So you think the invasion was justified? I believe the US and friends are not saints. But whataboutism is meaningless when cities are being destroyed and civilians are losing their lives, regardless of where it is.
The fact of “civilian losing their lives” is where I think creates the differences in views. For many people, especially Americans, they can’t get past that or put the body count in perspective. Others, and I think this includes much of the non-western world, are more like “well people die, what’s special about this?” I don’t say that to be callous, my point is that 50,000-100,000 people die annually in state based conflicts, and everyone morally triages them, and that can produce different results.
UNHR estimates 2,000 civilian deaths so far in Ukraine. That was a typical number for (1,500-3,500) for civilian deaths in Afghanistan each year for the past decade. And you probably didn’t post anything about it on your Facebook, right?
So let’s get past deaths. What’s happening in Ukraine? The 20th century conflict between the “first world” and the “second world”—a conflict so epic that the terminology has become part of our vernacular—ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. When empires collapse they don’t just vanish. There was an informal agreement among all involved that the west would leave Russia its space. Remember, we were fighting against the Soviets in places like Korea and Vietnam. So giving them a buffer in Eastern Europe against NATO was a good deal. Maintaining buffer states to avoid conflict between major powers is a centuries old practice rooted in pragmatic considerations.
So what happened? NATO reneged by gobbling up Eastern European countries and pushing ever closer to Russia’s border. Russia sees NATO encroaching closer and closer to their border, flirting with allowing membership of a country in Russia’s border. What were they going to do?
What happened in Afghanistan was devastating and horrific.
You think because I’m a Westerner that I have “picked a side” and look past our own crimes. I don’t.
Russia also reneged. They agreed to protect Ukraine’s borders and sovereignty.
They could recognize that joining NATO is a ultimately the choice of the states that choose join NATO, and respect that. It is that simple.
Empirically, it's not!
Russia behaves like an abusive parent that says that their adult daughter cannot hang out with her friends.
Nothing. NATO isn’t something akin to the Soviet Union - a collection of client states politically and militarily dominated by a single country styling itself an expanding imperial power - it’s a simple mutual defence pact.
It’s reasonable for Russia to object to theatre range nuclear missiles and specific military systems on its borders, and that’s the sort of thing treaties between NATO and Russia should cover - but it’s entirely unreasonable for Russia to argue that Ukraine should not have the capacity to defend its borders from invasion, that this from NATO membership constitutes an intolerable military threat - it simply doesn’t, nor in the modern era are countries allowed to dictate neutrality to their neighbours as a condition of their own security.
No kidding, glad we got that out of the way.
> I think it was a predictable outcome of what the west was doing.
Aka the 'Mearsheimer' doctrine. Which is patent nonsense, but it gives cover for what you apparently want to believe.
> NATO reneged by gobbling up Eastern European countries and pushing ever closer to Russia’s border.
NATO didn't gobble up anything. The countries that joined NATO did so because they were scared shitless of Russia re-invading them at some point in the future, because all the signs were pointing in that direction and none of these countries felt like becoming the next Belarus. NATO doesn't 'gobble', no country was ever forced to join NATO that did not want it, but Russia does.
Those countries have to date been proven right on four occasions where other countries, not in NATO were attacked rather than them, and there is a fair chance that if Ukraine had joined NATO before the 2014 invasion that that would have never happened to begin with.
I’ve never heard of Mearscheimer until my dad sent me a video. I think his general view aligns with ours. I don’t need “cover” for anything my opinion is quite common. I also took a bit of international affairs and European history in college so I’m not starting from scratch here.
> NATO didn't gobble up anything. The countries that joined NATO did so because they were scared shitless of Russia re-invading them at some point in the future, because all the signs were pointing in that direction and none of these countries felt like becoming the next Belarus. NATO doesn't 'gobble', no country was ever forced to join NATO that did not want it, but Russia does.
NATO had every right to say no and should have said no. These little countries shouldn’t be affecting the balance of world power.
> Those countries have to date been proven right on four occasions where other countries, not in NATO were attacked rather than them, and there is a fair chance that if Ukraine had joined NATO before the 2014 invasion that that would have never happened to begin with.
I think if NATO had rejected admission of other Eastern European countries the war would never have happened either.
Yes, but it being 'quite common' doesn't necessarily mean that it is right.
> I think if NATO had rejected admission of other Eastern European countries the war would never have happened either.
Putin seems to disagree with you there. He's been dreaming of a USSR revival since the day the SU collapsed and he's on the record about that. Note that all of the countries that did not join NATO when they could have by now been attacked or have been threatened with an attack. And two of them have been bombed back into the stone age with untold loss of life.
This is so surreal. Like trading with colonies. You really thing that people in Eastern Europe should not have say in this?
This whole point is not rooted in reality because Ukraine was not joining NATO. It was not possible for them. They were maybe going to join EU. Even after invasion it seemed like real option but this is now probably not going to happen as well for different reasons (diplomatic relations between Ukraine and some EU countries).
So this invasion has nothing to do with NATO. "Buffer states" are not going to change situation between Russia and NATO. Putin has nukes - he does not really cares about NATO.
NATO didn't force us to join, we asked for it, as an independent country which suffered a lot for centuries.
All the "NATO provokes" Russia are garbage, because they remove us, the countries that decided to join NATO, from the equation. We acted in our own interest, to protect ourselves from Russia and free ourselves from Russian influence. We didn't plan to "push against the borders of Russia", we planned to protect ourselves, and today more than ever I believe we were right to do so.
This number is nowhere close to being accurate. UNHCR "believes that the actual figures are considerably higher" [0]. More than 900 dead discovered since the liberation of the areas around Kyiv [1]. And we've not yet had the opportunity to count the dead in Mariupol, or Russian controlled areas.
> And you probably didn’t post anything about it on your Facebook, right?
Millions in the West spoke out with horror and revulsion at the death tolls in the 9/11 Wars.
[0] https://www.ohchr.org/en/news/2022/04/ukraine-civilian-casua... [1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/apr/15/number-of-civi...
"OHCHR believes that the actual figures are considerably higher, as the receipt of information from some locations where intense hostilities have been going on has been delayed and many reports are still pending corroboration. This concerns, for example, Mariupol and Volnovakha (Donetsk region), Izium (Kharkiv region), Popasna (Luhansk region), and Irpin (Kyiv region), where there are allegations of numerous civilian casualties. These figures are being further corroborated and are not included in the above statistics. "
But that somehow didn't make it into the quote by the GP.
Those were of course much higher. I’m talking about the annual death tolls after 2010 when everyone in the west thought that the war was long over.
But that's a causal question, there's nothing moral about it. It's like saying someone who walked through the bad part of town and got mugged made a bad decision. But morally speaking the mugger is in the wrong, Russia is in the wrong. Ukraine, a sovereign state, is allowed to flirt with joining NATO or enter trade agreements with the EU. Besides, somewhat ironically, Ukraine would have no reason to join NATO if the Russia wasn't an ever-present threat to Ukrainian sovereignty.
People are just talking past each other. Realists aren't making moral prescriptions and moralists are worried about right and wrong, the violations of sovereignty and the body count. Both perspectives are necessary. Moralism can't guide foreign policy completely but it can't be totally absent. Reasonable people can disagree about the right mix.
Like the grandparent poster noted, it is strange and irritating that realists are being shouted down as "Russian agents" by mindless moralists.
I actually used to think this when I was four years old. That if a burglar broke in, I would simply talk to them and explain what they're doing is wrong.
My view is that the US baited Putin into this by making repeated overtures about Ukraine joining NATO (while Zelenskyy has himself said that he was told privately it wouldn't be admitted). This happened as Putin repeatedly said that Ukraine's NATO membership was a red line for him. We saw the Cuban Missle Crisis and our reaction. To me, from the Russian perspective, this is akin to Russia making preparations for a deal to put nukes in Tijuana.
Meanwhile, Ukrainian forces have spent the last 7 or 8 years shelling Russian-speaking Ukrainians in Eastern Ukraine, in violation of the (signed) Minsk accords. This is largely encouraged and participated in by forces that include entire units of Nazi sympathizers. We'd do well to bear in mind that from a uniquely Russian perspective, Nazism is often associated as much with being anti-Russian as it is anti-Jewish.
Then we have leaked audio of US politicians (Victoria Nuland) hand picking the Ukrainian leadership after the 2014 coup that appears to have been backed by the US, and the far-right Nazi groups, to oust their democratically-elected (pro-Russian) president. I won't even get into the Hunter Biden stuff except to say that the NYT recently said his laptop was real.
In sum, what Russia is doing is probably a war crime (war of aggression) and the whole situation is tragic. The US shares a lot of the blame, has done nothing but stoke the flames which is destroying Ukraine rather than push to broker a peace deal that includes the Ukrainian neutrality it had decided on anyway. The lack of open discussion about any of these issues is disheartening. I'm suspicious that the narrative being pushed by the US media has a lot more to do with the arms industry than a moral judgement by the US, which is shown through other ongoing conflicts (Yemen, Somalia) not to exist.
the russian idea of 'ukrainian neutrality' would require the US to formally reject the idea of a nations right to self-determination to satisfy the demands of a state that isn't even a peer or on good terms which isn't going to fly it weakens the united states and europe
the rest is minutia, blowback, corruption and handwaving at the end of day this is the stupid game russian leadership setup and wanted to play
You skip over annexation of Crimea and gas-rich parts of Ukraine, over Putin's rant how Ukraine shouldn't be a country, how all those new NATO countries don't have nukes stationed in them and the whole European NATO standing army is not larger than Russia's. And to top of it all, you think it's a complicated legal issue if a country that wasn't attacked or was about to attacks another one.
It is. Look up Article 51 of the UN charter. Russia's case is that there was an imminent attack on its sovereign ally. As I said, I don't think that would hold up, but it's a logical argument. "Country wasn't attacked" is not how this law works.
> annexation of Crimea
I have a similar opinion there, which is that Russia was on a poor legal footing for that action, although did proffer a defense, but that the US played a large role in that happening. Recall that simultaneous with that conflict was Ukraine's democratically-elected president being overthrown in a violent coup that by all appearances was backed by the US.
> Putin's rant how Ukraine shouldn't be a country
I didn't comment on that because I've never heard that. I'd have to read his comments to comment myself.
> those new NATO countries don't have nukes stationed in them
If the point here is that NATO participation isn't a threat to Russia, I would just say that of course it is, or the US wouldn't have expanded it.
> the whole European NATO standing army is not larger than Russia's
Germany just said they're increasing their defense budget to 100B euros.
There's a deeper issue here by the way, which is that I'm simply not going to continue to go along with the line that I and, I see, my entire country has been fed my entire life, that America #1, and we're the good guys, and everyone else who doesn't do exactly what we say are the bad guys, and be told who I have to hate and who needs a righteous war to straighten them out.
Every single hot military conflict the US has been involved in in my lifetime has turned out to be immoral, wrong, based on lies, or best-case scenario, absolutely none of our business and not something we should have been involved in. I have zero trust in anything the government, or the media they appear to control, has to say at this point.
What is that, “logically”? Who is sovereign, who is ally, who’s imminently attacked? By invading, that denies Ukraine sovereignty. If you mean Russian sovereignty, it’s not the boss of Ukraine, can’t require it be allied.
Unless, of course, Ukraine isn’t really its own thing. And that’s what Putin’s essay sets up.
> Putin's rant how Ukraine shouldn't be a country
I didn't comment on that because I've never heard that. I'd have to read his comments to comment myself.
It’s a clever piece, and to purport to be unaware undermines every comment you’ve made.
Selectively quoting, the piece argues not that Ukraine is not a country, but that it’s not its own country, has no history standalone, is really more of a greater Russia border land, and makes no cultural or economic sense apart.
- Source: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/On_the_Historical_Unity_of_Ru...
- The Russian state incorporated the city of Kiev and the lands on the left bank of the Dnieper River, including Poltava region, Chernigov region, and Zaporozhye.
- These territories were referred to as “Malorossia” (Little Russia).
- The name “Ukraine” was used more often in the meaning of the Old Russian word “okraina” (periphery), which is found in written sources from the 12th century, referring to various border territories.
- And the word “Ukrainian”, judging by archival documents, originally referred to frontier guards who protected the external borders.
- …the idea of Ukrainian people as a nation separate from the Russians started to form and gain ground among the Polish elite and a part of the Malorussian intelligentsia. Since there was no historical basis – and could not have been any, conclusions were substantiated by all sorts of concoctions…
- Ukraine and Russia have developed as a single economic system over decades and centuries.
- I am confident that true sovereignty of Ukraine is possible only in partnership with Russia.
So: It’s not sovereign on its own. It’s not a real country.
I’m simply not going to continue to … be told
Insofar as that causes you to reject controlled media, consider whether you could turn off US news, stop reading US sites, and instead study journalism, legal opinion, and historically contextualized views on this matter emerging from nations independent of Russia and U.S. both, ideally also outside EU.
Crimea is an even worse example since annexation there happened even without a pretext of defending anyone. It was so blatant disregard of laws that they stripped their uniforms of any identifying insignia and lied about their involvement until they annexed it.
Violent part of the president overthrow came mainly from former president's forces shooting on protesting civilians. The protests started why? Because the corrupt president reneged on his promise to start the process of joining EU. For all your worry about US involvement you seem to be pretty uninterested in Russia's. Ukraine had two presidential elections since.
My comment about NATO is that expansion was not akin to putting nukes directly into Russia's neighbourhood because they are exactly where they were pre-expansion. They are certainly farther from Russia than theirs are from us (Kaliningrad). And NATO is a defensive pact which you may not believe, but the fact that it doesn't have a joint army and certainly not a European army that would even remotely suffice for a plausible successful attack on Russia makes it really hard for me to believe anyone in Russia would seriously worry about countries that have mostly been very reluctant to invest in their own armies and until Russia's invasion could hardly agree on anything of substance.
That Germany intends to increase their defence budget proves exactly nothing since this was a direct consequence of Russia's invasion. Not that long ago their soldiers sometimes used brooms on joint exercises for lack of equipment. I'm sure other defence budgets including probably ours will probably change too as our assumptions have so thoroughly been proven wrong by Russia.
I'm not a US citizen and it is completely up to you how you feel about your own country and its government, but I am from a country that willingly joined NATO. I've been critical of most US military interventions in recent history, but I've also not been blind to Russia's meddling in Europe and elsewhere. It is starting to irk me describing this conflict as US or NATO one since neither is in Ukraine. There's just one country with significant forces in another one's so it really shouldn't be difficult to figure out who the aggressor is.
I don't care if your are a merchant of doubt or just being influenced by them. I do find it bemusing that someone bothered by being labelled as pro-Russian spends so much time finding excuses for their invasion.