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Comment by ithkuil | Hacker News Reader

That can totally explain the lack of desire to get involved.

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.

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>some other country to just give up

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.

Eh, money well spent tbh. Alternative, letting Russia just win, is worse. Give no quarter to fascism. We learnt that in the 30s.

PS russia isn’t stronger lol.

I'm not talking about whether you guys should give him money.

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.

Hundreds of thousands of casualties for Russia too. Haven't they considered just stopping?

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.

>Haven't they considered just stopping?

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.)

Russia can unilaterally retreat inside their international borders at any time.

If you think the cost for supporting Ukraine is too high, wait until you see the cost of Ukraine falling and Russian tanks crossing into NATO territory :^)

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