Understanding the War in Ukraine
acoup.blog
acoup.blog
Let us please not be so passive aggressive and dismissive. Serious diplomats have been warning about this for decades.
Just because what's happening is evil and revisionist does not mean we should sweep all of that under the rug and buy into the mainstream a la the 2003 WMD hysteria.
Pointing at one person and yelling "he's a bad man" has not been helpful and yet we can't help but do the same thing every single time.
Anything else is highly irrelevant.
Russia is a repressive dictatorship and has a combination of a brainwashed and scared population. We don’t need unnecessary nuance there.
I'm sure that if Cuba or Venezuela entered a pact with Moscow that placed ICBMs on their territory, we would respect their sovereignty the same way.
There are a few things I'd like to respond to below but the rate-limit hammer has dropped.
What I will ask is that we refrain from calling the brave people who stood against the grain apologists or naive. They warned of the dangers decades ago.
We owe them better than that; they were prescient.
We don't care about sovereignty when we're violating it.
You are trying to imply a hypocrisy that simply isn't there.
The distinction isn't meaningless. You can't reach the conclusion that "we don't care about sovereignty" if we only violate it in the face of perceived imminent threats.
- How is Ukraine joining NATO different from Cuba or Mexico joining a military alliance with Russia?
- Dictatorship argument is moot since US actively supports many evil dictator and provides them with financial and military support.
- Any country is right to be scared of the US as it has invaded/destabilized many countries in the last two decades including Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen and Libya.
Well, it's different than Cuba doing that in that it never actually happened.
Mexico has entirely different problems.
Neither of these countries got invaded or had their regime changed by the USA.
But I fail to see what this has to do with the Ukraine and the Russian invasion there, which is not theoretical.
Cuba did, in fact, get invaded by the US. But not like Russia is doing to Ukraine.
That said, despite how shitty the US is towards it in terms of sanctions etc., there's certainly no boots on the ground invasion by the US.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r...
I'm not sure what your point is.
But then when push comes to shove and we are shown clear evidence, the only arguments they can find to justify real aggression against a sovereign state is whataboutism.
It's funny how many people here constantly repeat that it's a crime to attach and split an independent country, but I could not hear such voices anywhere in any western country when NATO bombed civilian targets in Serbia for months to support Kosovo independence.
As a remainder, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Iraq, Vietnam, Korea, Cambodia, Laos, Panama, Cuba, Guatemala, Mali, Yemen ... all independent countries attacked by NATO and its allies. Sorry if I added a few extra or missed a few, the number is just too big to remember correctly, since the number of independent countries worldwide attacked by NATO and its allies is bigger than list of countries attacked by Nazi Germany in WW2.
There is no NATO blood on my hands, can I condemn Russian action without you scolding me with "whataboutism"?
US is a misinformed bipartisan country and has a combination of brainwashed and scared population
In the world sphere, there is no de facto government. The UN is an attempt to create some sort of world governance, but as we know it's quite imperfect and it doesn't have the stick (i.e., the equivalent of a police force) to enforce its resolutions. Thus, the world works in a fragile equilibrium of military and economic power, with multiple countries forging alliances and pacts to try to put in place some form of civility.
So, while Ukraine "can decide" what alliances to join, there is nobody to ensure that it "can decide". Ukraine was relying on the West/US/Nato to get some say in its future, but we are seeing how that's unfolding. Ukraine unfortunately has to "earn" this right by forging alliances or building a stick big enough to ensure that others respect it.
Ukraine doesn't have a stick (it gave it up after the fall of the Soviet Union) but Russia does. Thus, Russia gets away with enforcing its own view of the world.
Unless other countries use their own sticks to enforce their point of view about what should happen with Ukraine, Russia will simply get away with it. "Rights" have very little to do with will happen.
I cannot think of a time in human history when things didn't work like this.
Quite frankly your comment adds nothing of value.
Nonetheless, I'll try again to not leave you empty handed... What I'm saying is that "right" and "wrong" have little to do with the situation. I suggest you read Wikipedia on Realpolitik: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Realpolitik
Russia guaranteed ukraine free choice of alliances with: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_Charter
There is no chance of NATO acceptance while there are still ongoing territorial disputes like crimea and donbas. Solving those could take decades if not longer.
Putin himself has said that the ukrainian state is a historical mistake and has no claim to statehood.
He just wants some juicy bits of strategical importance like a land connection to crimea and a broken country as a buffer zone that he can show to other aspirants what happens if you misbehave.
Whether we have a dictatorship or a democracy, there is an apparatus that IGNORES the legitimate concerns of others, and for whom it is a net positive for their country to impose its will on others through violence.
Eisenhower gave it a name in the US: the Military-Industrial-Congressional complex. And we can add the mainstream Media to that as well.
To put it in perspective, what Russia was doing supporting the Donbass separatists against the Ukrainian government is what the US has been doing in Syria…
What is currently being done by Russia is analogous to the bombing of Yugoslavia by NATO forces despite UN opposition, combined with a recognition of Kosovo’s independence, something that shocked Russians at the time…
If Russia continues with a full scale invasion, occupation and regime change in Ukraine, that would be analogous to what USA did in Iraq and Afghanistan in the last few years.
So the US has done it all, and other things too:
propped up friendly rulers against rebels in Yemen, leading huge humanitarian crises
trained guerillas against the government in Nicaragua and elsewhere
trained dictators like Manuel Norriega in the School of the Americas
installing friendly regimes around the world
carved off and annexed large parts of Mexico in the Spanish American war
Russia at least does it in its own back yard and to protect its interests. USA goes all around the world and for some reason sees fit to be a “world police”. But both are incredibly imperialistic. And of course, Russia’s freedom of speech internally is far worse than in USA.
But when USA does it, it never gets any sanctions. So there is no threat of escalation to nuclear mutually assured destruction. When Russia does it, the same actions are criticized badly by the world, but everyone is afraid to escalate further because of the nuclear consequences.
It's pointless to argue really--there's 0 hope that we'll do anything differently.
To be clear, there are limited options now wrt to Ukraine. Nobody wants to go to war with Russia. But being hardline and not pragmatic means we'll set ourselves up for similar issues in the next few years and decades.
We strung Ukraine along knowing we wouldn't come to their six when it counted. Honesty has to be the preferable approach.
NATO has to invite Russia to join. Or Russia has to apply.
Someone has to go first, but neither country’s nationalist cold war war hawks would do it. That’s why we need moderates in office.
Trump should have done it, but it never occurred to him to di that!
At the end of the day, NATO was created to counter the USSR. When the USSR collapsed, we had an opening to integrate Russia, and we squandered it. That was the real opportunity.
George W Bush wasn’t a “dictator” but he and his inner circle got us into the war in Iraq which destroyed huge swaths of the middle east. Perhaps in practice, the US President can wreak just as much if not more havoc than a Russian one?
Let me know what borders for the renewed USSR you find acceptable. Should they include Poland? Maybe former East Germany or France perhaps?
I think many war hawks in the West just want to cut Russia down to size, one less “superpower” to worry about. If it is invited into NATO them the whole raison d’etre of NATO kind of disappears: the big bad enemy is only Russia.
Personally, I don’t care too much for imperialism. But we all know how well USA or China would react to secession. USA’s bloodiest was began to “preserve the union”. EU and USSR was actually kind of nice to have a way to let some members secede.
To become a member, a country must apply and agree to settle disputes using peaceful means. Does not look like Russia has any interest in that.
What should Russia do if Georgia is massacring separatists in Ossetia? (Similar situation to Ukraine.) Just stand by and watch? Should Georgia be inducted into NATO but Russia not?
What should anyone do if Pakistan is massacring separtists in Bangladesh?
Just curious what is the standard really for when a country should intervene.
Come on, man. This is such bullshit it's just insulting. How many "separatists" will there be left after Russia stops paying their wages?
They tell me Kiev’s attitude towards the Russian speaking population there. You can ask them yourself. Where do you live?
The situation is exactly as you’d expect … some guerilla fighters shoot rockets and then Kiev shoots back and civilians have to sit in basements… so there is escalation and the local residents feel that Kiev is bombing them… just like in any other separatist situation.
Hardly a “genocide” as Putin characterized it but also not exactly welcomed by Kiev. They say they offered Kiev to be an autonomous region with its own Russian language etc. and not bother anyone but Kiev sends troops.
I just listen, I am trying to piece together what the situation was like on the ground from people who are there.
I honestly think Russia is motivated only by NATO being a long term geopolitical existential threat. And what it sees as the wresting of its allies by “the West”. Honestly, seeing how nations fare after trusting the USA (eg Kurds) I can’t really blame them for that.
What I do blame them for is sucking at public dialogue and messaging and then lashing out militarily. I blame the USA and others for that last part too. But at least the USA is good at meesaging so people know what we are concerned about.
Remember, after all, this is the prevailing sentiment around the world every year: https://amp.theguardian.com/world/2021/may/05/us-threat-demo...
(I bet that poll will change this year, though)
> And what it sees as the wresting of its allies by “the West”. Honestly, seeing how nations fare after trusting the USA (eg Kurds) I can’t really blame them for that.
I think the USA treated the Kurds poorly, but how is that relevant to this? The Baltics were eager to join NATO and are very happy they did. Are you arguing that Russia invaded Ukraine so that they wouldn't join NATO and be treated badly by America in the future?
Separatists overreacting to news of civil war in Odessa and moving to declare independence from Ukraine
Kyiv blowing the separatists out of proportion and sending its army in a protracted siege war against them instead of sitting down based on Minsk agreements
Putin blowing the “fascist Kyiv government genociding Russians” thing out of proportion and sending his army in a blitzkrieg to destroy Ukrainian capabilities instead of sitting down with Zelenskiy’s government at the highest levels
NATO ignoring Russia’s repeated concerns over the years about expansion and surrounding it with the same kind of thing that made JFK ready to go to war during the Cuban missile crisis
Basically on every level, sending an army backfires. Better to just not react with violence and use diplomacy. But seems that cooler heads do NOT prevail
How can you not have seen the invasion of Ukraine that started yesterday?
That is like saying Israel took Golan Heights because of its ambitions to expand and take over as much Arab land as it can. Rather than limited strategic control for security guarantees.
Every country wants to have a buffer against enemy troops so they can’t shoot as far into its main population centees. In my opinion this is not going to be a thing in the 21st century but it was a thing all throughout history before.
USA is just “lucky” to be surrounded by two oceans because frankly they managed to either exterminate or ethnically cleanse and demilitarize all the previous inhabitants on the continent through war or disease. Otherwise it would act the same way. (The Monroe doctrine kind of declares the whole hemisphere to be under USA protectorate btw.)
It might pay off to regain parity with current affairs then.
And maybe read a bit about Chechnya while you're at it or any one of the pages linked from:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Post-Soviet_conflicts
But I also feel that it’s important to acknowledge that if it was wrong for the US, it is wrong for Russia. There are too many people out there who aren’t really being sincere with their arguments and are using US crimes to justify Russian ones.
(I'm not even American)
For example counterfactually i am pretty sure that Ruanda would have fared better with an intervention.
You can't imagine how angry this makes me.
Russia is twice the size of the US. Their direct "sphere of influence" was three times the size of the US.
Romania, for example, never wanted to have anything to do with Russia, yet here we are 2500+ kms away from the Russian heartland, stressing out about this stuff, because apparently it's "Russia's backyard". We've been here 2000+ years, it's <<our>> backyard. The same goes for many of the countries next to Russia.
And modern Russia, just like the USSR, is highly interventionist. Who do you think is propping up the Assads? Or was propping up Marxist militias in Latin America and in Africa?
Join the club, it seems to be in the water or something:
The entire Caribbean is in USA’s sphere of influence. We toppled Hawaii’s kingdom and annexed that, too.
Actually, the entire hemisphere, going back as early as President Monroe (200 years earlier)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monroe_Doctrine
USA seized territory during the Spanish-American war, which is now Texas / Arizona etc.
In short, as angry as you are, I am sure many South American countries were and are angry at the USA as well, for propping up fascist dictators (Pinochet), or toppling regimes for fruit companies (Guatemala), or arming rebels (Nigaragua) in violation of our own laws (Iran-Contra affair) or training terrorists and dictators (School of the Americas). Whether or not we are “a dictatorship” is beside the point.
I was simply pointing out that Donbas has ethnic Russians so it is more their business than Iraq was ours, Iraq has no credible threat to us at all. Neither do the dozens of other countries that USA effected regime change in.
https://williamblum.org/essays/read/overthrowing-other-peopl...
Pointing out total hypocrisy and asking both sides to stop doing bad things is somehow hitting below the belt eh
It’s a sad state of affairs when being evenhanded and keeping a sense of proportion is considered extreme bias.
When you say that a member of group X is bad, then you have to have a baseline. When it comes to superpowers we have Russia, China, USA. They all do terrible imperialistic things and we the people living in them should maybe try to get them to let up. “Whataboutism” is a stupid non-rebuttal that just says “let me just be biased and keep navel gazing at one specific country while ignoring even worse things by other countries because I care not about the actual humanitarian issues but about proving how bad a particular country is, and you’re making me care about the actual issues”.
This is not one of those things where there is a bit of truth on both sides. One country just invaded another.
https://theoutline.com/post/8610/united-states-russia-whatab...
> That’s why you usually hear “whataboutism” used by people who are punching down, not punching up. The nation that is more powerful, or more assured of their moral superiority, tells a Bad Nation it is Bad.
At this exact moment, the US isn't punching anyone, neither up or down.
Russia... well, you can see it on livestreams.
Could you expand on that a bit? I'm genuinely curious.
Greece, Germany, Peru, Columbia, Angola, you name it, Soviet funded.
Some others were funded by China, but those were a minority.
Let's not be biased or naive and assume that the authoritarian USSR was all of a sudden only sponsoring socialist democracies around the world...
The US withdrew from Afghanistan and Iraq, ending mistakes made almost 20 years ago.
Russia attacked Ukraine 2 days ago.
So we should follow the model of the current day aggressor, not of the country that's at least trying to change its ways?
And how is all of this relevant in a discussion about Russia attacking Ukraine, anyway?
Some call this the Chomsky principle: "My own concern is primarily the terror and violence carried out by my own state, for two reasons. For one thing, because it happens to be the larger component of international violence. But also for a much more important reason than that; namely, I can do something about it. So even if the U.S. was responsible for 2 percent of the violence in the world instead of the majority of it, it would be that 2 percent I would be primarily responsible for. And that is a simple ethical judgment. That is, the ethical value of one’s actions depends on their anticipated and predictable consequences. It is very easy to denounce the atrocities of someone else. That has about as much ethical value as denouncing atrocities that took place in the 18th century." - Noam Chomsky
Nobody can fix the past, just apologize for it.
Right now we need to fix Ukraine.
The USA is far from perfect, but nearly all the interventions you listed were much more justified than what Putin is offering: the explicit aim of securing Ukraine as part of a new Russian empire, regardless of their will. (E.g. Afghanistan was a base for an attack on the USA; there was ethnic cleansing in Kosovo that needed to be stopped; populations in Syria do need to be protected. On the other hand as Devereaux points out, there isn't even a plurality of people in Donetsk and Luhansk in favour of secession, and Ukraine hadn't gone on the offensive against the separatists.)
The argument "the USA has done bad things; therefore we should turn a blind eye when anyone does any bad thing" is total nonsense.
Zelensky should have listened to Donbas separatists and met to address them (Minsk agreements)
Russia should have listened to the Ukrainian democratically elected government and met to address them
And yes, NATO should have listened to Putin and other Russian officials saying over and for years about the bright lines, and should have listened to internal voices including the architects of the USSR containment strategy WARNING about NATO expansion, and realized they should invite Russia into NATO.
No one listens because of the apparatus within their country, and the idea that cities do not have self-determination, only countries do. People believe in their flag so much because of mass media and government schools, they are willing to kill and be killed for it.
But if you look at a time-lapse of most places on the globe, you’ll see flags changing so quickly that you wonder what is the big deal. Most people if left alone would just earn money and raise their families.
Every city should be able to choose what country it belongs to, periodically. These nationalities are making people go crazy killing each other for a flag to fly over a specific territory. Most of the local populations are radicalized using mass media or government schools. It’s sad to see.
My developers are in Ukraine and Russia and I attended one of their weddings in Chernovtsy a few years ago. We all work together and we don’t want to kill each other. I’m in the USA. The vast majority regular people would not want their country killing anyone in their name. They’re just fed propaganda about how benign their country’s actions are, and how bad the “other guys” are.
Take Crimea for example. It is majority Russian because Stalin deported the vast majority of Crimean Tatars because many of their men fought against USSR in WW2. Ethnic cleansing. Then Khustchev just gifted Crimea to Ukraine for no apparent reason. But when they had a referendum they voted to rejoin Russia. In an ideal world, no one would give a shit what flag flies over Crimea. They could vote every 4 years to be 80% Russian and 20% Ukranian. By removing the need to choose a discrete variable, you’d eliminate almost all conflicts between separatists and imperialists. Catalonia vs Spain. Basques vs France. Kurds vs Turkey. But no. People need to fight for what flag flies over that territory…
IMHO, you are talking about Crimean Goths. They are speaking German dialect, so they were used by Germans as translators. Ukrainians, Crimean Tatars, Greeks, Italians, are killed or deported just because their land was promised to soviet officers.
Anyway, number of Crimean Goths participated with Germans (140) is minuscule in comparison to Russian Liberation Army (ROA) AKA Vlasov Army (3 millions). By your logic, all Russians must be punished for ROA crimes. BTW, they wear ROA flag even today.
USSR was brutal. World War 2 was extremely brutal - they lost 30 million people
Anyway it is all war crimes, I totally agree !
I don’t know if it is “just” because Russian officers wanted their land. They already could get land through crooked courts easily.
USSR was pissed at how rabidly some Ukrainians and others killed people when they sided with the Nazis. I am Jewish and two sisters of my grandma were brutally killed by Ukrainians (not Germans) while being under 10 years old. One German wanted to quietly save them but the Ukrainians wouldn’t let him.
People want independence and appeal to have their rights, but during war time they can often abuse weaker people too a lot.
As far as Tatars read the last two paragraphs here: https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/krimchaks
Yes, but most Russians are still not punished for their crimes like Crimean Goths. Moreover, they openly wear fascists symbol: ROA flag, and Russian Eagle is surprisingly similar to German Eagle.
> USSR was brutal. World War 2 was extremely brutal - they lost 30 million people
USSR lost 12 millions in WWWII, fighting Poland with Germany (1939), Finnish, and Germany with England and US. Losses are raised to 42 millions to hide 30 millions Ukrainians killed during Holodomor (7 million adults and 23 million children). RF accepted number (02.04.2008) is 7 millions only, but they are still hiding them in WWWII losses.
> USSR was pissed at how rabidly some Ukrainians and others killed people when they sided with the Nazis.
Guess what? If you kill millions of Ukrainians, they remember that for a long time.
Anyway, Berlin was taken by First Ukrainian front and Second Ukrainian front. No Russian army was involved in the taking of Berlin, because Russian Liberation Army (ROA) was on Nazi side.
(USSR took his family’s house and everything earlier during the civil war, they came to live in the city)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Port_of_Novorossiysk
The dissolution of the Soviet Union brought up a question of headquarters relocation to Novorossiysk. In September 1994 Novorossiysk Naval area was reestablished, three years later it was officially reorganised into Novorossiysk Naval Base.[62] To ensure its modernisation and development the government initiated special federal programme 'On Black Sea Navy Fleet Base at the Territory of Russian Federation in 2005—2020'. [...] The naval base is equipped with 5 berths (including floating dock) capable to receive up to 100 vessels from 1500 to 30,000 DWT. The submarine base shelters all 7 diesel-powered submarines of Russian Black Sea Navy.[citation needed]
But anyway, I'm confused, because you're saying not only countries but cities should have self-determination, but ALSO Putin gets a veto over Ukrainian policy?
the moment somebody attacks Europe with missiles diplomacy is over. I think we should call out all the Putin apologists in our own ranks and make sure they recuse themselves. Next we need to hit them where it hurts. Not with "a strongly worded letter" or "a frown" as we usually do in the EU but right in their money. Let's make it impossible for Russians to visit their money in Cyprus, Malta or London. Make it impossible for Russian oligarchs to strut around European capitals flashing their dirty money, anchor their yachts in the Mediterranean, or spend winters in the Swiss Alps.
Also anyone calling for diplomacy, while Russia is bombing civilian infrastructure in Europe, should have their ass handed to them and be called out for what they are: at best useful idiots, at worst propagandists.
This includes whataboutist statements like:
> a la the 2003 WMD hysteria
What we see right now is exactly the opposite. It's the effect of that fallout when we listened to the IC too much and realized the damage it caused to our credibility & foreign affairs.
What we _actually_ have now is the effect of what happens when we ignore the warnings of the IC for a whole year, a bit like the late 98/99 when we should have known that 9/11 was coming.
None of this is a surprise for anyone who has half-assedly been following Russian politics in the past 2 years, the murdering of journalists, the disappearance of an opposition media, the attempted murder and imprisonment of Navalny, the assassination attempts on people in UK and Europe.
In fact if you're Russian and not waiving an UA flag and a sign opposing these actions outside a RU embassy right now you should also be considered sus.
I value the diversity on HN.
I mostly value when my view are reputed by facts and reasoning.
edit: to say nothing as well of the anti-war protests that are happening in the streets of Moscow and across Russia. If they continue and grow they will pose a risk to regime stability.
More likely he will try to cleave off strategically important territory with Russian majorities (forming a land bridge to crimea, maybe all the way to transnistria) and leave Kyiv having extracted a promise to remain unarmed, "neutral" and providing no aid to insurgencies or face another bloody assault.
Theyre already offering to negotiate, but now theyre demanding total demilitarization.
Also they probably want to destroy/capture military central command.
In principle.
Direct occupation would be dumb. We live in a century of illusions
Essentially undoing the 2013 coup (or whatever we call it in the US)?
Everything that Mearsheimer stated would happen to Ukraine has now come to pass. He predicted it perfectly 7 years ago. He was not wrong. Neocons and Liberal Imperialists, as he calls the "war party", have now sacrificed Ukraine and left them to be massacred by advancing Russians. If you want to debate any of his arguments, please do so.
If you accept the latter rather than the former, I think it's hard to lay the blame on the West for simply having a defense alliance that sovereign states chose to join -- unless you would argue that NATO should simply not exist.
Strictly speaking that isn't true.
That doesn’t justify Russia’s action - you aren’t justified in invading your neighbour over the mere inchoate possibility they might join a potentially hostile military alliance. (Ukraine still hasn’t joined NATO, and there is no evidence they were likely to be accepted as a NATO member in the near future.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coalition_of_the_willing
The really bad part is that they were acting during the 'first installment' against people that weren't part of the attack on the United States to begin with (it was essentially a pretext), and the second time they outright lied about the intelligence regarding the WMDs (of which there already was conflicting data collected by the UN weapons inspectors).
NATO’s own resources are essentially office buildings, computer and communication systems, bureaucrats, and seconded military planners. The US didn’t need them for the Iraq War, although it would have liked to have had them involved, because of what that would have meant politically/diplomatically/symbolically.
Despite claiming a broad “coalition”, only three countries actually contributed fighting assets to the initial US invasion - the UK, Poland, and Australia - only the first two are NATO members, and Poland at the time had only recently joined (only 4 years prior). 3 more NATO members (Netherlands, Italy and Spain) provided non-combatant support. I don’t see in what meaningful sense it could be said to be something NATO did.
More NATO members joined in the occupation forces after the initial invasion. But that was never an official NATO operation because those require unanimous approval, and certain member states (most notably France) were always opposed to that.
NATO eventually did become involved in Iraq - training the new Iraqi government’s military. But no fighting ever happened in NATO’s name.
NATO was very careful to obtain requests from the UN in both cases, resolutions 1244 and 1973.
How is Putin ceasing to throw Russia's unwilling and unwitting armed forces onto Ukraine not easy?
"The treaty was created with an armed attack by the Soviet Union against Western Europe in mind, but the mutual self-defense clause was never invoked during the Cold War."
After WW2, it became clear that a new world order had emerged around what would be called "First World" (US-led countries members of NATO) and "Second World" (Soviet Union-led communist countries members of the Warsaw Pact). The "Third World" were non-aligned countries, often confused with "poor countries".
The roots of the current crisis trace back to these power structures. The fall of the Soviet Union and the rise of China could be seen as the beginning of new alignment, but so far, we haven't seen it fully taking shape (China is certainly working on it). Russia, while nowhere near its Soviet Union peak, remains a military superpower and the owner of vast natural resources.
Russia's current role in the world is unstable - there is a dissonance between its hard power and its actual influence in world matters. It doesn't accept being relegated to a weak geopolitical player, and the invasion of Ukraine is part of an attempt to assert its position in the world.
And they just changed again.
Putin believes that the "Soviet Union" is simply another name for Russia, the name of a particular phase of Russian history.
In his mind, the ex-Soviet states were all part of Russia, and their people were Russian–Ukrainians and Lithuanians and Georgians are not neighbouring foreign nationalities, they are Russians, traditional Russian ethnic minorities just like Chechens or Tatars or Tuvans. He views their independence in the breakup of the USSR as a historical mistake, for which he blames the Communist leadership.
He wishes the Communists had never introduced the idea of a "Union of Soviet Socialist Republics" because he believes it planted the seeds for the breakup of Russia–yes, Russia, since to him the Soviet Union was just another name for Russia–in 1991, and his current invasion of Ukraine is an attempt to partially reverse that breakup – even though he probably doesn't plan to annex the whole of Ukraine in the near-to-medium term, installing a puppet government in Ukraine which will promote Russophilia and Russification would bring Ukraine back into the Russian fold, and might even eventually lead to full annexation further down the line.
> Since then, however, NATO has revived admirably. Under President Joe Biden America sounded the alarm about Russia’s build-up and co-ordinated the Western response. “Putin has single-handedly given NATO a vitamin injection,” says Wolfgang Ischinger, chairman of the Munich Security Conference, an annual transatlantic talkfest that begins on February 18th. NATO’s three decades of angst about its role after the end of the cold war has been dispelled. Having performed “out of area” operations in the Balkans and counter-insurgency in Afghanistan, it is going back to basics: the territorial defence of allies. The theological rivalry between institutions in Brussels over whether the EU should have an autonomous defence capability has for the moment been stilled.
In other words, I feel like some people have a consistent standard on what constitutes acceptable aggression depending on who the aggressor is.
This kinda borders on the radio station justification - a rogue terrorist attack does not justify an invasion, and most of the attackers were Saudi, so its not even consistent.
That was a really eye-opening moment for many people, I felt the same as now about Ukraine.
Honestly, that is going to be tested when Russia attacks one of them. How eager the rest of NATO will be to support or abandon them.
Joining NATO won’t protect you and will just antagonize Russia. Maybe next time they’ll just try and remain neutral?
My understanding is the Ukraine was “up” for consideration of NATO membership at some unspecified date in the future?
On the other hand, around 20 years ago Putin said he could imagine joining Nato one day...
Of course the west is ultimately not to blame for Russia to invade. There were bad choices...
Here is the actual treaty:
https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natolive/official_texts_17120.ht...
Article 4 is quite deliberately vaguely worded. And the treaty also explains why NATO only got involved in Libya after the UN requested it to.
Even the Yugoslavian war did not - though it almost happened - ended up pitting NATO against Russia, and I believe that if Russia had followed through on the reforms instead of turning into a Dictatorship/kleptocracy that they just might have joined NATO at some point.
Moreover he explicitly says that NATO/US does not want to expand to Ukraine as it is not a vital strategic interest to the United States, instead US will have to focus on Asian alliances to counter China.
UN security council is how things like Srebrenica happen. In my eyes, disregarding it is justifiable if there is a high enough likelihood of something like that repeating.
It’s fine to have a principle of non-intervention but the situations are not really comparable outside of both being interventions. The Iraq War is a better comparison, and the US should have been sanctioned for it.
And that has exactly nothing to do with defensive NATO core mission.
Sectarian violence happens all around the world, except NATO chose to invade Kosovo under the pretext of ethnic cleansing / "genocide", again current RU excuse, which later investigation pointed out to be unfounded. The real cynical reason was for NATO to rationalize its existence post USSR collapses by reinventing itself as an offensive alliance for LIO/US geopolitical interests, which is how it has been wielded since causing untold deaths in various interventions. NATO is a hegemonic instrument disguised as a humanitarian one. RU sees through the "defensive" narrative. Ultimately, the point is US opened pandora box of bad norms in terms of prosecuting wars and upsetting balance of power. It won't get sanctioned for it, instead wielding sanctions to deter geopolitical adversaries from pursuing more pertinent self interests. Until the sanctions stop working, and US adversaries use US playbook for their own interventions.
Mearsheimer points the finger at an enthusiastic expansion of NATO here and draws a line from it to the West being at fault, but I don't think it was really the case.
So it wasn’t independent peoples joining a defensive pact, but Russia dislocating its arms onto stolen territory.
Only exceptions are Belarus, which effectively remains under Russian thumb, and Ukraine which didn’t make it (and had, now dead, significant pro Russian sentiment).
Either we agree that countries have sovereignty and can enter whatever pacts they so please or we do not. You can't have it both ways. NATO is an alliance that Baltic nations joined of their own accord. The US doesn't even enter the picture here.
I completely agree. The problem is that for the past 70 years or more, this has not been like the US has behaved. They set the historical precedent that it's ok to respect other countries sovereignty if and only if said country aligns with your own interests. When that's not the case, it's fine to overthrow the government to make it more "democratic".
> Joining NATO--not that the Ukraine was even doing that
Ukraine was actively seeking NATO membership since 2014, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukraine%E2%80%93NATO_relations
I find it completely overestimated. The makes it US responsibility to prevent Ukraine from considering to enter defensive act. And when US does not shut it, somehow US is responsible for Russia invading Ukraine.
US is not responsible for making sure Russia can take over Ukraine whenever they please. US is not responsible for making Russian emprire to happen.
Setting aside other countries for a moment, the actions of a country is ultimately decided by its leader and the leader of Russia went to war. We can debate how other countries influenced the leader, but before that, are you in agreement that Putin premeditated a troop build up around ukraine and then invaded despite no immediate threat to russian soil?
Can you please state that ultimately the buck stops with putin russia freely chose to do this war, and then we can get into the debate of how other countries may have pushed him that way only once that clear acknowledgment has been made without any digressions that may come off as unintentional prevarications.
In the video, around 23:30, he says putin is too smart to invade ukraine and that an invasion will not happen...
He seems to be right in many other points, so go watch the video.
Reminds me of; Putin will not insist on outrighouts terms, he will know his own weakness......
WHEN will the lesson be learned. WHEN will be the lesson be learned.
How many more dictators must be wooed, appeased - good God, given immense privileges - before we learn?
You cannot reason with a tiger, when your head is in its mouth!
- Winston Churchill ( Gary Oldman ) in Darkest Hour
That’s exactly what Mearsheimer has been saying. He has said that it would be a terrible mistake for Russia to invade Ukraine.
With the information we have at hand this invasion is nonsensical and a fiasco but Russia and China are information black boxes. The world is slowly opening eyes to China and Russia tyranny and now that the US left Iraq/Afghanistan and the West defeated Covid, the future is not so favorably for those that are cultural antagonists (democracy enemies). US economy is facing high inflation but there are rumors of China economy collapsing. It might be that Putin and Xi decided to escalate and show hands sooner than later.
I wouldn't be surprised by China invading Taiwan in the next weeks. Specially after NATO committing assets to deal with an ongoing humanitarian crisis far from the Pacific. As the Fallout franchise summarize: war never changes.
Did you know Navalny’s court case has started? It should be front page news, but now it’s barely mentioned. That’s not directly why the invasion happened, the court case is probably timed by the invasion not the other way around, but there is a connection. Now anyone protesting against Putin will be anti war and therefore traitors. Sanctions will also consolidate his factions grip over the domestic economy, and provide an excuse to do away with the already flimsy rule of law in the economic arena.
Putin will install a pro Russian client government, like that in Belarus, and make allowing Ukraine to become ‘independent’ in name alone conditional on easing sanctions on Russia. The west will play along because there are no votes in not doing so.
If he believes he will win this war, he may either do so on grounds of something we do not know, possibly bad intel.
If he does not believe he will win this war, he may think he must on grounds of something we do not know, possibly bad intel. It could also be he doesn't want to win the war, for some reason we do not know.
Mostly addressed to his own subjects.
Putin is not a moron, he is not impulsive. If anything he is ruthless in his cold calculations. The only logical reason for this is desperation. Putin's popularity is dwindling and more and more people are vocal about it.
Invasion of Ukraine is last ditch attempt to rally support from ussr sentiment of global power people. But this is quickly backfiring, in terms of PR it a disaster. Common people in Europe support Ukraine and the politicians probably will have easier time imposing restrictions as their own people will be ok paying the price. Remember that Putin's hope is that divided europe will not come together and will fail to react.
The West should've stopped Putin (and other madmen like him) a long time ago instead of appeasing him.
Of course, the idea is to prevent people from the same circle - with similar or worse ideas - to have the power. Robustly that's to be solved by the people of the country - who apparently suffer from lack of learning on the previous mistakes. Also, getting best solution takes longer time... to the initial results.
Except for the generation of Afghan girls that got to attend school for the ~20-years that the US was in charge.
No leader or country will ever start a war because of some diversity concerns.
It only shows humanitarian aid is partisan.
You can't, on the one hand, claim that the Western allies were a malign influence in Afghanistan and also claim that Western aid is the only thing that can keep Afghans from starvation.
Did I? I don't think so.
> also claim that Western aid is the only thing that can keep Afghans from starvation.
I didn't claim that eiter AFAIR, but since you are bringing it up : sanctions were imposed, aid was halted and the economy collapsed.
I am not saying that, the US admin is saying that : https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/25/us/politics/us-sanctions-...
I am not sure what your beef is, but you sound like a neocolonialist.
Oh, now I get you.
There is at least a good chance it will have a better leader after Putin. Because Putin has become a terrible leader.
So now I ask, can you provide any evidence that prof. Mearsheimer has ties with Russia/Putin that influence his opinions?
I'm Ukrainian. I lived in Kiev, Dnipro, Odessa and Kharkiv.
Apparently Zelenskyy thought Ukraine had a chance of joining NATO, and was actively partnering with NATO.
I don't see any reason why Ukraine couldn't join us.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021%E2%80%932022_Russo-Ukrain...:
On 14 September 2020, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy approved Ukraine's new National Security Strategy, "which provides for the development of the distinctive partnership with NATO with the aim of membership in NATO." On 24 March 2021, Zelenskyy signed the Decree No. 117/2021 approving the "strategy of de-occupation and reintegration of the temporarily occupied territory of the Autonomous Republic of Crimea and the city of Sevastopol."
I think it lays too much of the blame on the US and the West and ignores the fact that Ukraine itself is an entity with its own autonomy and not as simple as just being a US pawn. Mearsheimer's analysis seems to dismiss it completely and assume that basically everything that occurs in Ukraine are just machinations of the US political machine, but very reasonably, since the annexation of Crimea in 2014, it is rational for Ukraine to seek closer ties with NATO.
That said, I do appreciate his perspective on why Putin might act like he does, but "Why the Ukraine Crisis Is the West’s Fault" is... interesting framing.
I feel like we largely lack any perspective because so many of things that are happening are something so completely foreign to us that it's difficult to even realistically imagine it. Imagine if Russia formed a 'defensive' military alliance whose primary mission was to contain the US. And they then gave speeches, such as McCain's, in Mexico City shortly before a pro-US Mexican government was overthrown by an insurrection and replaced with a pro-Russian one. And then they now moved to integrate the new Mexico into their military alliance which would undoubtedly result in 'defensive' weapons, arms, soldiers, etc being placed right along the US border - possibly to the point of imperiling our credible nuclear deterrent.
I would certainly agree that Ukraine is not just a US pawn and wants to decide it's own fate, and deserves that. But there's also no doubt that it's political present and future is instead repeatedly decided by outside actors.
But this didn’t happen! Ukraine did not join NATO.
As for the John McCain bits, you ask whether it would be in the US’s interests to invade Mexico if Putin went and gave a pro-authoritarian speech there? Of course not! We would be fucking insane to do that.
It's a very "US-centric" video, and the comparison to the Monroe Doctine is imo a false equivalency. Russia is not even the Soviet Union, let alone the US. Russia isn't a match militarily to NATO, and it's not even a match economically to the EU. It has nukes and oil, so it's a thug and a bully. If it was any other nation, it would be wiped off the face of the planet.
The 90s born generation like myself, mostly see Russia as neutral, from the neutral-positive way we saw them in the 90s, when we were still relying heavily on their bootleg electronics.
Romania joined NATO way back as it saw it as a way to get closer to the west and ultimately into EU. Not because of Russia but because the bad state of the local economy (and associated poverty) lead by incompetent, post revolution, ex-communist party, people. That couldn't be improved without outside investment, guidance, and trade partners.
Absolutely not true[1]. Soviet Russian-Romanian friction dates as back as early as the 70s, and let's not even talk about WW2. Soviets raping and pillaging Transylvania is well documented.
[1] https://www.wilsoncenter.org/publication/the-soviet-romanian...
Where we were taught to have beef with Russia, was on the large amount of gold/valuables we shipped there during WW2 for "safe keeping" and which were never returned back to us.
The 90s romanian propaganda was against the west in general, and Hungary in particular. You see, even if Hungarians were the first to bring large convoys of humanitarian help in our country after our revolution, the politicians made sure to make Hungary a boogeyman that is trying to steal Transylvania from us and support separatist movement in majority ethnic hungarian regions.
It's not a black and white kind of thing, and it seems that trade relationships also shape up the perception of those trading partners.
Don't get me wrong, people's perception of Putin and his actions are mostly negative (we have our fair share of people that cling to the extremes).
You tell me what life was like as a vassal state of Russia.
Opinion on life during communism is very much a mixed bag. Depends who you ask. I don't know why people keep painting Romanian communism as a black&white kind of issue.
https://jacquesmattheij.com/a-western-kid-living-in-communis...
Imagine your friends informing on you to the secret police either because of ideological reasons, or simply because they want to get ahead in life and you're a convenient stepping stone.
Imagine empty stores.
Imagine family members taken in for 'questioning' never to be heard from again.
Imagine winters without fuel.
And so on...
Really, the life in the countries that were plundered to power the failing economy of the USSR was pretty harsh, especially if you were smart and not part of the party.
FWIW I love Romania, have lived in Bucharest for two years and have friends and family there. Enjoy your freedom, it was paid for in blood.
Unless you were in the Communist Party, everyone hated the Ceausescu regime and it's absolutely NOT a mixed bag. I was born in 86, my sister in 90, and both of my parents fought in the Romanian revolution in Timisoara. I still remember yelling "Jos cu Ceausescu" and my parents telling me to be quiet; I also remember having to hide in our tiny apartment, and bullets flying outside; I was around 4 or 5.
We're Christian, and my dad was interrogated by the Romanian Communist Secret Police many times (he was trafficking Bibles), and was also threatened with my murder and my (at the time pregnant) mom's murder.
Putin is an extension of that same old Communist cancer that the Russian people need to excise. I have dual citizenship, and if the Russians stepped foot on Romanian soil, I would gladly pick up arms.
And stop with the revisionist garbage, people literally died.
During communism they had the safety of a job, and housing. The basic premise of a living condition. Just like some might one day hope adoption of something like UBI could do.
Now we have village life slowly "going extinct". Back then you could continue to live in villages because of mandatory cooperatives, there was always work available. There was stability.
When communism fell, those citizens were left to their own devices. It gave them maximal individual freedom, but no the same state-level safety nets.
The population that just wants to live their family life regardless of politics, and those that lost their safety is reflective in voting preference, and also in the low parliamentary vote turnout (31.02% of voters).
I was born in the late 80s like you, but we're still 90s kids. My father had his own run-ins with the state security police, and everyone was happy for the fell of communism for a very brief moment of time. Maybe you were well of in the 90s but most of the population really struggled with economical change and poverty. It was less about communism-era scarcity and more about the month to month livelihood.
Instead of just stating things unilaterally in a certain light, I would ask you to allow yourself the time to listen to the ordinary people that are living worse of now than during communism.
This mixed feeling about the fall of communism is very well illustrated in Recorder's documentary (30 years of democracy). Documentary that also touches upon my original point where Romania joined NATO with the ultimate goal of joining EU due to disastrous economy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUbN6DXJwFg (english subs are also available for anyone else interested)
Respect to your parents actively fighting during the revolution.
Is incompatible with the rest of your comment.
Only if you were part of the Nomenklatura or the Secret Police. The rest hated communism quite uniformly.
Yeah, people who didn't live through the cold war and didn't suffer aggression or witness it being used against a nearby country are prone to being blue-eyed in that way.
I guarantee that a lot of the 90s kids are now having second thoughts and start to think more like the older population.
Overall, I'm happy that Poland is a NATO member. At least it adds another deterrent (or failing that, a speed bump) in the way of a Russian invasion. Were NATO not to exist, and Russia to re-awaken it's conqueror instincts at some point, we'd be screwed yet again.
> or witness it being used against a nearby country are prone to being blue-eyed in that way.
I agree, awareness and proximity to direct effects give you a different perspective.
Based on my experience, I can tell you that those 90s kids are having second thoughts on the EU&West this time around. Might be Russian propaganda derived, but EU skepticism is on the rise in that same age group, especially for those that live in the country.
Only the ones unable to succeed in modern times. Which is a quite incredible feat considering the astonishing wealth of opportunities the EU opening offered the Eastern Block.
How can you not succeed when you can move and work anywhere in the EU?! The only way I know is by being a child of ex-communist politicians, a child of Nomenklatura parents. The pain they feel is quite like the nostalgy Putin feels when remembering good old Soviet Union.
The idea that Putin is invading to counter a possible extension of NATO into Ukraine is beyond silly. NATO members have been directly bordering Russia through the Baltics for almost two decades at this point.
And any observer can see that there is zero interest in any sort of NATO aggression against Russia.
The only threat to Putin is internally, either too many Russians thinking he is weak (causing Putin to invade other countries to maintain a mirage of strength) or too many Russians seeing successful neighboring democracies.
Mearsheimer is kidding himself if he believes an unaligned Ukraine (remember, Ukraine is unaligned right now, and several NATO member states are on the record unambiguously opposing Ukrainian membership, which requires unanimous approval) would be allowed to prosper. Any NATO justification for Putin's actions holds no water. Pretetending that the goal is to demilitarize Ukraine as Putin is doing now is also nonsense because Ukraine's military was never threatening Russia. Putin doesn't care if his puppet government lasts or not as long as Ukraine remains poor.
https://www.irishtimes.com/news/world/europe/moscow-s-tried-...
In my humble opinion, his story lacks lots of context, both cultural and historical. Russia has never belonged to the Western culture, not even in the XIX century. Its mindset is radically different and not reducible to analysis based on the assumptions common in the Western societies. Treating it as a "partner one can civilize" has been a mistake made repeatedly in Europe and resulted in many tragedies in the last ages. I hope the current conflict will open eyes of many naive idealists looking for the rational outlook on the modern world.
It is somewhat ludicrous to suggest that russia would invade ukraine because ukraine might join NATO decades after putin leaves power.
Especially since putin has explained himself that he does not see ukraine as a souvereign nation on historical grounds and wants to correct that mistake.
The problem seems to me that there is a real breakdown in competency and responsibility in the russian regime. Just take a look at: https://twitter.com/peterliakhov/status/1495851796782362628
This might be far more serious and dangerous than it might look.
Memberstates might be amenable to vow to block certain admissions, or maybe not. There is zero chance of an unanimous vote to admit a country that has open territorial conflicts with russia.
Its not within the power or responsibility of NATO to decide about ukraines neutrality. The charter of Paris, Budapest memorandum, https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/official_texts_25468.htm .. (russia signed all those) all guarantee ukraine a free choice of military alliance.
Wow. Powerful.
Ukraine, keep fighting. You are fighting for the ascendency of justice over injustice in the affairs of mankind.
If ukraine falls, border with russia will be our headache, and it will cost more than helping ukraine would.
I also worry that kicking Russia out of SWIFT, could make them partners with China and others in hastening the demise of the PetroDollar.
China has been selling services to Iran for oil for years now. Instead of actually paying for it in currency.
You can only threaten sanctions so many times when the other side is a world power. Trumps America showed that the US a bit of a toothless tiger when they didn't retaliate after Iran shot rockets at their Iraq military base.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/27/russias-bid-to-ditch-the-us-...
[2] https://www.bloombergquint.com/global-economics/russia-s-583...
And funny you should bring up Iraq in these troubled times, because I think the recent conflict Russia->Ukraine is most comparable to - outside of Russia->Other Neighbours - is US->Iraq. Assuming the situation calms down rather than escalating.
Russia is marauding about Ukraine and people are arguing against doing the bare minimum because they're worried Russia will change payment systems. Russia has already built their own alternative to SWIFT and will eventually switch to it regardless.
What's the alternative? Any source(s)?
TBH, anything that stops the blatant abuse of international systems for political goals by the hegemony looks good for me.
They already sent a message [1].
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/43828/undersea-cable-c...
I never used IBAN outside of Europe (actually Dubai if I'm not wrong used that too) so I'm not sure how international that is
What might be a compelling argument is that China gets a lot more influence in Russia, e.g. the space to move in there and exploit Russia's natural resources. But they need to make the tradeoff whether that's worth it.
China may get sanctioned, taxed, and generally lose reputation if they help Russia mitigate the effects of international sanctions.
The author doesn't get it
The claim that NATO cannot attack Russia is often justified by the fact that "NATO is a defensive alliance". Previous events show that actions by NATO in the recent past do not reflect this definition, so this line of reasoning is invalid.
The other line of reasoning on why NATO would not attack Russia is that it would trigger MAD. And while this is a really sad state of affairs, I believe this to be more credible rather than lies about NATO being "purely defensive".
To just watch genocide being carried on "in your backyard" is considered not moral, and it is "defensive" in more than one way.
https://web.archive.org/web/20090301043917/http://www.un.org...
Please tell me how I should take your comment seriously. Every reliable source in the world agrees on defining it a "NATO intervention". This is not even debatable and it is exactly the kind of behaviour that would get one instantly labeled as a "Russian propagandist" if one were to make similar (non-sensical) claims regarding Russia actions (and in this case rightly so).
Or he does, but he considers it understood that the logic of mutually assured destruction rules out "pre-emptive strikes" on nuclear nations like Russia.
And if you realize this, it doesn't make sense to view NATO's expansion in Eastern Europe as "creeping closer, preparing for an attack on Russia", as Putin seems to see it, but rather it is happening because existing NATO countries want to afford peace of mind that they are safe from Russian aggression to those European countries that most need it, namely Russia's neighbors.
Putin doesn't realize this because he's paranoid - and by acting on his paranoia he has precisely proven that his neighbors need the guarantee that NATO affords.
Yet xenophobic Canadians would not consider Georgia or Moldova or Chechnya to be on our team.
Is this a uniquely Canadian thing, or would it be common to the rest of the West?
If Ukraine can develop a functioning economy in communication with the West, and a functioning government more or less accountable to the electorate, that is a huge embarrassment for Putin's regime. The Russian economy is basically oil and gas extraction, the Russian polity is basically "support Putin or go to jail". If Ukraine were to begin to prosper in other activities, and well they might given decent governance, the Russian model would be exposed as an authoritarian sham.
Additionally, Putin gains politically by Great Power rhetoric. We are simply protecting our interests, everyone is against us, we must be strong and united! It's nonsense, no one in the West gives a damn what happens within Russian borders so long as they don't bother anyone else, but it unites the country behind Putin.
The Putin regime is a nasty mix of oligarchy, corruption, propaganda, media control and intelligence and police services. It's sadly enabled by modern information technology, which can be used for ill as well as good. The Chinese Communist Party is a similar contraption. The question is, how long can regimes like this perpetuate themselves? It would be great if these ugly contrivance were contained within their own borders, but current events show us they are everyone's problem.
It isn't for us to tell the Russians, or the Chinese, how to govern themselves. But we shouldn't be enabling these regimes by our trade or technology. The hope that trade and communication would make them more democratic and accountable and law-abiding has been tried, and failed. If anything, those connections are making us less democratic, as we see Chinese censorship filtering into American entertainment and marketing. It's time to decouple from these countries. Economically that's very painful, but over the long term it is much less painful than feeding these cancers.
Yes, should've just turned eyes away from genocide in Europe.
… that agreement is purely defensive.
If you and I see some vile rhetoric that is directed at someone else, we can both decide to attack it, even though it’s arguable our actions are offensive. That action is independent and not bound by the YCTO.
We just both agree, independent of the YCTO, to act.
It’s a function of like-minded values that made the decision.
1.a) NATO declared that "defense only" claim is a lie.
1.b) Other countries will now ask themselves what else in NATO charter is a lie.
2. USA, the permanent member of UN Security Council(which is de-facto enforcer of all UN decisions), severely undermined UN authority.
AFAIK, none of the NATO articles were invoked as part of the operation in Yugoslavia. That is to say, though it was a NATO operation, members were not bound by treaty to participate.
This fact muddles some of the points the author made, but the author speaks broadly of the ramifications of invoking Article 5, so I would say their analysis is well-reasoned.
I argued that both conflicts cannot be compared. USA was reactive (against the threat of 9-11), whereas Russia is proactive, invading an independent country with shallow arguments (Nato is a defense alliance that would never invade Russia, yet Putin calls Nato a threat).
Anyway, any German that is in favor of the Russian border moving closer to Germany is an idiot, and possibly too stupid and ignorant to be helped.
The USA got rid of a really bad dictator in Iraq. Ukraine's government was democratically elected and much better.
The USA did not annex Iraq (directly or by proxy), take Iraq's oil or establish permanent military bases in Iraq. Putin has explicitly said he sees Ukraine as part of a new Russian empire.
Also, you can't really compare Saddam to Zelenskyy.
The strongest argument they can make is one based on the hypocrisy of the west. (But there is a lot of truth there that's why it's strong and they use it)
It boils down to "they did it, so we should too".
It doesn't have any morality and say it's good or has any claim to noble acts. There's no positive arguments in support only negative against their enemies.
The west has the freedom mythos for people outside to believe in. Russia only had an internal facing fatherland idea. Russia does not appeal to freedom for all in its propaganda, indeed they will attack the idea of freedom as false through examples of western hypocrisy.
It's also defended, for example, by the claim that the entire world except Russia, is lying via media, corporations etc.
There are probably nuanced arguments to be made about which is worse. You could maybe argue that attacking a NATO-aligned country is more dangerous for world peace than attacking Iraq was (at least from a western perspective). You could point to the fact that there's no reason to believe Putin will stop after Ukraine if that attack goes well; his "excuse" for invading Ukraine applies to most former Soviet countries. But you don't have to defend US invasions, you can accept that at least some US invasions are bad even if you generally prefer US hegemony to Russian or Chinese hegemony (which I also do, FWIW).
However, objectively, one cannot with the same breath claim and act as if there are no other world views and values and interests (China, Russia, Middle East, etc), which is dismissed apriori or even vilified.
I wonder whether my own leanings are not just a results of the easy life (materially) which is an end result of wealth extraction by US and EU from the poorer countries (assured by policies of economic or military). When I talk to friends from the Middle East or Africa who live or lived on the other side which is used to extract wealth for the west, have very different opinion/view. One might be surprised to learn what ME average person think about a westerner (as an abstraction).
In summary, living under hegemony in prosperity (and a future assurance of it) it is easy position to defend and take security in it (and its values). However, being or living on the other side of this equation one is confronted with different view.
Non-Western non-superpowers are no more excited about being kicked around by Russia and China than Western ones. Western hegemony hasn't been all good for them, but it beats the amoral free-for-all that self-loathing Westerners wish for.
Typical Putinist deflection. Watch some talk shows on Russian TV involving him from the past decade. Whenever people question or criticize his actions, he does not answer and instead start raving on about the US this and the west that. Even if the action has nothing to do with the US or the west. It's a simple tactic to try move focus from whatever he's doing to whatever evil he thinks the west has done. He's always doing everything to paint the west in bad light; he wants people to think the west is evil, and in doing so, he's supposed to get a free pass.
I used to watch (English) Russian propaganda channels on youtube. They're all full of this. Obviously a lot of people buy it.
The reality is that whether the war in Iraq was justified or not is a completely separate discussion, and the US going to war with Iraq (whether justified or not) is not a justification for Russia going to war with Ukraine.
You can draw parallels, but that is no justification. And vague "self-interests" is no justification. Anyone who thinks USA waged war for oil is probably also condemning that war.
For another example of self-interest, Finland (together with Nazi Germany) attacked the Soviets in Continuation War in order to regain lost territory and to annex East Karelia. You can argue that's self-interest but it does not justify invasion, and I think most people condemn that offensive.
This. If all we do is justify our current actions with the past, then every country can find some historic argument for invading another country. So yes, US in Iraq means nothing for Russia attacking Ukraine, it is a red herring by Putin propaganda. It is just hard or impossible to convince those who believe in it.
Morally speaking, it's not justified for humans to keep making war
Objectively speaking, it's justified from Russia's point of view
> If all we do is justify our current actions with the past, then every country can find some historic argument for invading another country
Unfortunately, history repeats itself because human nature is difficult to change, so that's likely to happen for centuries
That is such absurd wording. It almost sounds like you're trying to make an argument but you aren't really.
You can always put it like that. "I see Russia as a security concern. Objectively speaking from my point of view Russia is a threat and we should pre-emptively nuke Moscow. It's justified from my point of view."
Hussein was actually a dictator (zelensky is .. so far .. not)
US underlying reason was more access to oil than increasing territory, it stays at the economical layer.
US freedom narrative was easier to swallow than Putin's (less poisoning of opponents, less nuclear threats)
Russia feels more corrupted and dictatorial than US ? (a bit like the point above)We need a plan now.
Wikipedia article: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_for_the_New_American_C...>
This may look like a made-up conspiracy theory, but everything was public, in the open on their official web site at the time (link at the bottom to copy on archive.org). (Oh boy, am I going to get downvoted for this ...)
You can ask how effective the US's invasion was; they spent two TRILLION in various wars in the middle east, I don't believe for a second the oil was worth it, and (from a distant armchair observation) the US had no lasting effects in their favor in the middle east; they've instead made a generation of people growing up under the Americans pissed off. To the point where I wouldn't be surprised if Russia makes a move south again.
Also some documentary makers went to interview the oppressed russian speaking 'freedom fighters' in Donbass and the main guy was a Russian coronel from Moscow who theoretically had quit the Moscow millitary before becoming a 'rebel' but seemed still pretty much loyal to and funded by Moscow.
I realize that many EU countries are also NATO countries. But still, if it was done under an EU banner, and the soldiers were not there to fight Russians, but to act as a neutral peacekeeping force. I know many of us did not expect Putin to be crazy enough to launch a full scale invasion, but is he also crazy enough that he would have attacked an EU peacekeeping force?
I realize that it's way too late to do anything about this - going in now would be seen as an attack - but still, knowing what we know now, what would have been the best possible way to try to prevent this? It might also inform what to do later, if after the dust has settled, there is still a democratic Ukraine to help.
Send in people, give them Ukrainian passports, deny everything. Not only Russia can perform false flag operations, deny responsibility and not get flak.
(The only problem being sidestepped above is that when there is a madman with nukes there is no semblance of fairness and all bets are off.)
Maybe there could have been a combined French/German (or whatever EU countries you'd like...I imagine there'd be no shortage of volunteers in the Baltic) peacekeeping force.
Imagine China would send peacekeepers to Canada to peacekeep the policing against the truckers.
No way.
The causalities you mention are happening due to accidents or sad and bad collateral damage.
They also weren't dumb enough to start a war there's no solution to, yet here we are.
Bombing Kyiv and civilians dying isn't "collateral damage", because there are no legitimate military targets in the middle of a city.
How naive can you be? Here's the grim reality: https://twitter.com/berojag59060636/status/14971314085357445...
And yet, and how could PEACEKEEPERS have stopped that?
I take the American side in most international issues but I think that's a mistake.
The analysis of how the war could have been avoided also seems lacking, in the sense that sure, there was probably nothing that could realistically have been done in the last few months. But the post itself says: "the conditions which would have resulted in a Russian invasion of Ukraine were likely decided on weeks or months ago." What could have been done differently in the last few years, even decades? I find the implied answer of "nothing" suspect.
If not for that no dictator would ever live longer then 30 minutes.
But after he renounced Ukraine's status as country and after I saw that many people protest in Russia and even part of his army is abandoning him, I'm not so sure anymore.
I haven’t heard this, what’s happening?
They were sent to Ukraine under false pretenses to gather information, later they found out a invasion was starting and they didn't want to attack Ukrainen people.
It is in Russian, but Google translate does more-or-less ok job translating it.
Note: The US's interests are not necessarily aligned with the interest of the people in the US. Also, note: I don't necessarily think this applies to Trump; I think it applies to Biden because he probably largely plays along with the institutions which exist to preserve the US's interests, while Trump didn't.
I'm not educated on the matter, all this might be wrong. I'm just some guy on the internet who pays some attention to politics. I'm also not American, I look at both the US and Russia from the outside.
I don't totally agree, Putin called this a "special operation": this is vague enough so he can claim "mission accomplished" cherry picking any "war accomplishment" he wants. To people claiming he failed his invasion, he can just say "you called it an invasion, it was never an invasion, I said it wasn't an invasion from the beginning."
He is out of moves. Putin is old but can not retire - he will lose power and will be jailed or executed for his crimes. Only one move left have a war that will keep him in control, and have population distracted. - that’s why he is so unreasonable in negotiations and ready to throw Russia’s economy under the sanctions bus. There’s no deal he will accept because any deal would mean end of war.
Likely this happens next: russians priority number 1 is to change government. They will either capture Zelensky or he will be able to escape and hide. They install puppet government. But all Ukrainians furiously hate everything about this situation. Unlike Russia where population is divided into police and brainwashed mass, in Ukraine he can not recruit police enforcers from population. So the army will stay to control the population. Indefinitely, that is until putin dies. That’s his goal right there.
If this is the goal/expected outcome, this would support the stories that this is the FSB's war and not the army's, as this sounds like an impossible task.
One of them is that Gorbachev has been promised that the NATO doesn't expand in Eastern Europe. So perhaps this is one of the causes Putin invaded Ukraine. He is afraid of the NATO and deems the EU and the USA untrustworthy partners. I don't know. Seems plausible.
https://www.infosperber.ch/politik/darum-fordert-russland-de...
Edit: This doesn't exculpate the invasion. An invasion of a country is a violation of international law. I just try to understand the rationales.
Think about this a bit more and you will realize that this explanation makes less than zero sense.
NATO members in the Baltics have bordered Russia for almost two decades with zero sign of interest in invading Russia. Even right now, in the aftermath of Russia performing imperialist conquest not seen since WW2, there is zero interest in military intervention against Russia.
Stable democracies are simply not going to go to war with a nuclear power.
> The conquest of Russia by NATO, by contrast, is the personal fear [...]
It doesn't matter what people do, it matters what people think what people do.
I know armchair generals are peeved about what's going on right now, but suggestions like this are psychotic. I urge anybody on HN who might be entertaining this idea to look at some of the numbers in this article.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanctions_against_Iraq
Putin will be fine if the Russian economy is deliberately tanked. Normal Russians won't.
This is an honest question; I don't have enough samples to draw upon. In the case of Iraq, North Korea, Venezuela, it seems like the misery just trickles down.
Czechoslovakia isn't even a country any more, which says something.
"You only have power over people as long as you don't take everything away from them. But when you've robbed a man of everything, he's no longer in your power—he's free again." -Solzhenitsyn
Czechoslovakia is two countries. They not only gained independence, they did it twice.
Russians have become accustomed to developed Western standards of living. North Koreans and most Iranians haven't.
And in line with Solzhenitsyn... Putin isn't a Grand Ayatollah or a flawless all-benevolent Juche godhead. Iran and North Korea still have something they can take away from their people.
Nobody chooses economic sanctions over armed conflict out of bloodlust.
Have a good day.
- Ukraine military equipement is aging and of Russian origin. It is mostly useless to defend oneself against Russia. One day or another an independant Ukraine would have bought military equiment to the west or China. This is inacceptable to Russia for the next reason.
- traditionnel defense paradigm of Russia is "defense in depth". Refer to Napoléon Wars or WW2 for applications of this paradigm. Since Putin seems to stick to it, Ukraine is merely a buffer for Russia, so long it is an ally. Hence the urge to replace the Ukrenian government with dummies as in Belarus.
- Allies can only have compatible weapon systems.
The Siege of Gondor writeup[1] is worth reading by itself, but I think rereading it with Putin juxtaposed to Sauron would retroactively give LotR that much more relevance and gravitas.
[1] https://acoup.blog/2019/05/10/collections-the-siege-of-gondo...
(1) Russia is a state on brink of bancrupcy. Deplatforming Russia from SWIFT, Visa, Mastercard, stopping gas pipelines, etc etc. cutting any trade swhatsover would degrade Russia's finances enough to prevernt them from being able to finance a prolongued military offensive operations. Helicopters, tanks, planes are very expensive.
(2) Russia is a also a very oligarchical state with regular people having zero power or assets. Therefore preemptive sanction should have been imposed on Russia's oligarchs in order to "motivate" them into questioning their support of Putin himself. Again degrading his ability to order risky military missions, degrading his ability for prolongued war and perhaps the oligarchs would overthrow Putin altogether. With perhaps the war itseelf already being Putin's preemptive tactic to escape being overthrown.
Forthermore, again, preemprively NATO should have supplied Ukraine with vast amounts of defensive antitank and antihelicopter weapons which wold inflict very costly damage and perhaps stop the invasion altogether - there were ideas to supply these weapons but Germany opposed.
NATO could also have ordered massive militaty training in Ukraine and again did have this idea but again Germany was against.
Proofs? AFAIK it is exact opposite: very low debt, stable source of income from resources export, large gold reserves.
70% of their trade is with Western countries [c] so if cut them off, their deficit quickly pushes them hard into debt and with no external financing they will go into internal debt. With no credibile ways to pay off debt they have hyperinflation and people on the streets demanding Putin out.
Modern war is super expensive [d]
[a] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Russia_Export_Treema... [b] https://atlas.cid.harvard.edu/explore?country=186&product=un... [c] https://atlas.cid.harvard.edu/explore?country=186&product=un...
[d] https://www.forbes.com/sites/hanktucker/2021/08/16/the-war-i...
It seems to me that the author defines Nazi as anti-Jewish, while Putin has in mind more broad definition "anti-ethnos, for any ethnos". Being Russian I'm sure that my understanding of Putin is correct. Putin talks that Ukraine supposedly anti-Russian, prosecutes and kills Russians living in Ukraine, dreams of genocide of Russians and so on.
So the argument of the article seems to be a non-sequitur. But if we defined Nazi as anti-Jewish that the argument would cease to be a non sequitur, it would be completely logical and conviencing.
But maybe I do not understand something else?
I'd like to clarify one more time, because it is a hot political topic. I do not think that Ukraine is anti-Russian-ethnos. I'm sure it is now strongly anti-Putin and even anti-Russian Federation, and rightly so. So regardless of what definition of Nazism we used, Putin declaration is a lie.
https://original.antiwar.com/rick_sterling/2022/02/24/how-th...
What's next? You're gonna claim Cuba is the fault of the Soviet union?
> But why on Earth is anyone buying into it?
Russians buy it, because their propaganda shows them enough "facts" of Ukrainians attack Russians. Outside of Russia it seems to me no one buys it.
Turns out now, that this lack of education, for lack of a better term, might be an issue. So, sincere question, what is the Russian understanding of Nazism?
Hitler was not so much against Jews he was against non-Aryan people, the group that included Jews and Russians and African, and Asian, and almost everyone.
I'm not sure is it a good definition or not, but it is how it is. I vaguely suspect that this definition even may be offensive to Jews (judging by a recent Ruby Goldberg blooper), but honestly I have no intention to be offensive, just describing how it is. And trying to understand the other point of view.
Well, first and foremost Nazi were anti-semites. All other "minor" and "undesirable" people and races came after that.
I think Putin's understanding of a "Nazi" is deeply connected to the Russian trauma of WWII that the West still doesn't get. Russians believe that due to the sheer number of lives lost, the USSR (and so Russia as its successor state) played _the_ central role in WWII. I encourage you to watch this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DwKPFT-RioU (the relevant parts start at about 4:40 and 9:40)
I personally think that it makes no sense to talk about "who made the victory" because it was an allied effort and none of the allies could have done it alone. But at the same time, I think that westerners just don't get how personal and traumatic this was for the people of Russia.
So, Putin is very sensitive to any view on WWII that differs from his. Things like "this was just two dictators (Stalin and Hitler) fighting". Or the view of some Ukrainian nationalists that the communists and the nazis were just both occupants (same view exists in Poland), or even that the nazis were liberators from communism. There's history of collaborationism in the Ukraine, as is everywhere, but not everywhere the collaborationists are viewed by a lot of people as national heroes, not as traitors who joined the aggressor (the nazis). I personally understand why this view exists, but for Putin and most Russians it's just outrageous.
So, for Putin a nazi is mostly someone who disagrees with the Russian view on the role of the USSR in WWII. That includes nationalists from countries that Putin views as satellites/buffers (ex-USSR and socialist block), but Western countries that don't get how it looks from the Russian side, even those that were allies in WWII, are also tinted with this "nazi" color.
I think there is truth to the saying that WW2 was won by English intelligence (I wpuld add stuborness), Soviet blood and American bullets (as a synonym for industrial power).
I'm not a fan of Putin's policies here, but inside Russia it's certainly not oppressive in the linguistic sense. If you agree on the unity of the state (don't want actual political independence), you're free to use your language.
Who BTW are funded and equipped with our tax dollars. Yay!
Of course it's a rotten excuse for an invasion. But I think it answer OP's question, "why on earth anyone is buying into it". People are buying into it because there's a grain of truth to it.
https://www.csis.org/features/kremlin-playbook-3
It will click why this rhetoric is used by him and also the western (extreme) right (including Trump)
> while Putin has in mind more broad definition "anti-ethnos, for any ethnos"
But: the Ukrainian government never was against any ethnic group. That is what Putin would like you to believe, but it simply isn't true. Just like the Latvian government isn't against the ethnic Russians living in Latvia (a very large fraction of the people in Latvia have Russian roots).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azov_Battalion
There are photos of them doing the Nazi salute [1] and videos of them flying the Nazi flag on the front lines. Even human rights groups have complained about the arms sales to neo-Nazis [2].
https://ukraineatwar.blogspot.com/2014/11/nazis-in-azov-batt...
https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/rights-groups-demand-isr...
Both Russia, Ukraine and Serbia have a Neo Nazi problem. But that does not justify Russia invading Ukraine.
So does the US. But in the US, neo-Nazis are not in our government, the Congress and in top military positions. They are extremely powerful in the Ukraine and are dictating policy.
No, they aren't, that's pure propaganda from Russia, which, ironically, uses international neonazis as a means of undermining other states around the world.
https://www.justsecurity.org/68420/confronting-russias-role-...
No, it doesn't. There simply aren't any in positions of significant policy influence. (The US has—although that has changed a little bit since Jan. 6, 2021 for...reasons—historically largely turned a blind eye to the much more extensive influence of neonazis in the US, where they have, among other things, deep and extensive peentration of the internal and external security services, which is one reason the US has been especially vulnerable to their use as international agents of influence by Russia under Putin.)
They wouldn't, because it wouldn't solve any problem for them. The current Ukraine government is friendly towards the US and the neonazi militias were doing the job of suppressing insurgents, largely with support from said government. The US had more than a little influence in the replacement of the previous, Russia-friendly government.
Are you sure about that?
And there's little doubt that if a country goes through a violent clash against corrupt government (see euromaidan), such groups would take the opportunity to gain standing. You can draw parallels to capitol hill events, or imagine what groups like Soldiers of Odin (the nordics) would have done had there been protests with bullets.
And when your country is invaded by a foreign nation, your army generals are not going to ask about the political opinions of those who are willing to fight for their country. A small group of nazis defending Ukraine from Russian invasion? So what. There will be nationalists standing in any country's army if they get invaded.
Talk about nazism is a mere distraction and something Putin's trolls would do. Please don't.
It's a bit more complicated than that. Ukraine has neonazi militias that enjoy some level of government support and that have been involved in violent incidents in the past. This, of course, does not justify an invasion by a foreign power. Ukraine currently ranks very low as a functional democracy (we can give them some slack on that, since they've been essentially invaded since 2014). I'm still not sure what's the upside of this for Russia, or for Putin. As the article points out, invasions take months, if not years, of planning. While the decision to stand down can be made at any point, the decision to invade has to wait for all the pieces to be in place. Whatever the end-goal is, it's not Ukraine.
> On 11 August, Azov battalion, backed by Ukrainian paratroopers, captured Marinka from pro-Russian rebels and entered the suburbs of Donetsk clashing with Donetsk People's Republic fighters.
So, I assume, the Ukraininan Nazi are killing Donetsk People's Republic fighters? This is THE crime you are talking about?
No.
Try these:
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2018/05/ukraine-attac...
https://freedomhouse.org/article/ukraine-authorities-should-...
https://khpg.org/en/1517275970
https://freedomhouse.org/article/ukraine-authorities-should-...
https://freedomhouse.org/report/analytical-brief/2018/far-ri...
I'm trying to say that this would likely happen in any country where political unrest and corruption leads to a violent change of regime. That militia formed during Euromaidan, and they are useful to the government in so far as they are against occupation by Russia. Just as Nazi Germany was useful to my country (Finland) in the second world war.
Nazi bad, but a small group with nationalistic ideals fighting for the nation doesn't mean the nation is nazi, and it would be irrational to reject the aid of such a group in the fight against occupation. It'd be good for virtue signalling at most but you don't fight a country the size of Russia or China by thoughts and prayer and virtue signalling. And I'm pretty sure Putin would have some excuse for attacking Ukraine with or without a minuscle amount of neo-nazis in the soup.
If Ireland is invaded by a giant neighbor, the government isn't going to ask their infantry whether they're nationalists before letting them fight for your country.
If Putin thinks nazis are the reason to invade a country, he ought to invade Finland too. I'd still hope our nationalist party takes up arms and goes to the front lines to defend Finland. And they should have the Government's full support in doing so.
As usual, the problem is how you deal with them later, after they got access to weapons and military training and, perhaps more dangerous, some political legitimacy as war heroes.
https://khpg.org/files/img/1394442849.jpg
Maybe if Putin would stop funding neonazi groups across Europe he'd have any credence on the matter.
Utter bullshit.
If there is any country that is instrumental in financing hate groups then it is Russia, they have their fingers in every pie that they can find.
What percentage of budget goes into Russian-majority areas? Let's say even before the whole NATO thing started in 2008.
Ukraine is not like the Nazi’s since their leader is Jewish, the opposite of being a Nazi. Hence the Putin lie.
The most important one is the promise given to Ukraine that it will enter NATO and the EU if only given enough time for implementation details, totally ignoring the needs and apprehensions of Russia next door. Which might be ok in an ideal world, but fact of the matter is that international relations are as far from an "ideal world" as one can imagine, they're one of the last, true bastions of open hobbes-ianism when it comes to politics and human relations. We needed more realists, more people willing to see things as they really were, and less idealists, less people saying things like "how can Putin not accept the sovereignty of other countries? Doesn't he know that breaks international law?"
Also, one must have the feeling that Ukraine has been a little let down by the EU and NATO in all this, especially by the EU. I can understand at this point why NATO won't get involved more than it has (I think they now see the possibility of Putin starting WW3 on the flimsiest of pretences), but imo the EU could have done so much more, at least when it comes to direct economic assistance given to Ukraine and to real economic sanctions imposed on Russia. Just two days ago the Belgians and Italians were still bickering [1] over not imposing sanctions on Russian oligarchs related to the diamond market (very strong in Belgium) and the luxury market (very strong in Italy). When you put in the balance the selling of luxury bags to some Russian oligarchs' wives vs the fate of a nation to whom you had promised the world then something is wrong, really wrong (hopefully, once the war really started a day after that those petty negotiations were put on hold)
Source: me, living in a NATO and EU member country bordering Ukraine
[1] https://twitter.com/MatinaStevis/status/1496758467943866374
Your comment history approaches deliberate misinformation. This is an example. NATO admission was never promised. The consultation process was all but abandoned over a decade ago, before Putin rolled into Crimea.
NATO reaffirmed that “Ukraine will become a member of the Alliance with the Membership Action Plan (MAP)", which is the most traction on the topic since 2008.
In 2016, Ukraine was granted the Comprehensive Assistance Package (CAP), comprising the advisory mission at the NATO Representation to Ukraine as well as 16 capacity-building programmes and Trust Funds. And in 2018, Ukraine was officially given an aspiring member status.
I found this article to be informative:
https://euromaidanpress.com/2021/06/15/the-2021-brussels-nat...
You can read it yourself from the 2021 NATO statement, unless you think the NATO website is another shill. See section 69.
It corroborates my earlier statements.
Poor Ukraine people. They're between two fires.
Your comment is too sided, US to good to have secret services that influence elections elsewhere (after all, it never happened :) )
But in this case, the commenter suggests that the US was already attempting to overthrow the Ukrainian government?? That’s complete conspiracy and certainly deserves a downvote. Not only is there no evidence to support the claim, it doesn’t even fit anyone’s narratives (except perhaps Russia’s) about US/Ukrainian relationships. It just doesn’t make any sense in relation to US politics, especially considering the current leadership was elected in a landslide and is already relatively pro-EU/pro-NATO.
Compare to, say, Iraq, and you can see how that would fit into US politics much better.
Is it outside of the realm of possibilities? Of course not, but at least provide some kind of theory or narrative and phrase it as conjecture instead of just tossing it out as a conspiracy.
And no, NATO members - which Ukraine is not - are not US territory. That's reality.
I mean, I understand it's a hot topic, but interpreting every sentence literally just to say "you're wrong" isn't very fair.
Quite
> They're between two fires.
No, there is only one fire.
Russian living in Russia here. I don't know anyone around me who supports this. Many people in Russia have friends or relatives in Ukraine and we are horrified about what is happening right now.
You should despise them.”
Precisely.
Source: https://www.npr.org/2022/02/24/1082954761/republicans-are-co...
Link to footage: https://twitter.com/american_bridge/status/14966827592087756...
If admiration, cheerleading, and calling an invader "smart" - isn't support... What is?
Trump is obviously detached and breezy here. Irreverently honest, like a comedian doing a bit. Better it make you think, than make you mad at the messenger.
If you admire someone and they did the smart thing - it means you would have done it, too, or else you're stupid.
If you would've done it - you obviously support it.
> And he’s gonna go in and be a peacekeeper…We could use that on our southern border
Oh, I can believe that Trump is being irreverently honest, just like your uncles, but I doubt your uncles are vying to be re-elected into a position that gives them the power to do such a thing.
It was sarcasm. Here's what he said:
Speaking with conservative podcaster Buck Sexton, the former president said: 'I went in yesterday and there was a television screen, and I said, "This is genius,"' Trump recalled. 'Putin declares a big portion of the Ukraine — of Ukraine -- Putin declares it as independent. Oh, that's wonderful.'
'I said, "How smart is that?'" the former U.S. president continued. 'And he’s gonna go in and be a peacekeeper. That’s the strongest peace force… We could use that on our southern border. That’s the strongest peace force I’ve ever seen. There were more army tanks than I’ve ever seen. They’re gonna keep peace all right.'
I get why so many people find Mearsheimer's reasoning to be correct - it really fits Russia and the wordviews of Russian ruling class (Post WWII upbringing in a totalitarian state + professional deformation of intelligence officers). However, it's limiting in the same way the whole Offensive Realism theory is. Let me try to explain. I'll use "Putin" as a substitute for "Russian government and ruling class" below.
Yes, Putin sees NATO as an existential threat, even though he understands there's no real risk of any military action coming from NATO unless provoked. Yes, Putin wants "regional hegemony" and thus wants to get to control Ukraine, probably indirectly, by almost any means.
But the war in the Ukraine only makes NATO stronger? Yes, however, the threat from NATO, as Putin sees it, is not only military, it's also cultural. Even though his actions will probably lead to Finland and Sweden, for example, to join NATO in the nearest future, those countries are already classified as "the West" so their military status is of lesser concern. Ukraine, on the other hand, has extremely strong (probably, the strongest of all other countries, Belarus being the second contender) cultural ties with Russia, this includes family ties, language, traditions of policy practice, etc.
Why does Putin care about cultural changes in neighbouring sovereign countries? This is where offensive realism falls short. The answer is internal politics. The main motivation for Putin is self-preservation. Ukraine "choosing West" is unacceptable for Putin, as if it works out even slightly net-positive for Ukraine it will be almost impossible to maintain the illusion it can't ever work in Russia.
If it's so important for Putin, why didn't he do it 8 years ago? You can take only so much risk and economic damage. Annexing Crimea was a guaranteed easy and swift operation and it didn't look like a military intervention for the Russian people, which is good for the ratings. As the consequences hit Russian economy pretty hard, it took whole last 8 years to hammer down to the population it's all "our enemy's fault". It also took 8 years to explain to the business elites "the confrontation with the West is for real, prepare".
But the economic damage? Putin's well off regardless. Prosperity of Russians is of no concern - Venezuela shows how low you can go and still keep your seat. Poor people and non-existent middle-class means less political activity, which is a bonus.
Speaking of elites, there were some rumours of a considerable dissatisfaction with the economic situation and the lack of the development momentum brewing up lately. Making all the top officials and close businesses complicit in War and some of them receiving direct losses from the sanctions leaves them no choice but to double down on supporting Putin's regime, as there's no alternative for them. This could also additionally explain the timing for the decision to break the status quo, but we have no info on this.
So, to sum up:
- No NATO in the Ukraine means you fully control the region. This is a good feeling for the paranoid character.
- War means mobilization and mutual responsibility of the elites, which is essential to maintaining the mafia state.
- Economic damage to Russia will totally obscure the poor management of the Russian economy by Putin's government and total incompatibility of the policies with economic growth for most of the citizens.
- Preventing the sovereignty of culturally close countries means Russia looks the strongest and the most successful of the bunch and this is good for the general support.
- Putin personally is a violent bully, his close company are mostly the same. You need to demonstrate the decisiveness for violence to be on top.
- Putin might be additionally stimulated by his messianic delusions of restoring USSR being the prime directive of old-school KGB officers. Although, it's impossible to know the truth here.
The only serious risk Putin took is with his own people: did he manage to dumb and oppress us all down to accept and offensive War and still maintain the required level of support? Only time will tell.
I personally despise it all. I saw the writing on the wall but couldn't believe it, a fool. Now I can only hope. Peace.
Since I've written it, Putin threatened with nukes to Finland and Sweden in case they join NATO. I don’t believe in my predicting ability anymore, so I can only hope it's a bluff.
Actually, we did. NATO – and especially US intelligence – was remarkably effective at predicting what Putin had planned before he did it, down to predicting the day the assault would begin.<
After Iraq, Afghanistan, etc, there was no reason to trust western intelligence just for 1 second.
What was special about Iraq was that there was conflicting intelligence, the WMD inspectors had it right, and Colin Powell lost the respect of the rest of the world when it turned out that he'd effectively lied.
As for Afghanistan, that was/is an outright failure, but still not enough to automatically disbelieve everything that comes out of the intelligence services.
The important thing is to realize that intelligence can be wrong.
If this analogy seems unrealistic to you, try replace Mexico with Cuba. Could two independent countries (USSR and Cuba) agreed to place nukes close to US borders in the 60's? Legally, sure they can. Does US agree with it? Even if WW3 was the case they will never allowed it.
Same thing now with Ukraine. If Ukraine joins NATO, their troops will be on russia south border, which is unacceptable for Russia. And russian government thinks about it as an existential threat. Invasion is the direct result of failed negotiations between Russia and NATO about Ukraine neutrality.
Ukraine has no chance of joining NATO too (and never did while the conflict in eastern Ukraine continued). NATO troops are already on their borders in the Baltics. Invasion is the result of Putin's delusional idea of wanting to make Russia great again USSR style because if he wanted them to never join NATO all he had to do was continue the conflict in eastern Ukraine.
Then why not declare it on paper with both Ukraine and NATO guarantees? That's all Russia wanted during negotiations last few months.
> NATO troops are already on their borders in the Baltics.
Yes, and Russia been told for many years it will not happen. That's why Russia now wants it to be legally declared. Not just promise.
It is on paper that they cannot join while in active conflict?
> Yes, and Russia been told for many years it will not happen. That's why Russia now wants it to be legally declared. Not just promise.
Gorbachev himself admitted there was no such formal agreement.
"There would be no extension of NATO’s jurisdiction for forces of NATO one inch to the east," Secretary of State James A. Baker told Mr. Gorbachev in 1989
The National Defense archives of George Washington University declassified this discussion on 12 December 2017. You can look it up.
If you extend your analogy with the US behaving like Russia towards its neighbors, perhaps Russian forces on Mexican borders would sound perfectly fair.
After the US invaded Mexico, killed off political and cultural elite, and started colonizing it with american resettlers to eradicate Mexican culture, but Mexico somehow regained independence, would it really sound so strange if Mexico started seeking alliance with China to prevent it from happening again?
I'm not support this war in any sense. But at least I understand the reasons behind it.
I'm actually not awared of any sign of genocide from russians to ukranians (and vice verse). If you do, plese enlight me.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor, followed by suppression of Ukrainian culture until 1991.
Russia continues to deny Holodomor to this day, and in the recent speech Putin called the whole idea of Ukrainian independence a fiction, and now he has declared a war on Ukraine. I don't see how this has any similarities to US-Mexico relations. Does the US deny that Mexico has the right to exist and is it preparing to wage a war on Mexico to replace its government and absorb the country?
Yes, Holodomore did happened, and like it mentioned in the article it was only a part of a huge Soviet famine of 1932–1933 which affected not only ukranians but almost all nations in the south part of USSR including russians.
It's a shame that modern Russia not recognized this as a genocide, and not only ukranian genocide. Because it really happened. 100 years ago. Under USSR and Joseph Stalin.
So, if that is a valid point for Ukraine to join NATO now, would it be fair to Mexico to join Russia Military Alliance, because they will tell the world, they suddenly afraid of USA expansion and following culture suppression? I mean, what USA did to native americans.
Absolutely not, and Ukraine has all the legal rights to do it. But that changes nothing to Russian perspective. Russia just will not allowed it. Same as US not allowed Cuba to place soviet nukes no matter what.
Then this perspective needs to change to accommodate valid concerns of others, too.
Really an excellent talk, and one of the most insightful things I have heard so far about this whole Ukraine situation. Thank you for sharing this.
This is a little bit of a let down. "It happened because Putin wanted it to happen".
Looking at the way Putin talks and behaves, his actions are like actions of a child who has a tantrum. He's very emotional, probably someone pissed him off very much on an inner child level. Maybe someone threatened taking his toys away. The man seems to be very irrational, he says words that to him are reasonable, but they're so shallow that someone with half a brain can read through it in a split-second.
I think this is all personal. There could be things happening within a very small circle of people causing his childish reaction. We have to remember that those at the top of world politics know each other for decades. Putin ain't a superhuman, he's simply like a 12 year old bully but unfortunately he has 850k active military personnel, a fuck-ton of tanks, artillery and air force.
Without justifying anything Putin has done, let's consider an alternative narrative. Let's accept that what American intelligence is saying, that he was preparing this for 15 or 20 years. Putin once before the invasion said something along the lines that "Americans (rest of the world?) have done similar things". Maybe his actions are as simple as "look, they've done it so many times and THEY won't let ME do X, they profited here and there and they forbid me from doing the same, I will show them" where that X maybe even wasn't about Ukraine in the first place? Although, it probably was. He watched USSR collapse under drunk Yeltsin.
But from Putin's perspective: Iraq and Afghanistan under Bush and co. Unjustified war backed by totally falsified evidence, no idea how a regular person in the USA benefits from those but I'm sure military industry made a killing on it. Iraq alone was, depending on the source, from 460k to over 1m "excessive casualties".
Libya? What was the point? Proxy war in Syria? What's the point? Are the alternatives we have now better?
I'm not saying "but look what the other side did", whataboutism isn't what I'm doing here. I'm saying: this is how Putin maybe sees it.
As Putin was getting more and more isolated, he felt ignored, frustrated, angry. That he cannot finish his plan because the guard has changed and those who did similar things alongside him are no longer in power. And like an ignored and frustrated bully, he waited around the bush and smacked the victim right in the nose. Unfortunately, this victim is the people of Ukraine and the smack is tanks and bombs.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to downplay how severe this situation is. Innocent people suffer and die. Putin is a criminal and he will be remembered for all the wrong reasons. He will stand in the same line as Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, and the rest from this list: https://www.scaruffi.com/politics/dictat.html.
What it does seem to leave out is that Cuban Missle Crisis argument:
Wouldn't the U.S., too, consider military intervention if a direct neighbor country of the U.S. was preparing to essentially become a base for Russian missiles?
This article here [1] makes that point. And some commenters here have also made similar comparisons.
The question here is not if Putin's actions can be "excused". Let's not make the mistake of thinking that to explain someone's behavior was equal to approving of it.
On the contrary. No amount of disapproval will have any effect unless one first has a good handle on what is truly causing that behavior. And telling yourself stories like that the other party is just "a bad person" or is just "acting irrationally" are really just a band-aid on one's own helplessness. They can comfort, but they distract from defusing the actual problem.
One can say that Putin is just following a kind of salami tactic. Taking one small slice after another, making sure that each individual slice is small enough for him to get away with it. Just like Hitler did in 1938 (and before, internally, in 1933).
But I do find that the counter-point also "computes". Namely that Putin's main goal is to stay in power. And that he feels threatened in this regard by an ever-encroaching NATO at his borders. And that he isn't acting much different than Kennedy acted in 1962, when nuclear war became a possibility because the U.S. could not tolerate Russian missiles at their doorstep, in Cuba.
The blog I linked to also points out another curious similarity. The crisis in 1962 was defused by Kennedy agreeing to withdraw U.S. missiles from Turkey. But this concession had to be made in secret, without the public's knowledge. Because any concessions to Russia would have been political suicide.
And I do find that a little odd. I mean, take marriage counseling. That you have to compromise, and take at least part of the responsibility for the problem, that is the only thing that can save a relationship. That other strategy, where you claim you are right and the other person is wrong, that is called stonewalling. And if you do that, the relationship is fucked.
It is one thing to say "What you're doing inside of your country is not democratic, and we don't like it". But to translate this into "We're not going to make any concessions, ever, because doing that would mean that we become like you" - that's irrational. Making concessions to a dictator doesn't necessarily mean giving up democratic values. But a refusal to even discuss ways of compromise does.
When everybody seems to agree that Putin is "just another Hitler", and opinions that do try to make sense of the situation do not get discussed, but flagged and ousted instead, that does make me concerned.
When a question becomes taboo, we're no longer being that free and democratic society that we're claiming to protect.
I do not know what the right answer is. But I do think that this one question should not be brushed aside, but openly discussed. Which is: What merit, if any, is there to the claim that the actions of NATO and the U.S. are putting Putin in a position where what we're seeing now becomes inevitable when you factor in his need for self-preservation?
And sure, I get it: Dictators shouldn't want to preserve their power. Just as thieves shouldn't steal. But they do. This is the real world. That Putin will act in ways that preserve his power is a known fact which any rational actor cannot leave out of his calculations.
I admit, there's a fine line between not pushing a dictator into a corner and provoking an escalation on the one hand, and drawing clear boundaries without falling prey to salami tactics on the other. Everyone who is a parent here knows what I'm talking about.
Thanks for the discussion.
[1] https://lt3000.blogspot.com/2022/02/russia-update-road-to-wa...
Not comparable examples, because no-one's parking missiles in Ukraine. The goal of Ukraine's NATO membership is to obtain a political deterrence against Russian invasion.
Eastern European countries so far have no missiles, and not even any meaningful presence of foreign troops after 20 years of membership.
Russian propaganda has sidetracked everyone into talking about Russian security when Russia has been the main agressor in the region for the longest time. What about everyone else, don't they deserve the same considerations? Why must we accept Russian wars on peaceful countries in Europe and yet defense cooperation with their victims is frowned upon? Isn't it a bit insane?
On the contrary. What I'm seeing is that it is politically incorrect to even mention the idea that Putin might be not just crazy, or that someone else in his shoes might be tempted to do the same thing.
Make no mistake. I don't like what Russia is doing one bit. My investments are down by several hundred thousand dollars. And I consider myself lucky that this is the only impact that situation is having on me, so far. The idea of war in Europe scares me. I wish none of that craziness was happening.
They held a referendum.[1]
> Over the weekend, citizens in two east Ukrainian regions overwhelmingly voted to become independent in a referendum that only the Kremlin seems to be on board with. Separatists in Donetsk and Luhansk report that 89 percent and 96 percent, respectively, said they wanted to break free of Kiev's authority.
You may not like the results and might have issues with the process, but to claim that the majority oppose secession is a joke.
No country in the world will tolerate secessionist sentiment in any part of it and will prevent it with all its might. If it has the ability. In this case, Ukraine doesn't.
[1] Referendum on Self-Rule in Ukraine 'Passes' with Over 90% of the Vote (https://web.archive.org/web/20160304070829/http://www.thewir...)
The issues with the process include (among many other issues) the fact that the borders that the separatists claim and to which they claim these referenda apply (and whose borders have been recognized by Russia, though given the decapitation strike Russia is making on Ukraine, that’s less important than it would otherwise be) are much larger than the areas they actually controlled at the time and conducted them in.
You need to stop trying to understand it, and take it for what it is. A long staged military invasion of a country Russia been attacking for 8 years.
Act accordingly.
Analysis paralysis is what Russian KGB actively tries to cause in the West, and no wonder they fund tons of garbage think tanks to pump what is called "фуфло" https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Fuflo . It's jamming basically, but for the brains of people in power. Mental warfare.
Eastern portion of Ukraine is heavily in favor of joining Russia as most speak Russian while he central and western parts want to join the EU but this is largely a one sided love affair. EU has repeatedly stalled and delayed Ukraine's membership seeing that it would be the second poorest member state after Greece, and thus would be against the interest of Germany, who stand to gain a lot by using Russia's gas pipeline.
Enter Maidan revolution, while not outright instigated by the US, one does raise questions about the role of Facebook in previous revolutions namely the Arab Spring movement, Syrian rebellion, etc, and how quickly they were able to spread a the Maidan propaganda that EU/NATO membership was imminent when it couldn't be further from the truth.
The 2014 invasion was relatively well restrained campaign at reminding who the master of Ukraine is which was promptly ignored by the following administrations. Rather than choose peace with Russia by remaining neutral, they chose to go down the impossibly difficult act of trying to gain NATO membership with a border dispute in Donetsk/Lukansk region.
It might very well be said that Putin planned to take Ukraine anyways and 2014 was a test run and a good platform to encircle and hook into Moldova, another potential hotspot. The fact remains that leaving the Ukraine flatlands to NATO troops would open up Moscow to an indefensible flank, the upkeep cost of maintaining a wide frontline the size of Ukraine-Russia border would bankrupt Russia.
Simply put the cost of inaction was calculated to be far greater than the risk of action.
Imagine if you will, Mexico wanted to join China's security umbrella and it was receiving Chinese troops, tanks, hardware right across the US-Mexico border. Next Canada joins the party.
How quickly do you think the US would put down such strategic positioning?
WTF? Ukraine is a sovereign nation.
> Eastern portion of Ukraine is heavily in favor of joining Russia
This is factually incorrect, even today, and it was always so.
http://www.ifes.org/sites/default/files/2014_ukraine_survey_...
There is plenty of disinformation around this subject but the whole idea that one day the Donbas region decided that it wanted to join Russia and that those pesky Ukrainians in the Western part of the country wouldn't let them is bogus.
To simply whip out a PDF and scream disinformation seem awfully short sighted way to influence people's opinions especially because it is condescending to the average HN user who has access to a plethora of fact finding search engines and social media to judge what the truth is.
It's up to the readers to gather information themselves and find the truths, not have it shoved down their throat in some emotional mania state of us vs them primal instincts.
Ukraine was never part of the West and it can never be if you understand the military strategic value of its flatlands.
You mean: like Latvia. Where it works just fine.
> To simply whip out a PDF and scream disinformation seem awfully short sighted way to influence people's opinions especially because it is condescending to the average HN user who has access to a plethora of fact finding search engines and social media to judge what the truth is.
Yes, the truth is: the Eastern part of Ukraine was the poorest, mostly because of the flow of capital going West-to-East, like in most countries that border even poorer countries to their East and richer countries to their West.
> It's up to the readers to gather information themselves and find the truths, not have it shoved down their throat in some emotional mania state of us vs them primal instincts.
Ah, the 'do your own research' bit. Yes, I remember that from some other context.
> Ukraine was never part of the West and it can never be if you understand the military strategic value of its flatlands.
The same was said of Poland and of the Baltics.
But it's clear what your angle is.
As for self determination: as long as it isn't financed and pushed by a foreign adversary I say have at it. But in the case of Ukraine it is pretty clear who was pulling those strings.
The problem is that NATO and the West lost so much credibility in the last decades that we stand on shaky ground when we oppose moves such as Putin's. The West invaded Afghanistan and Iraq, especially the latter one was totally unjustified. We happily deal with Saudi Arabia and support their war in Yemen. Spain can crack down on their Catalonian independence movement as much as they want, including blocking voting access with police. The EU lets, literally, drown poor people in the Mediterranean. I could go on. Thing is, Russia has no right whatsoever to invade Ukraine. The question is, what is the world going to do about it?
Might is pretty thin ice, here, they didn't and they don't.
> Everybody is pulling strings in Ukraine, the Maidan revolution was supported by the West, the separatists are supported by Russia, organized crime is supporting corruption. And now?
The separatists are a small fraction (best estimates around 23%) in the East and without Russian support they would have been overrun long ago.
> The problem is that NATO and the West lost so much credibility in the last decades that we stand on shaky ground when we oppose moves such as Putin's.
No, the problem is that NATO is a very blunt weapon that doesn't really work well against nuclear armed dictators.
> The West invaded Afghanistan and Iraq, especially the latter one was totally unjustified.
Agreed.
> We happily deal with Saudi Arabia and support their war in Yemen.
Again, agreed.
> Spain can crack down on their Catalonian independence movement as much as they want, including blocking voting access with police.
Agreed again.
> The EU lets, literally, drown poor people in the Mediterranean. I could go on.
And again. But: even if you could go on, you shouldn't because none of these have anything to do with Russia invading Ukraine.
> The question is, what is the world going to do about it?
Apparently, not a whole lot and it bothers me quite a bit.
>> Apparently, not a whole lot and it bothers me quite a bit.
Me too.
> And again. But: even if you could go on, you shouldn't because none of these have anything to do with Russia invading Ukraine.
Well, I think it does. Because doing the same (TM) thing all over the world, although for different (official) reasons, limits your credibility when you criticize others. And it makes it so much easier for, in this case Putin, to pain the West as the true aggressor (which, in this case, is wrong). In the war of disinformation it doesn't matter so. And it opens up venues within Western society to create, as limited as it might be, support for Russia's actions. There have already been the first demonstrations in Germany with people carrying pro-Putin slogans.
Half of Ukraine speaks Russian, including most of Kyiv. It wasn't looked down until Russia started the aggression. If anything western Ukraine (being less wealthy) was stereotypized as less developed and Ukrainian language was associated with that.
It became fashionable for Russian speaking Ukrainians to switch to speak Ukrainian after 2014 which is understandable.
In short you're wrong about almost everything.
> Ukraine was never part of the West and it can never be if you understand the military strategic value of its flatlands.
Ukraine was part of the west for over 300 years and why should it matter anyway? Ukrainians have the right to decide what they want to do.
Since more than one thing can be, and usually is, true at the same time, I think one part is exactly as you described. The other is that Putin simply really wants Ukraine back in the fold, among other countries that used to be part if the USSR.
Again, all of that is just a, potential, explanation. It is not, by any means, an excuse or justification.
The idea that Putin wants to reclaim the former USSR border is ludicrous to me because it would mean raiding his own coffers.
He comes across as an opportunistic and a highly adventurous individual focused on wealth building.
I don't know if you read Alex Litvenenko's book but Putin's roots, his associates and friends, wealth was his end goal from the start. Why someone like him would be considered to be capable of empire building (when he could barely contain Chechnya) is beyond me.
Putin is a thug and he cares more about his wealth than the interest of his own country, and the #1 threat to him isn't sanctions but Hague trials.
There is overwhelming evidence that Putin was responsible for the apartment bombings (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_apartment_bombings), and if the truth came out, it wouldn't be his own people that take him down alone but the combined threat of NATO military action and an emboldened local populace.
Again I am not a psychologist but someone this selfish and material focused (his stupid Versailles 2.0 project that went to crap) is simply NOT interested in restoring USSR glory or anything like that but rather like any good capitalist, obsessed with maintaining his wealth.
https://lt3000.blogspot.com/2022/01/us-vs-russia-geopolitics...
Given that it's now obvious that Russia in fact has been planning an invasion of the Ukraine, for months, which furthermore undermines the author's later claim that there was some peaceful concession that Putin would've accepted... I'm not sure why I should take this author's argument seriously. They seem naive and under informed.
Also I have no intention of backing a country like Russia but I also don't feel any sort of ideological camaraderie just because I am from the West. This coldness is largely how I deal with human attrocities, I take the emotion out of it and reduce biases to accurately gauge reality.
Can't do that when you let somebody tell you what is propaganda or an entire country are the baddies and we are the goodies....I mean that was fun in high school but surely you realize the duality and hypocritical nature of our modern reality....or at least might have been too much to ask during the war itself.
Perhaps when Ukraine becomes part of Russia which it inevitably will be through a forced federalization, will it strike just how badly the Ukranian leadership screwed up in misjudging Ukraine's geopolitical importance—if not obvious from the West's lack of military reaction.
I'm sorry but Ukraine does not produce any derivative goods like Taiwan's semiconductor industry which is of critical strategic importance to the West and one which US signaled military action against China in the event Xi tries to take it.
Great. Do you see the missiles sent in from the territory of Russia to blow stuff up in Ukrain? Or the Russian tanks moving about in Ukraine? Or the Russian attack helicopters delivering troops to Ukraine?
It is happening because someone controlling the Russian military ordered it to happen.
If you have to twist your mind into pretzels to explain that this all happened because Russia felt so threatened that they had no other choice then have at it. There is no rational basis for that.
> entire country are the baddies and we are the goodies
That is ridiculous and nobody said anything like that in the whole thread.
I’m totally fine for criticizing the OP in factual, political, or ideological terms, but think that shrugging these comments off as “disinfo” actually deter any civil debate and actively increase the amount of hysteria among people and make things worse (you’ve said you’ve been all day on social media… maybe this is why you’re currently overtly hysterical about paid state actors on the Internet?)
Funny how everybody is playing the "China in Mexico" strawman. Typical of propaganda talking points.
But please tell me again how bombing Kyiv has anything to do with "liberating" the eastern regions
> But please tell me again how bombing Kyiv has anything to do with "liberating" the eastern regions
This is a gross extrapolation based on your own conjectures at this point. I did not justify the bombing of Kyiv, more simply pointing out that your own emotional response towards Russia is creating blindspots in your ability to rationally figure out why a conflict is happening now suddenly.
The fact that Russia cannot "make friends" without stepping on their throat explain how they think Mexico could entertain something as having a Chinese base on it and their corresponding reaction. It's how bullies justify their behaviour.
> This is a gross extrapolation
It is what is happening right now. In the same way the discourse last week was "Russia would not invade" and "they are mere military exercises in Belarus"
I do understand why this is necessary so, because without unity those conflicts tend to be so much easier to loose. Again, as always, I don't justify Putin's actions here. I try understand hos motivation so, and political leadership around the globe should too, because if it works he won't stop. And Ukraine isn't the only region with disputed borders and conflicting territorial interests involving nuclear powers. If we want to find peaceful solutions for those conflicts, we need to understand them first. Just saying "other side evil and crazy, we good" is too shallow.
I simply understand geopolitics as a game of power and its easier for me to characterize nations as weaker vs stronger in terms of geopolitical capital when I'm describing my ideas, and some people might have been off put at my description of Ukraine as slave caught between two masters.
Nice attempt at justifying imperialism.
Imagine how much raping, murdering and pillaging the US would have to do beforehand to force Canada seek isolation from the US at all cost.
Whataboutists always seem to forget Russia's past actions. EE countries seeking security guarantees is not something that happened in vacuum.
So were the Nazis, though.
I'm not arguing that Ukraine's government are "Nazis", just that despots and extremists can be elected too...
Also they want to join EU (as all nazis do of course).
Meanwhile actually nationalist and imperialist Putin invaded 3 different countries during his 22 years of governing Russia. And he hasn't held fair elections there for a long time.
So yeah Ukraine is nazi.
And CNN doesn't set policy or make people say fascist things.
That is not an actual full truth there. First, there was considerable threat of violence and violence in an attempts to prevent wrong people from voting in those elections.
Second, the actual takeover of power after election did not respected German constitution at the time. And that vote was done with brownshirts lining up around the room, ready to physically attack.
When you visit the Reichstag in Berlin you can see all the postboxes of past members of parliament, including people like Göring and Hitler. Because the first time they were elected legitimately. After that, and until the formation of the BRD, those boxes show a gap for obvious reasons.
We would all do ourselves a favor by acknowledging the fact that the Nazis were, at one point, a legitimate political party in a legitimate democracy. Because there are a lot of lessons to be drawn from that very fact.
One of their tactics was considerable amount of street violence, both during elections to prevent wrong people from voting and to make them afraid of voting for wrong party. And also considerable violence to create chaose that would need order. People like to pretend those were normal elections to make a point about fragility of democracy. But, the real point is maybe that parties that are violent before getting power continue to be violent after.
And maybe that another point is that threats and violence around election day and toward voters matter - and makes those elections not really free.
Afaik, there was no similar violence and threats in Ukraine. Their elections and Nazi elections were not comparable. Weinmar with all its political violence for years (and not just from nazi) is not comparable to Ukraine before Russian invasion either.
The true violence campaign happened during the second election so. Which is the reason this election isn't considered legitimate anymore. And 30 % would make them a contender to form a coalition government in modern day Germany, just for perspective.
I don't really think this is true. Nazi party itself behaved differently in different elections.
Don't fall for the Russian divide and conquer strategy and look for imaginary complexity when the reasons are simple. Putin has stolen what he can from the Russian people and now he tries to steal what he can from Ukraine just as Hitler and Stalin did before him. And every Russian that is not on the streets protesting this war, either out of cowardice or because they support it (and don't be fooled, a lot of them do) is guilty of waging an expansionist, criminal war.