So basically Russia said: We will murder you if you don something we don't like.
This clearly calls for an economic sanction against .
Finland or Sweden joining NATO would spark Russian response, Russia warns
191–200 of 317 posts
Re: Finland or Sweden joining NATO would spark Russian response, Russia warns
#192Earlier quoted context omitted.
Technically, if there were attacked this evening, nobody in the US or EU would come to help them. They would be AND are in the same situation as Ukraine.
Do Sweden or Finland have any mutual defense agreements themselves or with other countries (Norway?) - or is NATO the only club in Europe ?
No, Europe is the only club in Europe and both Sweden and Finland are part of the EU Security pact.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Security_and_Defence_Po...
NATO is trans continental.
Re: Finland or Sweden joining NATO would spark Russian response, Russia warns
#193Earlier quoted context omitted.
You may be right about the US, but you are probably wrong about the EU.
Everybody would wish them well, argue they have a strong army and can resist the Russian army, but no sorry, no Spanish or German or French troops dying for Finland or Sweden any time soon. They better hurry up.
Re: Finland or Sweden joining NATO would spark Russian response, Russia warns
#194Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's starting to look like Putin may have miscalculated here.
Really? He is fighting to have veto over who gets to join NATO. It will be a victory for him if he is able to freeze NATO membership to the current number. Russian economy maybe be ruined for next decade or longer and most likely Putin will be dead or retired by then but he would be looked in Russia as the guy who keep Russia relevant. Putin is embarrassing US and NATO by destroying Ukraine while they watch helplessl…
There were protests by over a million people in the UK when coalition forces invaded Iraq.
To address your other point, victory for Putin here is swift regime change in Ukraine, nothing else will serve.
He may have overreached and if he has he will bleed Russia dry within months and be overthrown. Let’s hope so as he is a despicable person and a tyrannical curse on his country.
Re: Finland or Sweden joining NATO would spark Russian response, Russia warns
#195Earlier quoted context omitted.
But we aren't doing nothing. USA is 100% employing the old "Arsenal of Democracy" strategy. We're shipping huge amounts of weapons over to Ukraine. Just last January, we sent something like $200-million in weapons (largely Javelin missiles, which are clearly blowing up Russian tanks in pretty good numbers). That's January alone. There's different steps and different grades to the aid we can give to other countries. W…
It's just my opinion based on what I know. I hope whatever is done, whether it's my viewpoint or yours, is the correct one. There is likely no right answer here, just degrees of success and it depends how many innocent Ukrainians you're prepared to let die (and the citizens of the next nation on Putin's list). I'm praying for President Biden so he may make the right decision. So far, I'm dismayed. It does sound like…
> That's the problem. We already learned what happens next.
No. You missed the lesson.
USA is largely a peaceful nation that's many thousands of miles away from this conflict. It takes an incredible amount of evil before the US people are roused into action.
The US people in 1939 or 1940 weren't ignorant. Even as Hitler rose and took over large swaths of Europe, the US citizen was not roused into action. It still took significant amounts of political pressure / propaganda to get people to agree with the Arsenal of Democracy approach after the fall of France.
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EDIT: Those troubles are still with us today. We are still a nation very far away and seen as outsiders to the countries we visit. No one wants the USA to half-ass a war, that's how you get Afghanistan/Iraq/Vietnam.
Rousing the people to action is an incredibly important part of sending troops. If the people don't support the actions, the troops fight with less morale and less justice in their hearts.
The NATO process holds power. I do believe that if a NATO ally is attacked, the US people will rise up and truly move to defend our allies. You can't trigger that prematurely or artificially.
Re: Finland or Sweden joining NATO would spark Russian response, Russia warns
#196It's like Russia was expecting to be able to conduct the largest aggressive conventional military operation in Europe since WW2 and not completely flip the apple cart of the global order.
Putin thought he could have Russian troops enter Kyiv without resistance, quickly overthrow the democratically elected Ukrainian president and government, put some of his sock puppets in place, then wait some time for things to settle to normal, and withdraw letting Ukraine slowly transition itself back to a de facto Russian colony.
But Ukrainians are fighting back, and although they're no match for the Russian army, the risk of a blood bath of both Ukrainian and Russian people pose some dangers for his already not stellar public acceptance. Let's not forget that many Russians have relatives and friends among Ukrainian people; a lot of them don't want this war; that's why he is sending peace messages: if shit hits the fan then he'll say "it's the Ukrainians who didn't accept it, not me". For the first time he appeared in trouble.
If Ukrainians heroic resistance lasts enough time, the consequences could very likely undermine Putin's position. I don't have many hopes sanctions alone will obtain serious results; they're crafted to be just above a minor nuisance not to encourage Russia to either close or overcharge their supply of natural gas, which Europe totally depends on.
And of course any military response is pure fiction: Russia has nukes, and that's it.
Re: Finland or Sweden joining NATO would spark Russian response, Russia warns
#197There's a lot of comments about how outrageous the lack of a harsher response (in particular the lack of military action) from the west/NATO/USA is. But, whatabout the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan? Weren't they quite similar (the big difference being that those countries were not close to the US geographically and not really posing a big threat). Why was those invasions ok but not this one? Just to make clear: I…
> whatabout
Yes, that's what that's called.
Re: Finland or Sweden joining NATO would spark Russian response, Russia warns
#198Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think part of this is that the non-US NATO countries basically let the US run it. The only NATO countries which seem to meet the financial and military requirements of the organization are the ones on Russia's border. So the US pays the money to support the alliance while Germany uses the money it's saved to purchase gas and oil from Russia so it can close down it's nuclear plants.
I have wondered if the NATO system would be better-designed if it had specific defense requirements from all countries, but I presently think its current structure (where Germany is allowed to reduce military spending because they're surrounded on all sides by other NATO countries) prevents a worse outcome, where they'd find it in their interest to leave NATO and get the buffer states anyway. Voluntary multilateral t…
It does have specific requirements. It just doesn't meet them.
Re: Finland or Sweden joining NATO would spark Russian response, Russia warns
#199Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is not a world war. The fighting is specific to a single area. The Vietnam War involved at least double the number of involved countries and wasn’t considered a world war.
> This is not a world war. The fighting is specific to a single area. That was true of WWII, until it wasn't.
Germany invaded Poland on 29 Aug 1939, and France and Great Britain declared war on Germany on 3 Sep 1939.
If a major power declares war on Russia on Monday, we're in World War III.
Re: Finland or Sweden joining NATO would spark Russian response, Russia warns
#200I don't understand why Russia, or anyone else, thinks that Ukraine was anywhere near joining NATO. Ukraine had bits of it that were occupied by Russia, specifically Crimea. There was no way Ukraine would have been allowed to join under such circumstances because such occupations would have immediately triggered Article 5. Letting Ukraine into NATO would be tantamount to declaring war on Russia. It was never a real op…
Ukraine added that they will join NATO to their constitution, and in the past months NATO started to ramp up the amount of NATO weaponry in or near Ukraine. Russia reaction is basically the reaction of anyone cornered, something Sun Tzu warned about, if someone is cornered they will fight back hard because they can't retreat, they can only go forward, through whoever is cornering them.
Perhaps stop watching Russia Today and/or Fox News.