Lol. I'm sorry. I hadn't even noticed the date on it PG.
There is only one superpower. That's a uni-polar world. And the US is using that power, leaning on hesitant European countries (not all of them) to lean on Russia in such a way that hurts themselves a bit. Otherwise, your still not looking at things from a Russian perspective, otherwise you'd see that they are responding to US Western actions.
From the Council on Foreign Relations.
According to the prevailing wisdom in the West, the Ukraine crisis can be blamed almost entirely on Russian aggression. Russian President Vladimir Putin, the argument goes, annexed Crimea out of a long-standing desire to resuscitate the Soviet empire, and he may eventually go after the rest of Ukraine, as well as other countries in eastern Europe. In this view, the ouster of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych in February 2014 merely provided a pretext for Putin’s decision to order Russian forces to seize part of Ukraine.
But this account is wrong: the United States and its European allies share most of the responsibility for the crisis. The taproot of the trouble is NATO enlargement, the central element of a larger strategy to move Ukraine out of Russia’s orbit and integrate it into the West. At the same time, the EU’s expansion eastward and the West’s backing of the pro-democracy movement in Ukraine -- beginning with the Orange Revolution in 2004 -- were critical elements, too. Since the mid-1990s, Russian leaders have adamantly opposed NATO enlargement, and in recent years, they have made it clear that they would not stand by while their strategically important neighbor turned into a Western bastion. For Putin, the illegal overthrow of Ukraine’s democratically elected and pro-Russian president -- which he rightly labeled a “coup” -- was the final straw. He responded by taking Crimea, a peninsula he feared would host a NATO naval base, and working to destabilize Ukraine until it abandoned its efforts to join the West.
No worries on the date, it's an interesting conversation to have nonetheless.
I agree, I probably do see things from a Western point of view, as I've lived my entire life in the Western World. That said, a couple things from your response stand out to me.
First, why do we look at things from the paradigm of "Russia vs the West?" Why does there necessarily have to be a conflict, when Russia has historical ties to the West to begin with?
What about the Ukrainian's rights to determine their own future? Shouldn't they be allowed to decide for themselves what they want, rather than simply being a pawn in a larger, meaningless game between the West and Russia?
I liken it to the Cuba situation back in the 60's... only that time it was the United States that was on the wrong side of history. The US should never have attempted to overthrow Castro and subvert the Cuban alliance with Russia - as it was up to the Cubans to decide their own future. It's the same today with Ukraine.
As for the US being the only superpower, it depends how you define "superpower," and regardless, the status quo doesn't change despite what happens in Ukraine. If you're using the traditional definition of a superpower - military, economic, and cultural power - then the only way Russia or the EU or China can challenge the US as a superpower would be to build up militarily, economically, and culturally to the level of the Americans. Russia and China don't have the money to build up militarily, and the EU, largely comprised of NATO members, doesn't see the need to.
On the economic front, China and the EU are on the right path, with the EU matching the US. The only way Russia can catch up is if they somehow integrate better with the world economy.... spats such as the one in Ukraine don't really help in that cause although it can quickly be reversed if the desire is there to do so. Isolation hurts Russia's economy.
So, again, I come back to the question - why has Russia changed course under Putin and decided to isolate itself from the West, rather than do what would be most beneficial economically and align itself with it? Or at least with the parts of Western culture it agrees with? Why are we operating under this foolish paradigm that the world has to be divided up as "the west" vs "Russia?"
The cold war is over. We should start acting like it.