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Comment by junon | Hacker News Reader

Disappointed in Europe at the moment. Putin knew sanctions would be endlessly pushed off as "still trying to achieve diplomacy". He called the bluff.

Putin made it 100% clear he does not want Diplomacy. He wants a victory by conquest. He wants war. He doesn't care how far he has to take things to get it. Anyone who listened to his bizarre rant on Ukrainian "history" can see this.

What the hell is NATO waiting for? "Okay, but if you kill another thousand civilians, we're REALLY going to start thinking about those sanctions!" seems like the defacto mode of thinking right now.

2022 shaping up to be a disaster.

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> What the hell is NATO waiting for?

NATO is defensive pact, not peacekeepers, that's UN (United Nations, blue helmets) job.

Its very easy to make a sweeping statements about what you would do if you could, but how are you going to convince, say Spanish nation to suffer consequence of escalation of conflict for sake of Ukraine a country that was never on mind of Spanish people. That sounds like a political suicide for any Spanish politician.

With the advent of nuclear weapons, sanctions are all anyone can do anymore. Nuclear weapons mean the bad guys automatically win.

Everyone is absolutely terrified that any modern conflict would start with "let's keep this clean boys, no nukes" and end in "we can't lose the war so let's use our WoMD". Think right now, if Russia nuked Ukraine, what could the rest of the world do? Nothing. :/

NATO has settled military bases in all of Eastern Europe, despite promises from the early 90s that no country from the USSR-block would join NATO. By gradually pushing its pawns all around Russia, NATO (meaning the US) is as much responsible in that crap as Putin is. How many Russian bases in the Carribean, in Canada, and in the Pacific ?

NATO is a defensive treaty pact. Putin alone could end this. Russia is not being actively threatened. How much did Russia pay you to spread this garbage take?

Yes, setting army bases all around a country is defensive when it's the US, but it's an aggression if it is any other country. o)

When the country is a proven aggressor that held the region under occupation for 50 years, such a defense makes sense. Too bad they faltered.

Please outline a framework under which a country could be recognised as an aggressor. It could happen that by the same standard the US would be an aggressor who keeps the Hawaiian Kingdom under occupation since after its annexation in 1893: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overthrow_of_the_Hawaiian_King...

I don’t need a framework, I lived under the Soviet occupation of the Eastern Europe.

I visited Hawaii recently too - they didn’t seem occupied at all.

You don't need a framework because you know you'll be inconsistent. Very conveniently so.

> "they didn’t seem occupied at all"

all you're saying is that you like the outcome. The fact remains the same though - that territory was occupied, and then annexed, and the government was overthrown by the U.S. military forces.

> you like the outcome

Not me. The people living under that "occupation".

I lived under what's now called the "Soviet occupation", and it didn't feel occupied at all too.

NATO and US lecturing the planet about not being an "aggressor" is kind of funny.

Putin is pretty much emboldened in playing with the rule of law because the US showed him how to trample international laws for the past 20years (Kosovo, Irak, Libya, Syria). Yeah yeah I know, invading and bombing countries when it's Washington is ok...

NATO is not a defensive pact. It contains many provisions for offensive interventions, which were invoked more than Article 5. Beyond that, even Article 5 was never used in defense, only in offense - safe harbor is not an act of war, and the Afghan government did not provide material support to the attack on 9/11.

It's a military pact that contains both a self defense treaty that goes beyond self defense, as well as purely offensive considerations.

And still it’s Russia invading Ukraine, not NATO.

Of course. Two wrongs don't make a right. NATO invades innocent countries, so did Russia, doesn't make NATO any less threatening.

Funny enough, only Russia feels threatened by NATO, while all the other countries feel threatened by Russia.

That's 100% bullshit. The Libyan refugees - or worse, those that couldn't leave - whose country was bombed to barbarism and who lost everything feel even more threatened by NATO, which dealt devastation far beyond the worst fantasies from Putin's twisted mind.

Far more people died in the NATO invasion of Afghanistan than there even are soldiers and militia members in the whole of Ukraine.

Make no mistake, NATO is even more threatening and has dealt more devastation than Russia ever could. NATO has just as few qualms about intervention and far more power and experience in ruining countries than even Russia, and that's saying a lot.

Afghan people hated NATO so much that they were literally hanging off planes when the troops left.

Instead, Russia had to build walls and shoot people to keep them leaving their empire.

You may keep spewing your propaganda - people already know who the bad guys are here.

> Afghan people hated NATO so much that they were literally hanging off planes when the troops left.

Imagine taking the fact that some people wanted to leave as an excuse for hundreds of thousands of deaths. You're literally trotting the same line as Putin when he talks about people leaving Eastern Ukraine to go to Russia.

> You may keep spewing your propaganda - people already know who the bad guys are here.

No. Unlike you, I'm being consistent. All you can do is adapt your thought pattern so that your in-group can do no harm, open air slave markets and massacres be damned. You can't get around understanding your in group isn't a saintly force for good even when it burns villages and destroys entire countries, and then you accuse others of spewing propaganda. Truly remarkable.

Russia is not entitled to a ring of vassal-slave states.

That's because you lack historical culture. You should re-read about that lengthy negociations that took place in the 90s re. the dismantling of the USSR. It came with a lot of conditions, negociated for years, with Kohl and Mitterrand playing the middle-men. Conditions that the newly recreated eastern countries would stay neutral and not become NATO, were very clear, and signed off by Baker on the US side. I've given you enough key words for you to go and catch up a bit.

That is simply not true. No organization had the right to decide the defense strategy of the newly freed Eastern countries. And Russia itself had zero leverage, they were starving.

Well no, that's factually false. Every NATO member can deny the entry of any country in NATO. So, the US, Germany and France absolutely have the right to decide their defense strategy doesn't involve being part of NATO.

Please reread my post, I never said that.

Yes, you did. You said, in context, that no organisation had the right to decide the defense policy of the post Soviet states with regard to NATO. That's not true.

I said the Eastern countries had the right to align their defense strategy to NATO's policy and values, even if for joining they had to meet certain requirements.

But the decision to apply or not was theirs and other NATO members welcomed them exactly because that was conforming to NATOs values and principles.

Most tellingly, these were countries that were in a similar treaty before with Russia - the Warsaw Pact. The one that crushed the Prague Spring. They knew exactly what the difference between the two treaties were.

Of course they do, that's even why Japan has been pretty much not allowed having an army for the past 80 years.

It is common practice, after big wars, to negotiate what newly created states can or cannot do, this was done in Europe for centuries (Belgium, Poland were often under such constraints and used as buffer zone between empires).

Absolutely, what was negotiated was the budapest memorandum and the paris charter.

What treaty are you referring to?

do you happen to have any links to such documents, preferably originals? Because it sounds suspicious that US agreed on some conditions for whole NATO. Especially by the time when USSR basically lost any leverage and couldn't dictate any conditions to anyone.

It's a propaganda point, and false. So - I doubt you'll get any proof from them.

Documents don't really matter in such situations. When a state believes it's in a survival fight, it doesn't care about international laws or anything, because nothing can be worse than it's death.

The US has been working on surrounding Russia with NATO states, putting bases and nuclear next to Russia, Russia tried to do the same in Cuba during the cold war but the US did not accept it and was ready to sink the Russian ships, Cuba was "free" to do that but that doesn't matter because the US beleived it's a threat. Now that Russia beleives it's strong enough to face the US on some small issues (the US is still much stronger but not as before) it no longer accepts to have NATO on it's border, especially in Ukraine because historically that's where Russians come from plus it would hurt their access to sea.

Anyways, that's how it looks like for me as a bystander.

Sure: https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/russia-programs/2017...

With those countries’ and populations’ permission… I wonder why that is?

> NATO has settled military bases in all of Eastern Europe

... with permission.

I think the point is to avoid shooting war, not to be fair (whatever "fair" could mean in the context of countries).

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