What deeper integration would that have been? Geniunely curious, I don't see what could have worked once the oligarchs were minted. They only care about selling simple low-effort stuff, easily corrupted, like oil.
We talk a lot about economic integration but we rarely talk about cultural integration. imo part of what will keep us safe in the future is cultural integration. We have multiple generations of families established across many borders now. With enough of that, the appetite for world war in theory might be decreased. I don't know the answer here, but I do feel we don't think about cultural integration as a national security asset often, and it probably could be.
> We have multiple generations of families established across many borders now. With enough of that, the appetite for world war in theory might be decreased.
Like the multi-generational families some of their members living in Ukraine, some in Russia? Didn't seem to stop the war sadly.
It might be difficult to believe, but in the 1990s the people of Russia truly wanted to be in Europe (kind of like Ukrainians do now). That sentiment is now gone, and it's not (just) due to propaganda. The common people believe that Ukrainians will just be used to achieve some goal in the US vs. Russia power struggle and then abandoned.
Where do you got that info. Most Russians want to be part of Europe. Its not that Russian people dont have a way to think freely. They all watch youtube and other social media. And they all love to ski in Austria or to visit Italy for a holiday. I don't know one russian person who is not pro Europe. Even Putin himself is pro europe.
Boris Yeltsyn was proposing to Bill Clinton to admit Russia into NATO. This way Russian ambitions would be tamed and channeled into something more constructive.
Of course, we can't know what a Russian NATO membership could have lead to.
But a few red flags - Russia just barely held together at that time and had its own civil war. Also, there's the risk of Russia joining just to walk away with the keys to the kingdom at any later point. If the CFE inspections (1) were anything to go by, Russia didn't exactly play fair.
Your own link says: "The treaty proposed equal limits for the two "groups of states-parties", the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the Warsaw Pact" and later "most former non-USSR Warsaw Treaty members subsequently joined NATO, followed later by the Baltic states and the states of the former Yugoslavia".
"CFE-II took into account the different geopolitical situation of the post-Cold War era by setting national instead of bloc-based limits on conventional armed forces. NATO members refused however to ratify the treaty..." [0] What a surprise.
Having a veto on who gets in the alliance, gathering intelligence, who knows? Not me.
I just don't think Russia joining NATO is an apparent slam dunk success. Maybe it would have been great, we can never know for sure, but I can understand the suspicion.
Attack Ukraine? But on the other hand, joining NATO could have changed the course of history for the better, so such plans may never have come into motion. This is all counterfactual. There was deep mistrust on all sides and it didn't happen.
Not the parent commenter, but IIRC in that document Putin expresses an ideological belief that Ukraine is inherently a part of Russia and must be returned.
And how do you imagine it? Being in the same security alliance as Ukraine and having free trade agreement and having good relations with the West, he would attack the Ukraine to get a piece of land?
Nobody in Russia would've supported such an unthinkable war.
It took a coup in Kiev in 2014, burning people alive in Odessa, all the slogans 'Hang the Russians', dozens of streets named after Nazi collaborators, the war of the new Ukrainian government on the separatists in the East and eight years for people in Russia to start thinking that not all Ukrainians are brothers.
> Nobody in Russia would've supported such an unthinkable war.
Nobody would be against, in the same way there isn't anyone against this unthinkable war now. Why are you on HN. Maybe you should go and try to denazify some other website instead?
"Europe is partly to blame for the crisis in Ukraine although this is no excuse for Russian behavior towards the former Soviet republic, German Chancellor Angela Merkel's deputy said on Wednesday.
The tone struck by Vice Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel, head of the Social Democrats (SPD), contrasts with that of conservative Merkel who has pinned responsibility on Russia for exacerbating the crisis, which has soured ties between Russia and the West.
"Certainly, the European Union has also made mistakes, although this does not justify Russia's behavior," Gabriel told the German daily Rheinische Post.
"It was certainly not smart to create the impression in Ukraine that it had to decide between Russia and the EU," the Economy Minister added." [0]
Putin has pushing this lie that he tried to get closer to NATO and was rebuffed for a long time, but it's simply not true. His ideology has always been completely against being junior partner in a US led alliance.
For starters, pre-2014 Russians would be glad to have a visa waiver with the EU. But they never got that. Then 2014 and Crimea affair came and EU didn't have that lever to pull.
Things like student exchanges, etc, were also severily limited in scope. Russians only ever saw EU as tourists, not as neighbours. And tourists can sure swap one destination for the another. Russians knew that they live in Europe, but did not feel the neighbourly presense of the EU.
This is not accurate. In the USSR and after its collapse, Russians generally don't consider themselves European. I also think this aligns more or less with how the rest of the world sees Russia if you consider the standards of living and the freedoms citizens have in Russia (e.g., no freedom of speech; not being able to freely travel to most of the world). On top of that, don't forget that geographically, most of Russia is in Asia.
No more tariffs. No more visas. Vastly more economic cooperation between Russia and the European Union. That's the vision presented by Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin in an editorial contribution to the German daily Süddeutsche Zeitung on Thursday.
"We propose the creation of a harmonious economic community stretching from Lisbon to Vladivostok," Putin writes. "In the future, we could even consider a free trade zone or even more advanced forms of economic integration. The result would be a unified continental market with a capacity worth trillions of euros." [0]
Yeah, I believe visas issue is what actually broke the camel's back. Putin and the Russians felt humiliated when Ukrainians got visa free travel and they didn't. Humiliation is a very powerful emotion.
