There has been some talk about Finlandization (something I discussed in a recent post) as a route to a peaceful resolution to the crisis that Putin has created over Ukraine.
Whatever the rights and wrongs of such a solution, it won’t work. Whatever he may say to the contrary, Putin knows that there is no realistic chance that Ukraine will join NATO, or even the EU, any time soon, or even not so soon. His tantrum has nothing to with the prospect that Ukraine will join either. What worries Putin is the danger that a successful Ukrainian democracy would pose, not to Russia, but to his regime.
In the earlier post, I concluded:
[The] Finlandization of Ukraine would only be the first step in an infinitely more sinister rearrangement of what remained of its independence and its democracy, leaving it, probably, as a bigger, more valuable Belarus, free for Russia to use as it wished.
Meanwhile, some news from Belarus (via the New York Times):
Russia’s large-scale military deployment in Belarus, which the United States has long warned could be used as a pretext to build an invasion force aimed at Ukraine, will be extended beyond Sunday, when joint exercises had been scheduled to conclude, Belarus’s defense minister announced.
After repeated assurances from Russia and Belarus that the drills would end this weekend as planned, the Belarusian defense minister said on Sunday that the two countries’ militaries would continue to “test” their capabilities because of what they claimed were heightened tensions in eastern Ukraine.
The apparent extension of the exercises — which NATO has said involve 30,000 Russian troops, Moscow’s largest deployment on Belarus territory since the end of the Cold War — put further pressure on Ukraine, which shares a roughly 665-mile border with Belarus that is largely unguarded…