> Of course, one could argue Ukraine has a right to self determination, but we effectively egged them on and on.

One could argue that, but that would be their eagerness to ignore and dismiss important details of Ukraine's founding legal documents that made their independence possible in the first place.

If one reads the Declaration on the State Sovereignty of Ukraine from 1990 [1], one will find it in Chapter IX: "The Ukrainian SSR solemnly declares its intention to become a permanently neutral state in the future, which does not participate in military blocs and adheres to three non-nuclear principles: not to accept, produce or acquire nuclear weapons".

Ukraine's constitutional sovereignty has always been and still is predicated on respecting these conditions, but a whole lot of politicians, foreign and domestic, want you to believe otherwise because it serves their political goals.

[1] https://zakon-rada-gov-ua.translate.goog/laws/show/55-12?_x_...

Tanith Lee, "Wolfland" - "Little Red Riding Hood gets turned on its head. The wolf is frightening, but it's not the villian in this tale."

https://www.amazon.com/Red-Blood-Tales-Sisters-Grimmer/dp/08...

This isnt little red riding hood. It's a crips (US/NATO) vs. bloods (Russia) turf war with Ukraine trying to join the crips for protection and beat off the bloods using nazi paramilitaries.

Geopolitics aint no fairy tale. It's gang warfare writ large.

if there is none, it is definitely worth writing.

> Finally, Ukraine has the right to join any alliance it wants and for Russia to invade over that is bullshit.

In geopolitics, nobody has any particular rights. Whoever has the bigger stick and better propaganda gets their way.

One could argue that there’s no reason to have sanctions on Cuba, that Palestinians should also have the right to self determination, that America doesn’t have the right to interfere in the developing world.

That’s not how the world works, regardless of right or wrong.

IMO - the west could have prevented this war. Regardless of what Ukraine wants, an agreement that NATO will not expand eastwards for 60 years in exchange for Russia not invading. That was all we needed.

> Finally, Ukraine has the right to join any alliance it wants

No, it doesn't have this right to join ANY alliance, as it may violate one of the conditions (military bloc neutrality) under which their sovereignty was granted to them by the USSR, which Russia is a legitimate successor of: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31746866

Yeah, you're right. Just saw on Youtube that a Biden aid, Brian Deese, said they are not blocking expanded oil and gas production but killed refinery expansion, preventing 1M+ acres of oil/gas leasing. Per him, "I guarantee you, we're going to end fossil fuel & I am not going to cooperate them". It looks they are taking a long term view, and I hope the execution will be smooth: we can manage short-term increased cost while figuring out a way to keep the planet for our children".

Why would oil companies invest in production when the politicians plan to phase out oil in the near future? Infrastructure is expensive and takes a long time to break even.

And what investments they do make, like the Keystone XL pipeline, are blocked by the government.

Would you invest in that?

As someone who was born in the Soviet Union, has Russian friends and family, and has been observing Russia for decades...

> is run by (mostly) competent people

Citation needed.

Why would running out of military hardware cause an economic collapse?

> Why are some people rooting for more and more needless death and destruction?

Maybe ask on a Russian forum?

First, letting Putin run over Ukraine is a guaranteed destruction of Ukrainian culture and identity, or at least a setback for several decades or centuries until Russia collapses again. Another generation of poets, writers, citizen sent to mass graves. Fine, you might think that physical safety of a majority outweigh such ephemeral concepts and the minority of cultural elites can be sacrificed to Putin but not everyone thinks that way. Many Ukrainians, for instance, are willing to sacrifice their physical safety for the survival of Ukrainian culture.

Second, letting Russia win will not stop further death and destruction when Putin continues his expansion westward, only then with Ukrainian conscripts as a cannon fodder.

At this point you're just parroting Russian propaganda without any clue of what you're talking about, so I don't think there's any point in further discussion.

I wouldn't consider it similar to January 6th at all

You provided a source to show the elections were valid but who was questioning that? The cause of the uprising (from wiki)

"In November 2013, a wave of large-scale protests (known as Euromaidan) erupted in response to President Yanukovych's sudden decision not to sign a political association and free trade agreement with the European Union (EU), instead choosing closer ties to Russia and the Eurasian Economic Union. "

And you also speak about lack of representation but

"A total of 315 of the 349 MPs registered in the sitting hall supported the document on Friday." [1]

That's a huge majority in any political system. I think there's room for debate whether the people were represented sufficiently by the president's actions.

Regardless, again unlike jan 6th, a foreign country was involed and later invaded. Two, the revolutionaries reason was truthful and not a lie about election fraud , and three a meaningful percentage of the population was involved which gives some merit to a revolution.

Sources

1.https://www.kyivpost.com/article/content/ukraine-politics/pa...

Well, the US President and Pentagon disagree with you. As do the receiving ends of those weopons systems.

"By the end of this war Ukraine might end up with the largest tank army in Europe."

As Ukraine officials beg for help, and ask for half of US army armor 4th month into the war, you guys keep inhaling copium, dreaming in your beds about Russia "being destroyed" in Ukraine. I wouldn't expect anything less from western propaganda enjoyers tbh. Also taking oryx stats seriously, that's fun.

While some parts were definitely messy, and it really is a tradegy donbass and crimea situation had to be resolved this way, you'll soon be aware about the real situation in Ukraine, no matter how bad you want to believe the lies.

"The rate of Russian use of long-distance missiles dropped off dramatically" I offer you to check Ukrainian telegram channels, like "труха" for example (2mil followers) which will gladly tell you about this "dramatic decline".

Oh really?

Sounds like they're already on the outskirts of Moscow and don't actually need the $40 billion.

Maybe we can get some of that back?

Yes, but why? Why do these people have to suffer all the time?

One reason I heard my Russian friends repeating is that "it's a bit country so we need a strong ruler to keep it together". But history shows this is not true. Also a federation of states like the USA would probably work better than the current setup where a short guy from Moscow is sending Buryat boys to die in a country they haven't seen before.

Not sure how that question is relevant, but if you think the politicians and military brass are worried at all about the “murders of children and women” I have a bridge to sell you.

sovereignty is not surrendered by respecting the condition of avoiding all military bloc alliances, under which such sovereignty was granted initially [1]: "The Ukrainian SSR solemnly declares its intention to become a permanently neutral state in the future, which does not participate in military blocs and adheres to three non-nuclear principles: not to accept, produce or acquire nuclear weapons."

[1] https://zakon-rada-gov-ua.translate.goog/laws/show/55-12?_x_...

It's not filibuster-proof, and it's even less veto-proof. But it would let the Republicans set the legislative agenda, and nothing would pass without their approval.

Funniest part is that US and Europe buy Russian oil from India.

Because Indians are able to remove all evil totalitarian molecules from it.

Russia can find new customers before EU can find new suppliers (at least regarding natural gas), which is precisely why we're seeing increases in energy costs.

If it wasn't for Russia having nukes I think your government may have already joined the war at this point. Poland has made Germany look really bad in how much more forthcoming its been in aiding Ukraine against Russian aggression.

Y'all need to be realistic about the energy situation or you'll have bigger problems than Russia.

Propaganda and fear mongering in Poland is so high that news are meaningless. The current political topic is that Germany would support Russia if Russia invaded Poland and would split it between. This is not a fringe thing it is a political topic of the day! In the mean time the current president looks like a Zeleski's bro, and PiS supporters chant for Jarek the same way you would chant for Putin.

Yes you hear Ukrainian/Russian in the street, but I am not sure you hear much gratitude. I certainly do not and I also live and travel in the country. I actually know of families hosting for 2 months and the people they hosted left in one day and never said anything back. Others had everything set here, like employment housing etc but went back to Ukraine or to Germany. The ones who went to Germany regret it as they are not pampered like in Poland. Hell even in euro vision song contest the polish got the taste of Ukrainian gratitude for the polish unconditional solidarity.

There are grateful Ukrainians but those already were in Poland got their life's easier now thankfully. The refugees could not care less about Poland. Actually historically the Ukrainians and Poles haves as bad blood as with the Russians or Germans.

As a foreigner what i see Poland needs, is to continue to get stronger economically so it can support a very advanced armed forces that could wipe the floor with the Russians. Poland needs to be needed and that is achieved by being an economic powerhouse on which the great powers depend. In the past Poland was left alone because it was not worth the trouble. Look at Taiwan, they sure know how to make themselves worth the trouble. The "honor" thing in polish culture is so self destructive: Throw everything away for honor. Let's keep growing and stronger, it will not be long before Russia is a nuisance.

The goal is to survive and to win, not to go down in history with honor.

Then let's agree that we don't agree. And if we can't find a common interest, let's just split the EU.

Russia has actually raised minimum wage and pensions by 10% due to the huge inflow of tax revenue. They also reduced the emergency 20% interest rate to 9.5% (about same as before). And I can't find the article, but I read somewhere that they're only losing about 1/3 of the original reserves that was originally announced.

The EU is getting played by both Russia and America.

Syria was the worst part, because the fallout from that was really bad. Not sure we'd have had Brexit without the extra pressure that put on Europe. Likely empowered Erdogan somewhat (doubt it made a big difference there, admittedly) and contributed to the rise of far right parties in Eastern Europe. Plus, you know, sucks for the Syrians.

Nb. what I blame him for isn't the Syrian civil war itself, but for choosing to get involved in such a way that it's dragged on indefinitely, rather than concluding it one way or the other much faster. This also contributed to destabilization and suffering in Iraq.

Continuing to allow Afghanistan to bleed for his entire 8 years while everyone at the top (and probably most folks in the middle, and at the bottom) knew no progress was, had been, or would be made was a straight-up crime (see: the Afghanistan papers).

But sure, it's hard to beat Bush II for "foreign policy fuck-ups". Dude's a legend in that regard. I wouldn't be surprised if historians in 2100 will look back at that and see it as America falling on its face at the starting line, for this century, and never really recovering.

> Trump’s foreign policy was largely symbolic and detail-free, focused on breaking up US soft power to aid Russia, symbolically opposing China to appeal to anti-Asian racists, making up nonsense about Latin American immigrants to appeal to anti-Latino racists, continuing middle East aggression (and the Muslim ban etc.) to appeal to anti-Arab/anti-Muslim racists. To the extent things went okay it was largely down to incompetence and uncoordination.

Pushing NATO members to meet their defense spending obligations ended up being damn-near prescient, even if the rest of his action on NATO was mostly bad. I'd love to see more breaking down of trade relations with China, so that part was fine by me. Lots of his rhetoric was idiotic but at the same time it was refreshing to see anyone in power talking anti-neoliberalism, for once, even if he was either too ambivalent in-fact or too incompetent to accomplish much. Withdrawing from Afghanistan was way overdue and it disgusted me that NPR ran with "it's just too hard to withdraw in more time than it took to put the same number of soldiers and same amount of equipment in-theater" bullshit, in response. All his stuff related to the Southern border was moronic, of course.

I'm not saying I think he was great—dude belongs behind bars 10x over, I'd say, including for some of his foreign policy actions. In fact, a lot of it's just that, after his predecessors, accomplishing very little was kinda an improvement.

There's already NATO bases in the Barents Sea (and Turkey via the Black Sea) in addition along their land borders via the baltic states (minus Belarus). Their actions have also pushed Finland and Sweden into the arms of NATO.

The thing about the Cuban missile crisis is that Kennedy was able to get Russian missiles AWAY from the United States. Russia's actions are getting hardware placed closer.

And why is that? Probably because Russia will tolerate it in exchange for territorial expansion. Even after the 2014 invasion of Crimea there was open talk about how NATO was obsolete and a waste of money and effort. Russia could've probably eliminated any NATO threat without firing a single shot. It was already seen as a relic of the cold war. Instead, Russia's actions have given a renewed justification for NATO's existence.

why do you assume Russia wanted only the Eastern lands? Putin said he wanted all of Ukraine. The invasion started with attempt to take Kyiv. Why level Kharkiv if all you want is Donbas?

> The breakdown in diplomacy with Russia is the worst part. The previous administration at least had diplomacy. The current one just pushed them into this.

If by diplomacy you mean kowtowing to everything Russia does, I'm not sure that's much better.

Invasion started in 2014, when diplomacy was okay. Russia kept rotating their knife in Ukrainian back all this time, you can't with a straight face victim blame Ukraine here.

> When's the last time the US fought against a near-peer?

When's the last time any major power fought a near peer?

I would have said we're getting solid evidence of American intelligence supremacy out of Ukraine. But given the incompetence of the Russian military it would be embarrassing to put them in the same league as China.

> They ran out of both two months ago, didn't you hear?

Russia has lost on order 20k dead soldiers and some multiple of that wounded, thousands of lost pieces of equipment, etc. But that is still less than half of the resources they committed in Ukraine. Despite steep losses, attrition hasn’t yet completely obliterated the Russian armed forces.

But since they have done no general mobilization in Russia, those lost troops are not being replaced, and more and more units are losing combat effectiveness with each passing month. They are also running out of untrained separatist cannon fodder from Donbas.

Ukraine has also suffered tens of thousands of casualties and lost a great deal of equipment. But since Ukraine is fighting for survival, it has much more available manpower, and its soldiers have better morale and motivation. The bottleneck for Ukraine is training and advanced weapons like artillery, rockets, missiles, and fighter jets.

> Any evidence [Russian economic trouble] is happening or will happen?

Lots of Russian industry has already shut down, and GDP is expected to contract 15% this year and an additional several percent the year after (for reference, US GDP contracted by 4.3% in the great recession, and by about 30% during 1929–1933). Europe is transitioning to other energy sources as fast as possible. In the medium term Russia is not capable of continuing much of its domestic oil production without foreign equipment and expertise. Few foreign investors are going to feel any confidence to invest in Russia, for years.

Nobody has argued Russia isn't making a killing off its energy portfolio. But a quarter of a billion dollars of revenue, not profit, in a booming global economy no less, doesn't make up for a similar quantity of frozen reserves.

Russia is weaker and poorer than it was at the end of last year. The Russian state is doing far better than was expected, domestically. Credit due where owed. But it's a growing share of a shrinking pie situation.

Most people in the USA agree that the Iraq war was a senseless tragedy fought on false pretenses, and a gross violation of international law. Iraq posed no threat to the USA, the USA had no good reason to invade, and the outcomes of the war were tremendously destructive and destabilizing. If it were up to me, the perpetrators would be locked up.

If nothing else, the Iraq war led to a sharp political change in the USA. With any luck the senseless war of aggression in Ukraine will lead to similar changes in Russia. But since Russia is a fascist dictatorship, peaceful politics is outlawed and any changes are likely to be more violent.

* * *

The 1999 apartment bombings in Russia attributed to Khattab (among others) were most likely a false flag operation undertaken by the Russian state security service, under orders from Vladimir Putin. Using self-terrorism killing hundreds of your own civilians as a pretense for launching a war and mass-murdering tens of thousands of your unhappy oppressed colonial subjects while obliterating their cities is a hell of a way to cement personal power.

Not take but threaten. And yes, Russia wants the buffer zone.

Ukraine remained neutral, and yet Russia invaded it in 2014.

Doesn’t even matter the cost, if there isn’t enough to go around people will starve whether they can afford it or not.

> In the US where free speech is protected, those who made various claims and conspiracy theories about the September 11 attacks (Bush did it! Israel did it! The CIA did it! etc.) didn’t get locked up or murdered

Only, for some reason the free speech protection did not help Assange from being prosecuted and his life being destroyed for broadcasting US war crimes evidence in Iraq [1]. The same could be said about your prior mentioning of the Battle of Grozny. There were real terrorist groups in Grozny that had to be eliminated, and in a 2007 Baghdad there was nothing but a false pretence.

[1] the infamous US taxpayer-funded "keep shooting" "collateral damage" done in Iraq: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zYTxuW2vmzk

Other countries can provide fuel. Multiple countries have already signed contracts with American and French companies to manufacture fuel for their(Soviet designed) reactors. It's already happening. Also a fully fueled reactor can run for a long time before it needs refueling. Germany doesn't want to turn its reactors on for like the above poster said - ideological reasons. And yeah there is a startup process, but they could have been spun up by now since the start of this war.

Eh, re-read the comment--I'm agreeing with you. I'm saying they want that status quo, without war they don't sell weapons. But interestingly enough someone did attempt those same gymnastics.

They have approved 40 billion. Is it really that hard to imagine that a protracted war would benefit defense contractors. Do you think these multi billion dollar war machine only thinks in simplistic first order effects.

It requires no mental gymnastics whatsoever. Actually the counter argument is where you need to twist yourself to believe otherwise.

Highly dubious.

But okay. Suppose there were a cyber attack sufficient to trigger full scale nuclear war and which also didn't fully disable Russian's nuclear armament.

Do you really think that Russia would not launch nukes just because the US didn't publicly declare responsibility for the attack even though Russia knows the US is responsible? Because, to be clear, that was OP's assertion:

>> And to make my point clear, the issue isn't that they're conducting cyber attacks - that's a given. The issue is admitting it, in the open, to the news media. Everyone knows this is happening, but you don't say the quiet part out loud because it's an escalation against a nuclear power and gives them carte blanche to retaliate.

I think they have serious problems, but FISA courts oversee warrants for wiretapping foreign spies, not extrajudicial murder of dissidents.

I am sorry, but thinking that Russia will invade the Nordics is dumb. Ukraine made sense, but the Nordics.. that is ridiculous.

People will not carry this ideological politics as soon as they will feel the pressure over a longer period.

Sanctions will go, mark my words.

> This is exactly what everyone said about Putin invading Ukraine.

First, not everyone, Ukrainians knew. Second, after the end of WW2 we lived (wanted to live) under a spell that conquering whole countries with some opportunistic genocide on top is not going to happen anymore, or at least not in the "civilized" Europe. Now, I hope the spell is off, we can see the world more clearly, and it's a raw power competition in which Putin thinks he has the winning cards or can at least out bluff everyone.

Specifically from a Finnish perspective:

Russia has a weird imperialist interest in Finland. Our history can largely be summarized as "trying to cope with living next to Russia, with varying degrees of success". From the dawn of history, until Napoleonic wars, there was an invasion from the east every generation or two. The invasions only stopped after Sweden lost Finland to Russia. After Finland gained independence, it took only 22 years before there was another invasion.

The Cold War and the decades after the collapse of the USSR were the exception. We had a lifetime of peace and prosperity by leaning to the West while maintaining good relations with Russia. But that is over for now, as Putin no longer cares about having good relations with anyone. Russia is big, it's next to us, and it has become unpredictable again. Dealing with that takes priority.

> What do you expect him to say, "Putin bring it on?".

That's an absurd take. He was clearly completely unprepared for the invasion and was not expecting it in the slightest.

If he was expecting it, he wouldn't have been in complete denial of US intelligence and wouldn't decried it as "the West sowing panic for political gains".

> In some random interviews he said Ukraine is prepared

I have no idea why you're looking at "random interviews" when you can just look at exactly what happened.

Ukraine was completely unprepared for Russian invasion and they were clearly shocked when the Russians invaded.

Did Zelenky evacuate any civilians beforehand? Nope. Did he ask NATO countries for aid? Nope, it was the exact opposite.

NATO countries were offering aid and he was calling them alarmist.

So this is a troll account. Got it.

Trump was literally impeached for secretly withholding congressionally appropriated military aid to Ukraine and then extorting the Ukrainian president to make up a fake scandal about his political opponent in return for keeping aid flowing. Several of Trump’s top advisors/officials were directly corruptly involved with previous Russian puppet leaders of Ukraine and corrupt pro-Russia Ukrainian oligarchs, notably Paul Manafort, who had directly worked for years to undermine Ukrainian democracy (Manafort was imprisoned in the USA for his illegal Ukraine-related fraud, among other charges. If you want to single out an American to blame for the current war, Manafort is your best bet.)

Remember, Trump fired the US ambassador to Ukraine because she was opposed to Ukrainian (and American) corruption, and instead sent Rudy Giuliani, Rick Perry, and Gordon Sondland – an incompetent hotel developer who bought his way into a cosplay job as EU Ambassador – to further his corrupt schemes, including not only the extortion plan to invent scandals about Biden, but also replacing the leadership of a Ukrainian state-owned gas company so that it could give contracts to Trump’s corrupt American allies, ending the US attempts to extradite Firtash (a criminal Ukrainian oligarch with Russian mafia ties who hired Rudy Giuliani and other Trump allies), etc.

When Trump’s extortion scheme was exposed and blew up as a scandal, Congress appropriated additional aid for Ukraine, and Trump was driven by the scandal and intense public and congressional scrutiny (not to mention pressure from the US military) to continue the aid. (He still wanted to be re-elected, remember, so didn’t want to look totally corrupt.)

Thankfully the USA is not (as of 2016–2022) a dictatorship, and the president does not personally decide all national policy. So when Trump had some bright ideas like nuking a hurricane or selling off Puerto Rico, those didn’t actually happen. When Trump suggested pulling the US out of NATO, there were still enough powerful and sane figures in the US defense establishment who were able to thwart that proposal.

* * *

You are right that the US and NATO did some (though in retrospect it perhaps should have been more) to help Ukraine from 2014–2021. That training, funding, and support was surely one important part of the Ukrainian army’s recent success. Score one for the US military and US federal government.

* * *

> who say that Merkel was always against German dependence on Russian gas

I don’t know about Merkel per se but German political parties clearly have significant corruption problems. The German response to the Ukraine war has been a disappointing indictment of the whole German political class.

More generally, many Europeans (and Americans, etc.) have been bought off (explicitly or implicitly) by money embezzled from the Russian people by various oligarchs and organized criminals. Russian corruption is a serious worldwide problem, and other countries should continue to make large-scale coordinated responses, ending money laundering, seizing corrupt assets, and imposing legal liability on local residents (e.g. the legal, real estate, and financial services industries) who knowingly participate.

Oops Greenland was wrong, I meant Iceland.

Hardly. As someone local to this conflict I see it as a simple matter of Russia needing a war (or just something internally recognized as a "success") from time to time for whatever internal reason du jour. Wouldn't even be the first time it happened in history.

If I had you pegged wrong, then I apologize. But even the slightest whiff of Russian propaganda makes me see red. It has eaten away at the minds of my parents' and grandparents' generation, and a number of my slavic friends are suffering greatly because they don't know how to deprogram their loved ones. Just obvious, blatant fascism that's being repulsively consumed and regurgitated by the Russian media and population in a grotesque feedback loop. All an engineered frenzy by some deplorable propagandists high up in the Russian government. And now I see it spreading among contrarians in the Western world, too.

That's the scent I get from these comments. The same lies that I've been hearing on Russian TV for years and years. "Sanctions? Russia's doing better than ever! Failures? The entire war has been going exactly as planned! Technology? We have some of the most advanced military tech in the world! Ukraine? It was never a country to begin with!"

Except for boots on the ground [officially], NATO does everything else: intelligence, weapons, training, supplies, etc. It is not a secret e.g., https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/6/15/infographic-what-we...

Imagine, somebody did it for Afghanistan in 2001 what do you think NATO response would be?

People don’t realize Donbas is Ukraine’s last real line of defense and their only stronghold. After it falls, and it will soon, it’s a matter of siege and patience. Ability to counterattack will be completely removed.

The problem for both Syria and Yemen with US audiences is that the USA just went through 2 decades of jingoistic anti-Muslim propaganda and complicated Middle-East wars ending in political failure.

The war in Ukraine is a straightforward story with an obvious bad guy, and it doesn’t require much self reflection to figure out or cause much cognitive dissonance.

>"They don't want to do anything about Yemen or Syria."

"They" were fine with their own government killing hundreds of thousands in Iraq and whole bunch of other countries. They're fine with their government threatening ICC as organization and its members. They've definitely picked their battle and frankly I think by doing all those things without any repercussion they are being hypocrites and setting example to other countries. No high moral ground here. The whole world affairs are quite disgusting for that matter.

Personally I just try to think about nice things that humanity still manage to produce and as I am a creative person my brain is always busy with rather more inspiring matters.

The American public want what the TV tells them to want. Today it's Ukraine, but tomorrow nobody will be able to find Europe on a map.

Yes, Manufacturing Consent is a good one.

The media & their masters tells us who to support. And Ukraine vs Russia is profitable.

The media and the vast majority of US pundits were saying the invasion was impossible. US intelligence was being criticized before the invasion for being alarmist.

Again, just read the news articles from January/February of this year.

It sounds like you weren't paying any attention to this in Feb and are just trying to come up with arguments to support your points.

You're brave. I tried giving a more balanced perspective on this war in the comments here 3 times, and I was called a Russian troll in the first attempt, flagged in the next one, and I lost a lot of karma in the third. You're going to be - at least - downvoted a lot, so I thought I'll join and will get downvoted with you. The more the merrier, right.

I'm not sure what point this is trying to make. None of these countries want to be part of the old Soviet Union.

Except Putin himself calmly explained recently its all bullshit, the Nato expansion, Nazis, harasser Russian population, all lies. Putin is after "lost land and glory"

https://www.businessinsider.com/putin-says-ukraine-war-seize...

"Putin said on Thursday that the Ukraine invasion is about expanding Russian territory.

Before, Putin insisted that Russia was freeing Ukraine from so-called Nazis and preventing genocide.

Putin said it was his destiny to "return and reinforce" Russia like Peter the Great did."

OK you can have the Sudetenland! (please stop there)

OK, you can have Czechoslovakia! (stop there, please)

OK, you can have Poland.

...France?

You see how this doesn't work anymore.

That's what they said in Munich in 1938 - just give Hitler the Sudetenland, that would work and satisfy him, he'll stop after that.

Appeasing dictators with delusions of grandeur simply doesn't work. It might buy you some time, but you better prepare during it.

> Molotov-Ribbentrop 2.0 with Germany

Damn right you are (not in the literal sense of a secret deal, but the effects are similar). IMO Germany bears the most responsibility for this situation, on par with Putin himself. Ukraine was screwed big time by German diplomacy and their ambiguous stance. That Ukrainians still want to belong to the West is a miracle. Once the war is over, they should, and I think they will, start asking questions about all the "NATO membership is on the table, the doors are open" alternating with "well, you'll need to wait some 20 years to get past the doors anyway". I sincerely hope this will weight on the conscience of Germans enough to substantially lessen the amount of money they will demand from Ukraine for the support they (reluctantly) are showing now.

> If you prepare for war in the meantime

Yes, exactly - I should have written it more clearly:

> Buying time is the same as saving thousands of lives. I would hardly say that means it doesn't work [- unless you decide to waste that time by not preparing sufficiently.]

In short, you're right - buying time on its own doesn't help much.

I don't think Ukraine prepared sufficiently, by the way. I don't know what their leaders thought, but joining NATO was effectively a pipe dream due to the unresolved civil war in the east. Without NATO nukes it was obvious that they will need to fight for survival at some point. How come they need so much weaponry and ammunition right now? Where are the stockpiles accumulated over the last 8 years, where are the nationalized factories that produce tanks and guns, where are the roads, railways, bunkers, weapon caches, evacuation routes, minefields, trenches, and so on? Apparently in Switzerland - the most peaceful, neutral country (in Europe at least) - they have enough bunkers to house all its population and then some. They are used as warehouses normally... and mostly for long-lasting foodstuffs, too. How come Ukrainian civilians, after 8 years of preparation, need to hide in theaters? You could say that it's in hindsight that we know Russia would attack, but.. It's Russia we're talking about! They have a lot of similar wars in their history, both in the past ~1k years and in the past 50 years - enough to conclude that they will try to attack if the circumstances are favorable to it (after a major, world-wide crisis, preferably).

I do believe that it's not "at all cost" though. Otherwise a nuclear power could do literally anything and you wouldn't be able to stop them "because nukes". If Putin started rolling tanks into Poland saying "don't stop me or I'll fire nukes" that would be the time to call his bluff, even if the consequences of getting this wrong are dire. The line has to be somewhere - right now it's the border of NATO member countries.

So Putin might nuke us and therefor we should be afraid to stand up to him and essentially let him have whatever he wants?

That's truly moronic.

Fuck who? He's more likely to destroy Russia and not much else.

Given the performance of the Russian military what makes you think that Russian nukes (and the people who operate them) are any better?

US intelligence and capabilities are likely much more effective than anyone knows.

Then what are you suggesting? That Putin ought to be allowed to do literally anything he wants because if we tried to stop him he might nuke everyone?

What is the wall there? Pre-Feb 24 status quo? Why does Putin need to commit suicide in that case? He didn't need to commit suicide before February.

Boris Yeltsin wanted it to be a long-term goal of Russia to join NATO - a measure supported by the United States (source: https://www.nytimes.com/1991/12/21/world/soviet-disarray-yel... or https://archive.ph/31hkF)

And they started down that road earnestly in the 1990s. But it required extensive military and certain Democratic reforms Russia didn't want to commit to so they abandoned it. And that's totally fine: nobody is required to join NATO. Ultimately, since the early 90s, Russia helped form the CSTO which serves a similar function.

> recent Ukrainian pol's have done everything they can to marginalize the people and their Russian cultures in these regions.

The current Ukrainian president is a native Russian speaker and was quite popular in Russia. They have spent the last 8 years dealing with a Russian-instigated (and supported) civil war with the so-called LPR and DPR. Is the southern United States oppressed because the Union didn't allow it to secede? That certainly was the argument people used to justify segregation!

Anyway, the stated justification for this war is not NATO expansion but "denazification"

The myriad of excuses were for domestic propaganda purposes. Russia wasnt about to sacrifice this much for language rights in the donbas or Putin's belief that Ukrainian identity is bullshit but selling the idea of nascent potential military threat of gradual military encroachment to Russian audiences isnt a winner despite how fundamentally critical it is.

For the integrity of Russian borders theyd sacrifice 100,000 in the blink of an eye. And have to ensure Mariupol wont ever host a NATO base.

If Putin simply wanted to invade only for territory he would have taken it years ago when it would have been militarily easier. He invaded because the military threat it posed was slowly growing as Ukraine formed ever closer links to NATO.

>if you pay attention to anything besides the message crafted by the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs for Western audiences

I monitor all sides (neutral, russian, western), but the above analysis I read from a military analyst who hates Russia.

Your idea of what constitutes Russian propaganda and "useful idiot" is comically out of whack.

It's also pretty hard to get exposed to Russian propaganda accidentally despite what a bevy of Americans raised on 1950s red scare tactics seem to think.

>It's more likely that simply letting Ukraine skip ahead straight to joining NATO would have stopped the war.

Yep, but NATO doesnt actually give a fuck about any of the countries bordering Russia and isnt willing to start a hot war with Russia over any of them. The decades long drawn out application process is simply to let them gradually up the threat to Russia without having any real obligation until its certain that obligation wont have to be invoked.

This is slowly starting to dawn on Zelensky, I think. He's pretty mad at us right now for providing restrained help against the onslaught.

It's not a surprise but it's still wrong. Also his opinion that NATO is a threat needs to have some backing otherwise I don't accept it as a valid fear

Whataboutism

Not actually true. Current borders of Russia are defined by its reckless self-destruction in 1991. Also some land on the east of Russia was given away without any fight. For example, Alaska or Fort Ross.