This feels like the way the world ends.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/feb/27/vladimir-putin...

I guess it depends on how much you can get away with.

For guys with guns, those are guys with guns. For drones, it is hard to prove it's not Ukrainians flying those TB2s or how many they have or anything.

Getting away with Patriot or few A-10's being on vacation might be hard.

My grandfather was a truck driver from northern Sweden. Just before the war he had just bought a new Volvo truck with about 70 hp (a monster in those days) and had loans to pay, but during the war suddenly there was no jobs. In the newspaper he read about a job in the port of Holmsund near Umeå and when he went it became clear that this was no ordinary job.

As you said Sweden allowed and encouraged Swedish volunteers to Finland, but the military also sent a lot of firearms, artillery and other equipment. But the railways in Sweden and Finland were of different widths meaning all cargo would have to be unloaded and re-loaded by hand at the border. They still tried but the system was quickly overrun.

The winter in 39/40 was one of the coldest ever here, meaning the Bothnian Bay was frozen solid. The solution was to drive civilian truck convoys loaded with armaments over the ice over "Kvarken", the strait from Holmsund to Vasa. There they unloaded the trucks and loaded Finnish pulp for paper production, which was the only thing they had a surplus of.

They had to drive at night and cover their headlamps so Soviet planes wouldn't spot them. They had to drive with their door open so they could get out and run if they were attacked or if the ice started caving, meaning many of them got frostbitten (especially those from southern Sweden )

My grandfather drove many times and "advanced" to plowtruck in the front part of the convoy, a safer position. One time there was a blizzard and the tracks got covered with snow in seconds. Since the drivers couldn't see more than a meter or two, the convoy quickly clogged up. Even if the ice was thick, it couldn't handle it. One driver died. He was the only casualty of the "Kvarken traffic" although 6 trucks went through the ice in total.

My grandfather proposed to my grandmother in the beginning of the war, but she already had a boyfriend. The morning after the blizzard my grandmother heard that the convoy hadn't yet arrived in Vasa. She was worried and devastated, and realized she loved him.

So, I guess the moral of the story is I exist because Sweden and Finland had incompatible train tracks..

> If Russia was in fact waging some kind of imperialist war

> They want to restore a supplicant government loyal to Russia,

What exactly do you think imperialism is?

It doesn't seem like "Russia" is fighting the war at all as a society; Putin personally is, but people up to federal legislators are publicly objecting, and if you follow the battle reports it seems the soldiers so far have barely been given orders, don't want to do their jobs, not to mention keep running out of gas and abandoning their vehicles.

Somewhere between the cabinet and the rest of the military there is quite the lack of motivation.

Russia is pretty much turning Belarus into a puppet state, not a neutral buffer.

And what if Ukrainians disagree? Maybe because they prefer freedom and choosing their own destiny?

>"If Russia was in fact waging some kind of imperialist war, wouldn't they have annexed more resource rich neighbours that the world cares so much less about? Like Belarus, or Chechnya? Look at those countries"

Chechnya is not a country and is a part of Russia. Before that it was part of the USSR.

But that is not what will happen. From all indications of Russia wins this war and installs a puppet regime that regime will meet heavy popular resistance and be overthrown as soon as Russia leaves the country. So I do not see much option here other than trying to defend Ukraine and to isolate and/or topple Putin. Your ideas about not provoking Russia are not relevant in the current climate where Putin is hated in Ukraine and where the Ukrainians do not want to be in the Russian sphere of influence. Your strategy might have worked in 2010 but now it is too late.

> Russia is not fighting this war to annihilate Ukraine

https://www.firstpost.com/world/ukraine-not-a-real-country-h...

> If Russia was in fact waging some kind of imperialist war, wouldn't they have annexed more resource rich neighbours that the world cares so much less about? Like Belarus, or Chechnya?

https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/belarusalert/soft-anne...

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

Belarus and Chechnya have been annexed in all but name.

Does it? There is exactly 0% chance if UKraine joined NATO back in 2008 Russia puts 200,000 troops on its border and has its psychopathic president give a speech that Ukraine is full of Nazis and has no right to exist.

Joining NATO means "the member" doesn't have a history of armed invasion; NATO does.

To prevent exactly what’s happening now.

White is a skin tone, but it also seems to be a catch-all for anyone that can be assigned historical guilt for benefitting in some way from imperialism. From there, the possibilities are endless. So, the present-day Russia has transgressed greatly and should be punished, according to this perspective. However, apparently, Ukrainians are benefitting as well as Caucasians, and that's why they would receive sympathy. If I could just forget about having heard of this ideology, I would.