https://adamtooze.substack.com/p/chartbook-68-putins-challenge-to
Adam Tooze's notes on the Russo-Ukrainian situation. He notes Russia's ability to accumulate foreign exchange reserves, the incompetence of Ukraine's ruling class over the past decades and the unlikelyhood of Putin seeking external action for internal motives:
>It is sometimes suggested that Putin needs a war scare for domestic political purposes. The annexation of Crimea in 2014 earned him a huge popularity bump. That has dissipated. There is little evidence from Lavarda polling data to suggest that the Russian population would welcome a new war and particularly not one with Ukraine.
>It is true that since 2014 the gloss has come off Russia’s economy. Putin’s regime can no longer offer a good news story of an improving welfare bargain. In 2018 it raised the pension age, further undermining morale. As analysts at the Carnegie center have remarked, the Putin-era social contract - “you provide for us and leave our Soviet-style social handouts alone, and we’ll vote for you and take no interest in your stealing and bribe-taking” - has worn thin. In the autumn elections to the Russian parliament the legacy Communist party gained strength. But, again, that hardly provides a good reason for a sudden escalation to the current level of military tension.

He sees Russia's actions in 2008 and 2014 as reactive and interprets the present situation as a reaction to an anti-Russian turn by Zelensky since 2021.

>>46228
>Indeed a country cannot invade itself.
Invasion is a military reality, if it's justified then it's a good invasion. If Somalia conducted a military campaign to reclaim Somaliland, that'd be an invasion, a disturbance of the local balance of power and a war between two countries. There's no point in claiming the Somaliland Armed Forces are actually just "rebels", that the Somaliland government is "self-proclaimed" or that Somalia can't invade itself. Good or bad, Somaliland and Taiwan are real countries, Western Sahara only exists beyond the Berm, the Crimea is Russian, the Golan Heights are Israeli, the Donbass is not Ukrainian and any military operation to change these realities is a disturbance of the local geopolitical balance. One day Taiwan will belong to the Chinese Communist Party and Westerners will cry about it, but until it happens, complaining that it rightfully belongs but some local insurgent group called the KMT occupies it is useless.

Taiwan negotiating its autonomy is useless in the long run because the CCP will still want its power to be as monolithic as possible and autonomy wouldn't last long. On the other hand the safest way to prolong its independence as long as possible is to become some sort of harmless isolationist backwater, but the Taiwanese might not love their independence enough to accept this.