Russia Invades Ukraine

[Basic_GnR_Fan]

3 hours ago, -Jaro- said:

Don't really understand posts questioning helping and cheerung Ukraine. Their people woukd rather die fighting than living as Russians slaves. And yes, slaves would they be. Just like they did in years before WW2 - read about The Holodomor. And just like they were in years after WW2...

And while they want to fight, only correct way for the rest of us is to help them every way we can ( and fear of Putins wrath allow us)...

While Ukraine people have attitude like this:

 

No way Russia could rule them even if they defeat their army. Ukraine is large country, has 40 mil people, you cannot occupy it and hold by force, especialy if you are Russia whose economy is almost zero under sanctions, and already have to control few potential hotbeds of rebellion accros 2 continents, support puppet goverment in only "friendly" country - current Belarus gvnt would collapse within days without Putins help.

Here's my thing, they can choose to fight, that's their right. But it's also my right to refuse them arms to encourage them to keep doing so. If they know no support is coming from the outside that gives them more incentive to negotiate a deal now rather than later.

A Holomodor part 2 isn't coming. Let's just put that to the side. I'm not saying Putin is a good guy, but he's not Stalin, Kaganovich, or Beria level bad.

[-Jaro-]

1 hour ago, Basic_GnR_Fan said:

Here's my thing, they can choose to fight, that's their right. But it's also my right to refuse them arms to encourage them to keep doing so. If they know no support is coming from the outside that gives them more incentive to negotiate a deal now rather than later.

A Holomodor part 2 isn't coming. Let's just put that to the side. I'm not saying Putin is a good guy, but he's not Stalin, Kaganovich, or Beria level bad.

Thank god you are part of minority. 

[grouse]

1 hour ago, Basic_GnR_Fan said:

Here's my thing, they can choose to fight, that's their right. But it's also my right to refuse them arms to encourage them to keep doing so. If they know no support is coming from the outside that gives them more incentive to negotiate a deal now rather than later.

A Holomodor part 2 isn't coming. Let's just put that to the side. I'm not saying Putin is a good guy, but he's not Stalin, Kaganovich, or Beria level bad.

And by doing so, you are condoning what is going on there. That is not the side of the fence I'd want to be on.  

Edited March 5, 2022 by grouse

[downzy]

 

[Dazey]

8 minutes ago, downzy said:

 

I wanna hear what Diners Club has to say! 😂

[downzy]

18 minutes ago, Dazey said:

I wanna hear what Diners Club has to say! 😂

At this rate they'll be resorting to the Player's Club Card.

 

[Dazey]

12 minutes ago, downzy said:

At this rate they'll be resorting to the Player's Club Card.

 

Apparently he “won’t forget” that the UK supported Ukraine. We’re not likely to forget that he used nerve gas on our soil so I guess we’re even. 😂

Edited March 5, 2022 by Dazey

[Basic_GnR_Fan]

9 hours ago, grouse said:

And by doing so, you are condoning what is going on there. That is not the side of the fence I'd want to be on.  

I actually want this war to stop and I'm grown up enough to realize Putin isn't magically going to disappear. The Ukrainians will lose this war, and NATO and the US don't want to get into a shooting war with Russia (with China lurking on the sidelines). I'd rather have the Ukrainians lose now and negotiate some type of peace rather than get obliterated completely. You guys who want to give arms to Ukraine are just delaying the inevitable and giving Ukraine false hope (and there will be more dead Ukrainians in the process of that). That's my take.

[-Jaro-]

1 hour ago, Basic_GnR_Fan said:

I actually want this war to stop and I'm grown up enough to realize Putin isn't magically going to disappear. The Ukrainians will lose this war, and NATO and the US don't want to get into a shooting war with Russia (with China lurking on the sidelines). I'd rather have the Ukrainians lose now and negotiate some type of peace rather than get obliterated completely. You guys who want to give arms to Ukraine are just delaying the inevitable and giving Ukraine false hope (and there will be more dead Ukrainians in the process of that). That's my take.

Why stop there? Get troops there and side with Russians to reach the end of war even faster.. 

 

"The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in times of great moral crisis, maintain their neutrality." 

[jamillos]

2 hours ago, Basic_GnR_Fan said:

I actually want this war to stop and I'm grown up enough to realize Putin isn't magically going to disappear. The Ukrainians will lose this war, and NATO and the US don't want to get into a shooting war with Russia (with China lurking on the sidelines). I'd rather have the Ukrainians lose now and negotiate some type of peace rather than get obliterated completely. You guys who want to give arms to Ukraine are just delaying the inevitable and giving Ukraine false hope (and there will be more dead Ukrainians in the process of that). That's my take.

It’s not this black & white. It’s also a game of time and pressure. Sooner or later, someone will take that cunt out, and it will be a domino effect from there (I admit this may be just wishful thinking on my part). Russia is already devastated, the news is spreading among the people; how long would you think this can go on? Even if they win, they lose. 
Plus, we’re people. What you’re saying may be the officials’ actual strategy, but I’ll never subscribe to that. 

[EvanG]

I read that Putin's daughter is married to someone from my country and lives here. Hopefully this means that if Putin decides to start nuking NATO countries, he will skip mine : 0

Edited March 6, 2022 by EvanG

[alfierose]

Good article about the roots of the money flowing through London.

How the oligarchs’ Russian money tree took root in Britain

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/cb0b1c80-9ca2-11ec-a6a5-32c563cf34cb?shareToken=9c6e87c8a428dd44dabffcdfe3e7055a

[downzy]

I would highly recommend everyone listen to Ezra Klein’s podcast with Fareed Zakaria to get a better understanding of what is going on from an international relations framework:

https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/the-ezra-klein-show/id1548604447?i=1000552911610

[downzy]

 

[zombux]

9 hours ago, -Jaro- said:

Why stop there? Get troops there and side with Russians to reach the end of war even faster.. 

 

"The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in times of great moral crisis, maintain their neutrality." 

thanks for reading my thoughts, brother.

meanwhile, in Russia, about 4300 people have been arrested during protests today. those Russians have my huge respect, they risk 15 years in prison.

[dontdamnmeuyi2015]

My paper said today, Taiwan is getting worried now since China wants them part of their country. With the invasion of Ukraine and the mess that this is, I bet Chi will figure he has a good chance of invading Taiwan without any resistance from anyone.

The only thing Putin didn't figure on is that the US and Europe all came together to help Ukraine.

Now I've read that some US veterans are going to Ukraine to fight the Russians. Will Putin consider this an act of war from America? Who knows?

 

20 hours ago, downzy said:

 

I actually this will hurt the Russian people and not Putin at all. That's what sucks, whatever other nations do to Russia, it's the people who will get the worse of it.  It would be amazing if the Russian people could overthrow Putin and the government. Not sure this could happen?

[zombux]

not sure if this has been posted here already. alleged whistleblower from russian FSB wrote this https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1500301348780199937.html

[grouse]

14 hours ago, Basic_GnR_Fan said:

I actually want this war to stop and I'm grown up enough to realize Putin isn't magically going to disappear. The Ukrainians will lose this war, and NATO and the US don't want to get into a shooting war with Russia (with China lurking on the sidelines). I'd rather have the Ukrainians lose now and negotiate some type of peace rather than get obliterated completely. You guys who want to give arms to Ukraine are just delaying the inevitable and giving Ukraine false hope (and there will be more dead Ukrainians in the process of that). That's my take.

That is fine and I respect your opinion. I just disagree with it that is all.

I will not pretend to know where this contested quote originated, I however deem it appropriate to post it in this thread.

“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”

[ZoSoRose]

1 hour ago, zombux said:

not sure if this has been posted here already. alleged whistleblower from russian FSB wrote this https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1500301348780199937.html

Very interesting. Sounds very unsustainable

[downzy]

Not sure how big Netflix is in Russia, but it has now shut down operations (on its own accord).

[downzy]

Incredible. 

[Ace Nova]

On 3/6/2022 at 6:08 PM, downzy said:

Incredible. 

Smart man.  

Edited March 8, 2022 by Ace Nova

[PatrickS77]

18 hours ago, Basic_GnR_Fan said:

I actually want this war to stop and I'm grown up enough to realize Putin isn't magically going to disappear. The Ukrainians will lose this war, and NATO and the US don't want to get into a shooting war with Russia (with China lurking on the sidelines). I'd rather have the Ukrainians lose now and negotiate some type of peace rather than get obliterated completely. You guys who want to give arms to Ukraine are just delaying the inevitable and giving Ukraine false hope (and there will be more dead Ukrainians in the process of that). That's my take.

Again. There is nothing to negotiate. There is also no deal to be made for Ukraine. Putin doesn't want to negotiate. He wants Ukraine to surrender and give in to his demands. Telling a country, do what I want or I will continue to bomb you is not a negotiation. It's oppression.

[downzy]

A great thread/explanation on why the US didn’t (and to a point, hasn’t so far) send flashy weapons systems to Ukraine in 2014/2015 and instead focused on developing the core of Ukraine’s military capabilities that are making a real difference:

 

[Blackstar]

On 3/2/2022 at 5:47 PM, downzy said:

his is why I find arguments made by John Mearsheimer so unsatisfying.  They fail to explain why Putin has spent so much focus on Ukraine not having any right to sovereignty and his larger worldview of a rightful Russian empire. 

NATO inclusion might have given Putin the reason or argument he needed to justify his actions, but to say that the West bears responsibility for entertaining the inclusion of Ukraine into NATO is, frankly, absurd.

The problem for Mearsheimer is that he wants to put most of the responsibility on what's happening on NATO.  As I noted earlier, one can criticize the U.S. and partially Europe for not having a more hands off approach to Ukraine and Georgia, but it's a bit of a reach to suggest that the US and NATO own any responsibility for what's happening today in Ukraine.  It's akin to the suggestion that NATO has been driving a bit outside of their lane, and therefore it makes Putin's response of crashing both cars as an understandable response.

He comes across, to me at least, as being a Putin apologist at some parts..

And as an uber-realist, he's also not very consistent.  On the one hand he wants to argue, as realists do, that large powers deserve to have their own spheres of influence respected by other great powers with respect to Russia and Ukraine.  And on the other he's also on record with saying that the U.S. should use everything at its disposal (including a full-on military intervention) against China should it make any real effort to take Taiwan. 

Mearsheimer shows the limits of the realism-school of thought.  It would have never accounted for the level of Ukrainian opposition we're seeing today.  It would have viewed a fractured EU and NATO as incapable of serving as a backstop against this level of Russian aggression.  Realism certainly has its place and deserves to be considered.  But realism in its purest form, for me at least, is far too limited and in some cases too amoral.  Actions are not weighed by their morality but solely based on power politics.  It would be foolish to ignore those aspects, but we're not going to progress any further if all calculations are considered only within a realism framework.

Mearsheimer’s main point is that the US has failed to understand that Russia and China think in 20th – even 19th – century terms, i.e. their foreign policy revolves around spheres of influence; at the same time, the US itself hasn’t abandoned the Monroe doctrine. I’d add that of course it’s been convenient for the US to verbally dismiss the concept of spheres of influence as a thing of the past, since it has seen itself as the sole great power after the end of the Cold War and the whole world as its potential sphere of influence.

Mearsheimer has not been alone in pointing out that NATO expansion has something or a lot to do with the current situation. It’s not just people like Chomsky talking from a radical leftist anti-NATO/anti-imperialist point of view, but many others talking from the perspective of US interests. A few pages back I posted a video interview with Jack Matlock, second to last US ambassador in the USSR (safe to say that nobody bothered to watch it – here it is again). But we’ve come to a point where all these people are called “Putin apologists”. Since Putin invaded Ukraine the blame is on him for it, so fuck him. But I think that, with the exception of those who invested in the Russian threat making it a self-fulfilling prophecy, no one can seriously and objectively deny the causative link between NATO expansion (in the broader sense) and the current war.

The main counter-argument is that Russia didn’t take it too far in its reaction to the past NATO expansions. The answer here is simply that it was too weak to do so, but that doesn’t mean that it didn’t consider it a threat to its security. It’s been well documented that back in 1991 Bush Sr. had promised Gorbachev that NATO wouldn’t expand to the east, but Gorbachev wasn’t even in position to have asked it in writing. Then, under Yeltsin and after the shock of the economic “reforms”, Russia was a country-Eldorado for corrupted local oligarchs and western companies while its population was impoverished (the reasons for Putin’s popularity in Russia, at least until 2011, were that he replaced Yeltsin’s oligarchs with his own who, although also corrupted, served Russia’s national interests creating a middle class – even though there was still big income inequality and poverty in the lower social strata – and that he played the card of national pride). In 2008, however, Putin did take it as far as invading Georgia and recognizing Abkhazia and South Ossetia as independent states – a fact that most current analyses arguing against the NATO related causation conveniently forget – after the Georgian government had run a referendum about joining NATO and then NATO offered Georgia and Ukraine the prospect of future membership in the Bucharest Summit (a compromise between Bush Jr. and Merkel). Ukraine hadn’t run a referendum, still had non-alignment in its constitution, the polls of the time showed that the vast majority of its population was against joining NATO, and, moreover, it’s much bigger than Georgia, and Russia wasn’t prepared enough then to attempt military action. But, in the end, the “if Putin’s issue was NATO expansion he would have reacted earlier” argument bares no merit, because it’s equally applicable to the other interpretations: if his issue was democracy or a greater Russia, why didn’t he act earlier, e.g. after the Orange Revolution in 2005?

The other counter-argument is that there wasn’t real possibility in Ukraine joining NATO (despite the Ukrainian government’s pushing for it and NATO keeping the door open), which would mean that NATO would be obliged to defend it was attacked. However, regarding everything else, Ukraine has been treated by NATO as a de facto close ally, at least since 2014, with the US and other NATO countries funding ($3 billion from the US since 2014, according to the WP) and training Ukrainian armed forces (including the neo-Nazis of the Azov Battalion). And that while there was war in Ukraine – that’s another fact that gets overlooked: there was an ongoing war with approximately 14,000 victims in Donbass for seven years that, although de-escalated after 2015, it never stopped (with the Minsk agreements being violated by both sides) and re-escalated in the few months before the Russian invasion. So NATO has been practically involved in Ukraine since 2014 helping the Ukrainian army and militia fight the pro-Russians. There were also NATO exercises near the area, etc. All this is mere description of facts.

And besides NATO expansion, there’s its other post Cold War activities. NATO’s “defensive” and “humanitarian” bombs (of depleted uranium) in Yugoslavia (to which Russia was incapable of reacting) and its adoption of the doctrine that “the sovereignty of independent nations is not absolute” (page x in the book preview), which resulted in the independence of Kosovo in 2008 (just before the NATO Bucharest Summit and the subsequent war in Georgia). Regardless of the position one might have on this issue, it set a potential precedent for countries that have separatist movements etc. (that’s why countries like Spain and Cyprus have not recognized Kosovo), most notably former Soviet countries, including Russia itself. So, for Russia, the Kosovo precedent posed a potential threat on one hand (e.g. Chechnya) and, at the same time, an opportunity to use it to its advantage with Abkhazia and South Ossetia in Georgia and now with Donetsk and Luhansk in Ukraine.

Back to Mearsheimer, a very interesting post-invasion interview (the interviewer really challenges him):

https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/why-john-mearsheimer-blames-the-us-for-the-crisis-in-ukraine

I disagree with some of the thing he says, e.g. that NATO expansion was to keep the peace or that the US made wars in the Middle East to spread democracy (implying that these policies were driven by idealism and not realism). But he is right in that Russia wasn’t seen as a threat by the West before 2014 – I’d say definitely not before the mid-00s and at least not as a serious threat after that. So NATO’s existence and expansion after the Cold War had nothing to do with protection from Russia.

I agree that realism has its limits in interpreting and predicting actions. I also don’t think that international relations should be amoral. But I do believe that international relations are amoral and, in many cases, immoral – even in WWII, morality wasn’t what primarily led the Allies to declare war on Germany. It’s good that since then we’ve had international rules to refer to, but we all know that their application is dependent on the law of “might is right”. So if all this somehow ends in a good way and the reaction to this war marks a new era where rules and morality will prevail in international relations, I’m all for it; that would mean that the same rules would apply to all other current and future violations of international law, including the next time the US invades a country – right? But I don’t see it ending well. This war and the reaction to it (and, of course, I don’t mean the Ukrainians) feels like it’s the end of the world as we know it – for the worse.

Edited March 7, 2022 by Blackstar