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Comment by labrador | Hacker News Reader

I fully support the sovereignty of Ukraine, but I understand the Russian position from watching Prof. John Mearsheimer lectures, particularly this one:

Why is Ukraine the West's Fault?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JrMiSQAGOS4

John Mearsheimer

John Mearsheimer is an American political scientist and international relations scholar, who belongs to the realist school of thought. He is the R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago. He has been described as the most influential realist of his generation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Mearsheimer

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Thanks for sharing the video. I think the downvotes you got are unfair, as you're just linking to a talk from a, from the looks of it, very distinguished professor, so I upvoted you.

However, I would like to inform you that there's a good article that was written in response to Mearsheimer's talk: https://archive.is/6vdRf

That's a very interesting article that I encourage interested observers to read. I always like hearing from McFaul.

It includes a rebuttal by John J. Mearsheimer at the end:

It is not surprising that Michael McFaul and Stephen Sestanovich disagree with my account of what caused the Ukraine crisis. Both the policies they helped frame and execute while in the U.S. government and their responses to my article exemplify the liberal foreign policy consensus that helped cause the crisis in the first place...

You can't support the sovereignty of Ukraine while also supporting Russia's hegemony over Ukraine. Ukraine has the right to defend itself against Russian aggression and to seek alliances which can help to that end. The Russian autocracy views democracy as a threat. This is really no different than Germany, prior to WW2, seeking to dominate the countries around it. Some of those countries had ethnic Germans living there, and that was part of the justification used at that time, as it is by Putin today.

Russian security assurances aren't about trying to defend the country against an encroaching NATO, but rather trying to restore as much as possible the domination of Russia over former USSR states.

the first part of the video by that professor, explains that ukraine is a very divided country, it's made up by two different groups of people, ukrainian-speakers and russian-speakers. So you gotta take this into account when considering what "Ukraine" wants.

> Russian security assurances aren't about trying to defend the country against an encroaching NATO, but rather trying to restore as much as possible the domination of Russia over former USSR states.

well, the video explains better than I could in one comment why this is nonsense. It 100% is all about Russian preventing a rival military base in a border country.

> So you gotta take this into account when considering what "Ukraine" wants.

Ukraine is a sovereign state with internationally recognized borders.

Whether Russia thinks that Russia is “anywhere Russian is spoken” or “Anywhere Russians live” isn’t really relevant. “Ethnic Russians” living in Ukraine are Ukrainians, and no amount of unrest or even mistreatment of those citizens would be legal a cause for military action.

Either Russia recognizes the borders and sovereignty of Ukraine or it doesn’t. And to be honest, if Russia doesn’t which appears to be the case, then it should probably expect any smaller neighbors to join defense alliances.

Which works democratically, there's people in Ukraine who will support Russia and people who will support "the west"

The point is also that it's borders are badly drawn, there's an air of civil war to this conflict within Ukraine.

...then again, this is just rando interent opinion and I have no stakes in any of this.

> Which works democratically, there's people in Ukraine who will support Russia and people who will support "the west" The point is also that it's borders are badly drawn, there's an air of civil war to this conflict within Ukraine

Absolutely. And a civil war (which you can argue has been a thing for many years now) is a tragedy. But of course - and this is the whole point - no one crosses a sovereign nations borders to aid a side in a civil war, without a UN resolution to do so. And Russia not only actively supports separatists in eastern ukraine, it also more or less started this conflict AND annexed Crimea.

> It 100% is all about Russian preventing a rival military base in a border country.

Not so sure about that. To me this looks more like a diversion from internal political problems, "Wag the dog" style.

It's slightly more than that. Russia (Putin) can't stand a successful democracy on his border, especially one that used to be in the USSR. For some reason, he ignores Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. But Ukraine? It's a direct threat to Putin's power if it is successful as a real democracy, if it turns toward the west. Not just because it diminishes Russia's sphere of influence, but because it shows a path that Russians could take - a path that leaves Putin not at the top of "the vertical of power".

Just to add - Putin defers action on the other neighbors rather than ignores. He'd be happy to weaken them internally or via disinfo campaigns.

Bigger fish to fry at the moment in his USSR2.0 drive.

Mearsheimer doesn’t even recognize the sovereignty of Ukraine, it’s realist vs liberal schools of thought (with realism having been sidelined for decades in the west).

There’s a Foreign Affairs article version instead of the hour long random YouTube lecture version: https://www.mearsheimer.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/Why-t...

In a nutshell of what it’s like: One also hears the claim that Ukraine has the right to determine whom it wants to ally with and the Russians have no right to prevent Kiev from joining the West. This is a dangerous way for Ukraine to think about its foreign policy choices. The sad truth is that might often makes right when great-power politics are at play. Abstract rights such as self-determination are largely meaningless when powerful states get into brawls with weaker states. … Even if one rejects this analysis, however, and believes that Ukraine has the right to petition to join the EU and NATO, the fact remains that the United States and its European allies have the right to reject these requests.

Guy did argue for Ukraine to keep nukes in the 90s though, it’s just a much more mechanistic type of thinking.

That is true but there is a history. While it is a prominent Kremlin talking point, there is a civil conflict in Ukraine. The initial reason was that some wanted free trade agreements with the EU while others did not, because it would mean their industry breaking down due to more competitive European alternatives and investors buying their infrastructure.

But this is not an ethnic or cultural conflict. You have Russians and Ukrainians on both fronts of this conflict.

While most Ukrainians are nationalists, it is very true though that the Maidan factions is vastly more interested in democracy and the Anti-Maidan one, or whatever they call themselves now.

More info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_in_Donbas

Ukraine is complicated. You have to read up a lot. Probably begin with the orange revolution but even the time before and the relation to the EU and US is important.

To take sides here until the internal conflicts are resolved basically means supporting another proxy war. If it isn't already one because the factions are dependent on outside help to keep up the fight. The south-eastern Russia associated group certainly more so than Kiev and co.

The conflict also hits innocents, the MH17 to Malaysia with a lot of Dutch people got shot down by the Russian associated group.

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