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Can you substantiate this? Please provide to specific examples.
For context, Estonia is a NATO member with significant Russian minority population
An interesting 2014 read on their inclusion re: national defence matters: https://icds.ee/wp-content/uploads/2014/Juhan_Kivirahk_-_Int...
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I doubt Russia wants any such thing, they just want their toy back in their pram and the good feeling that having Ukraine under their heel gave them, as well as any useful resources Ukraine might have - agricultural land, seaports, raw materials. Stuff like that.
They don't want to negotiate with anybody, they just want their stuff (back?) on their own terms and are willing to sacrifice as many Russians as it takes to get it.
The world has moved on from that kind of behaviour though, but lots of 60+ yr old Russians are living in a past they'll never get back to and are blithely ruining Russia's future to get there.
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Who broke the Budapest memorandum? Russia was all alone in that. It's impossible to make an agreement with Russia, as a state actor or not, while being sure that Russia won't break it the second it is beneficial for them. Claiming the contrary is pure ideology.
Other people have mentioned it bellow me, but see what Merkel herself ("accused" of being on Putin's side, funnily enough) had to say about the Minsk accords.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is what happened in WW2. Nobody was willing to negotiate with Hitler because it was apparent that he was utterly untrustworthy, as evidenced by his repeated aggressions through the 30s before WW2 finally broke out. It's the same situation here. Nobody can possibly trust Putin. He's utterly untrustworthy and any treaty would presumably just be breathing space and time for Russia to continue building up its forces…
If someone in Russia could just remove Putin it would save a lot of Ukrainian and Russian lives.
All the bluster about "denazification and demilitarization" and helping the DNR/LPR aside, this war is entirely about NATO. It would make no difference were Putin replaced, in fact it may be worse since he is (surprisingly) one of the more moderate voices in Russia.
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Also it’s bonkers that someone thinks Ukraine is untrustworthy this situation. Didn’t they give up all their nuclear weapons in a signed treaty under the guarantee that Russia promised to respect their territorial integrity? Doesn’t Russia now posses territory that’s “historically” German or Japanese, and expects that territory to be respected as Russian, regardless of the history? Ukraine is Ukraine, and the thing preventing the situation from reaching a diplomatic ending, which again is how all wars end, is that Russia can’t bring itself to back down now, and everything else is just excuses from the land of fiction that only work when applied unilaterally.
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Earlier quoted context omitted.
If someone in Russia could just remove Putin it would save a lot of Ukrainian and Russian lives.
There is the mistaken understanding that this is all just an artefact of Putin. It's not. Most of the Russian elite agree with this war, since they (collectively, including before Putin) have been warning that they will not allow Ukraine to join NATO since the 1990s. This is all well documented. All the bluster about "denazification and demilitarization" and helping the DNR/LPR aside, this war is entirely about NATO.…