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Along with others here, I'm questioning your "Ukraine...cannot win" comment. As I see it, they have already won, and will continue to win for a long long time.

• itake 5y ago
  > probably because they believed that Russia would easily walk over Ukraine Sorry to be brass, but why would NATO support Ukraine? Its not a strategy ally. There aren't any special resources there. I don't know why the US was tempting Ukraine to join NATO in the first place.
  • sidibe 5y ago
    With neighbors like Ukraine has article 5 is the obvious temptation, USA didn't have to do anything. Believe it or not Ukrainians can have their own opinions and not everything they do is because of they are pawns
    • itake 5y ago
      There are several guilty parties. US/NATO are not fully responsible.
      • sidibe 5y ago
        I can't help but read that as you acknowledging Ukraine deserves some of the guilt of wanting to join NATO instead of just the USA's fault, which is definitely not what I meant. Russia is the lone guilty party in this invasion, or more specifically Putin, I feel pretty awful for the poor soldiers who are getting killed in foreign land or forced to play role of occupier to hostile locals. People who understand his concerns about NATO are people who have bought his lies.
        • itake 5y ago
          Question: Whose fault was the Cuban Missile crisis and post-crisis economic sanctions of Cuba?
          • Paradigma11 5y ago
            Mostly the fault of the USA. But lets not forget the ridiculous scale and number of military interventions Cubas worldwide. They were hardly an innocent bystander during the cold war but a very active opponent.
  • rblatz 5y ago
    In what ways was the US tempting Ukraine to join NATO? Because NATO expansionism is the core of Russia's propaganda, along with other non-sense like clearing the country of Jewish Nazism.
    • itake 5y ago
      Bucharest Summit Declaration 2008 > NATO welcomes Ukraine’s and Georgia’s Euro-Atlantic aspirations for membership in NATO. https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natolive/official_texts_8443.htm https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natolive/official_texts_8443.htm
      • pedalpete 5y ago
        It's 2022. You're pointing to a declaration that is 14 years old. Do you have anything more current? Why the invasion now?
        • tommiegannert 5y ago
          I have been wondering the same thing; what was the trigger? Maybe new ties to Turkey: > Over the past two years, NATO member Turkey and Ukraine have bolstered defense industry ties, including an agreement by Turkish drone-maker Baykar to build a production facility near Kyiv for its popular Bayraktar TB2 drone. The Ukrainian government has also dubbed Turkey "one of its key economic partners." https://www.dw.com/en/turkeys-intelligence-agency-abducts-arms-dealer-in-ukraine/a-60634563 https://www.dw.com/en/turkeys-intelligence-agency-abducts-ar...
        • itake 5y ago
          Russia Annex Crimea in response to that in 2012. Russia's power and economy is weakening. They needed time to prepare their forces and complete their Crimea annexation. We also had COVID in 2019-2022.
      • kelnos 5y ago
        So Ukraine says "hey, we think we probably want to join NATO". And NATO responds "cool, that sounds good", and... so what? Ukraine is a sovereign nation and should be allowed to ally itself with whatever country or group it wants to. Perhaps Russia should take a hard look at why Ukraine didn't feel that allying with Russia would be in their best interests?
  • pedalpete 5y ago
    I didn't say NATO, I said "the west", but you're right, I probably should have said "the world" or something else. A major superpower decided to invade a sovereign country with absolutely no provocation with the goal of extending their borders. This isn't the first time this has happened, and it won't be the last. It shouldn't be allowed. Let's be clear here as well. Russia is not the only country to have done this. Western countries have been just as guilty in the past.
    • nevermindiguess 5y ago
      You are not correct when you say “without provocation”. The UKR government had been assaulting its own ethnically-Russian citizens in Donbass four 8 years. Russia went in to stop that. There are many journalistic documents that prove those societies.
      • pedalpete 5y ago
        Link to the documents? I appreciate we are getting differing stories depending on what media you see.
      • kelnos 5y ago
        I'm not sure what to believe anymore, honestly. Certainly there has been military action between Kyiv and the separatists. But there's been so much anti-Ukraine propaganda coming out of Russia in the past 8 years, plus what seems to be questionable or incomplete reporting from Western outlets, that it's hard to know where the truth is. Did the separatist movements start because of Russian agitation, or because of actions the government of Ukraine took? Is Ukraine targeting ethnic Russians in the Donbass region, or are they just attacking separatists, who maybe(?) happen to mostly be ethnic Russians? I'm having a hard time understanding the true history here.
    • itake 5y ago
      > with absolutely no provocation This is false. NATO in 2008 invited Ukraine to join. This is the equivalent of Cuba inviting Russia to setup a military base on US borders. The US's reaction was to economically nuke Cuba. https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natolive/official_texts_8443.htm https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natolive/official_texts_8443.htm
• baq 5y ago
  > If Putin loses in Ukraine, could that also mean the end of his regime in Russia? The Russian people are standing up to him. He has proven that he is not only fallible. Will this also be taken as a sign of weakness to Russians? I believe that’s the play EU and NATO is going for. Putin made a mistake so obvious and of such magnitude that the western powers decided to go for the jugular. The risk is of course that it doesn’t work, as it didn’t in Belarus. We’re facing Cold War remastered in that case.
• echelon 5y ago
  > I wonder if they have given China extra pause in their stance toward Taiwan. > If Putin loses in Ukraine, could that also mean the end of his regime in Russia? The Russian people are standing up to him. If we see a loss of Putin's power in Russia as the world and his own population lionizes against him, a botched Taiwanese invasion could lead to a similar outcome in China. Lots of food to chew on for the strategists.
  • jorgesborges 5y ago
    A key difference is that Chinese citizens, soldiers, and leaders won’t lionize against the state. Nationalism is total. But no doubt China is taking notes.
    • echelon 5y ago
      Last time I was there (in college during Obama's presidency), most of the students I got close to secretly told me they disliked their leaders but couldn't do anything about it. I attended lectures taught by incredibly nationalistic professors with an almost religiously fervent level of support for the CCP's "triumph over the America and the world" (paraphrase, but true to the content). Most of the young folks either didn't care or harbored distrust. They told me corruption was rampant and people were bitter. After the earthquake, people really hated on the CCP. Anecdotal, but it really shaped my opinions. Look at Hong Kong. They clearly hate it, but they can't do anything about it.
  • kelnos 5y ago
    More likely, to me, is that China will see what did and didn't work with Russia's invasion or Ukraine, and take those learnings when they go for Taiwan. I unfortunately don't see Taiwan's position getting better because of any of this. Also, I expect that the Chinese government has tighter control ("physically" and propaganda-wise) of their people than is the case in Russia. So I don't know that we'd see demonstrations or protests if China invaded Taiwan. Also I would guess that more people in China believe that Taiwan should be ruled by Beijing than people in Russia who believe Ukraine should be ruled by Moscow. Unfortunately I can't find polling numbers on this, which isn't surprising, as that data may not exist outside of some Chinese intelligence system.
• whirlaway 5y ago
  > I wonder if they have given China extra pause in their stance toward Taiwan. I expect so. But China is a great power, and Russia is only a regional power. It's much easier and cheaper to isolate Russia. China's claim on Taiwan is 1000x more valid than the Russian claim on Ukraine, and the world would react differently. I say this as someone who likes the RoC, and thinks they have a right to self-determination. Ultimately, though, China is trying to win the economic and political game. You need a large military to play that game as a great power, but you don't have to actually invade people to exercise military power. And wars are terribly costly when you're trying to modernize infrastructure. Decoupling China from the US would be terribly costly to both sides, while trade is profitable. So they use that to buy a sphere of influence, largely in Africa and South America. Putin is the idiot who still thinks he can invade his way to a sphere of influence, which hasn't really worked out for anyone after the Spanish-American war.
  • hdjjhhvvhga 5y ago
    > China's claim on Taiwan is 1000x more valid than the Russian claim on Ukraine I think you got it backwards: Taiwan's claim on China is more valid - after all, they are the original China unspoiled by the demon of communism.
    • akvadrako 5y ago
      That's exactly the point – if both countries claim to be the rightful owners of both other countries, they are not really separate countries.
    • ahahahahah 5y ago
      Sure, in the same way that the confederacy's claim on the south is valid.
      • christophilus 5y ago
        In the same way that the North’s claim on the US South is valid. Mainland China is the Confederacy. Taiwan is the Union. Taiwan and the North were the original governments.
• dirtyid 5y ago
  >given hope to other regions and countries that may come under threat in the future. To be determined. I surmise Ukraine will go the way of HK/Belarus and demonstrate that shitpost supremacy is not a counter to disproportionate military force. That getting drunk on propaganda manufactured and reinforced by liberal western media is ultimately going to trigger harsher reprisals and bloodier escalations. The alternative to Putin's quick "special operations" / decapitation strike is UKR cities getting shelled to rubble that we witness now. PRC will learn not to half measure in the name of cross strait "brotherhood", strategy can change but enduring geopolitical interests do not. We're now setup for an even bloodier resumption of Chinese civil war, and TWers will see the cost of porcupine strategy and prolonged insurgency and connect the dots of how much more hopeless doing so on an isolated island will be. >What happens when Europe faced with the threat of a lack of energy going into next winter? What's the sociopolitical aftermath of EU embracing migrants? People are fickle once policy touch their lives, it's much easier to turn on the gas spigot again, waive away sanctions, reduced promised military expenditures than to kick out already settled migrants. There's also Trump 2024.
  • throwaway0a5e 5y ago
    That's a reasonable take. But on the other hand... It took 20yr to replace the Taliban with the Taliban and that was without much external meddling. How's Syria doing? This could very much turn into "Iraq for white people" and unlike Ukraine does not have strong internal race/religion animosity (well it kind of does, but those regions left in 2014) that can be harnessed to keep the pressure off the invaders and puppet government. With the west providing the people of Ukraine with financial, material and ideological support this has the potential to become an incredibly bloody conflict. Ukraine is 40million people. If even 1/10th of that say fuck it that nation is a level of ungovernable that is hard to appropriately quantify. I don't think many people appreciate the kind of "once in generations" abyss eastern Europe is staring into. Or I could just be wrong and Ukraine could roll over. After all they were ruled by Russia historically and it hasn't been that long. Time will tell.
    • tguvot 5y ago
      they already had a couple of revolutions when elections got rigged. now, based on what i am reading, even people that were pro-russian forever, after all the shelling hate russia with passion. it's will be much more than 1/10th edit: there is an inflow of Ukrainian male population into Ukraine. There is Foreign Legion now