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I am genuinely curious. Did she not trust Biden's warnings? Or did she think the media was overblowing it? The "media" gets a bad rap, but I think we have reac
by qqqwerty 5y ago
I am genuinely curious. Did she not trust Biden's warnings? Or did she think the media was overblowing it?
The "media" gets a bad rap, but I think we have reached a particularly bad place if the general public is so distrustful of it that we can't use it to communicate about very serious public safety matters.
- dijonman2 5y agoShe is Ukrainian, why should she turn to America’s president for information? He does not run the world.
- waffle_maniac 5y agoTurn to Putin for information then. Same outcome.
- unclebucknasty 5y ago>why should she turn to America’s president for information? Because he has the World's most powerful intelligence agencies behind him? I know, children and propagandists will say "but, what about Iraq?" or some-such. But most serious people know that we generally hear about the relative few intelligence failures versus the multitudes of successes, and that the U.S. and its allies unquestionably wield the World's foremost intel services. And, here, we have the benefit of hindsight so we know unequivocally: our intelligence had it right and "she" would have done well to "turn to America's president for information".
- kofejnik 5y agoI’ve been begging my father to leave for the past week or so (and he has plenty of options in Europe and US), he was sure it’s overblown
- sillysaurusx 5y agoFwiw, my Ukrainian friend DMed me two days ago saying he was tired of the media “fearmongering”. Then a few hours ago he sent “oh shit, war has started”. I think people just genuinely didn’t think Putin would call everyone’s bluff and be willing to eat all the economic sanctions.
- bayesianbot 5y agoIt's surprisingly common take in these times. Climate change? Fearmongering. Covid? Who's going to be scared of the flu? And obviously Putin's danger is made up by media, at least until today. I don't think the accuracy rate for these predictions will be too good but plenty of people seem to think otherwise.
- Tainnor 5y agoThe West has mostly lived in peace and prosperity since 1945. It is hard to come to terms with the fact that this is not a natural state of events. I think this has led to a certain sort of hubris, that everything will turn out well and we don't have to make the hard decisions. But plagues and pandemics were a thing in the past. So were wars. And man-made ecological disasters.
- scrollaway 5y agoWe live in Belgium, so it's not Biden she's been listening to. And to be frank, I "saw it coming", but not that much more than her. I was maybe 50/50 on an attack up until yesterday.
- noduerme 5y agoIn this case, the western intelligence organizations were spot on from several weeks ago. Biden played it as well as he could, reserving some further sanctions until this happened. I lived through the "Iraq has WMD" build-up and lies, and I thought they were lies then, before we went in and found out there were no WMD. This was good intelligence. Unfortunately, it does no one any good. All we can do at the moment is sanction Russia. But it does argue that we should be prepared for a nuclear response if they cross any line west, as long as Putin or some other madman is in power there.
- rayiner 5y agoUsing nuclear power if Putin crosses into Eastern Europe is complete madness. Eastern Europe is Russia’s back yard, not ours.
- noduerme 5y agoNothing is Russia's back yard. Russia is the back yard. Russia is the graveyard of civilization, which has no claim to anything outside its miserable, ruthless territory. I would rather die than live in a shithole under Putin. The only madness would be not using nuclear weapons against Putin if he crosses NATO lines. If he wants to die rich, he can live a long life. Otherwise let him die with his missiles, and his daughter who dances.
- polotics 5y agoWord! The backyard of a sad Mafia of outdated old Russian men still stuck in the 20th century. As things stand my guess is this lasts about five years and ends with some nuclear exchange over Europe, assassinations across the West and East, and prude dove China slowwwwly crawling east, then south, north, west.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- slibhb 5y ago
- jononor 5y agoThe problem is that for Ukrainians the threat has been near constant since 2014, 8 years now. So people have heard the "news" thousand times before that invasion could happen any day now, and it did not happen... Until today.
- foxfluff 5y agoThey didn't have 200k troops and tons of military gear amassed around their borders for 8 years. It's hard to believe anyone who's been paying attention to the buildup would've thought they're there just to chill out.
- spicybright 5y agoIt's true, but I tend to think humans are pretty bad at threat evaluation if the threat lasts for years and years. Kind of like the IT admin that doesn't check backup integrity often enough because there's never been a data loss issue in years.
- __blockcipher__ 5y agoOr conversely, when you have a flappy monitoring system that constantly complains about non-problems and half-problems, it gets very hard to notice when an actually serious alert is firing.
- Dma54rhs 5y agoIt's not entirely true. Someone who lives in Eastern Europe these border drills and threats are normal and go back to 10 years and more. Obviously this time they were better equipped infrastructure wise that the western agencies clearly said they were but for an average citizen it was "the same as usual".
- TulliusCicero 5y agoEven if that’s true, Putin straight up announced he’d be sending troops into the two rebel controlled regions a few days ago. That’s a pretty obvious sign that this time was different. Like, I get that the previous buildups could be dismissed as saber rattling and training exercises, but Putin literally announcing, "HEY I'M COMING IN, I'M SENDING IN TROOPS TO UKRAINE NOW", how do you dismiss that?
- rhino369 5y agoEven if you believed it, most people don't have the luxury of just uprooting and leaving until it gets bad. The government still isn't recommending fleeing. They want to stay and fight--not preside over refugee flows to Poland.
- richardfey 5y agoIsn't this a war between brothers, after all? I want to hope that Russian soldiers will stop in front of the babushkas that obviously will never leave their houses, and show some compassion. That kind of humanity is of course much harder to experience when bombing or using drones, but I do not know if they're being used.
- Mikeb85 5y agoThe media is shit... So far Russia's done precision strikes and is simply rolling troops down roads. They won't encounter much resistance. A month (or more?) ago Zelenskiy said he's not sending Ukrainians to die. Today there's a lot of tough talk but there's no indication that Ukrainians will put up a fight and die en masse...
- waffle_maniac 5y ago> Today there's a lot of tough talk but there's no indication that Ukrainians will put up a fight and die en masse There's no evidence to the contrary. It has just begun.
- baq 5y agoThe Ukrainian army was 400k strong and quite experienced. They're badly out-teched, especially in the air warfare department, but they will make it up with morale - they're defending their motherland. Russian army just does what it's been told. They're risking their lives to make a select few oligarchs a couple billion richer each. They don't want to be there. If this doesn't end within a week, it'll take years. Putin knows this, hence the offers of unconditional surrender.
- kevinventullo 5y ago
- AlwaysRock 5y agoI'm not from the Ukraine but there has been news of something like this on a regular basis since 2014. It's kind of like South Korea/North Korea. On a near weekly basis there is big news about something bad potentially happening. It's hard to know what is serious and what isnt.
- azinman2 5y agoExcept Putin has been negotiating with all the other western leaders to avoid this for the past couple weeks, and each one basically failed. Doesn’t that seem different?
- waffle_maniac 5y agoHow is demanding the end of NATO via an outside party having veto control over membership "negotiating"? It's very obvious that his demands are impossible. Putin is really a master at playing people. It's kind of shocking people are _still_ falling for it.
- pc86 5y agoIf Putin actually wanted to avoid invading a sovereign nation in violation of international law, all he had to do was... not invade a sovereign nation.
- temp8964 5y agoHe was forced to invade Ukraine because he didn’t get what he wanted. /s
- dragonwriter 5y agoAnd what he wanted was NATO backing off so that he was more free to invade neighbors, not just Ukraine.
- hidudeurcool 5y ago
- Grim-444 5y agoIt's definitely an interesting place where we're at. I personally no longer believe anything mass media says, I lost all faith in them a number of years ago. They no longer have the ability to influence me, whether for better or for worse. I think I'm justified in having these beliefs, and some portion of people might agree with me, while another portion might call me an idiot, but the reality is that no matter how objectively "right" or "wrong" I am in having these beliefs, the fact still stands that the end result is I no longer believe a single thing mass media says. If they ever do have a legitimate, "true" message they need me to receive, whether about Ukraine, or Covid, or whatever comes next, they no longer have any ability to influence my thoughts or actions. At this point I feel standard mass media has become so institutionalized, so corrupt, so completely politicized, that there's not even reform possible; the whole system has to be torn apart and replaced with some new system, before I'll even consider listening again.