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Comment by analognoise | Hacker News Reader

Why would they demonize a place that throws doctors out of windows, poisons political opponents, kills journalists, and has a horrible reputation for LGBT rights?

Weird, right? /s

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Well Saudi Arabia is hundred times worse than all we have in Russia on every point you mentioned. But guess who get all the sanctions?

Most of the current sanctions against Russia were a direct response to Russia's paramilitary invasion of a peaceful neighbor and theft of a large portion of their country.

If Saudi Arabia were to commit a comparable offense, I assure you they'd face a comparable response, or worse (remember what happened to Saddam Hussein).

You don't consider the situation in Yemen comparable?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saudi_Arabian-led_intervention...

What Saudi Arabia has done in Yemen is a war crime in my opinion. But it's also part of an ongoing proxy war against Iran, whose government has made it clear that the goal is to destabilize the Saudi regime. So no, not comparable to Russia's ongoing attempt to reassemble its lost Soviet empire by destabilizing and invading neighbors who pose no threat to it.

Go read that wikipedia article you posted. It links to a good explanation of the Iran-Arab proxy conflict.

Crimea is also part of an ongoing proxy conflict between NATO and Russia, where NATO seeks to encircle the latter. The wars with Ukraine and Georgia were about maintaining buffer states (And to serve as a warning to the rest), rather than reassembling an empire.

Or at least, the facts can line up with this interpretation.

Maintaining a buffer is exactly why the Soviets annexed half of Europe after WWII, and spent the next half century brutally oppressing the populations therein. That's the whole point. But regardless, this is such a silly semantic quibble. Who cares why Russia wants to reassemble its empire? The international community is understandably alarmed by Russia's actions, and naturally care little about Putin's justifications.

> Crimea is also part of an ongoing proxy conflict between NATO and Russia, where NATO seeks to encircle the latter.

Fuck, this again? Go ahead and connect the dots for me. Explain what specific actions on the part of NATO, or the countries that have requested membership in NATO, were responsible for Russia suddenly invading a neighbor country that posed no threat to it, forcibly annexing a large part of it, and maintaining a ruinous and deadly guerilla conflict in much of the rest.

Let me reverse that question.

What specific actions of NATO lead you to think that its ambitions for Russia in the 2010s differ from its ambitions for the USSR in the 1970s and 1980s?

What has changed since the Cold War, in those ambitions? What specific actions has NATO taken that make it clear that those ambitions have changed? What reassurance is Russia expected to see that encirclement, containment, and isolation is not the goal of the West? I can't see a single bloody one.

We're going down the exact same road again, the only difference is that the front line is now 300 miles further east. Which is very comforting for Czechs, and Hungarians but unfortunately, far less so for Ukranians.

(Oh, and to answer your question, I think 'US Army bases in Poland' is a pretty good, solid example of why Russia feels threatened. Had the War in Donbas not happened, as likely as not, we'd have been seeing US Army bases in Crimea today. It's a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy, though. I advise that the best way to win for the buffer states is to either adopt neutrality, or, barring that, to not antagonize the side that's being backed into a corner.)

You're asking for proof of a negative? Proof that NATO isn't nefariously plotting Russia's demise? And "encirclement"? Really? The borders with NATO countries comprise like five percent of Russia's total border length. If NATO is trying to encircle Russia, they're doing a really shitty job.

Honestly, I'm not interested in engaging with this prove-a-negative nonsense. In my humble opinion, invading a neighbor and annexing part of it can't be justified short of a clear, present, and profound security risk. NATO, a voluntary, chronically underfunded defensive organization almost completely subservient to the political gyrations of the US, the leader of which is now actively trying to destroy it, is not that risk, and I don't believe that anybody honestly thinks it is.

Putin will gladly use any action on the part of European countries to justify more invasions. Like the way Sergey Lavrov threatened "military technical measures" in the Baltic region if Sweden joined NATO. Remember that? The Baltic states are lined up like dominos, possibly Belarus as well, where I've heard rumors that Russia is already sending troops. As Trump says when he has no clue what he's talking about, "We'll see what happens".

Soviet Union and Russia have always been incredibly paranoid about the vulnerability of the populated interior.

I believe NATO has the capability to bomb Moscow from Latvia in minutes.

I don't think Russia rates its vulnerability by border ratio vs total NATO aligned country border ratio. They look at how fast NATO could wreck Moscow.

Nope.

Saudis chopped WSJ journalist Hashoggi into parts! literally!

Also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State-sponsored_terrorism#Saud...

Yes, and I believe sanctions would be an appropriate response for that atrocity, as they should be for any state-sponsored murders of journalists or opposition politicians.

Good thing SA did not invade Yemen, had nothing to do with Khashoggi "suffering a paper cut" and absolutely nothing to do with 9/11 neither

Yes, thanks, we know. The Saudi Arabian regime is shamelessly and violently fascist, and corrupt at every level. What the fuck does that have to do with Russia's invasion of Ukraine and theft of the Crimean peninsula, and the commensurate response by the international community?

You stated:

> If Saudi Arabia were to commit a comparable offense, I assure you they'd face a comparable response

Offenses were cited to you. Where is the "commensurate response by the international community" to these offenses?

Read my comment again. I said that if SA were to do what Russia did -- invade a peaceful neighbor with no provocation and steal a portion of their country -- then I'm confident that sanctions would be levied against them. Pretty simple proposition, really.

So you don't think the Yemen situation is worse than Crimea (which is a complicated issue in itself?). Or even SA financing the expansion of Wahhabism?

I think SA gets too little sanctions for what they do. Too little.

And by the way, I'm totally in favour of Russia sanctions. I'm not questioning any of that.

What's complicated about Crimea?

Crimea is historically(last 250 years) Russian territory with Russian population which always leaned towards Russia.

During reclaim there were not any resistance from the local population. It says a lot.

Crimea was Ukrainian for last 20 years and before that it was Soviet for 70 years.

And you're wrong about resistance as well.

I agree. SA is a hugely destructive influence across the Middle East in lot of ways. For whatever reason, the strategic interests of SA and the US align just enough to keep them out of trouble. But if SA were to emulate Putin's foreign policy and annex, say, Kuwait, I promise their luck would run out fast. Funny, I seems to remember something sort of similar happening not too long ago...

You're missing the point.

Aren’t most of the sanctions related to the annexation of Crimea? Also, SA is an ally who allows a significant US military presence on its soil, in an area of strategic importance to global energy supply. Russia on the other hand still maintains an adversarial posture toward much of the Western world.

Yes, you can spawn freakazoo outfits who ram airplanes into skyscrapers, for as long as you have a US airbase.

I had a shock beyond believe seeing Bush pretty much saying "let Saudis go!," and jumping out of his skin trying to shield them, and then starting a war on Saddam — SA's biggest enemy at the time.

But lets keep the conversation on topic.

Saudi Arabia exports oil but apart from that is generally just completely irrelevant. It is a terrible, despotic regressive craphole, but it doesn't have context enough in the world to come up a lot.

To the dead reply to me - lol. Saudi Arabia's geopolitical power is entirely predicated on the US acting in its interest, which was a premise that only held when the US was dependent on oil imports.

Saudi Arabia's economy is non-existent and hyper-unproductive, and its military is farcical. While it has some modern hardware, it has F-15s being staffed by profoundly incompetent princlings (just another example of the broken nature of the society, where it is the absolute inverse of a meritocracy. Incompetence and nepotism from top to bottom).

Saudi Arabia is irrelevant, unless maybe you're some Indian guy looking for a job where you live in servitude as a slave in some foreign nation. When they do deplorable things it just doesn't get a lot of notice because it's entirely expected. They got to prance around with an imagined importance when they could squeeze the oil spigot, but now...eh. Those days are long gone.

Back in 2004, I did some consulting work for a manufacturer of Identification Friend-Foe (IFF) equipment. One of my colleagues had to go in and replace an IFF transponder on a Saudi military boat after its commander (a minor member of the royal family) decided, during the First Gulf War, to take it out of port despite knowing the IFF transponder was not working. A British RAF Tornado mistook the boat for Iraqi after it failed to auto-respond the pilot's IFF interrogation message. One HARM anti-radiation missile later, and anything near or behind the boat's radar dish looked like Swiss chesese, including the IFF transponder and pretty much everything in the mess hall. My colleague said that the mess hall looked like someone walked in with a shotgun and a ton of shells and just started blasting in all directions.

That commander had no business being in charge of a lemonade stand, much less a military vessel, and I'm told such nepotism is rampant in the Saudi military. People who have been isolated from all consequences of their actions for their whole lives tend to make terrible leaders.

Really? From which point of view? Arguably true for the Yemenites, but the fact is, no one really care about the Yemenites (sorry if there are Yemenites reading that but it's a fact). Saudi Arabia doesn't try to interfere with any western European country, neither militarily nor in their politics...

> Saudi Arabia doesn't try to interfere with any western European country, neither militarily nor in their politics...

O_O you are so wrong, it is one the biggest foreign lobbying power in America, and Europe.

But this is not the point of this conversation.

Not to mention actively trying to meddle with US elections.

And Brexit, and French and German elections, and shoot down Dutch airlines, etc.

You see, when anything go wrong in the world it's Russia's fault:) Especially if someone loses some elections - blame Russia 100% of the time.

Except... those things explicitly are Russia's fault. You can keep pretending Russia is a benevolent member of the international community all you want, but that simply does not make it true.

I’ve previously heard that claim about Brexit, but not about the other three.

Even then, despite being so Remain-y I moved to Berlin, I don’t see how Russia made enough of a difference to count as successfully interfering compared to all the decisions taken by Cameron up to the day of the referendum itself.

Well, the US is since WWII meddling with elections in other countries. And not only that but actively toppling foreign governments. The few millions some Russians may have spent on ads are a drop in the sea compared to the billions and billions that PACs and SuperPACs have spent.

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