https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18964/aggression-russia-ukraine
The West is not threatening Russia. Putin is threatening the West.
Putin might desperately try to reverse the situation, whatever the cost… Ukraine and its heroism have shocked the world. Ukraine’s army can win, but it will require the unwavering support of the West.
The men Putin recently began sending to the front may be reservists, but most have not held a weapon for a very long time and have no will to fight. Some who managed to send messages on Telegram channels say they know they are destined to be cannon fodder.
Putin has almost no allies and could lose what limited support he has. Chinese President Xi Jinping has in common with Putin a clear hostility to the West, but has reportedly not supplied Russia with weapons.
During a summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation in Samarkand, Uzbekistan last month, Xi reportedly told Putin that it was necessary to “instill stability and positive energy into a world in turmoil”. Whatever that meant, it was not a message of support for the war.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said on September 20 that “Russia should return the occupied lands to Ukraine” — not exactly the direction in which Putin would like to be going.
The Chinese Communist Party, which openly says it wants to dominate the world, apparently does not want a larger war just now. On September 24, Wang Yi, China’s foreign minister, was even more explicit…
The United States has, once again, like it or not, emerged as the only power capable of defeating an aggressive enemy of democracy; when it does, the status of the US and NATO are strengthened. It is, however, impossible to forget that America’s debacle in Afghanistan, the Biden administration’s frenzy to sign a lethal nuclear deal with Iran under almost any conditions, and the extreme weakness of Biden’s White House before Putin invaded Ukraine. These failures no doubt played into Putin’s decision to invade.
The Biden administration’s failure to arm Ukraine before the invasion and his comments that a “minor incursion” might be acceptable were catastrophic. The same failure to provide sufficient deterrence to Taiwan is unquestionably inviting Communist Chinese aggression.
The weakness of the Biden administration has created aggression everywhere — Russia, China, Iran, Turkey, North Korea; assaults on the dollar as the World’s reserve currency — even domestically.
Will the Biden administration ever learn from its mistakes? Or is its ultimate, unspoken goal actually to hand over the United States quietly to Russia, China and Iran?
September 21. Russian President Vladimir Putin, in a pre-recorded speech on Russian television, announces that Russia is being attacked by the Ukrainian government and the West. He defines Ukrainian territories occupied by the Russian army as “liberated zones”. He speaks of the referendums he staged in the regions of Donetsk, Lugansk, Zaporizhzhya and Kherson to try illegally to attach them to Russia. He says that he has decided on a “partial mobilization” to defend the Russian fatherland; adds that the West threatens Russia, and that any aggression against Russian territory will lead to a response by “all weapon systems available to us”.