Right now, for better or worse, Ukraine is fighting for the whole of Europe and maybe for the world's future. The fact that they are alone and we aren't doing anything to help them will hunt Western (and NATO) countries forever.
Other nations have been training Ukrainian Troops and supplying Stinger missiles and so on. Lots of diplomacy and financial sanctions happening.
The step to actually involve an external Army in killing Russian soldiers has big ramifications that shouldn't be ignored.
With friends like Germany, who needs enemies.
Natural gas is also quite common in germany for building heating + cooking.
But for the record, Putin has shown himself to have little regard for anything besides ending up in the history books next to Stalin & Hitler.
This is all very reminiscent of "Hillary is just as bad as Trump". Seems to be a common logical fallacy that you can't have something that is better than the alternative but still not good enough.
Instead people have to exaggerate to make the better one just as bad, which then has the implicit claim that the worse one is just the same as the better one in this metric.
Whatever Germany is doing or not doing, it seems unlikely to approach the same level as invading Ukraine and killing a whole bunch of people.
I am however pointing out that Germany is delaying and holding back the response to a European country being invaded.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/with_friends_like_these_who_n...
"An expression indicating that one's close associates prove more adversarial than one's opponents."
Probably just an unconscious idiom, but the use of the word "enemy" in context of an invasion seemed to be a bit too loaded a term.
Threaten to cut them off from SWIFT and kick them out of NATO. Their military is a joke, and they're clearly freeloading.
Hopefully anonymous and independent hackers don't escalate to infrastructure attacks.
A lot of that has been too little, too late (e.g. last minute transfers of some equipment). Some of it was an embarrassment (Germany sending hats).
IIRC, the US gives far more military assistance to Israel than it ever has to Ukraine. In retrospect, that really should have changed circa 2014. Most of Europe continues to live in a fantasy-land where war is unthinkable and Putin cares about the easy half-measures they're willing to take.
Putin's done a bully thing by making one of his demands that his victims be kept weak. The Western powers more or less obliged him.
https://twitter.com/kasparov63/status/1496865471995523080?s=...
Kasparov wrote the book "Winter is Coming" back in 2015.
I understand somewhat US not doing much of anything militarily speaking, and it's nothing new: happened before, it's precisely why Putin does it: he dares the west to do something, because (and this is the bigger, more overlooked picture) he knows he's mainly there to play a role: to distract the west from Taiwan, Kazakhstan[people already forgot about this one, it's critical for China's development of the 'Silk road' train route], etc. If sh1t hits the fan, he also knows China backs Putin.That's why also the Chinese are threatening TW lately: the western leadership(Biden, Germany's Scholz,somewhat even Boris & Macron) is weaker right now.
There are still other sanctions that can be applied. Removal from the Swift network is probably the nuclear option in terms of financial sanctions. But, Germany and Italy (at least), as of yesterday, were opposed because of the likely impact on their own economies.
> * Ukraine is not a NATO ally, and the alliance is not treaty-bound to protect it.*
I suspect risking a military engagement between NATO and Russia would be to risk a world war.
As disgusting and insane as this invasion of Ukraine is, the current state of European treaties would not necessitate a world war as an outcome.
Putin, the evil war making scum that he is, has been explicit for DECADES that the armament and NATO flirtation with Ukraine is completely unacceptable to Russia, Russia sees Ukraine as a buffer zone against the West, and that Ukraine belongs in the Russian sphere of influence. History does not disagree with him. Ukraine was for centuries part of the Russian empire and then the Soviet Union. Ukraine has a large population of ethnically and/or culturally Russian peoples. All of these facts have been known and communicated for many years. In fact, these are some of the reasons Ukraine has never been on the path to NATO membership.
In other words, while we can and should condemn Russia's invasion of Ukraine, it does not, per se, set us on a deterministic path to a world war.
Quoting Obama circa 2016:
"The fact is that Ukraine, which is a non-NATO country, is going to be vulnerable to military domination by Russia no matter what we do."
Russia has consistently announced that it will invade Ukraine to stop NATO membership.
NATO has consistently announced that it will not defend Ukraine, but it is Ukraine's' decision if it wants to be a member.
You might not like the situation (I don't), but the cards have always been on the table.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukraine%E2%80%93NATO_relations
War is about resources and control. That's it. There are no "good/bad" guys (or more specifically they're all "bad" guys). We're not participating in some grand moral struggle, we're taking calculated risks to maximizes gains when the opportunity appears and minimize losses when we have no other options.
For the last 70 years world power has be set so there was primarily one global hegemon (the US) so there was not much movement on the world stage among powerful nations. Economic strategies remained the safest way to control resources among world powers, but military actions still dominated in cases of extreme power asymmetry. The US has been invading and bombing countries and regions virtually continuously for the last few decades.
The resource situation is starting to change, so risks that made no sense suddenly start to seem more reasonable. But absolutely none of what we're seeing now has anything to do with some silly narrative about NATO powers and Russia. Russia has ceased the opportunity of low risk acquisition of resources, NATO powers have worked to minimize their own loses given the risk of any major action is high.
As resources grow more scare we'll see increased military conflict. The severity of which will be proportional to the scarcity. None of this will "haunt" anybody, it's just a game to survive which as been fairly easy the last few decades and that is changing.
I suppose that includes the one you just spent five paragraphs expounding upon?
> NATO powers have worked to minimize their own loses given the risk of any major action is high.
NATO is avoiding short term losses to risk long term ones.
They are part of the ways power maintains power. Every first king is just a warlord, a thug more brutal than the rest, and after defeating their enemies they suddenly declare the role of king is ordained by the god(s) and to challenge it is heresy. They set up the notion that rulers are more noble than common men, which is why they should rule over them and control the land. In later years they will use these tools to again convince their people to fight for them in the name of "country" or some other such notion.
And what peoples are against "freedom"? Do you really believe terrorists attacked the US because they "hate our freedoms?" No, it's because the US systemically destroyed their homelands, denied them of their own freedoms, and forcibly took their resources. But when you fill your gas tank you aren't comfortable recognizing that a hidden part of the price of the gas is the civilians murdered so you could have it.
I'm endlessly surprised to see educated adults buying into the stories will tell children about how the world works.
It doesn't matter what system or ideology people invent, war will always appear in order to to get power or resources. Or just because there are bored, just like Dostoevsky said it.
You just contradicted your entire first 3 sentences :)