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If you are really sincere, I invite you to ponder this video essay by Sarcasmitron. It explains why this familiar talking point has some basis in truth, but doesn't hold up on closer scrutiny.
What I also don't understand is that I'm being downvoted just for asking a sincere question. What am I doing wrong?
True or not, earnest or not in inquiry, people will reflexively judge it all the same.
I don't really care to understand the mindset of a dictator. They want power, resources,or reputation out of it. There's not a lot of justified reasons to lead an assault that will cost millions of your citizen's lives.
I don't mean with that that I fully agree with their standpoint, but that we shouldn't fuck too much with them, because they might fuck with us.
The truth of the matter from Ukraine's perspective is that this never would have happened if Ukraine was a NATO member.
NATO hasn't moved aggressively on Russia.
The motivations for Russia and it's neighbours for their opinions on joining NATO are the same. Russia doesn't invade NATO members. That's why Russia's neighbours want to join and why Russia doesn't want them to.
And then the rest of your "question" is straight up factually false.
The US did not push or expand NATO onto anyone, but Eastern Europe did everything they could to pull NATO towards them to gain additional security against the very same Russia that had just reluctantly agreed to the dismantlement of their dictatorships and removal of their armies from Eastern Europe.
Are you not aware that the Russian-run communist dictatorships were not voluntary, but forced upon Eastern Europe? That's the key to understanding everything.
In war, the objective is to get the other party to stop fighting. Either by destroying his means, or by destroying his will. If you can get enough people to believe that a war cannot be won, or that it is not just, then they will stop. And you have won. See Psychological warfare [1]
This is why Putin is menacing with nuclear weapons, even if he knows that he cannot use them. This is why Putin is making statements about Ukraine being a fascist nazi state, that he just had to invade for the good of the planet. This is why reliable / true statistics about macro-economics and battlefield victims have become state secrets.
Every time someone naively, but sincerely, enters in the reasoning of Putin, the public debate is shifted a little bit to his advantage. This is what is referred to as a Useful Idiot [2]. And due to Brandolini's Law, otherwise known as the Bullshit Asymmetry Principle [3] it takes time for people to be educated.
So people get frustrated with having to explain every time. So they just downvoted you. I guess.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_warfare
>So we should go on and risk WW3?
Well this is part of why your top comment was unpopular. Ukraine is not going to start WW3. Our inaction only accellerates the possibility since this was already winding down.
As others said, you are repeating Russian talking points. Blaming the one attacked for causing a mass scale war instead of the agressors or the spposed "allies" deciding to betray them and help the enemy.
How can America not do anything and withdraw support at the same time?
> Ukraine is not going to start WW3.
Yes Ukraine is not going to start it, but if the countries on Ukraine's side don't show any respect to Russia it might.
My reply was just based on your question, the point being that your question originated in Russian propaganda. That it was based on dishonest reasoning by Putin. And that asking the question was helping Putin. Read a history book: anyone can give reasonable sounding justifications for invading a country. At the very least leaders need support for their wars, so nobody lets loose the dogs of war, saying "yeah I just want their stuff". In geopolitics, the truth is not always in the middle.
But if you're now asking me my personal opinion, should we "continue the war", then, yes I think we should continue to enable Ukraine to defend itself. So if Ukraine wants to send more soldiers to the front, to defend their nation, then yes we should support them. Note: that does not automatically mean sending American or European soldiers, but that was never on the table.
We should continue to support them because we engaged ourselves to support Ukraine in the 90's, when we forced them to hand over their nukes to Russia.
We should continue the war because as both recent and less recent history has borne out, allowing Russia to perform a landgrab will give the wrong ideas to other countries, ultimately resulting in geopolitical instability everywhere.
We should continue to allow Ukraine to defend itself because demonstrably, it is effective.
I have kids, and do not want WW3. But if after losing hundreds of thousands of men, during a three year war, Putin has not started a nuclear war; do you really think he will start one now? If anything, supporting Ukraine will prevent future conflict.
All of this is obvious for anyone who has performed even a cursory study of history. Which probably explains why you were downvoted.
In fact I have read the history books (have you?). Yes it happened. Many things were said in fact during the negotiation. That generally happens during negotiations whilst people are trying to find a solution.
During scores of negotiations, over a period of months if not years, at one instance the phrase was uttered. Then it was retracted. It was never restated. It was not in the final agreement.
Does it mean that anything the Russians said at some point in time during the negotiations, even if it was retracted afterwards, should apply?
If you were negotiating a contract, do you think that sort of reasoning would fly? If so I have a bridge to sell you.
This is why it is propaganda. Because it is self-serving and disingenuous.
Are you sure that your original question was a sincere question?
Also, note that there is also a risk of not standing up to agression. The price of doing nothing is not zero.
All I said was that one should take care not to be instrumentalised by unwittingly propagating false propagandist narratives. I think we can agree on that?
The controversy regarding the legitimacy of eastward NATO expansion relates to the aftermath of the Revolutions of 1989, when the fall of Soviet-allied communist states to opposition parties brought European spheres of influence into question.
Russian authorities claim that agreement on non-expansion of NATO to Eastern Europe took place orally and the alliance violated it with its expansion while the leaders of the alliance claim that no such promise was made and that such a decision could only be made in writing.
Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, who participated in the 1990 negotiations, subsequently spoke out about the existence of a "guarantee of non-expansion of NATO to the east" inconsistently, confirming its existence in some interviews and refuting in others.
~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversy_regarding_the_legi...
OTOH, I understand there was an actual drawn up agreement regarding Ukraine giving up post Soviet nuclear weapons, Russia agreeing to Ukranian autonomy and the US agreeing to provide secuirty for Ukraine.
But yeah it would certainly help if they would make the agreement more official.
It's not an agreement if its a thirty year old unconfirmed one sided report of an off record discussion.
Has anybody on the NATO side from the time reported this being talked about? Were any drafts of an actual agreement ever drawn up and leaked?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J9x5E0ETyv8
And recently two Trump administration officials also brought this up:
NATO is a defensive alliance.
And it's not that hard to see why a military alliance created to counter Russian power would be the subject of Russian nightmares.
Or we should develop secret nuke capabilities and launch a first strike.
Russia lies extensively.
We can't moderate our behavior based on their irrationel fears.
Any concession to Russia means we are saying that it's ok for nuclear-armed states to invade their neighbours at will, and to expand their territory at will, because "oh no, ww3!".
That is unacceptable. That is unjust. There is exactly one guilty party in this conflict, and it is not Ukraine. We do not appease dictators who invade their neighbours.
We should rather go into conversation with Russia instead of ignoring their perspective and continue with things causing conflicts with them.
Ok, so who started the war?
But what's your point?
Actions speak louder than words. You can justify with all the quotes you want, the point is that reality is before our eyes. I don't sympathize with dictators waging wars for 13 years over much smaller countries.
Putin has been stuck in the cold war since forever. His expansionist ideals have been visible since forever.
I think the cold war never ended. And it's not just the Russians that are active in it.
Pure myth, refuted by no less than three different generations of Soviet and Russian officials, see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43149963
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Bucharest_summit
Note that Georgia joining was also on the table. Several months after this summit Russia trounced Georgia in a few days and since then there has been no serious movement towards joining NATO.
Russia likely expected the same outcome in Ukraine but as we know now that didn't materialize.
There's also Putin's 2007 speech in Munich about them being really pissed with how they are treated, does that count? Other than that there's the second Chechen war and maybe the time the Russians rushed some peace keepers into Kosoy.
And Russia is also a superpower, and we don't want to be in conflict with them. So yeah it's not that everything they say we should abide to, but we should also not think that we can do everything without upsetting them.
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/did-nato-promise-not-to-e...
The basic facts is that the US did give serveral verbal promises that NATO wouldn't expand, and that the later written treaties did not make such promises.
It is however not clear at all from the evidence that the US ever said that they were retracting the early verbal promises.
Further the Brookings piece you linked is trying to make hay out of the fact that the verbal promises were explicitly "only" about expansion into Eastern Germany, which is really just childish: If someone says you can't borrow their shovel, that's not to be understood as them allowing you to borrow anything else they own without asking.
The point is that while it's true that the US never signed anything that prohibited NATO expansion to the east, they were aware they did at one point promise just that.
Then later, as the US changed its minds during spring of 1990, the strategy seems to have been to just pretend not to remember those earlier promises and by narrowly focusing on German unification hope that the issue of the wider European order didn't come up again.
One thing that is really remarkable with all these accounts of how there wasn't any pledges is that the talks were only about German unification in the most narrow sense, and nothing else happened. So the Ion Curtain fell but the US was apparently entirely uninterested in talking to the Soviets about what the new overall structure would be?!
In this context, its a bit rich for the pro-Trump "great peace negotiator" group to imply that the US needed to keep verbal promises made 35 years ago. It was, after all, just what some dude said one time.
From the last presidents he's the one that started the least wars. I don't understand why people are saying that he's pairing with Russia when he wants to end a war that's been going on for 3 years.