That being said, Russia still is shit; and we wouldn’t be in this situation if they weren’t attacking civilian infrastructure in an attempt to freeze Ukrainians to death.
Actually bad guys have been the same. It is hard for people to understand or even stand the fact that their country and their countrymen could be evil. That is pretty much all there is to this. Everybody likes to believe the war they are fighting is for a just cause and will make the world a better place, and they think every other country doing the very same is evil.
We should all agree on the fact when we say "War for X reasons is evil" the real issue there is "War", not X which could be {religion, democracy, economic order, ...}
But honestly mostly people do if for things like resources, and influence and but like to sell as X. This is why everything you do is ok, but others doing it isn't. There are only finite resources, and this is a race condition.
In every war, the propagandists try to promote the view that this war is a “good” or “just” war - they are all wrong, just slightly different in their degree of “wrongness”.
And frankly it seems just as sad to see Russian soldiers throw into the fight to die by their own government.
This whataboutism around Ukraine is emblematic of the problem with misaligned postmodern thinking. The fact of the matter is that Russia has violently invaded Ukraine and they are trying to bend Ukraine against its will. It's wrong and the world _should_ come to their side. Likewise if the tables were turned.
Every US president since the end of the cold war has authorized eastward expansion of NATO, an alliance whose enemy no longer exists.
The current president was brokering arms deals with Ukraine. The previous president was delivering on those deals.
After the 2014 coup, a major Ukraine energy company, which was cozy with Putin, hired the Vice President’s son in order to cozy up with the new America-friendly regime.
The previous president was impeached for asking Ukraine to investigate corruption by the former Vice President.
Putin warned that arming or granting membership to Ukraine’s belligerent new government was a red line Russia could not tolerate. NATO did it anyway.
The players in the great game fucked around. Pretending nothing happened prior to 2022 is willful ignorance.
The North Atlantic Treaty was signed in an effort prevent war in Europe.
...and here we are today with war in Europe.
NATO is more relevant now than it ever has been since it was first established, and I think their current list of applicants is a clear testament to that.
If those countries wish to join NATO why do they need to ask permission to Russia? This argument really doesn't make sense unless you take away sovereignty of states from the equation, some countries decided they wanted to join NATO, should they be blocked to join a defensive military alliance for what reasons?
> After the 2014 coup, a major Ukraine energy company, which was cozy with Putin, hired the Vice President’s son in order to cozy up with the new America-friendly regime.
> The previous president was impeached for asking Ukraine to investigate corruption by the former Vice President.
What? Trump was clearly asking for a quid pro quo from Ukraine and keeping aid hostage unless he got some dirt on a political opponent. I'm not American so I really can't grasp why you'd bend reality this way to fit your narrative...
> Putin warned that arming or granting membership to Ukraine’s belligerent new government was a red line Russia could not tolerate. NATO did it anyway.
Ukraine wanted to join NATO, again a defence alliance, with a democratically elected government that came after ousting their previous Russian-puppet president which was openly propped up by Russia/Putin. Putin tolerating it or not it's not his decision to make over the wants of a foreign government. If you support this kind of meddling then you should not have any qualms against other nation-states directly meddling into other countries policies and politics, right? Like you don't have anything against the USA constant meddling into others' affairs, am I correct?
Please, source where exactly was the new government of Ukraine belligerent, that's an extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary evidence.
When ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine decided they didn’t want to be a part of Ukraine anymore, Ukraine shelled them. There aren’t any good guys over there. But there didnt need to be a war, and NATO didnt need to instigate it.
Oversimplification. Ukrainian constitution says that all referenda needs to go through a vote by all people, not only the ones concerning a region. It was unlawful under Ukrainian law. On top of that there were all the little green men coming from Russia to "help" those ethnic Russians, also there are recordings of Barkashov openly stating how the votes for the referendum in Donbass should look like [1]:
> The recording was of a phone call that the security service said took place between a pro-Russian political operative named Aleksandr Barkashov, who was identified as being in Moscow, and Dmytro Boitsov, a leader of rebels in Donetsk.
> The authenticity of the recording could not be independently verified.
> In the conversation, riddled with expletives, Mr. Boitsov suggests canceling the referendum and Mr. Barkashov insists that it must go forward, but says that it is ridiculous to consider holding a real vote.
> “Are you going to walk around and collect papers?” he asks incredulously, his words punctuated by curses. “Are you insane?”
> Mr. Barkashov adds: “Let’s say that 89 percent voted for the Donetsk Republic and that’s it.”
On this point:
> But there didnt need to be a war, and NATO didnt need to instigate it.
You keep saying NATO instigated it, again, how exactly did NATO instigate it? Ukraine wasn't posed to join NATO in 2014, Ukraine had a peace agreement with Russia since the denuclearisation, a treaty that wasn't respected even after Ukraine stating it wasn't planning on joining NATO. A Russian puppet was deposed from Ukraine's leadership, the people seem to be pretty happy with his replacement since then, and are able to vote for whomever they want.
If Ukraine wanted to join NATO, how is that instigation by NATO? I seriously don't understand this repetition of Mearsheimer's realpolitik take on it, yeah, Russia doesn't like it but Russia's neighbours have pretty clear reasons and motives to want to join a defensive alliance to avoid exactly what happened to Chechnya, Georgia and Ukraine. Russia's will to have lebensraum doesn't give then any validity or justification to invade a neighbour country, you are just catering to the whims of a Russian government that's been pretty clear about its objectives towards its neighbours, why do you keep trying to justify their actions?
Illegal referenda, annexation of territories (specifically productive ones with industries and natural resources) and so on are never going to be justified by the ghost of an ever-encroaching NATO. Russia just needed to stop being a fucking asshole to its neighbours, why can't they do that? Because it's an imperialist shell of a country trying to survive by sheer brute force over its vast expanse of land, something that would never be held together if the people had any say over their future, there's always an iron fist hammering down and subjugating all of its regions.
It's absurd and shameless to actually try to defend this, even worse by simply parroting Russia propaganda. You aren't smarter because you found and chose a contrarian position to be the hill you die on... Quite the opposite.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/09/world/europe/ukraine.html
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/mar/16/ukraine-russia...
That putin warned of something is meaningless. Are we expected to roll over whenever a foreign country makes a threat? Most of these threats are empty; even when they aren't, some things they have no right to threaten us about. A country arming itself to protect from a (demonstrably) belligerent neighbour is one such thing. I'm surprised people eat this ridiculous excuse from putin so easily.
And I suppose if the political establishment wants to fund a proxy war against a nuclear power, they would happily cross the red line.
> Joe Biden leveraged aid to remove top prosecutor as part anti-corruption efforts
> It's true that Joe Biden leveraged $1 billion in aid to persuade Ukraine to oust its top prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, in March 2016. But it wasn't because Shokin was investigating Burisma. It was because Shokin wasn't pursuing corruption among the country's politicians.
[1] https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/10/21/fact...
Worst case scenario: Biden did exactly what Trump did.
> John F. Solomon is an American journalist who was a contributor to Fox News until late 2020
> in recent years he has been accused of magnifying small scandals, creating fake controversy,[6][7][8] and advancing conspiracy theories.
> During the Donald Trump presidency, he advanced Trump-friendly stories including questioning reporting that women who had accused Trump of sexual harassment had also sought payments from partisan political donors[10] and questioning the legitimacy of criminal charges against Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort.
Is that someone who you really want to listen to and agree with? If so, best of luck.
You are still spreading the words of people who peddle falsehoods, can't you really see that? Are you so ingrained in this point of view that you will die on that hill?