It is brave and commendable of you to admit you were wrong. If more people had your fortitude, the world would be a better place. Leave your blog as it is, the last 2 posts are a lesson to all of us who are prone to error.
Maybe we in the West should have been paying better attention:
(Senator) Leahy’s Law, prohibited the arming and training of the Azov Battalion already then accused of war crimes against the Donbass (well, really just the most prominent group), but the Pentagon saw fit to kill the bill in 2017.
Since arm-chair peace activist Paul has retreated to his ivory castle and decided to sided with the most violent country internationally, in which everyday he benefits from America’s exploitation and death in the world, I want to share with you these videos, of people on the media frontline
🇪🇺🇺🇸 *UKRAINE WAR* 🇷🇺🇷🇺
_Want to understand the war? Subscribe and share for the best coverage of the Ukraine War._
I am terribly sorry to see you end this blog, which I only found out about. I had been googling your name for the past two weeks: you were easily my most memorable prof in undergrad, and so far the only prof from whom I’ve ever taken a course because it was taught by you (I still don’t do international security, but I still remember all you taught us). When speaking to friends and colleagues I find myself better-versed than any of them when speaking about this conflict, which because of what you taught me in that fourth-year class in fall 2006 I have followed closely since 2014. It was you who rang in my head when the South Ossetia War happened in 2008.
None of us could have predicted this catastrophically stupid move by Putin, whom I think almost all of us believed to be a hyper-rationalist, Realpolitik statesman with a broken moral compass, rather than an impulsive tinpot dictator he has proven to be with this invasion.
I honestly hope you will reconsider your decision to terminate the blog and instead continue to provide insight like this: it’s incredibly important for there to be nuanced discussion in an increasingly polarized world.
I think terminating this blog was a right decision, because after all it is nothing, but empty moralizing and Western self-reflection and has nothing to do with Russia, its motives and aspiartions. You are unable to undestand Russia, however you try.
“Their children will huddle in basements while ours will go to school. That’s how we will win this war”
Petro Poroshenko 2014 (a milder voice of Ukraine’s idea of ‘democracy’)
BTW: Here’s some food for thought: The Ukrainian site ‘stopfake’ reported:. Lies: Petro Poroshenko Promised that Children from Donbas would be Sitting in Cellars
Yet there is readily available video of him giving that exact speech in 2014.
So; stopfake is itself a web of lies. Hardly surprising but certainly worth remembering.
“Their children will huddle in basements while ours will go to school. That’s how we will win this war”
What exactly does that mean? Does it mean that Ukraine will shell the cities and the schools and homes and playgrounds of the Donbass while even were the Donbass to dare return fire, it will never reach Ukraine’s children who are far, far away?
Because that’s exactly what that means to me and certainly has been born out by the last 8 years of history. A slam dunk of a conclusion, one might even wager.
“What’s left of their children will still huddle in basements while ours will serve as human shields and if they try to flee, we’ll shoot them and blame the Russians for all of it. That’s how, with the help of our western media friends, we will win perhaps not this war but the next one for sure.”
If one applies the criteria being applied to Putin today, one would have to conclude that every US president beginning with Abraham Lincoln has been guilty of them.
And most certainly, the last two Ukrainian presidents have been guilty. Just do the math, or for simplicity’s sake, add up the Donbass civilian dead through January. Oh, I suppose one could still argue they all committed ritual suicide. There are those who would believe it still.
No Western whitewashing of post-Maidan Ukraine will ever erase it.
Since this is a Canadian blog, the analogy begging to be applied would be if in the 1960-70 period, Ottawa had decided to ‘solve’ the Quebec separatist problem by bombing Montreal for 8 years and persecuting/jailing any French speaker who refused to speak English in public.
Would someone be kind enough to explain to me why these three events shouldn’t fall neatly within the same Western devised Venn circle?
1) Serbian operation to contain separatist insurgents, followed by a regime-change war under the thin guise of an R2P operation?
2) Libyan operation to contain violent insurgents, followed by a regime-change war under the thin guise of an R2P operation?
3) Ukrainian operation to contain separatist insurgents, followed 8 years later by a regime-change operation, under by western definition and/or thin guise of an R2P operation?
Paul: I don’t get it. You spent years describing how the “west” got Russia wrong and how the west kept doing it, year after year, with blatant misinformation and agitation, and how they kept escalating it on all fronts and kept antagonizing Russia. You described how counter-productive this was, and you were afraid of a serious backlash.
And when the backlash came, you disappear? Seriously?
I suspect Paul may possibly be going through an existential crisis of values and identity and withdrawal a necessity. I certainly am, although I think I’ve accepted the conclusions the evidence invokes earlier than most and better prepared for all outcomes. (or so I’d hope in any case).
When one begins to suspect that the very values of the society you’ve been raised and nurtured in are more a ‘potemkin village’ than a bedrock of faith, it’s a very unpleasant feeling. Most will avoid such introspection at all costs.
Obviously, I can’t speak for Paul, I can just reflect from instinct, right or wrong.
This has to be one for the record books of communal insanity:
Zelensky, like Poroshenko NEVER pushed to implement Minsk II, the peaceful resolution to the Ukraine crisis, that was even unanimously incorporated into UNSC Res 2202, instead actually publicly announcing that Minsk II was unenforceable and he was categorically opposed to it.
But that doesn’t stop the EU from:
“Officials push Nobel Committee to change procedure for Zelensky
Eurocrats are trying to nominate Ukraine’s President for a Nobel Peace Prize”
Would I want to be associated with such people? NEVER in my life.
Why should one question Russia’s disavowment then?
What side was it again that you inferred you were on by abandoning this blog, professor?
Zelensky seems to be out to pass the buck, blaming Poroshenko for the war now, saying: ‘if not for the joining NATO inclusion into the constitution, we wouldn’t be here today.”
Ukrainians are a strange lot. The EU will enjoy their antics, I’m sure.
Is this what you’re afraid of professor…to be ostracized by the mainstream ‘community’ for having an inquiring, perhaps a bit suspicious mind? Or perhaps to be stripped naked and wrapped to a pole or into a stock in the square, or even a late night visit from one of Canada’s find, upstanding right sector members?
If anyone would have an incentive to do such a thing to the Mariupol Theater, hoping to invoke a NATO response, it would certainly be the fine fellows at Azov, would it not? They certainly wouldn’t be above such an act, would they not? Is it then not our duty to prefer facts over fiction wherever it may lead? Are we manufacturing consent here or brewing a fine kettle of fish to cook ourselves in now, with our media happily cheering for WWIII.
When does it stop, professor? Ivory towers are the worst place to be during a nuclear blast, or so I’ve heard.
“A university professor has been accused of spreading Russian propaganda about the war in Ukraine after tweeting a link to an article suggesting that the attack on a Mariupol theatre was a false flag operation.
Tim Hayward, professor of environmental political theory at the University of Edinburgh, shared the link to a piece questioning if the attack was “staged” and asked: “What do we know of the reality?”
One month on: no one like Paul Robinson on the Great Wide Internet. A huge loss.
History is about making sense of the world. What happened yesterday is history – it’s just harder to make sense of. Only those who never think are never wrong.
A competent military historian perspective is sorely needed. >300 telega readers are still hoping for one… pls?
Atavism and barbarity have rushed in to fill the void.
It’s a fight to the finish now.Those who have survived will in generations to come be writing treatises on the comparative blunders leading to WWI and WWIII, with WWII as a middleman of afterthought to both.
So, are Ukraine’s finest killing Donbass children out of spite?
This man says they are. I think you can judge for yourself whether he’s genuine or not. I leave it to you to find his videos, that is IF you care.
“Russian soldier from Dagestan who was deployed in Ukraine and seriously wounded, shared videos on social media. During one of his recent interviews, he promise to return and punish Ukrainian nationalists for the murder of dozens of innocent Ukrainian children whom he saw killed in one of the schools on the front lines.”
“We have all kinds of defects now, ranging from congenital heart disease to severe physical abnormalities, both in numbers you cannot imagine,” Alani told Al Jazeera at her office in the hospital, while showing countless photos of shocking birth defects.
Is DU not a bona fide chemical weapon? Should Ukraine be thankful the Russian army does not use it? They certainly have enough of it.
This.. from the time when The Independent was actually not afraid to engage in investigative journalism.
Robert Fisk: The Children of Fallujah – the hospital of horrors
“EuroMaidan and the subsequent fierce civil war made it clear. … We see the blood and war crimes, the bodies of women and children, an entire country sliding back into the 1940s—and the Western world, which we loved so much, assures us that none of this is happening. … it was a shock stronger than Kosovo. For me and for many thousands of middle-aged Russians, who came into the world with the American dream in our heads, the myth of the “civilized world” collapsed completely”.
BTW: For one who was born and lives in this ‘civilized world’ he speaks of, it was the moment when this myth finally collapsed for me too and exactly by the same sequence.
IRRUSSIANALITY 
A war is a truly sad event. I’m sorry that VVP has shown you wrong in such a violent way.
May Ukraine, Russia, and the world find a path to peace.
LikeLiked by 1 person
It is brave and commendable of you to admit you were wrong. If more people had your fortitude, the world would be a better place. Leave your blog as it is, the last 2 posts are a lesson to all of us who are prone to error.
LikeLike
Maybe we in the West should have been paying better attention:
(Senator) Leahy’s Law, prohibited the arming and training of the Azov Battalion already then accused of war crimes against the Donbass (well, really just the most prominent group), but the Pentagon saw fit to kill the bill in 2017.
So, ask yourself then ‘why?’
LikeLike
Since arm-chair peace activist Paul has retreated to his ivory castle and decided to sided with the most violent country internationally, in which everyday he benefits from America’s exploitation and death in the world, I want to share with you these videos, of people on the media frontline
🇪🇺🇺🇸 *UKRAINE WAR* 🇷🇺🇷🇺
_Want to understand the war? Subscribe and share for the best coverage of the Ukraine War._
*ALEXANDER MECOURIS:*
https://www.youtube.com/c/AlexanderMercourisReal/videos
*The Duran*
Unfree YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCdeMVChrumySxV9N1w0Au-w
*****FREE SPEECH PLATFORMS*****
TELEGRAM: https://t.me/thedurancom
GAB: https://gab.ai/TheDuran
MINDS: https://minds.com/theduran
PARLER: https://parler.com/profile/theduran/
MEWE: https://mewe.com/i/theduran
VK: https://vk.com/thedurancom
OK: https://ok.ru/group/60904083488959
*3rd YouTube site*
https://www.youtube.com/c/AlexChristoforou/videos
🇺🇦 I love Ukraine 🇺🇦
☮️ Peace Corps 1999 – 2002, Odessa Ukraine ☮️
LikeLike
I am terribly sorry to see you end this blog, which I only found out about. I had been googling your name for the past two weeks: you were easily my most memorable prof in undergrad, and so far the only prof from whom I’ve ever taken a course because it was taught by you (I still don’t do international security, but I still remember all you taught us). When speaking to friends and colleagues I find myself better-versed than any of them when speaking about this conflict, which because of what you taught me in that fourth-year class in fall 2006 I have followed closely since 2014. It was you who rang in my head when the South Ossetia War happened in 2008.
None of us could have predicted this catastrophically stupid move by Putin, whom I think almost all of us believed to be a hyper-rationalist, Realpolitik statesman with a broken moral compass, rather than an impulsive tinpot dictator he has proven to be with this invasion.
I honestly hope you will reconsider your decision to terminate the blog and instead continue to provide insight like this: it’s incredibly important for there to be nuanced discussion in an increasingly polarized world.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I think terminating this blog was a right decision, because after all it is nothing, but empty moralizing and Western self-reflection and has nothing to do with Russia, its motives and aspiartions. You are unable to undestand Russia, however you try.
LikeLike
“Their children will huddle in basements while ours will go to school. That’s how we will win this war”
Petro Poroshenko 2014 (a milder voice of Ukraine’s idea of ‘democracy’)
BTW: Here’s some food for thought: The Ukrainian site ‘stopfake’ reported:. Lies: Petro Poroshenko Promised that Children from Donbas would be Sitting in Cellars
Yet there is readily available video of him giving that exact speech in 2014.
So; stopfake is itself a web of lies. Hardly surprising but certainly worth remembering.
LikeLike
“Their children will huddle in basements while ours will go to school. That’s how we will win this war”
What exactly does that mean? Does it mean that Ukraine will shell the cities and the schools and homes and playgrounds of the Donbass while even were the Donbass to dare return fire, it will never reach Ukraine’s children who are far, far away?
Because that’s exactly what that means to me and certainly has been born out by the last 8 years of history. A slam dunk of a conclusion, one might even wager.
LikeLike
2022 Update to Poroshenko’s speech:
“What’s left of their children will still huddle in basements while ours will serve as human shields and if they try to flee, we’ll shoot them and blame the Russians for all of it. That’s how, with the help of our western media friends, we will win perhaps not this war but the next one for sure.”
LikeLike
So there’s no misunderstanding, you aren’t me.
LikeLike
Regarding heads of state and war crimes:
If one applies the criteria being applied to Putin today, one would have to conclude that every US president beginning with Abraham Lincoln has been guilty of them.
And most certainly, the last two Ukrainian presidents have been guilty. Just do the math, or for simplicity’s sake, add up the Donbass civilian dead through January. Oh, I suppose one could still argue they all committed ritual suicide. There are those who would believe it still.
No Western whitewashing of post-Maidan Ukraine will ever erase it.
Since this is a Canadian blog, the analogy begging to be applied would be if in the 1960-70 period, Ottawa had decided to ‘solve’ the Quebec separatist problem by bombing Montreal for 8 years and persecuting/jailing any French speaker who refused to speak English in public.
Think long and hard on that one.
LikeLike
Would someone be kind enough to explain to me why these three events shouldn’t fall neatly within the same Western devised Venn circle?
1) Serbian operation to contain separatist insurgents, followed by a regime-change war under the thin guise of an R2P operation?
2) Libyan operation to contain violent insurgents, followed by a regime-change war under the thin guise of an R2P operation?
3) Ukrainian operation to contain separatist insurgents, followed 8 years later by a regime-change operation, under by western definition and/or thin guise of an R2P operation?
No Scholz-befuddled moments please. Thank you.
LikeLike
Paul: I don’t get it. You spent years describing how the “west” got Russia wrong and how the west kept doing it, year after year, with blatant misinformation and agitation, and how they kept escalating it on all fronts and kept antagonizing Russia. You described how counter-productive this was, and you were afraid of a serious backlash.
And when the backlash came, you disappear? Seriously?
LikeLiked by 1 person
I suspect Paul may possibly be going through an existential crisis of values and identity and withdrawal a necessity. I certainly am, although I think I’ve accepted the conclusions the evidence invokes earlier than most and better prepared for all outcomes. (or so I’d hope in any case).
When one begins to suspect that the very values of the society you’ve been raised and nurtured in are more a ‘potemkin village’ than a bedrock of faith, it’s a very unpleasant feeling. Most will avoid such introspection at all costs.
Obviously, I can’t speak for Paul, I can just reflect from instinct, right or wrong.
LikeLiked by 1 person
This has to be one for the record books of communal insanity:
Zelensky, like Poroshenko NEVER pushed to implement Minsk II, the peaceful resolution to the Ukraine crisis, that was even unanimously incorporated into UNSC Res 2202, instead actually publicly announcing that Minsk II was unenforceable and he was categorically opposed to it.
But that doesn’t stop the EU from:
“Officials push Nobel Committee to change procedure for Zelensky
Eurocrats are trying to nominate Ukraine’s President for a Nobel Peace Prize”
Would I want to be associated with such people? NEVER in my life.
Why should one question Russia’s disavowment then?
What side was it again that you inferred you were on by abandoning this blog, professor?
LikeLike
Zelensky seems to be out to pass the buck, blaming Poroshenko for the war now, saying: ‘if not for the joining NATO inclusion into the constitution, we wouldn’t be here today.”
Ukrainians are a strange lot. The EU will enjoy their antics, I’m sure.
LikeLike
Is this what you’re afraid of professor…to be ostracized by the mainstream ‘community’ for having an inquiring, perhaps a bit suspicious mind? Or perhaps to be stripped naked and wrapped to a pole or into a stock in the square, or even a late night visit from one of Canada’s find, upstanding right sector members?
If anyone would have an incentive to do such a thing to the Mariupol Theater, hoping to invoke a NATO response, it would certainly be the fine fellows at Azov, would it not? They certainly wouldn’t be above such an act, would they not? Is it then not our duty to prefer facts over fiction wherever it may lead? Are we manufacturing consent here or brewing a fine kettle of fish to cook ourselves in now, with our media happily cheering for WWIII.
When does it stop, professor? Ivory towers are the worst place to be during a nuclear blast, or so I’ve heard.
“A university professor has been accused of spreading Russian propaganda about the war in Ukraine after tweeting a link to an article suggesting that the attack on a Mariupol theatre was a false flag operation.
Tim Hayward, professor of environmental political theory at the University of Edinburgh, shared the link to a piece questioning if the attack was “staged” and asked: “What do we know of the reality?”
LikeLike
Twitter indeed. The world is led by twits.
LikeLike
One month on: no one like Paul Robinson on the Great Wide Internet. A huge loss.
History is about making sense of the world. What happened yesterday is history – it’s just harder to make sense of. Only those who never think are never wrong.
A competent military historian perspective is sorely needed. >300 telega readers are still hoping for one… pls?
LikeLiked by 3 people
Intellect and reason have left the room.
Atavism and barbarity have rushed in to fill the void.
It’s a fight to the finish now.Those who have survived will in generations to come be writing treatises on the comparative blunders leading to WWI and WWIII, with WWII as a middleman of afterthought to both.
LikeLike
So, are Ukraine’s finest killing Donbass children out of spite?
This man says they are. I think you can judge for yourself whether he’s genuine or not. I leave it to you to find his videos, that is IF you care.
“Russian soldier from Dagestan who was deployed in Ukraine and seriously wounded, shared videos on social media. During one of his recent interviews, he promise to return and punish Ukrainian nationalists for the murder of dozens of innocent Ukrainian children whom he saw killed in one of the schools on the front lines.”
LikeLike
It seems now that ‘Ukraine’s finest’ are torturing and then executing Russian POWs and publishing the videos.
If the Russians react anything like America reacted in Fallujah, I dread the consequences.
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“We have all kinds of defects now, ranging from congenital heart disease to severe physical abnormalities, both in numbers you cannot imagine,” Alani told Al Jazeera at her office in the hospital, while showing countless photos of shocking birth defects.
Is DU not a bona fide chemical weapon? Should Ukraine be thankful the Russian army does not use it? They certainly have enough of it.
This.. from the time when The Independent was actually not afraid to engage in investigative journalism.
Robert Fisk: The Children of Fallujah – the hospital of horrors
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Thx!
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Dr. Robinson’s still writing – just not here. So it seems.
Russia at a turning point? (Canadian Dimension, 3 Apr. 2022)
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On Telegram: https://t.me/irrussian/118
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Thanks for the ref. Have just read it. An excellent article, much food for thought. Thank you and thank you Paul. Keep at it.
LikeLiked by 1 person
“EuroMaidan and the subsequent fierce civil war made it clear. … We see the blood and war crimes, the bodies of women and children, an entire country sliding back into the 1940s—and the Western world, which we loved so much, assures us that none of this is happening. … it was a shock stronger than Kosovo. For me and for many thousands of middle-aged Russians, who came into the world with the American dream in our heads, the myth of the “civilized world” collapsed completely”.
BTW: For one who was born and lives in this ‘civilized world’ he speaks of, it was the moment when this myth finally collapsed for me too and exactly by the same sequence.
LikeLiked by 1 person