by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
I’m definitely not an expert, but here’s my novice hot take on what’s going on at the moment between Russia and Ukraine. If all of this is just a big flex on the part of Putin in hopes of getting “respect” from the West, then he sure is expending a huge amount of money to do so. Or, put another way, there comes a point when you just can’t have a massive portion of your military forward deployed, then pull back, without looking like a fool. The world community thinks you’re going to do something, so you might feel obliged to live up to their expectations.
It doesn’t make any sense to me that Putin would go through all this trouble just to turn around and say, “psych!” He’s up to something, something big. And the questions now are when and how big? Given what I understand about the issue of mud around Ukraine impleading any Russian advance, it seems as though sometime in February would be ideal.
At the moment, the sweet spot for any invasion is probably after the Winter Olympics, which end on February 20th. And, yet, I dunno. It seems as thought that might not be a consideration for Putin at this point. My current personal guess is any war between Russia and Ukraine might starts around February 15 or so.
I say that because a huge number of Russian forces are flooding into Belarus at the moment for “joint training exercises” that are supposed to take place between now and around the middle of February.
And, yet, there’s a big thing to consider — to date, I’ve been wrong all the time about what’s going on with Russia and Ukraine, so why would this be any different. So, it’s very possible that this really is just a big, foolish flex on Putin’s part and the spring mud will come and…nothing will have happened.
But I am keeping an eye on all of this. At the moment, the momentum is towards a major war between Russia and Ukraine. If that happens, it could collapse the entirety of the post-WW2 global liberal order to the point that we’ll see instability the likes of which we’ve not seen since the inter-war period of 1918 – 1939.
And to this how the United States is careening towards a “Fourth Turning” around 2025 and we could very well have something akin to a “Great Reset” with a Second American Civil War happening in conjunction with WW3.
