Ukraine’s president says Kremlin checking Europe’s capacity to protect its skies following new drone sightings
Vladimir Putin will expand his war in Ukraine by attacking another European country, Volodymyr Zelenskyy has predicted, and accused Russia of recent drone incursions that he said were an attempt to test Nato’s defences.
Speaking in Kyiv after his meeting with Donald Trump at the UN in New York, the Ukrainian president said Russia was preparing for a bigger conflict. “Putin will not wait to finish his war in Ukraine. He will open up some other direction. Nobody knows where. He wants that,” he said.
Ukraine’s president said the Kremlin was deliberately checking Europe’s capacity to protect its skies, after drone sightings in Denmark, Poland and Romania and the violation of Estonian airspace by Russian fighter jets. More drones were spotted on Friday night above a Danish military base, and over a Norwegian base on Saturday.
Well, it’s obvious why Zelensky would say something like that. I don’t blame him, they’re at war after all. What’s less obvious is why Russia might be up to something like that. I don’t see any good reason.
Then again, I didn’t see a good reason to attack Ukraine. I distintively remember that before the invasion, there were these reports of 180k Russian troops amassing at the border and I was damn sure, that Putin won’t attack, 'cause…you can’t conquer Ukraine with only 180k soldiers. But here we are ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
So, who knows what that madman is doing for what reason.
This is not reason, it’s bullshit.
Integrating Ukraine into Russia has been a core geopolitical goal of Putin and the Russian government for a very long time now. It’s not new, and while it might not make sense to us, it makes a lot of sense to them. And Ukraine seemed, at the time, like an easy target. They’d already stolen Crimea from them back in 2014 with nary a peep from the world, and Ukraine had basically no real defence agreements to call upon. While Putins plan for a three day war was laughable in hindsight, its easy to see why it was believable at the time.
OTOH, there are very few other European targets that aren’t already NATO members. He’s not going after Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Finland or Poland, because hitting any of them triggers a full scale war with NATO, and all of them have significant combined NATO forces already present. Any other targets are too far to realistically maintain supply lines. So I really don’t see what options there actually are for expanding the war.
We do know that Russia is trying to prepare, economically, for an increased scale of hostilities by 2030, but unless he can successfully jam up NATO in some big way that basically assures mutual defense is out the window I just don’t see what their options are.
You do know that Russia is going to increase hostilities by 2030 . From your crystal ball, I suppose. Still, no good reason for the opening claim which does not make sense at all. Just downvotes from the usual brigandists.