There was no coup:
Parliament votes 328-0 to impeach Yanukovych on Feb. 22; sets May 25 for new election3,056 karma · joined May 1, 2019
Parliament votes 328-0 to impeach Yanukovych on Feb. 22; sets May 25 for new election > That was a rather obvious false flag attempt, presumably from Ukraine.
My house has 65 cm / 2 ft stone walls, which makes the normal temperature changes throughout the year very gradual because of the enormous thermal mass of the walls. But once the walls heat up during a prolonged heatwave (which are becoming more frequent because of climate change), AC becomes remarkably ineffective at cooling because the walls will continue radiating heat into the rooms. The walls used to cool down during the night and provide a very nice thermal buffer during the day, but with elevated temperatures even at night, that doesn't work anymore.
"Just install AC, brooo" seems like something coming from the crowd that doesn't want to address the root problem.
> And why were the Soviets forced to make a pact with Nazi Germany? It was because the western powers rejected good-faith Soviet efforts to make a defence pact against the Nazis in the first place.
> But what really tipped them to fight the Russians was the false hope that western superpowers would help them fight the Russians.
> Even after the western instigated coup, all Zelensky had to do was de-escalate domestic tension and declare that it would not join NATO and remain neutral. /---/ he lost Crimea, he lost most parts of Eastern Ukraine
As I said before, you are recommending a recipe that already led to a disaster.
Pinning this on "the false assurances of then western powers" is just rubbish (with a very modern smell), nor was there anything comparable to the international coalition currently supporting Ukraine. Finland was very much alone. Even the Swedish state hesitated and lot of support that is counted in statistics as "Swedish" came through volunteers instead.
The war ended not because "they prioritised people and soldiers over territory and their own ego", but because Russians had broken through the main defensive line and the situation had become critical for the Finns and making territorial concessions was considered the less risky option. The Finns were afraid that if the war dragged on, Germany would enter the war in support of the USSR. Germany was about to invade Denmark and Norway (April 1940), after all.
Finland did not believe that territory was unimportant. When the major fighting broke out on the eastern front in 1941, Finland fought three years to regain their lost territory in the Continuation War of 1941-1944, and the USSR ultimately settled for far less than Russia is demanding from Ukraine.
The situation is nothing comparable to Ukraine's present day, because Russia has been stuck for years, the defensive lines hold well and the risk of sudden breakthrough is minimal, while Ukraine is able to deliver increasingly severe and disruptive strikes on the Russian rear. Since the introduction of improved drones in February-March 2026, the balance of power has been visibly tipping in favor of Ukraine, and the FP-7 and FP-9 ballistic missiles that are expected to enter service in the coming months will shift that even more so.
As to neutrality, Finland didn't join NATO because a 80-year-old clock ran out, but because the unprovoked nature of the war against Ukraine and the scale of it proved neutrality as an unviable option. There's simply no hope for any country in Europe to avoid such invasion without betraying their independence and becoming a colony of Russia, nor to stand against such onslaught alone. Even with pooled European resources and additional support from all parts of the world, it's still very difficult, as we can see from the news.
Ukraine pursued the same kind of "sitting on both stools" neutrality and it didn't work out, because that did little to slash Russian ambitions, but left Ukraine without much stronger foreign support in the initial stages of the war.
There's a reason why from the arctic tip of Norway down to the hot deserts of the Middle East, not a single neutral country remains on Russian border anymore. What you are suggesting is exactly the kind of recipe that led to this war: isolate your country from allies and hope Russians don't come to attack you. That is not a responsible statesmanship.
> Demanding "security guarantees" while undermining Russian security is oxymoronic.
> It was only when certain Ukrainian leaders decided that they wish to form ties with the west, even if it meant undermining Russian security, that Russia became belligerent against Ukraine.
Regarding Ukraine specifically, important events that led to the changing perception of Russia were the 2003 Tuzla island conflict, in which Russia violated the territory of Ukraine, along with constant Russian meddling with the internal affairs of Ukraine, peaking with the spectacular poisoning of Ukraine's president Viktor Yushchenko. The before and after pictures speak for themselves: https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/2009/09/28/ukraine-pm-t...
When a neighboring country violates your territory, intimidates your voters and supports electoral fraud, and poisons your highest representatives, then no shit that you're going to orient more toward the countries that treat you better. Don't throw shit around if you don't want people to turn away from you. Not a very novel idea, is it?
> The straw that broke the camel's back was when these leaders explicitly and publicly stated that they wanted to join NATO (a military alliance specifically against Russia) ... Talk about idiocy - why would any country knowingly allow another country to undermine its own security, if it can do something about it?
Andrei Kozyrev, who was the Russian minister of foreign affairs 1990-1996 and the leading man in rebuilding Russia's post-USSR international relations, offers a different perspective. Instead of having ten little post-breakup Yugoslavias on its borders, mired in endless civil wars that are overspilling crime and refugees into Russia, European security cooperation has instead lead to Russia's neighbors becoming some of the most prosperous, stable and predictible countries on the planet. The Germans, French, British, and Americans have poured billions upon billions into transforming Eastern Europe's rickety people's militias into modern first-world militaries, led by professional civil servants and held to the highest standards of accountability. Solving disagreements through cooperation frameworks like the EU (instead of guns) has become the established norm. Russia has reaped immense benefits without having to pay anything for it. Kozyrev, bluntly, calls this "free-of-charge security for Russia". According to him, Russia has gained spectacularly in terms of security from the cooperation, and it's a total disgrace that the Russian state has spent decades trying to destroy it.
> The promise of NATO membership in 2008
> It is not "greatest hits", it is simply a view much closer to truth than the western (US) version of events.
> Doing all of the piracy stuff with VPNs and navigating torrent sites and getting a setup where you can play files on your TV is an order of magnitude more work.
Apple TV and other commercial offerings are a steaming pile of shit in comparison and I can't imagine people like the CEO of Apple watching stuff off Apple TV and not a proper arr-stack setup. It's like eating McDonald's every for every meal when a chef is readily available. Why would you do this to yourself.
With Apple TV, you can't even do something as mundane was fixing translation errors in subtitles before you show a movie to a friend. You're stuck with what some cheap outsourced translation service came up with. It reduces the owner of the library to a passive mouthbreather who has virtually no control over their experience; can't choose which cut of the movie to see; can't replace an ugly poster with a nicer one; can't edit movie description to remove spoilers; and so on and on. In essence, you're watching someone else's library, and that someone has not put much effort into proper curation to present every item from the best possible side.
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> Then Ukraine chose to abruptly end the talks following the intervention of the West, allegedly Boris John in particular.
David Arkhamia said that after the Bucha massacre was uncovered, western governments stopped pressuring Ukraine into halting the war at any cost (including surrender). This was Boris Johnson's message too.
Russian propaganda put a spin on it, misrepresenting the "reduction of western pressure on Ukraine to surrender" as "western pressure on Ukraine to fight". This supports the overall propaganda narrative that Ukraine is resisting the Russian invasion only because they are forced to by foreign governments, and not because they want to be free, independent and, not live under the Russian boot.
That's all the substance there is behind this "Boris Johnson forced Ukraine to fight" story.
> They seem utterly bewildered by the fact Ukraine is even attacking Russia at all, it doesn't seem to make any sense to them.
They have been propagandized to such extent that they just cannot accept the reality even when it becomes completely undeniable. Ukraine blows up something near them in Russia, and they go completely off the rails explaining how this has nothing to do with Russia nor Ukraine, but is some IMF-Blackrock-NWO scheme against Slavs, with references to the 1999 staged terrorist attacks in Russia that solidified Putin's rise to power. The war isn't real and a "third party" is in charge of both militaries and using them to play mind games on Russians to coerce them into accepting "globalist plans".
It's utterly fascinating to observe the breakdown of sense of reality in real time as lifelong propaganda narratives (like the might of the Russian army) turn out to be lies and the world they thought they lived in turns out to be a mirage. And it's remarkable that these conspiracy theories are not coming from central figures, such as a small circle of social media grifters (vaccine-autism, chemtrails, flat earth, etc), but appear from the grassroots, which is why there are so many variations. Many millions of people are still trying to make sense of these events within a propagandized worldview that they cannot let go of.
Public survey: https://surveys.ecb.europa.eu/10b/neweuro/
> Things were accelerating rapidly on the Ukraine-NATO front.
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.
2. Most of Eastern Europe has been in NATO for over 20 years and has not seen any permanent stationing of "NATO troops", whatever that means. And the forces that were in Western Europe have seen dramatic decrease since the 1980s, around 5-10x across all key categories (personnel, weapons, etc). The US military is currently undergoing a review with the goal of making further reductions of their presence in Europe.
> Why do you see that institute as the authority on the secession of Donetsk and Lugansk?
Nothing described there is meaningfully contested by anyone other than talking heads on the Russian state TV and the cheap whores who parrot their talking points in the west. The commander of the 2014 invasion force is a public figure and used to hold multi-hour livestreams where he talked about the same things; namely, that his forces were directly responsible for the war, and that there was no groundroots support for them among the locals in Ukraine. He often complained that the 2014 invasion stalled because Moscow did not allocate him enough soldiers, tanks and artillery to work with.
> So, going back to the cold war is insufficient, you want to make analogies to Stalin's USSR in the 1940s? That's almost all the way to Godwin's law.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abkhazia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transnistria
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Ossetia
Finland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania are just some of the oldest examples of this. At this point, you have to be intentionally trolling to take these "people's republics" propped up by Russian military with any credibility. Russians have been abusing the concept of peoples' right to self-determination for about as long as the concept has existed, to justify territorial expansion.
> Still, you are making my point, in that the war in Ukraine is perceived as NATO's war, or the US-and-EU's war, to fend off the evil Russians like in the old days.
> With Donetsk and Lugansk, Russia did not annex; those areas seceded from Ukraine, declared independence and fought a protracted war against the Ukrainian Army for some years.
The verdict: https://hudoc.echr.coe.int/?i=001-244292
Key part:
The reality of the relationship between the separatists on the one hand and the respondent State [Russia] on the other was such that, whatever their legal status, the separatists were completely dependent on military, political and economic support from the respondent State to carry out their activities and were, ultimately, a mere instrument of that State. It is for these reasons that the Court was persuaded that, from 11 May 2014, the relationship of the separatists to the Russian Federation was so much one of dependence on the one side and control on the other that it would be right to equate the separatists in the “DPR” and the “LPR” with de facto organs of the Russian Federation, within the meaning of Article 4 ARSIWA. Any other solution would allow States to avoid their Convention obligations by choosing to act through entities whose supposed independence is purely fictitious.
At this point, it's such a common Russian strategy that in several European countries children learn about in the middle school, from the times when it was used against their own countries.
> Russia shouldn’t tolerate NATO troops stationed on one of its longest land borders.
> NATO is certainly participating:
> * It supplies most ammunition and arms and much of the equipment.
Instead, the most important decision-making platform has been the so-called Ukraine Defense Contact Group, which consists of 57 countries, of which only 32 are members of NATO.
> * A negotiations process in Istanbul, having reached a draft agreement which would have concluded the war, in early 2022, was vetoed by NATO, or at least the US and the UK.
> And this is in the context of NATO's long-standing strategy of expanding eastwards towards Russia
It's widely known that Germany had chronic shortage of oil products through the war (which led to them developing coal-based synthetic fuels, etc), but few know that - for example - USSR supplied crude oil and various petroleum products to Germany during the Battle of Britain, which were processed into fuels and lubricants for Luftwaffe and Kriegsmarine, which helped them bomb London and sink allied ships in the Atlantic. "The Great Patriotic War" framing helps to hide all of this and uphold the national myth that Russians were merely a victims in the war and liberators of Europe, not chief collaborators with Hitler in the destruction of pre-war Europe.
Under Putin, this winners-liberators narrative has been dialed up to 11 and turned into a state-promoted MAGA-like "victory cult": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pobedobesie
Perhaps the best examples of this are "victory parades" with preschoolers, dressed up by their teachers: https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2019/05/10/russian-preschoole...
When the USSR collapsed in 1991, the citizens of the USSR had to choose their future. If they were in countries that declared independence from the USSR as it was falling apart, they could become citizens of those countries. They could also apply for the citizenship of Russian Federation, because RF had declared itself a successor state to the USSR. By default, those who did nothing, became aliens, which is a funny legal term for people without citizenship.
A shitload of Russians outside of Russia did nothing out of misplaced belief that the Soviet Union would return any day now, and they remain without any citizenship.
The irony is that all sorts of human rights organizations see stateless people as horrible tragedy, but the stateless Russians prefer it, because being an alien grants certain privileges on both sides (like visa-free travel in both Europe and Russia) while simultaneously exempting from certain duties like mandatory conscription (again, on both sides). In some regards, both countries treat you as a citizen; in others, both treat you as a foreigner. If you have regular business on both sides of the border, then the alien passport is the best travel document to have.
And if you don't want it anymore, all you have to do is demonstrate B1 level language proficiency and knowledge of the constitution to get a citizenship.