What Is at Stake in Ukraine
economist.com
economist.com
It would take something about as long as the article posted here to write a proper refutation but if there was a point to be made then it could not doubt have been made much better.
For instance:
"Most of the emerging world either backs Russia over its invasion or is neutral. Some countries depend on Russian arms, others feel a misplaced nostalgia for Soviet largesse, but many see the West as decadent, self-serving and hypocritical. And many more, even if they do not welcome the invasion, see it as somebody else’s problem."
Where to even start? The two large players that matter in the 'developing world' are China and India, both have their own very unique reasons to be either supportive of or ambivalent towards Russia, not because they depend on arms but because Russia and/or Russian connected territories serve their interests or because they have similar political systems and have similar designs on their immediate surroundings. That's already by population almost 3 billion people and yet it is only two countries.
"As America and the rest of NATO rally support for action against Russia, that is a stunning rebuke."
So that 'stunning rebuke' is not nearly as stunning as the author makes it out to be.
Then:
"It is also taking the world down a dangerous path."
Correction: Russia is taking the world, and especially Europe down a dangerous path. If anything it has destabilized the European continent in a way that nothing has since WWII, not even the war around former Yugoslavia, where - it needs to be said - Russia again played a major role.
"On March 2nd, 141 countries voted in the UN to deplore Russia’s invasion. Just five voted against and 35 abstained. "
The ones that abstained have their reasons to walk a very fine line, in part because they depend on Russia and in part because they have ambitions to be more like Russia.
The ones that voted against are: North Korea, Eritrea, Syria, Belarus and Russia itself.
I don't think anybody is going to be surprised by four of those, the one that remains is Eritrea. Russian veto power in the security council has repeatedly protected Eritrean leadership.
"But the real pattern is more complex. Our sister organisation, the Economist Intelligence Unit, has noted that only a third of the world’s people live in countries that have not only condemned Russia but also imposed sanctions on it."
Yes, that's also the part of the world that either aligns with the West because they are closely tied economically and/or because they have the ability to do so without entirely ruining their own economy. If Upper Volta decides to boycott or sanction Russia it won't move the needle much because they aren't really the most active trading partners, but if the US, UK, the remainder of Europe or Japan does so it definitely does move that needle.
There is a whole debate possible about whether or not sanctions are effective and then another one about whether or not these particular sanctions are effective. But it is pretty easy to see why those countries that are most directly affected by Russia invading Ukraine would be the ones to support the sanctions and leave the rest of the world less likely to do so.
Proximity + economic ties + feeling threatened by Russia is enough explanation for me.
"Most of them are Western. Another third are in neutral countries. This group includes giants like India and tricky American allies, such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. The final third are in countries that are echoing Russia’s rationale for the invasion. The biggest, China, has repeated propaganda claiming that Ukraine has hosted American-backed bioweapons laboratories."
I don't really see what this paragraph adds to the previous one, it is pretty clear that China has its own agenda with Taiwan, a word that isn't even present in the article, and that India has its own dependencies on Russia.
"In Mr Putin’s world, where might makes right, today’s lack of support is proof of Western decline."
Winner of the 'jump to conclusions' prize.
Anyway, this whole article looks to me as though it started out from a conclusion, then pulled together a bunch of unrelated facts to paint a completely incoherent picture.
I don't think your critique opposes the article as such - you provide the background information that generally Economist excpects it's readers to already have.
I think this quote from the article is very correct.
"the world Mr Putin desires would be far more decadent, self-serving and amoral than the one that exists today."
The concepts in the article are complex, and yes, it's more of a statement of sentiment than deep policy analysis (those take hundreds of pages).
this whole article looks to me as though it started out from a conclusion, then pulled together a bunch of unrelated facts to paint a completely incoherent picture.
Generally that's the whole point of Economist - their authors strive to digest a complex event and at least attempt to condense it to a brief article. I would love if they would cite all of the references used in an article but alas it is not so.
Economist is also declared itself politically very partial to the liberal world view, so it's not something that they hide. You go to the Economist to get the liberal take on things - you don't need to like it, but you are not deceived by the authors motivation as it is very clear.
That's true but that's just a pretty basic observation, the thing that the article seems to want to say most of all is that the rest of the world outside of a relatively small minority portion in the 'West' is either supportive of Russia or ambivalent and I don't see the support for that thesis.
See the part that starts with:
"In Mr Putin’s world, where might makes right, today’s lack of support is proof of Western decline."
India, I actually do take issue with. Their self-serving actions I hold against them and I've been disappointed with Indian leadership and alignment as of late.
But all of this misses the point. The unaligned movement is acceptable to my western eyes, but I never for a second forget that they need us for their stability and security. Small, poor, neutral states rarely change the course of world politics. So out of the countries that actually matter there is NATO (and friends like Australia and Japan), India, Brazil, Russia, and China.
India and Brazil both disappointingly went neutral, Russia started the war, and China is softly backing their junior partner. So my take away is simple: The countries that are willing to sacrifice at their own cost for others are the ones that have internal politics that mirror their values. The more populist or fascist or communist the country the more likely they are to put their own national interests ahead of others.
Or do you think Canadian-Ukrainian trade is so vital to Trudeau that he's willing to frost relations with Russia, outlay hundreds of millions in direct aid and munitions donations, and spend political capital garnering support for Ukrainian defence?
I bet there are people that see this as ideological, fair and good vs evil I also bet there are some for whom this is a strategic and precedent setting
That said, some things are good and evil. And Putin's invasion of Ukraine is evil. Ukraine was a democratic, peaceful country.
The thing that really got to me (and which made me actually write them an email, the first in 10+ years) was their latest Charlemagne column [1], the one where they were comparing Orban and his political party/government to a virus (to Covid, as it happens). I tried to explain to that poor fellow/lady writing the column that making that comparison in these parts of the world (I live in neighbouring Romania) is extremely, extremely problematic, given past history. We were supposed to be the "good guys", the ones that are fighting against Orban the anti-semite, but we can't be the good guys anymore when we're borrowing well-known anti-semite tactics from the past.
To say nothing that half-way through the article I was saying to myself: "maybe I'm imagining things, maybe painting your political enemies as a virus/disease is how it's done these day", until I saw one of the column's sub-titles that was just this text: Buda-pest . Absolutely horrendous.
Also, there was a despicable "interview" with Blair a few years ago out of which he got pretty much clean as a whistle when it came to the Iraq war, no ruffling the feathers or anything like that.
I am asking this because I myself fell for some propaganda and this has shaken me up. I want to learn how to recognize propaganda better.
Can't pinpoint to an exact thing, because good propaganda is always diffuse, it kind of encircles you. Were it to be more "straightforward" it would be way easier for the target subject to just reject it, thus denying the propagandist's objective. It is easier for said target subject to say "no" (let's say) to one big thing that is presented to him than to say "no" to lots of smaller things addressed/presented to him, but which smaller things, taken together, have the same "effect" as the one big thing.
Back to The Economist, and after that long digression, the signs were in a sort always there. For example when it comes to the China section that it's included in every issue there was always that feeling that nothing that the Chinese government/authorities did was right. If something good was happening in China it was because of individual people, if something bad was happening, it was, of course, the government's fault. And maybe the "government" is the wrong word, because there are lots of people in the West itself who think that the Government is always wrong, too, it was more like "it was the fault of the Chinese regime taken as a whole, of the way it was set up, of its ideological system".
But when it came to the US the bad things were never the fault of the government, or if some government-related person was doing something wrong (think the previous US president) then it was the fault of that particular person, not of the entire system per se. Also, said US system, even with its minor faults, was always presented as being capable of self-correction, there was always an intrinsic belief that "things will get better, by definition". No such hope was attached to the Chinese-based system, which was always presented as an ideological dead-end (maybe not in this direct words, but that was the idea).
And then there are even smaller things. One that stood up to me was when the previous president was accused of lying, a thing that lots of other US president had done in the past (and will probably do in the future, too) but which I hadn't seen presented as such by this magazine, I mean, not with those words. And not only that, but that lye accusation was written down in one of their columns with a capital L, something like "the big Lye", which is a basic propaganda technique: one is not a mere "traitor", but a big, dangerous, "Traitor", one just cannot think and reason about a nondescript "people", one instead dreams big nationalistic things while thinking about the "People" etc.
The war/Russia issue I was talking about had all of the above dialed up to 100.
It was literally founded as a propaganda organ for the liberals in England. In opposition to the "Corn Laws"
It is also "where the Queen goes, go we". So if England (not Britain, England) declares war they are in, boots and all. They cheer lead the Iraqi debacle then years later talked of "those mistaken supporteds of the Iraqi invasion including this magazine".
It is what I like about them. Most media does not admit it bias, the Economist admits it every day.
"FROM A CYNICAL European perspective, Viktor Orban’s election triumphs are like covid-19 wave" it says. Because it has always been anti Orban. Always called on the Hungarian voters to rejected him.
I disagree with many of their priors (I find the emphasis on individual rights as opposed to collective rights unbalanced. Collective rights exist an often conflict with individual rights and I put the balance in a different place) But I have huge respect for the honesty.
You can label it "propaganda". It is not incorrect. But it is unsubtle and very honest.
Compare that to Fox News or the Guardian both of which do not recognise that their views are prejudice at all.
I hope you're happy now that we're buying your expensive gas which travels over the atlantic with tankers.
And wtf is Biden doing financing biolabs in a corrupt country at the doors of Russia anyway? f this
So biolab conspiracy nonsense (the US was funding the dismantment the old Soviet biological weapon program) + nonsense about GE (US went max pressure and GE left too). Kremlin probably can't pay even for a decent bot program?
https://nypost.com/2022/03/26/hunter-biden-played-role-in-fu...
> In April 2014, Metabiota vice president Mary Guttieri wrote a memo to Hunter outlining how they could 'assert Ukraine's cultural and economic independence from Russia'. 'Thanks so much for taking time out of your intense schedule to meet with Kathy [Dimeo, Metabiota executive] and I on Tuesday. We very much enjoyed our discussion,' Guttieri wrote
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10652127/Hunter-Bid...
Thanks to unlimited soviet bioweapons to dismantle I imagine.
Anyway, it's always the soviets and conspirationists isn't it, just like for the chemical weapons of mass destruction in Irak.
Just take the money for the gas, but then don't complain about CO2 emissions and especially don't lecture the rest of the world.
Actually the same argument about China's expansionist agenda can also be made for India. In the case of India it intends to at some point go to war with Pakistan over the Kashmir region.
Categorizing the other side, their supporters and their size as vested, threatened, agenda, opinion don’t count and proximity related Surely those apply to both sides
Leaving the one true view as what matters
The one true view that matters also lean on countries, have proximity to other countries and have designs and interests so why should their views be right and pure ?
The one part that I understand is that you think that I have the 'one true view' which is clearly not the case, all I have is my opinion. I'm not 'discarding' any country because they are still there, all I'm trying to do is to figure out their reasoning for positioning themselves as they do in contrast to what the article claims, which I think is simply not supported by the facts.
The rest of your comment I can either not parse, make sense of or reply to, sorry. If English is not your first language then it must be frustrating not to be able to communicate your ideas clearly, it isn't my first language either but I would definitely encourage you to keep trying because that is the only way to improve. Thanks!
In comparison to this, these other issues from the article seem to be secondary at most.
A lot of the USA anti NATO sentiment is still a leftover from the Trump administration which was all but preaching isolationism (and which of course very much played into the hands of Putin who would love to reacquire not just Ukraine but also the Baltics and maybe even other former USSR states).
I'm with you on the premise that they probably thought Trump would win a second term and I think if not for COVID that this would have all happened two years earlier.
Public opinion in the United States with respect to NATO will be put to the test: for the first time in a long time it looks as though other nations in NATO may have to lean on it when in the past it was the USA that asked other countries to stand with it when it was attacked. What the outcome of that will be I do not know but I agree with you that it is of primary importance compared to the points raised in the article.
Got to love the mental acrobatics required to think that an invasion 13 months after Trump's departure from the White House must have been planned assuming a second Trump term (since, y'know, Trump was a Russian agent!!!!!!1!11!!!). Anything, everything, to avoid the more obvious conclusion that Russia was more afraid of the US/NATO with Trump as president than Biden.
Besides, how is your "thought experiment" relevant to Ukraine?
In any case Russia has many bases in foreign countries, and as far as I can remember there's only ever been a risk of direct conflict over it once, with Cuba, and that was specifically over nuclear missiles, not jut having a military base.
Then also, NATO already risked direct confrontation in Ukraine, sending large training units to a country at war with Russia. As we speak US AWACS is providing early warning across large swaths of western Ukraine and the Black Sea, one wonders if missile sites actually use their early warning radars in the case where they most likely have a notebook with a nice situation log besides their soviet terminals.
In this situation I wonder why noone is pushing conspiracy theories around the Moskva sinking (which could still be Ukrainian luck combined with Russian ineptitude) which embed these facts. Apparently this ship was hit at the extent of the Neptunes range. Is it that much of a stretch to think that such thing might have been made much easier, when the ships SatNav was spoofed by a Globalhawk leading it towards shore, while the Ukrainians knew exactly where to look when they flared up their targeting radar?
Western military aims in Syria are not to change the regime, they're just to support allies and suppress enemies like IS. There is no way US operations in Syria could possible be described as seriously attempting to topple Assad or drive Russia out of the country, that's simply not tenable. As you point out, US and Russian forces, when in the same vicinity, backed off from each other.
As Ukraine amply shows when one side, either the west or Russia, heavily commits militarily to a country the other side limits itself to interference operations only. That's been true ever since the Cuban missile crisis. Nobody wants a repeat of that.
This is relevant to Ukraine because obviously it was allowing America to expand its military reach right up to Russia’s doorstep.
Did that happen with Cuba? (I know about the Bay of Pigs invasion, when it happened and what kind of force was used for it)
you mean US or GB would announce that those countries/nationalities are an artificial creation and have never historically really existed, and that Mexicans or Irish people don't ethnically exist, that they are just "little/sub Americans" or "little/sub Englishmen", and US or GB would go to perform ethnical cleansing and genocide there?
> send in weapons and military personnel
that happens all around the world by pretty much all countries.
> set up military bases
you forgot to add major point of Russian propaganda here - development of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons DNA targeted to Russian DNA as well as breeding birds and dogs who only sh!t on and byte only Russians - all that with the direct help and financing by American imperialists.
The main difference is that the US and NATO are not aggressors. At no point has there ever been a threat of them invading Russia.
Meanwhile, Russia has invaded Ukraine and has set its sights on other former USSR countries.
You're trying to apply false equivalence.
Oh wait...
Not that the US didn't try have their way with Cuba, but it's telling that in the only instance of your imagined scenario actually happening the US gave up when they realised the deed couldn't be accomplished with just ~1500 Cuban exiles as soldiers.
Certainly it would be a horrific act regardless of the invading country- autocratic, democratic, socialist, capitalist, communist, western, eastern, whatever. And yes, the US government has done some horrific things in the past.
None of that makes the current bloodshed by Russia any less terrible, or excuses it in any way, right? I just ask that we don't kiss ourselves on that either.
What if the US invaded Canada back in 2014, taking southern Ontario (the industrial heartland) and southern Alberta (the oil region), and set up two US puppet states called "The Republic of Ontario" and "The Republic of Alberta"? What if since then the US repeatedly said things like "Canada doesn't exist as a country", "Canadians are really USAians", and "Canada is full of Nazis and needs to be purged"? What if the US held yearly large-scale military drills on the Canadian border? Do you think that Canada might be alarmed enough to go looking for allies, even if the ally was Russia? Do you think they would be right to do so?
What if Mexico saw all that, and decided that they had better find some allies too?
Countries trying to join NATO didn't happen in a vacuum...
NATO was not the cause of this conflict. NATO would have stopped this conflict had Ukraine been a member.
NATO is a force of stability.
Russia is waging a war of extermination on Ukraine. Their sin was that they wanted to align with the west. Russia wants to genocide away all nations it consider taints Russian soil, what ever the international borders say.
Either you choose to go along with this (Fine, destroy their cultural identity, go ahead, it's your right. Let them kidnap the children, rape the women and - steal their washing machines?) or you do something to counter the Russian threat.
I presume most would prefer to live in a world that at least attempts to stop genocide.
There are two options here - NATO or nuclear proliferation.
Ukraine war showed that barring obvious superiority in conflict, nuclear threat is the only guarantor of state sovereignty.
Without more nukes, NATO is a necessary guarantor of state sovereignty at each state bordering Russia by providing credible force.
Russia has proved this theory themselves by assaulting every non-NATO country at it's borders.
How could countries like Estonia, Lithuania or Latvia defend themselves without a NATO alliance? Should they get a nuke? Or should they just yield to Russian rape, pillage and annihilation of cultural distinctiveness?
For those who like Star Trek - This is EXACTLY a situation where the Russian states behaves like the Borg. You oppose the Borg. Not say "yeah, you have right to do that because you are ... mean?"
The Russian state also behaves like a fascist villain but that's kind of obvious already.
Still, it is possible that Putin really was, at one point, a bit more sympathetic to a multicultural point of view. It's possible that he's gone insane over the last 10 years. Consider how he sounded in 2012:
-----------------
Putin’s final major address as prime minister to parliament in April 2012 hammered home this point – the dangers of dividing and thus destroying. It came in the form of an answer to a suggestion from a member of the Russian Duma that the preamble to the Russian constitution be changed from beginning with “We the multinational people [narod] of Russia,” to “We the [ethnic] Russian [russkiy] people and the people who have joined with it.” Putin retorted:
Do you understand what we would do [if we did that]? Part of our society would consist of first class people and part would be second class. We must not do that if you and I want to have a strong single [yedinaya] nation, a single people [narod], if we want each person who lives on the territory of the country to feel that this is their homeland, and that there is no other homeland, nor can there be one. And if we want each person to feel like that, then we have to be equal. This is the principle question. The fact that the [ethnic] Russian [russkiy] people are – without a doubt – the backbone, the fundament, the cement of the multinational Russian [rossiyskiy] people cannot be questioned….But to divide everyone up into first, second, third categories, you know, this is a very dangerous path. You and I, all of us, must not do this.
-------------------
See more details here:
https://demodexio.substack.com/p/mr-putin-operative-in-the-k...
Chechnya and the other Caucasian republics are miniscule, and Putin and the Putin-sanctioned dictators there don't care about culture.
What changed is that they became much more open about their real goals. Previously, they did their thing, perhaps slightly more subtly, while bullshitting the world.
This is about encirclement, nato, missiles on the border, warm water access
No value judgment in the right or wrong of it
I mean if the people in eastern Ukraine or Crimea WANTED to join Russia, there's democratic and peaceful ways to go about it. If Russia wanted access to the Black Sea, there's peaceful ways to go about it, like trade and freedom of commerce agreements like Europe has.
You remember Zelensky was elected on the narrative he'd bring peace. For that there was Minsk which was not good and giving in to force, but well, implementing it would have been a hell of a lot better than what's happening now. Yet, he wasn't able to achieve that? Maybe Ukraine isn't the center of democracy the State Department made it into the past 2 months.
This is just straight up victim blaming.
A hostile Ukraine, or a conquered Ukraine, only bring more enemies on Russia's borders.
> nato,
> missiles on the border
What missiles? There's already Poland, Baltics, Turkey, Romania that can be used for missile bases.
> warm water access
That's the bullshitiest one of the bullshit list - first, Russia already controls Sevastopol, and before the occupation of Crimea, it had a joint lease on it. And of course, it has hundreds of kilometres of Black Sea coastline to the east of Crimea, including the sizable port and naval base of Novorosiisk.
Russia is providing enough fake excuses ( Ukraine isn't a real nation, Nazis) as it is, no need to add even faker ones for them.
Sure what you say may have played the role also. But Putin wants "glory days" of SU back. That's why he continuously tried to expand Russia (and Russian influence) since he came into power.
It's about him being a power broker on international scale and not another has been dictator of 3rd world country.
Nato was just used as an excuse. Because of the submarines and ballistic missiles, It doesn't matters where weapons are.
And nothing excuses them for what we are seeing what is happening on the ground.
Putin may well have been more open minded, he just got pissy lately and he has a lot of power. One tantrum means thousands die.
Why would anyone with half a brain allow that? Most people just want to live and work.
The problem is real but probably not as large as you might think it is based on the comments.
The more worrying thing is that lots of people have a 'somebody else's problem' approach to this, which is what got the world into World War II.
this works if you presume "sovereignty" is an objectively existing fact for more than like 10 countries in the world, which it isn't... Perhaps 10 is too generous. And the US contributed to weakening sovereignty all over the world. US is not the sole culprit, of course, but a big one.
Russia's problem is that if their neighbours have an ounce of sovereignty they will want to distance themselves from Russia as much as possible due to their terrible behaviour, so they are forced to rule their neighbours by fear & force.
I fear the US is doing the same, but perhaps with more decorum. (edit: thinking twice, not much more decorum if we think about south america)
The only country that the USA invaded in Latin America was Panama and that was mostly because of the strategic interest in the Panama Canal, and they eventually pulled out when the country was on a more stable course. (That said, I don't doubt for a minute that they'd do it again if the Panama transit became threatened somehow.)
The other influence the USA has had in Latin America has been either much further in the past (which doesn't excuse it) or through the support or denial of support to various governments (which also doesn't excuse it), but it is absolutely nothing compared to what the neighbors of Russia have had to endure over the last 60 years or so.
Example:
> Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine to force it to renounce the West and to submit to the Kremlin
I wonder what's their source, based on Putin's declarations this should be:
> Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine to force it to renounce the West and to remain neutral because it's located between the west and russia and because the west promised it
https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/nato-s-eastward-e...
Large scale things on contrary are far easier to spot, at least at a certain scale and at a certain extent. For instance when we keep reading "the Russian bombing hospitals, theaters and schools" it's evidently propaganda not because "Russians are good" vs "Russians are bad" but because missiles&co are not that cheap nor that abundant so an error can always happen, but normally no one army in the world waste ammo for nothing and as a result if those bombing are true then means Ukrainian army choose to violate Geneva conventions recycling hospitals, theaters, schools etc for military purposes and than as a result for the other side they became legit targets. But as always people at scale do not like to reason, prefer being fed with emotions.
With similar simple reasoning following the classic Latin cui prodest we can easy conclude that this war is needed by USA and UK élites against the EU, Ukraine and Russian interest. Unfortunately for those élites that move means pushing Russia toward China witch is less weak alone than Russia and far more important with Russian natural resources and a far augmented military tech transfer from Russia China will arrive in few years to have enough military capacity to counter USA and UK together. Those élites play the same game they have played with nazi Germany, counting on similar outcome, of course as back then against their own citizens interests. On the other side Russia need safety at their western borders, for them nazis are ok-ish if on their side, not ok if on NATO side, so they haven't really choice but go to war. China needs stability to keep growing, as any dictatorship that need to grow, but also to sustain it's population. There is no morale on all sides, just mix of interests, some legit some criminal, and different school of thoughts confronting.
Russia is mostly using in Ukraine (like before in Syria) dirt cheap unguided WWII style bombs, like FAB-250 (550lb) and FAB-500 (1100lb).
> if those bombing are true then means Ukrainian army choose to violate Geneva conventions recycling hospitals, theaters, schools etc for military purposes and than as a result for the other side they became legit targets.
You forgot to update your Russian propaganda version to spread. For example Russia hitting the Mariupol hospital because there supposedly was an Ukrainian army command center is the old version of their propaganda. Now they tell that they didn't hit the hospital, and that there were no Ukrainian military there, and it was just a real hospital which Ukrainians intentionally blown up.
This is disingenuous. Russia has a long history of bombing civilians as a psychological weapon. Both Grozny and Aleppo are well documented. Your arguments “the Russians are not stupid, so if they seem to be doing stupid, then it’s propaganda” rests on very faulty premises. They are not stupid, and are deliberately targeting civilian populations. We know their doctrine and we have seen their playbook. You are only carrying water here and your rhetorics are obvious.
> With similar simple reasoning following the classic Latin cui prodest we can easy conclude that this war is needed by USA and UK élites against the EU, Ukraine and Russian interest.
This is an interesting conspiracy theory.
> On the other side Russia need safety at their western borders, for them nazis are ok-ish if on their side, not ok if on NATO side, so they haven't really choice but go to war.
Come off it. NATO is an existential threat to Russia only if Russia’s existence depends on being able to invade its neighbours. The fact that its former satellites ran to the West at the moment they got the chance is telling. If they wanted stability, they’d have increased cooperation instead of rattling their metaphorical sabre for 20 years. NATO was not more menacing 2 months ago than it was 20 years ago, quite the contrary. It was desegregating before being reinvigorated by this stupid, pointless agression. Finland and Sweden applying was unimaginable just a couple of weeks ago. If stability was the point, a hot war was the absolute last thing to do.
Also, is there any evidence, even circumstantial, that Ukraine has a significantly larger nazi relative population compared to any surrounding country? Its government is just as incompetent and corrupt as you’d expect given the context. Where are their nazi policies?
You seem to be making a lot of effort to sound reasonable, but ultimately
All countries have attacked civilians, did you remember WWII USA in Europe mass bombing even on ally countries? Iraqi ones? French ones in Libya and Siria? NATO Belgrade siege? But their purpose is evident: WWII mass bombing were used to force rich European countries to reconstruct under the Marshall plan agreements a thing would not happen if those countries were not so badly treated, modern bombing in Iraq &c was done for similar reasons, less ample now, but equally in principles: making room for western private companies big earnings. Russia do not have such targets, they are meaningless for them, they do not have the western military-industrial complex, most of their activities are still public in military and health domains, private activities suffer more from sanctions and war than the outcome [1], they advance slowly and methodically clearly to minimize damages in area they want operational under their control.
[1] to a point I suspect some western sanctions are negotiated with Putin gov. to hit some oligarchs he dislike...
Major cities like Chernihiv, Kharkiv, Mariupol are shelled with dumb, indiscriminate weapons - Soviet free fall bombs from the 60’s, MLRS with unguided rockets. This stuff is cheap and plenty.
There residential areas where hundreds of thousands lived, now completely destroyed. There are videos, photos, everything. Yet you succumb to nice Russians narrative.
WWII bombing was mass bombing, with no precision target, '60s missiles are far more precise and absolutely not that cheap nor abundant and there is no military reason to mass using them even if you have a significant stockpile to bomb a residential area if this area is not filled by enemy forces. A practice mercenaries always use in war, regardless of their nationality, because that's the classic asymmetric war.
If I succumb to Russian narrative (curious, since I've cited western governmental sources to sustain my claims not TASS or Ria Novosti) you equally succumb to Bernaysian western propaganda. Being from EU BTW my own interest in on the Russian side, our major supplier, fellow European till the Urals (so Moscow included), not on the USA/UK side since those two equally do their best to pick our tech&talentsm put us one against each other (a thing we do remarkably well, shame on us for that) and do countless more or less discrete criminal and not criminal actions against us. The USA after WWII have transformed my home country (Italy) into the Mafiastan just to stop CLN Alta Italia (the major Resistence body of the country) to really becoming a democratic government, the UK help very well fueling corruption (a significant local weakness) by all means and imposing a redesign of public school to form a new kind of citizens unable to reason and act as Citizens. That after the UK itself have funded mussolini to became a dictator, that after Wall Street have founded hitler till the first year of WWII at least. Saying USA an UK obviously I'm talking about their ruling class, not their citizens that equally pay the price of their ruler business against their own interests.
Just consider a thing: EU countries can only blame themselves for their status from world superpower to a disaster, BUT Russians never invade US, while we try invading Russia few times, USA and UK and the world their ruling class represent have do so, few times. Even from history we are on opposite sides. And that's history not russian propaganda.
Or it's just a fact... I guess some people may think Ukrainian's are blowing up those palces themselves, or making it up. But this is not really the first time in history of indiscriminate bombings have been happening to terrorize the population of some place into submission/demoralization out of spite. (And I guess it will not be the first time, where it may strenghten such population's resolve, looking at you London...)
> but normally no one army in the world waste ammo for nothing
You seem to just explain away the fact that these places are being bombed/shelled with some reasoning amounting to "makes no sense to me, therefore it must be propaganda", without knowing about current leadership's real decision making, or taking into account results of any fact finding missions, like OSCE's.
All I can agree on is that we don't know for sure if it's a policy. But it sure looked like it was a policy in Syria, in addition to an apparent campaign to demonize the civil service and health care workers, so it's not really out of question. Especially not because of some flimsy reasoning about "I don't know who would benefit". Qucks like a duck, looks like a duck, etc.
I guess to understand the scale of the issue... to see if it's more like an active terror campaign with a city/village being shelled every single day (like the joint Russian/Assad terror campaigns in the northwest of Syria), or more like something else.
If it looks more like a former, then yes, I'll accept that UA gov doesn't care about civilians there.
I mean few weeks ago Italian main TV channel have passed "the bombing of Kiev" witch was recognized quickly as a cut-scene of the game War Thunder. Then various westerns media have publish a news about a correspondent killed on duty, the same one declared killed an year or so in Kabul. Other medias show pictures of crying women saying they are Ukrainian in tears for the Russian bombing, actually those photos came from AFP/2014 and were really Ukrainian women in tears, only they were Russian-speaking ones in tear for Euromaidan massacres.
Since I'm not there, not I know in person anyone there I can't say who bombed who nor if there war really such bombing at all. While I can reason at the macro level, because at micro level anyone can say no matter what it's next to impossible prove that true or false if not done so badly like actual propaganda, but at larger scale is equally next to impossible hiding things and reasoning about their real reasons is far easier.
Of course the fact that me, myself and I fails to see a sense in something does not disprove that something, but connecting dots help and the actual propaganda, on both sides, reached a level that's very easy to spot it.
As to the document you posted... That document is not from OSCE. OSCE just added a header to it. It's entirey written by https://democracyfund.ru/ . So it can hardly be described as created by a "western body". Also OSCE is not a purely western body anyway. It includes Russia, Azerbaijan, Turkey, and many other eastern european countries.
Most importantly, it's not a report from an official fact finding mission (which is a specialist endeavor to send observers to a location to gather facts regardless of the meaning of such facts, like movements and activities of armed forces, shots being fired, destroyed property, documenting casualties, etc.) with summary statistics, etc. The document you posted is composed of random interviews with released prisoners from UA prisons. I guess it has some value, torture by UA security apparatus may have been happening as described, but it's not relevant to what I asked for in my reply to you. (which was to take into account results from actual fact finding missions, which is about documented facts, not about interviews or hearsay)
And yes, news outlets are about clicks and speed and some about shock value, as we know. I agree with you that they sometimes report complete crap. Everyone needs to take individual news reports with a grain of salt. Game footage was reported as actual war footage by a Russian embassy on twitter during Syria war. There's stupidity on both sides, you know. ;)
One example; A Russian warship has sunk. This has been confirmed by the Russians, so that part is a fact. However, while the Ukranian side claims it was done by Ukranian anti-ship cruise missiles, the Russians claim it was "just" a fire / incident on board.
I mean personally am more likely to believe the side that isn't the aggressor and isn't run by an authoritarian person / government, but the news I follow didn't make any calls themselves; they just reported what the one AND the other side claimed, plus the facts (yesterday of a Russian warship being on fire, today of it having sank).
The west is fighting for a unipolar world but the rest of the world would probably rather have a multipolar world. It gives them more options.
What this war has mostly done is laid bare the illusion that if we interconnect the world strongly by trade that we can avoid war. This is what will cause a massive re-drawing of the lines in the near future and that is what was at stake in Ukraine. Putin pulled away the curtain in a way that leaves no doubt about this and the aftereffects of that are far larger than Ukraine itself.
I don't know how good Russia will come out of this. But at least in Europe it seems to weld countries together a bit more and moving focus away from US help to being more self-sustained in many different aspects.
In the best case it can lead the Europe to become a real global contender besides China and USA again.
Maybe this is true but there is also huge division in Europe. You can see many countries blaming Germany. Fidesz keeping power. Le Pen rising again in France. Pro-Russian parties likely to win in 2 years in Slovakia... and so on.
[1] some might consider this word an error, it's not. It's an old scam liberist have done to be called "liberals" for masking better their real nature
That’s pretty much the natural state of human society. It sometimes gets shaken up by wars or revolutions and slowly goes back to that state during peacetime.
Surely a certain cohort of citizens will always be unable to improve much, that's part of natural selection, but the size and nature of such cohort vary, actual regimes, both westerns formal (not substantial) democracies and classic eastern/southern dictatorships seems to consider 99% of humans as farming animals...
I have encountered various kind of people, some really hopeless by nature, and NOT necessary poor (just yesterday a friend, reasonably middle class, with a comfortable life and a nice job asked me what I think about a "revolutionary investment scheme", a classic Ponzi's one so badly presented even a little child smell the stench miles away) but others are just trapped in social organization while having a formal potential the society fails to let them develop. Nothing is perfect, of course, but from perfection to the actual state of things...........
In my view we all have different kind of people in a society, the bad, the good, the ugly and any intermix of them in between, the point is that nature can self-regulate the percentage of those toward stability so a Democratic society in the classic demos sense (demos does not means the working class/the poor but the People in the sense of those who are, feel to be Citizens, active in their community, participating etc) we do not need a pyramidal structure.
The French Revolution divide a bit the power from all-into-one in few separated and that can't touch/interfere each others, we need perhaps just more subdivisions. Any of those surely have a kind of hierarchy but not with single subjects at the top nor with a very little oligarchy that rules on many others. Something much more like Renaissance society of the municipalities where there are competing powers, good and bag guys etc but a sufficiently subdivided power and crossed/contrasted interests that no one power can rule the others and the society keep changing at a certain peace, not issueless, for sure, but still in a turbulent but flourishing society.
Those systems in the history have worked in many different times and societies but they never last long, pushing toward too much resource usages and polarization, culture IMVO can compensate. In the past culture, basic ones eh, not all PhDs, was expensive, now can be cheap and easy to be accessed enough for nearly all. The quid I miss is how in the past when those kind of society start can start out of an age of darkness?
Both are bad, the one is bad every 50 years or so and then millions of people die the other kills millions of people over the same period. We need better ways to govern or we'll end up killing the species one day.
Even more dangerous things happen when the war is not a ruling class means to survive BUT just a business or mostly a business, that's why IMVHO private A/N&D companies should just exists for small weapons for civilians and nothing more. The rest should be a State-only production always kept but so expensive that a war is chosen only as extrema ratio. Private companies can only participate aside like providing steel etc to the State, BUT that at a fixed and low price high enough to avoid making companies failing but low enough that's not a profit even in a deep bear market case.
We do not live to be efficient, to innovate, to produce goods etc: we live to live, we work because it's needed to live well and in various cases is also a pleasure to a certain extent, but definitively not the contrary. Quality of life on any individual is the outcome IMVHO not the rest.
Even if nazi research pushed infrared, new way to survive in cold waters, rockets, many various maritime, aviation and generic mechanical innovation who now and not only from now have produced good things for us those who have build them do not have any pleasure from them, so the outcome is still negative. Working to left something good behind is good, but not at the price of ruining or dedicate a life for that purpose.
Invading by NATO members is as always ok, Libya Syria Afghanistan Iraq
Was Russia's invasion of Ukraine provoked? Like, has there been evidence of the claimed nazis (which AFAIK isn't grounds for invasion) or whatever? Did Ukraine strike first?
If western ukraine were trying to break away and kyiv used nazi soldiers to cling on to lviv im pretty sure that the western propaganda organs (and by extension, you) wouldnt feel so ambivalent about the swastika tattoos and their war crimes and yea, it probably would be used as grounds for an intervention.
This may be what the West is fighting for, in a cynical fashion. And it’s not exactly wrong: “the West” is a lot of people and some have motivations that are less than noble. But an alternative argument is that the West is fighting for liberal democracy as an alternative to authoritarian governance (or “democracy in name only” authoritarianism.)
It's become fashionable recently to claim that liberal democracy is on the ropes, and to argue that the future will be full of effective authoritarian governments (despite over a century of such governments being out-competed by modern democracies.) The Ukraine war is a hell of a showcase for the weakness of that strategy. At the end of the day, the real lesson the world should take from this war is that democracy (and particularly liberal democracy) simply works better than authoritarian systems: not because it’s perfect, but because it gives societies a way to course-correct and recover from corruption and stupid mistakes. During peaceful times it's really easy to forget this and get frustrated by democracy: there’s a lot of appeal to the idea of handing governance over to an effective strongman. But even if you somehow luck into a brilliant strongman, dictators eventually age and make mistakes. When that inevitably happens your government won't have the structures necessary to correct them. The performance of the Russian military in Ukraine is an extreme example that shows how naturally self-limiting this strategy can be.
Trying to reverse the results of a referendum where 80% voted and 90% voted yes and multiple western polls confirm the result doesnt exactly show a resounding commitment to democracy.
Nor does being besties with Saudi Arabia.
From an imperialistic perspective both make perfect sense though. Saudi is a global energy chokepoint and Crimea is a regional strategic chokepoint for a rival empire.
More generally, "the West is a lot of different people." Many of them are lousy and have made lousy decisions, such as the support for Saudi Arabia.
Democracy doesn't mean perfection, and I'm hugely in favor of making it better. I don't think supporting the current basket of authoritarian regimes on offer is "better". We can agree to disagree.
(90% was also the result of a German run poll 2 years later without tanks present... the poll was consistent with the referendum)
It's worth bearing in mind that Kyiv has no intention of rerunning the poll if Russia leaves likely coz they know what the result would be. It will simply reincorporate the territory. The only vote that was ever going to happen after Maidan was with Russian tanks present.
I dont think this is about agreeing to disagree or about accepting imperfections in democracy. This is about an overarching willingness of our society to discard democracy when it conflicts with western imperialist objectives.
Not only are we willing to do it we are willing to engage in orwellian doublethink about it.
(or translation for that matter - if I didn't know english, I'd think kids in UKR are making mine laying drones instead of mine sweeping ones, and lot of other nonsense I don't remember anymore)
But here we are.
Living in Asia there is definitely not the staunch apposition to the war that you might expect to see.
People here don’t like it but are not lockstep on Ukraines side.
And as a so called and derided “red pilled” guy I’m not going to jump to any conclusions for the next year or so.
We’ve all been seen the ultimate truth and aims and outcomes of the last half dozen wars involving the USA.
Once you live abroad for a significant amount of time you tend to take off the rah rah USA rose colored glasses and see the world from the point of view of other peoples.
A very annoying thing about the news and SJW social media is everyone jumping on the Ukraine bandwagon with nary a thought as to why what is happening… is happening.
Not many people are asking WHY its happening.
Nothing warrants or excuses the annexion of Crimea.
Keep in mind Putin rolled his tanks into Crimea the day after the new pro-US/NATO regime in Ukraine had thrown out the democratically elected (albeit pro-Russia) government, and rewritten the Ukrainian Constitution[2] to then make it possible to drop neutrality[3] so that they could begin the process of joining NATO. A rule to join NATO is that a nation must be in control of its borders and not in active conflict, so by annexing Crimea, Russia ensured the moves to join NATO would be halted with that action.
Understanding cause and effect is not the same as excusing it. If I poke a bear with a stick, and the bear eats me, it's my fault. Just because the bear went a little overboard doesn't change the fact that it's a bear and I should know not to poke it with a stick.
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-26079957
[2] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-ukraine-crisis-constituti...
and the time before that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30887629
Not to forget: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30653796 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30648054
If you'd like to challenge the facts, do so. Pointing out that facts have been posted before in response to the same questions, doesn't change the facts.
Unless you think we can't trust BBC and Reuters...?
As I said:
> this kind of disinformation does not need to even be self-consistent or even that believable. But it does need to be relentlessly sent out.
I don’t see how changes to Constitution which limit the power of President could be related to whether or not Ukraine could be neutral.
Common sense can tell us Putin was itching for an excuse to annex Crimea, but then that leaves us with the very uncomfortable question of why the US pushed Ukraine into this situation knowing how Putin would respond.
Ukraine is being used a pawn in a proxy war between the US and Russia. People need to call it what it is if they actually care to understand it.
If 2014 invasion was somehow related to Euromaidan protests, this 2022 invasion has no relation to internal Ukrainian politics nor to it’s foreign policy — nothing has fundamentally changed. The only reason why Putin attacked now is because he felt he could get away with it — Ukraine was asking for weapons since October and got only light anti-tank weapons to fight insurgency war. Nobody in the West pushed Ukrainians to fight, what West really wants is business as usual.
Yet now it becomes less and less possible due to Ukrainian information war.
Repeating Russian propaganda narratives is not what makes you a sudden expert on Eastern European politics.
There is no "if", unless you are arguing that invading Crimea the next day was a coincidence. That is fact, not opinion. Just like the post-coup regime in Ukraine then officially voting to drop neutrality, clearing the way to join NATO (which is just the international arm of the US military).
As to what has fundamentally changed, well Biden is back in charge like he was in 2014. Biden and family have huge financial interests in Ukraine, as evidenced by the emails that our totally honest media finally acknowledged were legitimate[1][2][3] (only after the election was over of course). And with that, Ukraine was set back on their path against Russia, to poke the bear some more at our behest.
There is a reason Russia/Ukraine was quiet for 4 years under Trump. And its the same reason we had to listen to that tired "Trump is Putin's puppet" conspiracy theory for most of his presidency. He wouldn't play their game. Hell, he was even impeached over Ukraine. Elements of the US government have been orchestrating this game for years, and innocent Ukrainians are the ones left holding the bag. Well them, and middle class US taxpayers who always end up footing the bill.
[1] https://www.newsweek.com/burying-hunter-biden-laptop-story-w...
[2] https://ijr.com/ny-times-confirms-emails-hunter-laptop-not-r...
[3] https://nypost.com/2022/03/17/the-new-york-times-hates-to-sa...
Can you say you know for sure why it’s happening??
He doesn't like NATO, so his strategy is to invade a non-NATO neighbour. What an idiot. Now all of a sudden, all neighbouring non-NATO countries want to join NATO. What a surprise. Finland applied already, Sweden later this year.
Deals with EU were going great, especially with Germany that is highly dependent on Russian gas. Consequence of the war: EU kicks out (of phases out) economic trade. Nice one.
If Russia hates US so much, why don't they collaborate more with EU? A strong EU-Russia relationship could match US in any sense. But no, Russia prefers to behave like an aggressive lunatic. EU was very much open to work together, see Germany. Now it is clear that was a big mistake.
So yeah, it's because he's an aggressive idiot lunatic.
> he's an aggressive idiot lunatic.
I think there are two mistakes here:
1. Personalising it as being about Putin. 2. Characterising Putin as being stupid or mad.
Nearly everything that Russia (not Putin) has done has been pre-announced by the Russian leadership. In fact, most of the pre-announcement has been by Putin himself, and I wonder whether his generals think that's a good idea. NATO has treated those announcements as bullying bluster; they were wrong. Most of those announcements were based on long-established Russian or Soviet military doctrine. If anyone's an idiot, it's NATO leadership, for assuming it was all bluster.
Characterising your enemy as a mad fool is a standard propaganda technique. There are reasons why the invasion is happening now, not sooner and not later. Both Ukraine and Georgia have loudly declared their desire to join NATO and the EU; it's obvious that Russia would very much prefer not to have NATO on his border. If Russia thinks it needs to invade Ukraine, then it needed to be done now. Similarly, the cancellation of Nordstream II, and the increased deployment of renewables in Europe threatens Russia's economy. The Russian treasury is flush now, but even setting aside sanctions, it won't be for long.
Putin certainly has some odd beliefs, such as his views about the historical destiny of the Rus people. But basing claims to land on historical destiny isn't unique to Russia; there are long-standing US allies that make similar claims (Israel?).
You mean Russia claiming it's just doing some military trainings at the border, and then US claiming it's going to invade Ukraine in the next few days?
> If anyone's an idiot, it's NATO leadership
You mean 2 non-NATO parties fighting each other? Seems like good old divide and conquer strategy to me. After this war, Russia won't have much left to fight NATO. NATO is not affected in any way.
> Russia would very much prefer not to have NATO on his border
This is going to double once Finland joins, which will happen this year. All because of Putin's mastermind strategy.
> the cancellation of Nordstream II
This happened after the invasion. One of the reasons why this was a very bad move on Russia's part.
> a mad fool
The best you can claim is that he was misinformed (hence the arrests and layoffs of the FSB).
Putin made a serious mistake. Now they are rolling with it. Anyone who claims this was a good move on Russia's part is just an idiot.
Calling people (me, Putin) an idiot is itself idiotic, if you are at all interested in understanding the situation. If you dismiss a participant as being [mad | stupid], then you lose the ability to understand and predict his actions.
My view is that Russia, mainly at Putin's instigation, has perpetrated a catastrophic mistake. But how and why did that mistake happen?
I think it's plausible to claim that Putin's ministers and generals are afraid to tell him anything he doesn't want to hear. That doesn't make him stupid or mad; that just means he's scary.
So why has he made this mistake, and why now? I think if you read what he has said, and take it seriously - not as the ravings of an idiotic madman - your chance of understanding why we are here, and of making accurate predictions about what might happen next, are much improved.
[Edit] What I think is idiotic is to not take seriously a man that controls 6,000 nuclear warheads. If you check out the guy's career, he's a competent but boring bureaucrat, embittered that nobody recognised his wonderfulness, who got lucky under Yeltsin.
No I didn't think that. But it did seem to me that you thought this invasion wasn't a mistake on Russia's end.
> My view is that Russia, mainly at Putin's instigation, has perpetrated a catastrophic mistake.
So I wrongly interpreted your previous post. We basically agree on this one. So I don't consider you an idiot ;).
> I think it's plausible to claim that Putin's ministers and generals are afraid to tell him anything he doesn't want to hear. That doesn't make him stupid or mad.
I think it's here were we differ. He should know better as to how reliable the info is that he gets. If he punishes bad news, he should be smart enough to know that people will not tell him bad news. I call that idiotic.
> making accurate predictions about what might happen next, are much improved
I agree with you on this one. Maybe my "lunatic" was not well chosen, and should be replaced with "psychopath". Because only a psychopath kills or poisons political opposition. But it's perfectly doable to predict an idiot's actions.
For the most part I think we actually agree with each other, it's just the wording that might differ.
It seems Putin was living in his own fantasy land for quite a while. And now that he's getting hit with reality, I sure hope he's sane enough to understand certain consequences.
Poisoning opponents is actually customary in Russian politics. This isn't one man's psychiatric condition; it was Soviet policy. Stalin created units dedicated to the practice.
Rasputin apparently survived a cyanide attempt.
Ivan The Terrible poisoned three of his wives to death.
Putin is an admirer of Russian customs; it's not surprising that he favours poison.
It's easy for a layman to bandy-around terms like "psychopath". He may be a psychopath, for all I know; but I think it's much more likely that he's just a boring bureaucrat, promoted far beyond his abilities, and obsessed with a perverse view of Russian imperial history.
I don’t know about a mad fool. But I think it is pretty clear that the invasion of Ukraine is a bit of catastrophic buffoonery on par with the US invasion of Iraq by Bush jr and his neocon cronies.
If the past is prelude to the present we can predict that Putin’s political coalition is going to be thrown out, in a manner similar to what we saw in the 2016 US presidential primaries / election, which was more a rejection and overthrow of the political establishment than an endorsement of the orange Cheeto man.
This is not in dispute. This has been pretty much outlined explicitly by Vladimir Putin in several writings and speeches.
> I will start with the fact that modern Ukraine was entirely created by Russia or, to be more precise, by Bolshevik, Communist Russia.
Continuing in reference to the creation of the Ukrainian SSR:
> This immediately raises many questions. The first is really the main one: why was it necessary to appease the nationalists, to satisfy the ceaselessly growing nationalist ambitions on the outskirts of the former empire? What was the point of transferring to the newly, often arbitrarily formed administrative units – the union republics – vast territories that had nothing to do with them? Let me repeat that these territories were transferred along with the population of what was historically Russia.
...
> Why was it necessary to make such generous gifts, beyond the wildest dreams of the most zealous nationalists and, on top of all that, give the republics the right to secede from the unified state without any conditions?
> I would like to emphasize again that Ukraine is not just a neighboring country for us. It is an inalienable part of our own history, culture and spiritual space
- Putin, 21 February 2022 [http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/transcripts/67828]
> I am certain that the true sovereignty of Ukraine is possible precisely in partnership with Russia
- Putin, 12 JUL 2021 [https://tass.com/world/1313223?utm_source=google.com&utm_med...]
The Russian head of state does not deny that this war is intended to dominate Ukraine and bring it effectively under Russian control and end its independence and its drift away from the Russian sphere of influence. You don't have to act like it's a complicated situation - not even Russia is pretending that it is.
Special military operation. ;)
The continuous colonialism of Western nations to African and Middle Eastern countries? The Zionist occupation of Palestine? The US led invasions on Iraq and Afghanistan? Just to name a few.
As for Western nations in African and Middle Eastern countries: again, for the most part despicable but here too I don't see these as wars of conquest or ways to commit genocide by the West. That does not mean that what they are doing there is in general defensible but there are so many sides to those conflicts that clarity isn't always easy to come by, even the locals disagree on whether or not the Western involvement is a blessing or a curse, and it isn't rare for those sides to change as a conflict evolves.
The 'Zionist occupation of Palestine' as presented is already evidence of picking a side. Personally, and I'm not making any friends with this, I think the founding of the state of Israel and the preceding Balfour declaration were misguided - some of my Jewish friends agree with this - and the state of apartheid there is one that I can not and will not subscribe to. The behavior of Israel is unacceptable and I have no illusions that it is only the United States veto in the security council that stands between Israel and much wider condemnation of how they are behaving there. I do not believe that Israel as a state will survive unless they - and the Arab world around them - will find a way to effectively bury the past, and with every bullet fired and person killed that gets harder and harder. I do not subscribe to the Jewish people having an innate right to certain parts of the world based on religious texts from 4000 years ago, nor do I believe that to commit the same wrongs against people that others have committed to you make a right or can ever lead to an improvement.
But, and this is my point: in all of these situations there is are many factors at play that make me believe that some or all of the problems exhibited or some other form of discord or violence would be present in those regions, and in some cases that may have been far worse than what is going on there now.
Compared to Urkraine vs Russia these are all areas that are most likely going to be at war in one way or another with each other or internally regardless of what the West does to either pick sides or to try to improve things, it's at best meddling and at worst neo colonialism or patronization.
None of that however stops me from deciding - purely for myself - that these conflicts are too complex for me to fully appreciate all of the nuances and all of the aspects of the parties involved, in part because I do not know enough about the regions - though I know more about them than the people that I normally interact with -, I don't feel I'm on solid ground other than to roughly understand the basics and to draw coarse conclusions (see above for some of those).
But the degree of clarity with which I find myself judging Russia for the active destruction of a country closely aligned with Western Europe, a country close to Western Europe, a country that was party to more than one binding agreement and treaty which it did not violate is substantially larger.
I hope that clarifies my position enough for you to understand why this is different for me.
It's because Ukraine contains three of the nine "gap" invasion pathways into Russia and demographic collapse means if Russia doesn't take those gaps back now they won't be able to field an army to do so in the future. They had all of them before the Soviet Union fell. Invading Georgia gave them back one. Taking Crimea gave them back another. Taking the rest of Ukraine will give them two more.
If anyone decides to invade Russia, they better be super sure about their anti-ICBM capabilities. Just one warhead going through the defense means a leveled city. So, 200k-1million+ casualties.
So, who's taking that chance? For what?
My understanding is that the majority of Russia's large nuclear arsenal consists of "tactical" warheads, with a yield small enough that they can be used on a battlefield containing Russian forces. These are not city-busters.
Countries like the US and UK, whose nuclear doctrine is "no first use" and deterrence, rely mainly on MIRVed city-busters. The UK submarine force includes some cruise-missile nukes; but it's mainly MIRVed ICBMs. If you launch a single missile, you have launched multiple warheads. I don't know how NATO doctrine is supposed to respond to (say) a single ten-kiloton nuke fired at a railhead or marshalling yard.
Bringing the US into the issue seems to be quite the non-sequitur - is self-determinancy a concept that can only be viewed through the lens of US imperialism? Are the rights of Ukrainians (and other states bordering Russia) merely a construct of US policy?
Suppose the US currently had in place an administration which took an isolationist, ambivalent or even "Putin has valid concerns" attitude - this is hardly a speculative leap - would your attitude change? If there is nothing to see in what is happening in Ukraine, why would US imperialism bother you?
There's a history to this "What about this other thing" distraction / derailing technique, and it was fairly common from Russia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism#Soviet_Union_and_...
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Whataboutism
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/08/th...
Putin quoted a song during press conference with Emmanuel Macron in early February about Ukraine:
"Whether you like it or don't like it, bear with it, my beauty."
The full quote from "Sleeping beauty in a coffin" song by Red Mold would be:
Sleeping beauty in a coffin, I crept up and fucked her. Like it, or dislike it, sleep my beauty.
That gives you the mindset of Putin with regard to Ukraine.
Also, some personal note - my grandmother as a little girl had to hide from Russian speaking soldiers who were raping women and girls in my home town during "liberation" of Poland from Germany at the end of WWII. The stories from Ukraine are exactly the same as what my grandmother lived trough.
If you don't trust news or social media, that's fine. There are facts out there ready to be found in other ways. There are thousands of twitter feeds, embedded journalist, first person accounts, etc. But if you're not wiling to look for facts, and not willing to receive them from reputable summary sources, then you're an easy target for these kinds of propaganda tricks.