IDK, maybe it has something to do with spending 20yr replacing the Taliban with the Taliban.
You do not get a blank check to engage in nation building boondoggles until a "good one" comes along.
You do not get a blank check to engage in nation building boondoggles until a "good one" comes along.
That doesn't explain the victim blaming though.
Zelenski is depicted as a war criminal because he refused to capitulate to a stronger enemy.
War is crazy and brutal and engaging in one is going to get people killed. But I don't understand how we can expect some other country to just give up and yet we don't expect ourselves to do the same when somebody attacks us.
Hence my only explanation is that no living person in America truly knows how it feels to be invaded.
That some other country gets over 55% of its budget from the West and almost all its materiel. Total direct “aid” over 320 billion so far. Total costs to the West much higher still.
And the result for Ukraine is more territory lost, more destruction, and hundreds of thousands of casualties. No one would and could stop them from continuing the war on their own but imagine what that would look like.
And the result for the West is a stronger, hostile Russia with deepening ties to China, North Korea etc. Strategic failure.
>Zelenski is depicted as a war criminal
No. What we saw was a noisy attempt by the US to salvage its strategic failure in Ukraine/Russia. Russians weren’t fooled. It failed.
PS russia isn’t stronger lol.
But it's totally normal for a country to try to defend itself.
I honestly don't understand why people seem to ignore this angle and just keep talking about budget and money and foreign interests and nato and what not.
Ok, you don't want to give Ukraine money for their defence, FINE, do not give them money!
But why do you have to frame it as zelenski is corrupt, traitor, murderer, boogyman or whatever.
No normal leader of a country being invaded would be expected to surrender their country. They would have been hanged by their own people.
What I find infuriating about this discourse is the double standard. At the same time the american right is absolutely going bezerk over "immigrant invasion" and when some other people suffer an invasion "nah, I don't see the problem, they will just get along fine if they surrender".
You're free to spend your money as you wish, but it's the total lack of empathy (about this and other causes) that rubs me the wrong way.
Ukraine as client police state is not a casualty free environment either. Really the war started when pro-Russian security services killed over a hundred protesters at Euromaidan, back in 2014.
Someone who genuinely cared about Russian lives, rather than just the regime or contrarianism, would want the Russians to pull out immediately like the Americans out of Afghanistan.
We don’t have to speculate. They’ve just presented to Ukraine and published their conditions for ceasefire or settlement.
The reaction suggests Ukraine/the West would rather continue. Of course, demands will only increase.
> Really the war started with Euromaidan
Sure it wasn’t when Ukrainian nationalists burned 42 people to death in Odessa?
>regime, pull out
Ah, but Ukraine/the West were given so many opportunities to settle this peacefully. Even the March 2023 settlement (which has been published) was dangerously generous, for said regime. But peace was not on Western leaders’ mind. They wanted something else.
(Preposterous to compare Ukraine/Russia with Afghanistan/US.)
They are also tee-ing us up to attack Iran, and have provably spent money attacking Houthis despite knowing that Europe would take care of themselves.
They are full of shit and they know it. They do not care.
The Taliban didn't return to power in Afghanistan, because the war was unjust according to international law, or morally repugnant or any of that. That has never mattered. And it won't ever matter.
The Taliban won because American strategy was defective from the start. While great victories with thousands of Taliban getting massacred were common, none of those contributed the destruction of the Taliban or any other strategic objective. There had been minimal effort to learn from the failures of Vietnam and the idea of learning from British victories against the insurgents in Malaya and South Africa was unthinkable.
And the situation in Ukraine gives every indication of being similar. The Ukrainian side conducts ambitious operations, some of them impressive successes, but ever since the summer of 2023, victory only seems to be getting more distant as time goes by.
And the collapse of the Russian economy will happen any day now for the past 3 years.
After 20 years of being told the military leadership of the western world had COIN all figured out, you're going to have to give people something more than a prayer that the enemy's economy will collapse all of a sudden. Proud ignorance of the basic facts of the field or of the enemy won't procure much public support any more.
It's not at all unreasonable to think that Ukraine can continue ceding ground and shredding Ladas full of mobiks until Putin kicks the bucket, or the Russian economy collapses. A healthy economy doesn't have a 20% key interest rate for 8 months straight, you know. We've already seen one large-scale mutiny in the Russian armed forces, too, so who knows what else might happen?
You haven't proposed any sort of alternative to continuing to arm and fund Ukraine. What's your idea, cut them off and say "good luck?" How does that benefit anyone besides Russia and the minority of Ukrainians who don't want to fight?
edit: if you're thinking that I care about the financial cost of arming Ukraine, I don't. This is the best money we've ever spent and the only time I've respected our MIC, and I wish we were sending more weapons and more financial support. Every time Ukraine spends $100,000 of aid destroying a piece of Russian armor, that's saving us god knows how much in money spent on deterrence.
This situation is not present in the Russo-Ukrainian war.