It’s been two months since the Russian and Ukraine war started.
On Feb. 24th, Russia invaded Ukraine.
“For Russia to invade Ukraine, is like a child attacking it’s mother,” said Ferris State University Associate Professor of History Tracy Busch. “I thought that Putin’s plan was to try to peel off Donetsk and Luhansk, those two areas that want to be independent, although a lot of that is just Russians meddling in that area.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin sent his troops into Ukraine for a ‘special military operation’. Ukrainian forces started defending their land as bombings from the Russians began.
“Biden said, ‘Oh no, they’re going to invade’ because people would think ‘Oh, Russia wouldn’t do something so stupid’,” said Busch. “For Russia to invade Ukraine after everything it had done to prepare itself after the Crimean crisis, I think it just shows how isolated and unhinged Putin is that he would try to do something like this.”
From the beginning, Russia’s motivations for invasion have been unclear.
“The Russians have failed miserably to accomplish what we think were their goals of quickly taking over the capital and overthrowing the government,” said former NATO Official and U.S. Diplomat Jack Segal. “Now the areas that they were able to secure in northern Ukraine along the border with Belarus and the over on the other side on Russia itself, they’ve been pushed out of those areas.”
During the war, President Joe Biden issued several sanctions against Russia.
“We have not gone across the board and applied sanctions everywhere because we are taking into consideration what affect these will have on American companies,” said Segal.
The U.S. has also offered military resources to Ukraine.
“The level of violence escalates step by step gradually, and that’s what we’re in the middle of right now,” said Segal. “When we switched from defensive weapons to offensive weapons, that was an escalation step.”
Segal says the U.S. and NATO have to be careful with these escalation steps.
“If the United States is in a war with Russia and Putin, many people know, has indirectly threatened to use nuclear weapons in Ukraine,” said Segal. “Then we would have to decide what do we do about that. It’s still in Ukraine, it’s not a NATO country, it’s a dangerous situation, extremely dangerous situation.”
Segal said there was a chance for Putin to attack with the latest meeting between U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, who arrived in Ukraine on Sunday by train.
“It might allow Poland to say: that train was a Polish train and therefore you’ve attacked us and we want to invoke the NATO Article 5 and ask that NATO come to our defense,” he said.
Segal believes Putin may be holding back, even though Russia has 20 times more military men than Ukraine.
“The forces they’re using in Ukraine are not capable of conducting a urban war. They want to fight out in the open,” he said. “I don’t think he’s confident now that his army can do what he will need them to do.”
And the future of this war…depends on Putin’s actions.
“We have to be very cognizant of that and aware of what the danger is of the man we’re dealing with,” Segal said.
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