141–150 of 265 posts
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Mostly US.
How does "the left" give them a pass exactly? Until recently, both Dems and Reps were happy to fund and expand NATO, which is basically and anti-russian expansion org. Now Republicans seem to have an issue with that though. I just don't understand what you mean by "Russia has gotten a pass?"
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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.…
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> a former USSR country (although not willingly) this is a weird construct, we were not willingly part of soviet union, not not willingly former
Estonia isn't even really considered a former SSR if I'm not mistaken. The period of time they were an SSR was mostly considered an illegal occupation, with the legitimate and recognized government being in exile. It's similar to calling Vienna, Austria a "former German city" because of the Anschluss.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estonian_Soviet_Socialist_Repu...
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Democracy has a well-known blatantly US backing. Not just being punchy: if you accuse pro-democracy movements of being US-backed coups, then that's a low bar for association. The US even tries to foist democracy where it's a terribly ineffective idea, from a US interests standpoint, see efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Can we stop pretending these are anything other than resource wars, combined with an excuse to throw money at the defence industry?
Russia looked at US actions in Iraq etc and apparently had an irrational attack of atrocity envy, blended with greed over the mineral-rich areas of Eastern Ukraine.
Neither empire is wholesome and good, but the Russians are completely crap at militarised colonialism while the US is fairly competent at it.
However... Russia is much better at subversion and bribery. Given Jan 6 and the wholesale co-option of the far right of the Republican party - which is most of it - only someone very naive would believe that the US and NATO aren't in danger of being subverted from within.
My suspicion is that Ukraine is part distraction, part attrition campaign against NATO, and part proxy war with China, with Russia as willing (because naively stupid) intermediary.
The real front is the internal politics of each NATO state.
Hungary is already lost, the UK is severely weakened by Brexit, Germany was compromised but is recovering, and the US has some very serious problems with infiltration and subversion. Which aren't being taken seriously enough.
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Of course not, because they are all American vassals. Being under the Pax Americana umbrella myself, I'm quite okay with that. However, I hope you can understand why a major power like Russia might be suspicious.
> Of course not, because they are all American vassals. Someone is eating the Russian propaganda here. Projection and all. > However, I hope you can understand why a major power like Russia might be suspicious. It can be as suspicious as it wants, within its borders.
You need to take a walk, and I'm out too.
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You can't just say "Left" and "Right". That distinction has become rather meaningless. While the Right as a whole is leaning stronger and stronger in at least silent support of people like Putin (Christian defender of the white race and all that), the Left does not have this problem. There is a small crew of commies and tankies that drool over Putin, but us left-leaning folk laugh at them as much as anyone.
They might not drool over Putin but they are the most effective people to push the stop arming Ukraine narrative. Also again I've pretty much never seen them criticise russia for being a colonial empire with pretty brutal practices towards the colonised nations (outside of Chechen wars). Compare the amount of criticism Israel gets to Russia from the left.
Right now the world is in a process of reevaluation, and academia is a huge part of this. Educational institutions have realized they have been teaching Russian history all wrong, and it SHOULD be taught through the prism of imperialism. It's kind of amazing, considering that even looking at the last 100 years, Russia has been on a rampage of conquering and subjugating nations from East to West.
Before anyone tries, please do not compare this to ill-fated American adventures. Last I checked, Vietnam and Iraq are still not part of the United States.
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The thing is that nonetheless every war ever has ended as part of a diplomatic process. When this doesn’t happen you have something like the Korean War, which is technically still going on. 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…
Nukes are an irrelevant issue that keeps getting brought up. Ukraine were pressured by Russia and the US and were offered incentives to hand the nuclear weapons to Russia. Furthermore the US even had to help Russia itself with the dismantling and disposing of some weapons over the years. It was in nobody’s interest for yet another country to have nukes when poverty and corruption would have almost certainly led to “l…
The Budapest Memorandum, in which Ukraine agrees to divest itself of nukes in exchange from formal guarantees of territorial integrity from Russia, is hardly irrelevant here.
The executive summary at https://raport.valisluureamet.ee/2023/en/executive-summary/ may be the more useful link
Russia uses cyberattacks to support its strategic objectives (e.g., causing fear and weakening society’s resistance to the aggressor, disrupting the functioning of the state, and creating information noise to make it difficult to distinguish reality from disinformation). The Russo-Ukrainian war confirms that cybersecurity measures 12 make it possible to withstand cyber espionage, cyber sabotage and influence operations.
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> The first and most obvious is this... If Russia thinks a verbal assurance from the US SecState to a different country can bind NATO thirty years later as if it were a treaty, they're hopelessly naive. (They're not, of course. They know this is bullshit.)
It was many different leaders. I suggest you actually read the archive document(s). Yes, they're long. Regardless of whether you think the Russians were hopelessly naive or full of shit, it is a promise broken. Remember, we're talking about negotiations, so their opinion matters too, regardless what you or I think about it.
Nope. It's a PR meme created for 2007 Munich Security Conference where Putin made his famous speech and needes justifications for imperialistic ambitions. Stunning economic growth before 2008 crisis allowed him to build up an army, and there he declared his vision. Nobody talked about such assurance before ca 2006-2007, and the 1997 founding act on mutual relations between NATO and Russia excplicitly says that signatories must "respect for sovereignty, independence and territorial integrity of all states and their inherent right to choose the means to ensure their own security, the inviolability of borders and peoples' right of self-determination as enshrined in the Helsinki Final Act and other OSCE documents"[1].
Even if we accept the premise that such assurance was given (which Gorbachev denied), then it was given to the USSR, which does not exist anymore. Former parts of that USSR themselves applied for NATO membership. Should their status be bound forever to a non-existing state?
Furthermore, this approach is based on disgusting colonial attitude that Russians are a some kind of master race that has the right to decide over everyone else, while ethnically they made up barely half of the population of the USSR. What about the other half? Do they not have the right to determine their future? Are they forever slaves of the ghost of the USSR?
[1] https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/official_texts_25468.htm