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Comment by solumunus | Hacker News Reader

It's nowhere near the same thing.

This was supposed to be an imperialist land grab by Russia. This war did not emerge organically. Russia had a goal, to seize Ukraine - easily and quickly. Russia have failed at that goal. Failing is not winning. Not only have they failed to secure their objective, the attempt to do so has cost several orders of magnitude more than intended. The land they do control is of low value.

Again, spectacularly failing to carry out your goals is not "winning", in any sense of the word.

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Would you say that Austria-Hungary choosing to outright invade Serbia because the assassin was a Bosnian Serb who might have had some backing from the government, was reasonable? Or was that a land grab? And when when Russia joins Serbia was it solely an action of obligation or because they thought they might be able to get a piece of Austria-Hungary? And similarly when Germany jumps in seeing they can now shift the balance back towards Austria-Hungary, and so on.

And then this just kept iterating until suddenly everybody's fighting everybody, tens of millions are dying, and absolutely nothing was achieved. Then you get the Treaty of Versailles which desperately tried to justify it all by being excruciatingly punitive on Germany, but of course that ultimately did nothing but essentially guarantee WW2 where tens of millions more would die again, and again for basically nothing, with a good chunk of Europe left in rubble.

In the modern war Russia claimed that their motivation for the war was to prevent Ukraine from joining NATO. Their early movements were largely performative or Hail Marys (like the decapitation strike) and within 48 hours they were engaged in negotiations with Ukraine that involved 0 land concessions, but primarily focused on Ukraine not joining NATO. Ukraine chose to fight, at the urging of the West, and so here we are.

Ukraine were no where near joining NATO at the time, although as it turns out - if they were their motivation would have been entirely valid. Russia didn’t want Ukraine to join NATO because it would prevent them from annexing Ukraine, that’s simple logic.

> within 48 hours they were engaged in negotiations with Ukraine that involved 0 land concessions

So you think the plan was to invade Ukraine to scare them into a hand shake that they wouldn’t join NATO? I really don’t want to insult you but…

Not joining NATO would be an extremely small price to pay relative to what war could, and ultimately did, entail.

There's a nice timeline here [1] of relations between Ukraine and NATO. It's an archived version from the day before the invasion began, so there's no hindsight posts. Things were accelerating rapidly on the Ukraine-NATO front. In January 2022 there was apparently even a bill that was to be introduced in the US declaring Ukraine a "NATO+ country" immediately. And NATO's responses towards Russia's expressed concerns began to be completely dismissive with not even a vague allusion to reconciliation.

So I think the main goal was certainly to prevent Ukraine from joining NATO, but I think a major secondary goal was for Russia to make it clear that their claims of red lines and such are not toothless. If a country makes repeated claims of things being a red-line but never acts on such claims, then their future claims will be casually dismissed.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ukraine%E2%80%93N...

  > Things were accelerating rapidly on the Ukraine-NATO front.

They weren't. Ukraine is still nowhere near getting a membership action plan, which is the formal start of membership negotiations.

We saw with Finland and Sweden how quickly entry into the organization can progress if there's a will in the alliance to accept new members. We have not seen such will regarding Ukraine.

The whole "blame NATO" narrative is just a waste of everyone's time and completely ignores the internal developments in Russia and the ambitions of Putin and his clan. The main goal of the ex-Soviet security apparatus is to restore their lost empire and the special privileged position of the security services within it. To Europeans, the Cold War and the Iron Curtain were abnormalities that have been rectified; to the current generation of Russian decision-makers, the Cold War was a normalcy that they strive to return to. Russian dissidents have been warning for decades that the destruction of Russian democracy would sooner or later lead to resurgence of Soviet imperial thinking, and that's exactly what we're seeing.

NATO itself bears little importance in this. Russia is against all forms of European cooperation and would prefer to see countries alone and isolated, because it would permit attacking them one by one, instead of facing a joint front that they can't beat.

Doesn't matter now. Ukraine will never join NATO. Poland will be happy to veto their entry, and will be happy having Ukraine be the buffer state that can sacrifice its youth for the sake of Europe. What Zelensky did with honoring the UPA was irredeemable.

Heck, were Belarus to overthrow Lukashenko, they have a better chance of joining NATO than Ukraine now.

>In the modern war Russia claimed that their motivation for the war was to prevent Ukraine from joining NATO.

If Russia is so terrified of NATO invasion, why do they keep taking defenses off the boarder with Finland which just became a NATO member as a part of this war? Why does Russian state TV insist they should nuke Britain?

Why didn't Russia invade any of the NATO members already on their border?

>Ukraine chose to fight, at the urging of the West

It is well known that the US admin had prepared to airlift Zelensky out of Ukraine and support a literal insurgency because they expected Russia to win easily, and were not actually prepared to support Ukraine in a regular war. This resulted in Zelensky's famous "I need ammo, not a ride" statement.

Why did Russia violate their treaty terms with Ukraine, which explicitly guaranteed their security? Why should you ever trust negotiations with a leader who has clearly demonstrated they do not respect what they sign?

>Their early movements were largely performative or Hail Marys

No it wasn't. Attempting to take Hostomel was standard doctrine, and they fully expected to succeed, which is why their convoy was not in fighting shape, and carried parade uniforms.

Russia, at the very top, fully believed and intended to defeat Ukraine in 3 days. They were literally not prepared for a drawn out war.

The rhetoric about Ukraine falling in 3 days came from the West, not Russia. [1] And it's highly improbable that "we" actually even believed that. Wars don't ever end in 3 days, and Ukraine had been pumped full of arms for years, had multiple cities that been heavily fortified for war, and an army approaching a million men, large numbers of of "ultra nationalists" itching for a fight, and all of this before all men of "fighting age" (up to 60) were locked in the country and started being forced into the military. Why we were putting out nonsensical rhetoric that could serve no viable purpose other than to try to entice an invasion (and as such would normally be classified) is a question with only one apparent answer.

The only other NATO members that bordered Russia before the Ukraine War were were the Baltics. They have poor geography for an invasion and would also be immediately cut off from mainland Europe in the case of a war by the Suwalki Corridor - a tiny stretch of about 40 miles that is the Baltics only connection to Europe outside of Russia/Belarus. By contrast Ukraine has ideal geography for an invasion. Kursk is also the path the Nazis ended up taking when trying to press into Russia during WW2, and also where they suffered a very costly defeat.

I do fully agree that Russia expected their negotiations with Ukraine to be successful, and had the West not intervened they likely would have been right.

[1] - https://www.newsweek.com/even-russian-propaganda-was-hesitan...

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