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Comment by toenail | Hacker News Reader

We have an ongoing war in Europe because one President tried to remove the President of another country. You can perform all sorts of mental gymnastics to justify military actions, and depending on who you ask you will always get the answers you want.

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I'm not arguing the point you're making. I'm saying that these discussions on these sorts of things on chat boards populated by privileged western nerds and conspicuous progressives have little merit and are merely a reflection of biases/ego of the privileged western nerd when put up against the lived experiences of people in Venezuela and neighboring states.

You're not really saying anything, in fact, just bashing everyone else's opinion.

And note that we can look at history and see that, sometimes, people's honest opinions about their own country and what is best for it happen to be wrong. Libyans were extremely happy when Gaddafi was killed - and now they're living in much worse conditions than when he was alive. Many Afghans welcomed the US toppling of the brutal taliban regime, and now after twenty years of brutal war, the taliban are back in power as if nothing happened.

It would be absolutely wonderful if the same fate doesn't happen to Venezuela. I sincerely wish and hope that they will have a provisional government which quickly organizes free and fair elections and that a much better leader is elected who can start reversing the damage Maduro did. I don't think this is particularly likely to happen, sadly, looking at the history and track-record of violent regime change by foreign powers. This observation remains true regardless of what the people of Venezuela think and hope, sadly.

This is abusing the concept of lived experience (which by the way is an ivory tower privileged term)

You mean one unelected dictator tried to annex a neighboring country and wanted to remove the elected president of that country.

Please don't spread Russian propaganda by taking over their talking points.

Lol, saying the invading countries is bad is Russian propaganda, ok buddy.

That is not a reason why there is a war. The Ukrainian war is an existential one, a continuation of multiple acts of genocide performed by russians for centuries.

That is a big difference between war in Ukraine and war in Iraq or Venezuela.

Russia has unlimited objectives: destroy Ukrainian identity and sovereignty. Annex the country.

While USA has limited objectives, like to overthrow the government.

Overthrowing government (and installing puppet government) is considered an unlimited objective.

This is what Russians would presumably also do if able.

So your point doesn't stand

Yes and as a corollary, it has nothing to do with Venezuela having the largest oil reserves of any country.

Not a lot since Maduro had no objections to selling the Oil to the US.

Russia would be very happy to install a puppet regime in Ukraine, as long as they had some certainty this regime would be stable and subservient to their interests. We know for a fact that they don't care about necessarily invading other countries as long as those countries are subservient: they are not planning to annex Belarus, nor did they have any real problems with Ukraine as long as it was led by their preferred leaders and it was not making any overtures to NATO or the EU.

The exact same thing will happen in Venezuela: the USA will be happy with any leader that they have confidence will represent US interests, stop doing any business with Russia or Iran, and that they think will last. If instead another member of Maduro's party looks likely to win power, either now or in the near future, they will certainly not allow that to happen, even if it were to happen as a result of free elections.

The Russians actually had a puppet regime, which was overthrown by a "revolution".

Yes, they did, and there was no attempt to annex Ukraine before that regime fell, I said as much in my comment.

Note that this is not in any way an attempt to justify Russia's actions, quite the contrary. I'm using the comparison to Russia's obviously horrible actions in Ukraine to condemn the USA's equally horrible actions in Venezuela.

> and there was no attempt to annex Ukraine before that regime fell, I said as much in my comment.

They literally did. It's just they couldn't do it militarily before 2014 because of Chechnya and bad economic at the time.

In 90s they already tried to take Crimea (via politics). In 2003 they tried to take Tuzla.

In the 90s, the status of Crimea was an internal dispute in the newly-formed Ukrainian state. The status of Crimea as a part of the new Ukrainian state at this time was not yet settled in any way. The territory only became firmly a part of Ukraine in 1995.

The 2003 dispute over the island of Tuzla - whose status had not been clearly settled during the independence of Ukraine from the USSR - was settled diplomatically. If you call this occasion an "attempt to annex Ukraine", then we could equally say that "Romania attempted to annex Ukraine" when the countries had several rounds of negotiation and arbitration for control of Snake Island in the Black Sea.

The only reason Russia has been reluctant to formally annex territories it broke away from other countries until 2022 was minimizing economic damage to itself. They knew how sensitive the western countries were to forceful changes of the world map, and felt no need to inflict economic sanctions on themselves for a mere symbolic act of annexing a territory they already fully controlled.

Once that Rubicon was crossed (sanctions were in place and there was nothing to lose), they annexed the four regions of Ukraine that they partially controlled.