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Comment by jdmichal | Hacker News Reader

The best response I've heard to this is: Tell me which part of the US you would willingly give up to Russia if it threatened to attack. If your response would be for them to pound sand, why should we expect or want any different for the Ukraine?

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The US doesn't launch artillery into its own states like Texas for example. This is why I say the history of conflict in Crimea, Donbas, etc. is complicated--Ukraine government for years has done much aggression against ostensibly its own people (including firing on them with artillery!).

This is not a cut and dry, "Russia bad!! Russia invade!!". Some people in those contested regions welcomed Russia as protectors against Ukraine extremist aggressors.

As an American I have no skin in this fight and nor should I, this is a conflict for Ukraine and Russia to sort out hopefully through diplomacy. Russia has been a world power for decades post USSR fall and clearly have not been on a megalomaniacal quest for world domination. I see no reason to assume they want to start another world war.

The US most certainly has launched artillery into its own states, including Texas [1]. There's no benefit to doing so now, but if Mexico were to occupy all of Texas tomorrow, I guarantee the US would bomb inside Texas. Similarly, if Mexico just supplied support to get Texas to secede, there would also be violence.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Civil_War

The southern states started the civil war in protest against moves to end slavery which they profited from directly. It was not northern states deciding to be aggressors against the southern states for no good reason. The circumstances were completely different and you know it (it's in the wikipedia article you cite!).

It’s a lot more complicated than that as the Wikipedia page mentions. The southern states had ‘succeeded’ months before fighting broke out. Lincoln made some concessions but wasn’t willing to relinquish federal land in southern states or accept them having actually left. Meanwhile congress passed many new laws once southern state senators had left.

the history may be complicated, and that's why it's up to the UN, or bilateral negotiation between russia and Ukraine, to resolve the issue, rather than russia using force and trying to genocide Ukraine because russia is mad they don't get everything they want

indeed, as soon as russia abandoned the former, diplomacy, and resorted to the latter, force, they lost all benefit of the doubt and all rights to anything they wanted

and that's to say nothing of the fact that russian soldiers rape, torture, and murder men, women, and children in areas of Ukraine they control, so ceding control means allowing that to happen, which obviously means it wouldn't actually lead to peace, because who would be peaceful sacrificing THEIR friends, family, and countrypeople to that? You?

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