- Putin has been left in charge by the same people that now are surprised Putin is being Putin. also US were too busy in Afghanistan and trying to make China look like the biggest threat to international peace.
- NATO should never ever intervene in areas that do not belong to NATO. When it happened it didn't go well (Bosnia and Herzegovina 1995, Kosovo 1999)
I don't think anybody in Russia is surprised by Putin. They are, far and away, primarily responsible for him being in power.
NATO stopped some pretty horrific atrocities from spiraling even further out of control during those interventions. The not going well part mainly happened before they intervened. And yes, nothing is ever perfect.
who ever said anything about Russians?
You should also aknowledge that Russians don't know as much as we do about what's really happening in Ukraine right now.
> They are, far and away, primarily responsible for him being in power.
ridiculous.
Now it's clear why things are unclear to you, you don't even know how Putin got in charge in the first place.
> NATO stopped some pretty horrific atrocities from spiraling even further out of control during those interventions
No, it didn't.
Nothing NATO did prevented any atrocity, the atrocities had already happened, they could be stopped in many other ways, NATO chose bombings because bombing was the easier option and the one that assured that as little men as possible would be killed on NATO side.
The fact that it (kinda) worked doesn't imply that it did go well, it went very bad indeed.
NATO bombings worked same way they worked in Afghanistan, Iraq, Lybia, middle east in general: they didn't.
They just killed a lot of people for no real gain, what actually stopped those wars was the capture of the dictator of the day, not the bombs.
Milošević survived all of that and was also running for presidency in 2000.
He was arrested on suspicion of corruption, abuse of power, and embezzlement. The international tribunal could not charge him with anything, he died of heart attack in his cell in 2006 without a verdict under very unclear circumstances.
Ask William Perry (former Secretary of defense) what he thinks of those actions in retrospect.
Also the legality of the operation is still unclear.
You knew if your country was 30kms of sea away from former Yugoslavia and you could see the sky turning bright and red at night or fishermen kept digging up unused bomb flushed into the Adriatic sea by NATO bombers, together with a lot of toxic and dangerous chemicals.
Just a few pointers to shed some light on the whole fiasco
- United States bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade (bombed because allegation that proved to be false)
- Niš cluster bombing (cluster bombs were already illegal in 1999)
- A Perfect Failure: NATO's War against Yugoslavia - Michael Mandelbaum: Kosovo's consequences were just the opposite of what NATO intended: suffering Kosovar civilians, regional instability, and a fuming Russia and China.
But yeah, I guess American propaganda worked if there are people that still believe 23 years later that bombing the Balkans was "good". The Mandela effect is stronger than I thought.
I am intimately aware of the Kosovo situation, and not from US sources. I had to do a fair amount of reading to understand since I was constantly exposed to both Serbian and Albanian perspectives. This always turns into a flame war whenever it is mentioned online, but suffice to say there are many people who think they would not be alive today if it were not for NATO's actions. And that war was 23 years ago. The same thing could be more precisely done today of course. Again, I do not claim they were perfect at all. However, exponentially more innocent people were killed by the Serbs than those bombings ever killed. And civilian deaths were never the intention.
As for Milošević, let me pull out my tiney tiny violin. Whatever we might disagree on, I do think we can agree he was a war criminal, full stop. Whether he was convicted is irrelevant.
They are not.
> I was talking about the present, with 20 years of many/most Russians just basking in Putin's killer tough guy shtick while he had his soldiers massacre and rape people indiscriminately, and invade countries around the region
Not differently from what US has done in the past 20 years.
Russians are responsible for Putin's actions no more than Americans are for what their DOD does.
> but suffice to say there are many people who think they would not be alive today if it were not for NATO's actions.
That doesn't imply, __again__, that it wasn't bad.
Many people would not be alive if Stalin hadn't defeat Hitler, that doesn't mean it was good.
> However, exponentially more innocent people were killed by the Serbs than those bombings ever killed. And civilian deaths were never the intention.
Arithmetic is the weapon of dictators, not of democracies.
> Whatever we might disagree on, I do think we can agree he was a war criminal, full stop. Whether he was convicted is irrelevant.
Failure to bring criminals to justice is the reason why the death of civilians is unacceptable.
In our democracies nobody is a criminal, unless convicted.
Even war criminals such as Milošević.
It's not enough to know they are criminals to kill them in a prison's cell, that's what people like Putin do.
But most of all, democracies should __protect prisoners at all costs__, not kill them (if your country hasn't abolished death penalty, it's not a real modern democracy and can't be taken seriously when talking about "freedom rights") not let them die in prison and not discard their deaths because they were enemies.
I call myself a democrat because I would never do to them what they would probably do to me.
If we go around bombing civilians and keep doing things like this, covering up the atrocities[1] with lies and false myths[2], we are in no position to believe we are better.
That's why NATO should not intervene outside of NATO territories, because that's what NATO pact is about.
Protecting its members, not policing the World, especially those parts of the World that we kept unstable with our bombs.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/13/us/us-airstrikes-civilian...
The defeat of Nazi Germany wasn't good? The fuck?