Scott Ritter asks a question that any halfway-decent military analyst could answer:
Why did it take so long for Moscow to wake up to the need to bring the Donbass into the fold of the Russian nation?
This is the eternal question, one that Russia today struggles to find an adequate answer for.
Russia’s path of redemption ends in Donbass. Here, the sins, errors, and evil which combined to create the current Russian-Ukrainian conflict are manifest. Questions have been asked to which there may be no adequate answer. Today, the situation on the ground increasingly points to a Russian victory over both Ukraine and its supporters in the collective West. But this victory has come at a huge physical and psychological cost. While the dead may be buried and honored, the living will always have to struggle to come to grips over the sacrifices that have been made in support of the cause they were fighting for.
And, in the end, if they believe that the cause was a just one – and it is my firm position that they do, in fact, believe this to be the case – then the answer to the question as to why it took Russia so long to intervene on behalf of Donbass will hang there, unanswerable, if for no other reason than that the pain any honest answer will generate may be too much to bear for those who had been fighting for the liberation of Donbass these past ten years.
It’s a dumb question with an obvious answer. The Russians took so long to intervene because they were afraid to confront the full might of Clown World, both militarily in the form of NATO and economically, on their own. That’s why they’ve pursued such a cautious military strategy and steered well clear of declaring total war on the USA and NATO, while simultaneously securing their economic and military alliances with China and the rest of the BRICSIA countries.
The fact that Russia is now winning so comprehensively on the economic, military, and diplomacy fronts is testimony to the wisdom of the Russian approach, even though it was very hard on the people of the Donbass. And they have the benefit of knowing that their sacrifice was not in vain.