The 1969 Sino-Soviet Border Conflicts As A Key Turning Point Of The Cold War

Recommendable! While the Russo-Ukrainian war still rages it does not hurt to remind of other not so distant post WW II military conflicts that could have become major wars.

"... The background for the crisis of 1969 between Beijing and Moscow is multifaceted and complicated. At the time, both China and the Soviet Union were largely discredited by their own political madness. For China, it was Mao’s bloody ongoing Cultural Revolution aimed at eradicating “China’s Khrushchevs” inside the Chinese Communist Party, and cleansing itself of Soviet “Revisionism,” a CCP attack-phrase meaning Moscow’s apostasy from orthodox Marxism–Leninism. For the Soviet Union, its leadership role inside the global communist movement was severely damaged by its brutal crackdown of the 1968 Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia and the subsequent enunciation of the Brezhnev Doctrine that said Eastern Bloc countries under the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact had only limited sovereignty, since Moscow had the right to invade to serve the larger purpose of protecting the world communist movement. Eastern Bloc countries such as Romania and Yugoslavia openly rebelled against the USSR’s such claim.

Mao engineered a fierce conflict with the Soviet Union along the border in the Soviet and Chinese Siberia region in early March 1969, which escalated to a series of intermittent skirmishes for more than half a year. Mao had three purposes in mind. First, he wanted to exploit the opportunity of the Soviet Union’s weakened position and tarnished reputation after the suppression of the Prague Spring, in order to regain China’s lost ideological reputation within the world communist movement. ..."

P.S. Leonid Brezhnev was born in the Ukraine.

The 1969 Sino-Soviet Border Conflicts As A Key Turning Point Of The Cold War | Hoover Institution The 1969 Sino-Soviet Border Conflicts As A Key Turning Point Of The Cold War In 1969, China and the Soviet Union, the two largest communist states, were engaged in a series of ferocious military conflicts that nearly brought them to a general and nuclear war.