Russia: My Response to Russophobia Made War Inevitable

My comments at 7:43 AM and following on Russophobia Made War Inevitable: 

@permavegan: Russophobia or Russian Paranoia? Maybe 50% of both made this SMO happen. But that doesn't mean the SMO was inevitable.

@vgstb: The SMO has nothing to do with Russophobia and the US (Victoria Nuland's pet project) made the SMO fully unavoidable.

Remember the memo of Ambassador Burns on the brightest of red lines (Nyet means Nyet).

@permavegan: @vgstb Good argument. In my opinion, Russia should have better used the UNSC and ICJ to defend its red lines before it started the SMO. But absent this, if Trump had won in 2020, would the SMO still have been inevitable? Maybe after December 2021 it was inevitable, but that was not until Biden made it so. Biden had a choice, and so did Putin. Each side miscalculated. Now we have a very complicated international legal problem to solve.

@vgstb: @permavegan It's undeniable that the Russian governments (after the disintegration of the USSR) made enormous mistakes, all fueled by the naive, wishful thinking, striving towards a truthful cooperation with the US.

@permavegan: @vgstb I would like to think it's never a mistake to strive for truthful cooperation between UN member states, especially UNSC P5 members, but the issues are complex and there are many competing interests involved. I don't think the world can afford to give up on the basic decency of either America or Russia, despite mutual miscalculations.

@vgstb: @permavegan I politely disagree, by 2007 Putin was fully aware that the US was leading him on (see his angry speech at the 2007 Munich security conference). Nevertheless he refused to pivot towards China, which already then showed significant potential to become a top 3 contender in the global economic space.

@permavegan: ​ @vgstb Just to follow-up here in light of recent events (as of 10 January 2026), I continue to have faith that it's never a mistake to strive for truthful cooperation between UNSC P5 members, but I also have to admit that it's reasonable to politely disagree, particularly when one or more UNSC P5 members repeatedly act in bad faith. Then I suppose the pursuit of truthful cooperation could be seen as a liability. Still, I trust that deeply interconnected philosophical questions are raised in American, British, Chinese, French and Russian thought by a P5 realpolitik that is too heavily based on adversarial subterfuge.