Previously: Putin Effectively Declares “Total War” as West Holds Goofy “Peace Summit” Without Russia
Recent events are forcing Russia to go into Stalin mode.
The US coming in and saying they are going to fund the war for 10 years was really a strange move. Even if they were planning to do that, putting this out there in contract form was very strange, as it can only be designed to trigger Russia into drastic escalation.
I keep hearing people like John Mearsheimer say “the US understands that World War III would be bad for everyone.”
But where is the evidence for that theory? The evidence seems to be the opposite.
RT:
Russia will assess the damage done to its economy by Western sanctions and demand restitution at some point down the road, former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has said.
Commenting on the latest batch of restrictions imposed on Moscow by Washington last week, the official, who currently serves as deputy chair of the Russian Security Council, claimed that the West is waging a “war without rules” on Russia.
The US has sanctioned more than 4,000 Russian individuals and companies since February 2022, when the Ukraine conflict began. The EU, UK, Canada, Japan, and several other nations have also imposed similar restrictions on Russia.
On Monday, Medvedev said that Moscow was going to “be evaluating [the damage done] so as to be able to demand [compensation from] the countries that have imposed sanctions on Russia.”
He suggested that “one could start systematizing and evaluating the damage done to countries [that have] suffered from sanctions adopted in circumvention of the UN Security Council.” The former Russian head of state added that quite a significant number of nations would be subject to potential claims and that a “register of losses inflicted by crimes of the colonial epoch and neo-colonialism” would likely be necessary to get this process off the ground.
There are people in the Russian government who have wanted to up the ante since the beginning. There were maximalists who wanted to shift into a war economy immediately after the Maidan and then invade the Ukraine with overwhelming force as soon as possible, which would have been 2019ish. But so-called “cooler heads” kept prevailing, and you eventually ended up with the symbolic invasion of 2022.
But now, it’s become impossible for anyone in Moscow to claim that this war is anything other than existential, and everyone has to accept that the US appears to be trying to turn it into a much bigger and longer war.
The US got what they wanted.
The ante has been upped.
No one really knows why they wanted that.
But here we are.