In short, insanity.
A hot war between EU/NATO and Russia is not something anyone should advocate for, nor is letting Russia just take countries it wants on the edges of Europe. The current situation is a direct result of ignoring a long pattern of Russian aggression and expansionism in Georgia, Moldova, and Crimea.
They've made me, as a citizen in an EU country, pay out of my nose for their moral betterness though, when we are not even a party to the war.
The time to start getting off Russian gas was 2014. The EU, and Germany in particular, let a gun be pointed at their head for far too long.
It is possible to dislike all empires you know.
This is a very silly assertion.
The EU should provide payment assistance to low-income folks for their energy bills, or directly subsidize it.
I don't mean to be alarmist but we've seen similar scenarios play out in Europe before. This isn't merely about what's morally correct, it's also about self-interest.
They are hopelessly outclassed in all categories but nukes. And UK/France has a couple of them, so Russia can't nuke willy nilly.
A loss in Ukraine means every non-NATO state in the region either gets nuclear armed up, or gets annexed.
The expectation that the result of "letting it happen" would also be cheap gas is laughable: if someone's willing to trade away their morals and a country for something you sell them, then you already know it's underpriced.
EU and USA are letting it happen though: there is no military deployment to Ukraine to protect it, and (my guess is) there will not be.
I hope it doesn't come to that, but it could some day, I don't know, obviously if Russia attacks... well, in the meantime, I don't think we should be giving Russia more money it can use to further develop its military.
I am stating that going to war with Russia is the only way to walk the walk and be provably morally good over the issue. The sanctions are just a particularly expensive form of virtue signaling that does not alter the outcome of the war, but makes EU leaders Feel Good.
> Don't think we should be giving Russia money it can use to pay its soldiers and build more weapons.
And I disagree, my extended family is already in troubles and the proper price increase doesn't even come until winter.
It's not a "don't think" question either. Would I like to be energy independent? Of course. Can I currently? No, not without risking energy security for winter. So I would pay (but EU has decided it is a Moral Bad, and tells me to warm myself with Moral Good).
Suffering ~10%+ inflation and having no guaranteed energy (all depends on Germany) for moral good boy points only helps nobody, and neither of the conditions alter the material facts on the frontline, nor does it make EU resilient either (economical turmoil has generally been a politically radicalizing agent in democracies).
It is just stupid, hysterical politics.
Is that what you think Russian expansion in those regions is about? It's not. Just like the current military expansion, those conflicts have been about acquiring and controlling natural gas and oil reserves in those regions.
This entire conflict has been about energy and it's been going on for the past decade or so because of relatively recent discoveries of fossil fuel reserves in these areas coupled with control over pipelines transporting these resources.
At the end of the day these struggles are about resources and fundamentally existential in nature. If Russia fails to acquire more reserves it will be on a sure path to absolute decline. This is why the nuclear threat should be taken seriously, if Russia where to lose this conflict entirely, they would be on the path to complete collapse. If pushed too far it makes absolute sense for Russia to take extreme options since they would be backed into a pretty severe corner.
I mean the lack of sanctions, hasn't stopped Russia after taking Crimea, so it's only fair to assume Ukraine wouldn't be the end to Russia's (Putin's) expansion either. They implied so many times. Their enormous investments in the destabilization of foreign politics, have made it a very real possibility that the U.S. might drop out of NATO, if Trump gets reelected. Orban and Erdogan are also wild cards.
Such a development would put Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, and Poland at risk.
In long, that isn't insanity at all.
Yes, I am not disputing that.
I stated that the actions of EU (self-sanctions) have not, and will not affect whether or no Russia takes Ukraine though, this was the entire point of my post. It is part of what makes them so absurd.
An action that would affect would be to deploy there via strategic military action, but which our Moral Leaders are too scared (for right reasons, Russia has lots of nukes) to make. So they do this idiotic self-sanction regime to Feel Good (all paid by the tax payers and lower quality of life by people like me, who live in EU).
What credentials, intel do you have to back this up? I've heard a lot of evidence to support the contrary. The sanctions are working, Russia is just telling us they're not and that's what the rooble is so highly valued right now.
The ruble is worthless because no one accepts it.
I find these given cause-and-effect chains in defense of the sanctions and other actions largely to be magical thinking and hysterical (they'd be less so if they were actually backed by the proof-of-work of deploying to protect Ukraine).
Like, I don't care about the Ruble in itself. I was told that it would be flattened in two weeks. Well it wasn't, so we failed there. Okay, so next goal post is to pretend Ruble going up and down has helped Ukraine's strategic or operational capabilities or hurt Russia's, materially altered the course of the war. Well that's magical thinking, they were supposed to run out of missiles in two weeks somewhere around March, and it was like day or two ago they made their largest missile strike (which have been more or less continuous).
A NATO deployment would alter the outcome of the war, and that single action is not coming.
There is no way to know how Russia will behave exactly, but we DO know that they stopped invading Georgia when some territory was ceded. The USA and Europe behave very differently when invading (Iraq, Afghanistan). It does not help to reduce the conflict into a bad guys/good guys story. People are dying and a whole country might get flattened to rubble.
So, more sanctions I guess. It is immoral if any EU citizen has heating this winter when that could be going to Ukraine.
Poor, lights out EU with 10-20% inflation will not in fact be a 'strong against Russia' or whatever (and this is without EU being in a war of any kind, lmao)
Western countries have dealt with and enriched nasty reigimes one way or another for centuries