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Comment by graemep | Hacker News Reader

> Yes it has never before been as pro-West as it is today.

On the other hand Russia has never been more in China's camp than it is now, and I think that loss is far greater than the possible gain of Ukraine and the NATO expansion.

> After the second world war, Japan, Germany, South Korea and Taiwan have become friends.

Yes, over that period, but that is no longer happening. Power is shifting to other countries - China, India, etc. and they are not "friends". Quotes because I think the idea of friendship in international relations is mistaken.

> and maybe India one day?

India has very different values and interests to the west, and while it is likely to ally with the west against China, I cannot see it in anything else. It is not backing the west over Ukraine, for example.

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> I think that loss is far greater than the possible gain of Ukraine and the NATO expansion.

That wasn't a loss. Russia was never in the western camp.

The "loss" is the loss of the hope that they would become so. I'm not sure how realistic that hope ever was.

That is true, but Russia getting closer to (or dependent on) China is a loss anyway.

The Western camp has never invented any framework that would let Russia be in it.

What it could offer was: you sit here and sell us cheap oil and gas, while we court all your neighbours to stop associating with you and associate with us instead. But it did not have any meaningful participation format for Russia, only that it should be increasingly lonely. Not to mention stuff like visa waiver or student exchange programmes. In the end even at the best of relations the integration was actually tiny.

When confronted with this, the West will usually deflect and blame it all on Putin, which is also not constructive: This does not offer any plan to a regular Russian, especially seeing how close EU politicians were to Putin at that time and how they did not care if he stays for as many terms as he wanted to.

And yet all of Russias neighbours are now courting China, Kazakhstan especially. And also Russia is content with becoming a vassal gas station for China as long as it gets to play as a faux empire and slaughter both its citizens and its brother nation's citizens in an industrial meat grinder. 5D chess as the youngsters say these days

China is not so dangerous in this regard because it is not appealing. It has great amount of economic power, but culturally it is very insular, plus the story of Chinese Uighurs, making people (in Central Asia especially) wary of fully embracing the Chinese Way.

Not so with Europe, which is culturally dominant, and many countries around Russia would love to fully embrace the EU, if EU is willing to take effort. But this is shitty deal for Russia since it was never invited to any such schemes and will lose cultural and economic influence. It's also not all rosy for target countries' population, but it's acceptable and Europe can make it look great.

For Russians it will always look that they cut family bonds for sugar daddy, though. That has sufficient stigma that would explain why Russian population still does not mind the war.

Russia has the Snow White's Evil Queen role assigned here, who is uninvited to the party but crashes it. And boy does Russia embraces this role, unfortunately. "5D checkers" is the term.

Tell me. Had russia treated its neighbors well, not genocided them for centuries on end, enslaved and taken liberties from them. Would they then maybe feel different about russia?

Ukraine, Poland, Finland, Baltics, all the Stans. Everyone has been been attacked by russia over the centuries. Centuries before putin was born.

The biggest problem of course is that russia is STILL doing that. Attacked Georgia, attacked Ukraine, is threatening to attack Baltics again.

There is no sign that russia can be trusted to treat it's neighbors well or be a responsible member of a world where human rights are being valued.

This is completely on russia itself, trying to play the victim is not going to work as everyone has tried to accomodate russia. Germans thought that wandel-durch-handel tried to make russia to understand that trade is more profitable than war, but this was proven to be hopelessly naive.

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