As western politicians and the social media continue to rattle their ideological sabers at Russia and ignore reality, there's a far worse danger lurking ahead.
The last time Russia saw foreign armies massing on its borders, Europe supplying arms to Russian hating nationalists and found herself blockaded, she lost an estimated 20 million dead and a country left in ruins.
Given NATO's appalling record of recent aggression elsewhere and as history starts to repeat itself, is Russia currently paranoid or apprehensive for a reason?
Yet what did President Putin do to bring such venom and hatred on Russia? By removing Russia from the power of the parasitical western banks, cracking down on the oligarchs who flourished under Yeltsin, re-building the armed forces and banning the cultural-revolution spreading across the west (NATO) from reaching Russia?
Western politicians and the UN refused to heed reality, preferring instead to concentrate on their liberal idealism as they cheered an EU commissioner who told them he was in touch with alien leaders from other planets (Jean Claude Junker, 2016) and a 16-year-old autistic climate change activist who had "special eyes' that could see carbon rising from a dying planet (Greta Thunberg, 2019)!
"If we don't stop Putin in Ukraine we are going to see others under threat — the Baltics, Poland, Moldova, and it could end up in a conflict with Nato. We do not want to go there. That is why it is so important we make the sacrifices now." -- Britain's Defence Secretary Lizz Truss.
I'm sure Ms. Truss is aware of the possible danger ahead, but not to the west itself and remains ignorant of the causes.
The surprise factor in all this is why it took President Putin so long to respond to NATO and western political interference in a supposedly neutral and independent Ukraine. One assumes that despite years of appeasement and diplomatic dialogue with "colleagues' and "partners' and after years of banging his head against a brick wall his patience finally ran out.
Is Mr. Putin putting his nuclear forces on high alert a distraction? Is he bluffing?
Unlike his predecessor, Mr. Putin is unlikely to surrender Russia again to liberal ideologies and Wall Street capitalists. Boxed into a corner, surrounded by western armies and blockaded with sanctions, the little red buttons may seem the only viable alternative to a humiliating defeat and becoming another economically plundered satellite of the west, as happened to those countries who recently suffered the same fate in the Middle East.
An entirely possible scenario is that Russia will itself end the war through negotiations, yet not before destroying the limited capabilities of the Ukrainian army and causing severe damage to its infrastructure — electricity, water, food supply chain … Leaving an already economically declining west to pay for re-building, whilst sending a very clear message to NATO and those countries allowing it to happen to keep away from Russian borders. Which incidentally, is what all this was about in the first place. The alternative scenario is frightening.
In conclusion, the Russian response will have shocked both NATO and western politicians and as any bullies they will now retire to lick their wounded pride and stick their tongues out, as will the indoctrinated denizens of western social media with the three-second attention span of a goldfish! Ukraine soon forgotten as the next climate extinction scare emerges, or iPhone announces its new upgrade.
As for Ukraine, in time hopefully its basket case economy will improve as chunks of its GDP now spent on housing foreign armies and buying expensive US military equipment is re-cycled back into improving its economy. The present nationalist militias will fade away, NATO will re-consider its eastward expansion and Ukraine itself no longer the playground for NATO and the European Union, despite its present difficulties, will again prosper.