Vladimir Putin has assembled “hundreds of Russian T-64 and T-62M tanks and thousands of military vehicles” only 18 kilometers from the Russian-Ukrainian border in the environs of Kamensk-Shakhtinsk of Rostov Oblast. All this can be seen on Google Earth photographs, Igor Eidman said on Facebook on December 9, 2018.
“At any moment,” the Russian sociologist and commentator for Deutsche Welle says, this force can “move into Ukraine.” But as this is happening, the West is continuing to deal with Moscow as if nothing out of the ordinary were occurring, talking about Nord Stream-2 pipeline, American sanctions, and recent contacts between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin at the G-20 meeting (facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=2152134674849500&id=100001589654713).
This is an old, old story as Winston Churchill might have put it, and in fact did. The same pattern occurred “before the beginning of Nazi military expansion in Europe. Everyone saw what was happening but gave the impression that nothing extraordinary was happening. They feared to look truth in the face,” Mr. Eidman points out.
Tragically, it appears exactly the same thing is happening again, the commentator suggests.
Paul Goble is a long-time specialist on ethnic and religious questions in Eurasia who has served in various capacities in the U.S. State Department, the Central Intelligence Agency and the International Broadcasting Bureau, as well as at the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. The article above is reprinted with permission from his blog called “Window on Eurasia” (http://windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/).