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> There should be more serious grappling with why the Russians did this (and Crimea in 2014) than "Putin bad". Why don't you give us your explanation? It's ju

> There should be more serious grappling with why the Russians did this (and Crimea in 2014) than "Putin bad". Why don't you give us your explanation? It's just very odd to advocate for an appeasement policy when the aggressor keeps wanting more (first Crimea, then tried to take the whole Ukraine by going straight for the capital). It wasn't just Eastern Ukraine with Russian-speaking population, they went straight to the capital. I'd say the west is perfectly fine with ignoring a lot of their principles for the sake of peace and money, China and Middle East are very good examples of it as you just said. The west was even perfectly happy to roll over their principles just to get the gas they needed from Russia. It looks like it's Russia that self destroyed all those economical agreements for the sake of wanting to expand their borders.

roenxi 4y ago
- stoltzmann 4y ago
  The US has not been marching NATO towards Russia. It's ex-eastern bloc countries willingly joining the alliance to be protected from Russian aggression. If Russia did not have a long history of invading their neighbors, there would be no need or will to join the alliance.
  - roenxi 4y ago
    If, say, Cuba joined a Russian military alliance of their own free will and started setting up a military installation with a couple of Russian missiles of uncertain providence, would the US tut-tut quietly or would it be a war situation? Because as I recall it was considered a major crisis that nearly doomed us all. And Cuba is further from the US than Ukraine is from Russia. Those countries should have been vetoed out of NATO after considering the look of the situation to Russia. There should be no countries aligned with the US military within a very wide margin of Russia, and the alliance should have stopped expanding north-east when the USSR fell. Militaries deal in present realities, not how voluntarily people signed up for military alliances. Russia should not have to wonder how trustworthy the US is being (spoiler: the US is not trustworthy although they are a lot less capricious than the average nation). It is easy to see why they might have felt pressured to invade after the Ukrainian revolution, without needing to resort to "well Putin must just be that evil & crazy!".
    - stoltzmann 4y ago
      If Cuba decides to align itself with the USSR, then it has the right to do so. Same as Ukraine has the right to align with the West rather than Russia. >There should be no countries aligned with the US military within a very wide margin of Russia Why, just because Russia wants that, so that it's free to invade it's neighbors? People in Eastern Europe do want to be part of NATO for a simple reason - not to have to worry about their big neighbor deciding that it's time for a "liberation". This is not about aggression, this is about not being invaded.
    - chimprich 4y ago
      > And Cuba is further from the US than Ukraine is from Russia. Not a great analogy. Ukraine had not joined NATO, and there seemed to be no prospect of it. The countries that actually did join NATO appear to be safe from Russian invasion. If the Baltic states hadn't been allowed to join NATO then Russia might already have a land bridge to Kaliningrad and we'd have lost some more liberal democracies.
  - js8 4y ago
    The alliance as such would not be a problem. The problem is that its key member, USA, is Russia's nemesis, and that the common NATO defense is based on nuclear retaliation (that's why there are automatic triggers). I wouldn't mind if it was a military alliance of Russia neighbors and it disavowed the use of nuclear weapons. Then it would truly make the world safer, IMHO.
- distances 4y ago
  > We should all be lobbying for a large neutral buffer zone between US-aligned Europe and Russia As long as that buffer is inside Russia, I would be fine with it as I suppose most others would. It's not OK to suggest that countries can have a sphere of influence in 21st century. Each country chooses their alignment and alliance independently. Russia has repeatedly shown to be a poor neighbour, so it shouldn't be a surprise to them if independent countries decide to turn away from Russia. US and Russia simply can not agree between themselves what should be Ukraine's place in the world. That kind of world order does not exist any more.
  - pydry 4y ago
    >It's not OK to suggest that countries can have a sphere of influence in 21st century Ask your Congressman about pulling out of Guam and closing all overseas military bases. >That kind of world order does not exist any more. This is, ironically, enough, something that Putin started saying to us since he came into power. Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, etc. He lobbied the west to adhere to a rules based international order rather than couping or invading whomever we damn well pleased. In 2003 he said "please respect Iraq's national sovereignty and international law". Oh how we laughed. What did you think the result of ignoring that was gonna be? For me it was fairly predictable. He treated it both as a threat and a precedent. That said, Im not in denial about America being an empire.
    - distances 4y ago
      > Ask your Congressman about pulling out of Guam and closing all overseas military bases. I'm from a small country by the Russian northern border, so I don't have anything to do with Guam but of course do have pretty strong opinions about who should be able to dictate our future.
      - pydry 4y ago
        This probably means that your country (maybe reluctantly, maybe not) lent its support to the Iraqi occupation under pressure from the US government. That was due to those competing spheres of influence. When you join a criminal gang for protection youve gotta prove your loyalty to the top dog and respect his power. The dynamics arent all that different to when a 15 year old kid joins a gang in south central - sometimes after demonstrating loyalty he gets protection and sometimes he gets chewed up and spat out as cannon fodder in a wider turf war.
- The_Colonel 4y ago
  > We should all be lobbying for a large neutral buffer zone between US-aligned Europe and Russia, not expanding the alliance designed to destroy Russia towards Moscow. Ukraine was neutral before 2014, somehow it didn't help. It didn't get invaded because they were about to join NATO, but because they started to orient themselves to the EU. What you actually argue for, and what Putin is after, is to let Russia re-build its satellite system of countries dependent on Russia.
  - dnh44 4y ago
    The NATO Bucharest Declaration of 2008 mentioned Ukraine and Georgia joining NATO.
    - The_Colonel 4y ago
      Again, Ukraine was nowhere near to joining NATO in 2008, 2014 or 2022.
      - dnh44 4y ago
        I never said it was close. You seemed to put the demarcation date for the discussion of it joining at 2014 but it started before that. I simply wanted to add more information to the discussion.
  - blub 4y ago
    AFAIK the reason why Ukraine wasn’t invited to join back then were objections from France and Germany. The US were courting them and lobbying for them to join. This is a classic escalation spiral, where flirtations between Ukraine and NATO triggered Russian aggression which in turn intensified the collaboration of NATO and Ukraine. And so on and so forth.
    - The_Colonel 4y ago
      Nothing NATO related happened in 2013/2014 which would trigger the invasion. People keep ignoring the fact that from the Russian side this is not (just) about security/NATO, but about the larger goal of keeping CEE (and specifically Ukraine) within its sphere of control.

roenxi 4y ago

stoltzmann 4y ago
The US has not been marching NATO towards Russia. It's ex-eastern bloc countries willingly joining the alliance to be protected from Russian aggression. If Russia did not have a long history of invading their neighbors, there would be no need or will to join the alliance.
- roenxi 4y ago
  If, say, Cuba joined a Russian military alliance of their own free will and started setting up a military installation with a couple of Russian missiles of uncertain providence, would the US tut-tut quietly or would it be a war situation? Because as I recall it was considered a major crisis that nearly doomed us all. And Cuba is further from the US than Ukraine is from Russia. Those countries should have been vetoed out of NATO after considering the look of the situation to Russia. There should be no countries aligned with the US military within a very wide margin of Russia, and the alliance should have stopped expanding north-east when the USSR fell. Militaries deal in present realities, not how voluntarily people signed up for military alliances. Russia should not have to wonder how trustworthy the US is being (spoiler: the US is not trustworthy although they are a lot less capricious than the average nation). It is easy to see why they might have felt pressured to invade after the Ukrainian revolution, without needing to resort to "well Putin must just be that evil & crazy!".
  - stoltzmann 4y ago
    If Cuba decides to align itself with the USSR, then it has the right to do so. Same as Ukraine has the right to align with the West rather than Russia. >There should be no countries aligned with the US military within a very wide margin of Russia Why, just because Russia wants that, so that it's free to invade it's neighbors? People in Eastern Europe do want to be part of NATO for a simple reason - not to have to worry about their big neighbor deciding that it's time for a "liberation". This is not about aggression, this is about not being invaded.
  - chimprich 4y ago
    > And Cuba is further from the US than Ukraine is from Russia. Not a great analogy. Ukraine had not joined NATO, and there seemed to be no prospect of it. The countries that actually did join NATO appear to be safe from Russian invasion. If the Baltic states hadn't been allowed to join NATO then Russia might already have a land bridge to Kaliningrad and we'd have lost some more liberal democracies.
- js8 4y ago
  The alliance as such would not be a problem. The problem is that its key member, USA, is Russia's nemesis, and that the common NATO defense is based on nuclear retaliation (that's why there are automatic triggers). I wouldn't mind if it was a military alliance of Russia neighbors and it disavowed the use of nuclear weapons. Then it would truly make the world safer, IMHO.
distances 4y ago
> We should all be lobbying for a large neutral buffer zone between US-aligned Europe and Russia As long as that buffer is inside Russia, I would be fine with it as I suppose most others would. It's not OK to suggest that countries can have a sphere of influence in 21st century. Each country chooses their alignment and alliance independently. Russia has repeatedly shown to be a poor neighbour, so it shouldn't be a surprise to them if independent countries decide to turn away from Russia. US and Russia simply can not agree between themselves what should be Ukraine's place in the world. That kind of world order does not exist any more.
- pydry 4y ago
  >It's not OK to suggest that countries can have a sphere of influence in 21st century Ask your Congressman about pulling out of Guam and closing all overseas military bases. >That kind of world order does not exist any more. This is, ironically, enough, something that Putin started saying to us since he came into power. Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, etc. He lobbied the west to adhere to a rules based international order rather than couping or invading whomever we damn well pleased. In 2003 he said "please respect Iraq's national sovereignty and international law". Oh how we laughed. What did you think the result of ignoring that was gonna be? For me it was fairly predictable. He treated it both as a threat and a precedent. That said, Im not in denial about America being an empire.
  - distances 4y ago
    > Ask your Congressman about pulling out of Guam and closing all overseas military bases. I'm from a small country by the Russian northern border, so I don't have anything to do with Guam but of course do have pretty strong opinions about who should be able to dictate our future.
    - pydry 4y ago
      This probably means that your country (maybe reluctantly, maybe not) lent its support to the Iraqi occupation under pressure from the US government. That was due to those competing spheres of influence. When you join a criminal gang for protection youve gotta prove your loyalty to the top dog and respect his power. The dynamics arent all that different to when a 15 year old kid joins a gang in south central - sometimes after demonstrating loyalty he gets protection and sometimes he gets chewed up and spat out as cannon fodder in a wider turf war.
The_Colonel 4y ago
> We should all be lobbying for a large neutral buffer zone between US-aligned Europe and Russia, not expanding the alliance designed to destroy Russia towards Moscow. Ukraine was neutral before 2014, somehow it didn't help. It didn't get invaded because they were about to join NATO, but because they started to orient themselves to the EU. What you actually argue for, and what Putin is after, is to let Russia re-build its satellite system of countries dependent on Russia.
- dnh44 4y ago
  The NATO Bucharest Declaration of 2008 mentioned Ukraine and Georgia joining NATO.
  - The_Colonel 4y ago
    Again, Ukraine was nowhere near to joining NATO in 2008, 2014 or 2022.
    - dnh44 4y ago
      I never said it was close. You seemed to put the demarcation date for the discussion of it joining at 2014 but it started before that. I simply wanted to add more information to the discussion.
- blub 4y ago
  AFAIK the reason why Ukraine wasn’t invited to join back then were objections from France and Germany. The US were courting them and lobbying for them to join. This is a classic escalation spiral, where flirtations between Ukraine and NATO triggered Russian aggression which in turn intensified the collaboration of NATO and Ukraine. And so on and so forth.
  - The_Colonel 4y ago
    Nothing NATO related happened in 2013/2014 which would trigger the invasion. People keep ignoring the fact that from the Russian side this is not (just) about security/NATO, but about the larger goal of keeping CEE (and specifically Ukraine) within its sphere of control.