Dangerous Myths - How the Crisis in Ukraine Explains Future Great Power Conflict - A Contemporary Battlefield Assessment

7 Dangerous Myths: How the Crisis in Ukraine Explains Future Great Power Conflict West.” 20 The motivation for this strategy is the decline of Russian influence during the decade immediately after the end of the Cold War; the ignoring of Russia on matters related to security among former Warsaw Pact members, including the eastward expansion of NATO; and the fear of an internal revolt or a further. [...] “Russians are still brought up on the idea of a single ancient Rus/Russian nation and still have great difficulty adjusting to the idea not just of a separate Ukrainian state but of the Ukrainians’ separate origin as a people.”31 The modern era of bilateral relations can be traced to the wake of the First World War. [...] 12 Dangerous Myths: How the Crisis in Ukraine Explains Future Great Power Conflict and Russian speakers looked down upon the Ukrainian and Belarusian languages as peasant dialects slated to disappear because Russian was the language of modernity.”35 After the breakup of the Soviet Union, Ukraine remained under the thumb of Moscow. [...] During the war in Afghanistan, according to Robert Cassidy, they had relied on the “deliberate destruction of villages, high altitude carpet bombing, napalm, fragmentation bombs, and the use of booby-trapped toys—[which] testify to the intent of the Soviet military’s efforts to terrorize the Afghan civilian population.”87 When the Soviet Union collapsed, Russian soldiers still lacked the basic tra. [...] It also allowed the Russian government to monitor sympathizers of the post-Maidan Ukrainian government as well as recruit foot soldiers for its proseparatist proxies.151 Second, the Kremlin put considerable spin on its portrayal of events in Ukraine: the 2013–14 Maidan Revolution, the takeover of Crimea, and the ongoing war in the East.