defeated themselves through stagnant policies forced through by a motley collection of totalitarian governments led by delusional and frequently senile stick-in-the-muds. 

      Many of the nations assisting Ukraine through providing financial aid and shipping arms - ammunition as well hardware - are not engaging in a proxy-war. Putin likes to claim this as part of his attempt to engineer a persecution complex among Russian citizenry. Otherwise, the state is running off its feet to arrest anyone who speaks up, and putting on sham trials which make a mockery of the concept of law and order. 

          Ammunition and hardware being sent to Ukraine are provided just so they can defend themselves. They did not choose to start this war, and NATO did absolutely nothing to provoke it. Reassembly of the Russia under its former guise of the USSR is the sole reason for it having begun, whereas Ukraine's background with Russia is mainly to do with them trying to tolerate their oversized and angry neighbour. 

Ukraine = Russia 

            Ukraine's origins are similar to other parts of Europe - involvement and comings-together with Greeks, Romans, Slavs, Gothics, and so on. From the Middle Age/ Renaissance period onwards, Ukraine has been ruled and occupied by a variety of external powers. They include the former Soviet state Lithuania, Poland, and ethnic Cossacks. Ukraine was even a battleground of the Russo-Polish War of 1654-67 and the Great Northern War during which there were many battlegrounds beyond Ukraine itself. There were many belligerents including the Russian Empire and Habsburg Austria, two centuries before they fought each other during World War One. Ukrainian nationalism had already begun developing during the 19th century, having distant origins over a millennium beforehand. 

            Red October towards the end of World War One culminated in Ukraine being granted autonomy within Russia shortly before it declared independence from Russia as the Ukrainian People's Republic (UPR). From 1917 until 1921, the Ukrainian-Soviet War took place, which resulted in Ukraine becoming forced into the newly formed Soviet Union. Ukraine was one of the first states subsumed into the Soviet Union, and because of Stalin's machinations, it was not the last. The 3 Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia were also devoured by the USSR, on it's way to conquering half of Poland as part of the non-aggression pact arranged between Joachim von Ribbentrop and Vyacheslav Molotov on behalf of Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin. 

            As part of the Soviet Union, the Ukrainian language and culture both had official status, before the policy of Russification took place in the 1930s. Recent forced adoptions and obligatory schooling in Russian only in occupied parts of Ukraine confirm that Russia and Putin in particular is trying to emulate Stalin's attempts at cultural annihilation. 

            Once the Soviet Union had dissolved in 1991, Ukraine became formally independent. It had always been before the USSR era, however the nature of it during that era itself had long given credence to former US President Ronald Reagan's description of it as an Evil Empire. The farcical referendums in Crimea in 2014 then those in 2022 in Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia in which they "voted to join" Russia are the closest that any part of post-Soviet Ukraine has ever or will ever get to being part of the attempted reformation of the Soviet Union/ Russian empire. 

Reality flies in the face of the instigator of a rather personal War.

              The arrest warrant issued by the International Criminal Court justifies that the "Special Military Operation" should be renamed "Putin's War". Deliberately ignoring the dubious nature of the nation he was born in, he has transmogrified the Russian Federation into a more sinister nation, mainly because much of his modus operandi is based on his own version of  L'état, c'est moi. Finally, fewer on the international stage are unwittingly being played like a violin. He is counting on the many assisting Ukraine becoming weary enough so that he can play them in the same manner in which he was able to take advantage of environmentalists. Russia natural gas was exported to many countries which decided to curtail or stop their own natural resource industries entirely due to climate change evangelism. 

            He has long been engaged in misdeeds through being a global sociopath. Internationally and domestically, he is a a high-functioning psychopath who is attempting to engineer a persecution complex within Russian society. This is far more user-friendly to his agenda rather than locking his opponents up en masse as in the cold dark days of the USSR and the gulags.

             Ukraine, Russia, and also himself are not and never have been what he wishes them to be. He deludes himself first and foremost, and is still the same bitter man of Dresden in 1989 who is unable and/or unwilling to recognize what really happened, along with how and why it had taken place. The USSR was always morally void every single day of its existence from its foundation on December 30, 1922 until its dissolution on Christmas Day in 1991. Despite Gorbachev having introduced Perestroika and Glasnost, by the time he became General Secretary, it had already been too late to save the Soviet Union from itself for over a decade. 

          Attempts to portray NATO as a threat trying to impose imperial ambitions are completely groundless. However, this is used as justification by Vladimir Putin to invade Ukraine, as he is trying to reconstruct a Russia that has never existed. It probably never will, so the sooner that he realizes that his efforts are in vain, the better. Once he is wise enough to give up, the piles of Ukrainian and Russian corpses will stop growing.