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>> Sure, they would have if Naftali Bennett was allowed to conclude a peace agreeemnt JUST LIKE NIKOLAS SARKOZY DID in the Russo-Georgia war. The question to yo

>> Sure, they would have if Naftali Bennett was allowed to conclude a peace agreeemnt JUST LIKE NIKOLAS SARKOZY DID in the Russo-Georgia war. The question to you is WHY DID THE US BLOCK IT? Answer that directly, don’t dodge! This is a misrepresentation of events. The Israeli PM has clarified that his comments were taken out of context: https://www.businessinsider.com/israel-bennett-walks-back-claim-west-blocked-ukraine-russia-peace-deal-2023-2 https://www.businessinsider.com/israel-bennett-walks-back-cl... When the war started, the West was pressuring Ukraine into a peace deal with Russia at any cost. When the Bucha massacre was uncovered, the pressure stopped. Russian propaganda has tried to paint this change as "the West forcing Ukraine into war", which is blatantly false.

EGreg 3y ago
I don’t follow “Russian propaganda”, I think for myself. Every source I have shared with you is a mainstream Western source, including experts whose JOB it was to deliver analyses for their governments. If I lived in Russia, I’d be surrounded by Russian propaganda and also would have to cut through it like any independently-thinking person. If anything, I am constantly exposed to “US propaganda” since I live here, and it is a concerted effort to shut out anything that is even slightly away from the predetermined, official line, (in this case that the invasion is “unjustified and unprovoked”). After 9-11 it was going to be “Islamofascism” but that didn’t poll well, so they switched to “they hate us for our freedoms” and “weapons of mass destruction”. You can sometimes tell propaganda by how contrived the phrase is (eg “hacking the election”) and how it is repeated verbatim like it was normal and not contribed at all. In Russia it is “special military operation”. Everyone has propaganda. The attempt to label what half the world believes as “Russian Propaganda” is itseld a deligitimization tactic. Even within the most hawkish countries (like UK) there have been tons of voices clearly not on Russia’s payroll, but just as systematically ignored. This is a systemic problem: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/apr/30/russia-ukraine-war-kiev-conflict https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/apr/30/russia... https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KqE7UTptgGg https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KqE7UTptgGg https://www.wsj.com/articles/pope-francis-blames-nato-russia-ukraine-11651598988 https://www.wsj.com/articles/pope-francis-blames-nato-russia... https://theconversation.com/amp/ukraine-war-follows-decades-of-warnings-that-nato-expansion-into-eastern-europe-could-provoke-russia-177999 https://theconversation.com/amp/ukraine-war-follows-decades-... The Israeli PM walked back No, that lame attempt by someone at Business Insider to try to spin it was already addressed in the Krystal Ball video I posted. Did you watch it? They argued that it was a mistranslation and the US “stopped” the peace deal, rather than “killing” it. Oh great. Not exactly “walking back” anything, the title is misleading. Any other sources for this? When the war started, the Weat was pressuring Ukraine into a peace deal with Russia at any cost. This seems… untrue. Nah, stronger than that, every available piece of evidence points the other way. Almost like Ukraine was led down a path where all pro-Russian doves were sidelined or eliminated, and all hawks were promised EU and NATO membership if they stayed the course. What you said can’t possibly be true starting with the fact that the real-life timeline doesn’t match up. Bucha happened in late March, while the US killed the Bennett negotiation in early March. Even solidly pro-Ukrainian media in Ukraine admitted that Boris Johnson traveled to Kyiv to kill any peace deal. To quote this Ukrainskaya Pravda article: As soon as the Ukrainian negotiators and Abramovich/Medinsky, following the outcome of Istanbul, had agreed on the structure of a future possible agreement in general terms, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson appeared in Kyiv almost without warning. "Johnson brought two simple messages to Kyiv. The first is that Putin is a war criminal; he should be pressured, not negotiated with. And the second is that even if Ukraine is ready to sign some agreements on guarantees with Putin, they are not. We can sign [an agreement] with you [Ukraine], but not with him. Anyway, he will screw everyone over", is how one of Zelenskyy's close associates summed up the essence of Johnson's visit. Behind this visit and Johnson's words, there is much more than a simple reluctance to get involved in agreements with Russia. Johnson’s position was that the collective West, which back in February had suggested Zelenskyy should surrender and flee, now felt that Putin was not really as powerful as they had previously imagined. https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/articles/2022/05/5/7344096/ https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/articles/2022/05/5/7344096/ This totally contradicts your narrative, but to any person who’s been following the events since 2014 it makes sense that US and UK promised great things to Ukraine if they would leave Russia’s orbit up to and including having their population having a war with Russia. That’s been their MO since the beginning so it would be very strange if suddenly they would be “pressuring” Ukraine into an agreement. 2013: Before any invasions, armed conflicts, here is USA’s top people (including the very recently candidate for President, who hated Russia as he was a PoW in a USSR prison) fomenting a revolution against any Pro-Russian government — in this case Yanukovich who killed the extremely unpopular NATO integration that pro-NATO Yuschenko was pushing through against the wishes of the majority of Ukrainians … so McCain openly advocated for regime change: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=93eyhO8VTdg https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=93eyhO8VTdg 2015-2019 Angela Merkel, Zelensky and Poroshenko all admitted that Minsk II was just “a way to give Ukraine the time it needed to build up its armed forces”. Poroshenko even calls the army “his baby”. The same army that is now conscripting and sacrificing huge numbers of men to double down on the counteroffensive: At least they stopped the nonsense about people “lining up around the block to fight” and saying Ukraine doesn’t need to forcibly draft men into the war, while most propaganda says that Ukrainian men lined up around the block to fight: https://www.economist.com/europe/2023/02/26/ukraine-finds-stepping-up-mobilisation-is-not-so-easy https://www.economist.com/europe/2023/02/26/ukraine-finds-st... 2015-2018 - constant training and arming of radical groups, including neo-nazi elements, just as we have been arming radical groips with jihadist elements in parts of the world: https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2018-07-09/ty-article/rights-groups-demand-israel-stop-arming-neo-nazis-in-the-ukraine/0000017f-e080-d7b2-a77f-e3870e1c0000 https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2018-07-09/ty-article/ri... 2019 - Arestovich openly says Ukraine needs a big war with Russia so it can emerge victorious as part of NATO. He eerily predicts all the elements of the war (like Dick Cheney 1994 video about Iraq) and then says it is preferable to being in Russia’s orbit 10 years later. He became the advisor to Zelensky, like Kellyann Conway was to Trump: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1xNHmHpERH8 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1xNHmHpERH8 2021 - Ukraine absorbed the radical paramilitary groups into its army and they have been trained and armed for years to take on Russia. USA wants to avoid the “failure scenario” of how the Russo-Georgian war was brought to a quick end by Sarkozy. There has been peace and relative prosperity ever since. (I was in Georgia a few weeks ago, and it’s still a very poor country, but its economy was not destroyed, its population didn’t flee in the millions, and it doesn’t fear Russian attack at all. That is the result most reasonable people would want.) US killed the deal with Bennett, and Boris Johnson personally told Zelensky to keep fighting since Russia appeared much weaker to the West than thought. Here we are a year later - and USA doesn’t want any peace agreements to happen. Non-mainstream media in US, such as The Hill, Kim Iverson, Krystal Ball, progressive voices, conservative voices, Tulsi Gabbard, etc. are not all “Russian Propagandists”, despite what major hawks like Hillary or John Bolton would say, neither is the pope or the entire population or India or China or the heads of state if Brazil etc. Something else is going on here.
- chrysler 3y ago
  You said that Naftali Bennett was prevented from brokering a peace deal. He said that it was not the US, France, or Germany that put an end to any peace talks. Rather, it was Russia slaughtering hundreds of civilians. "The Bucha massacre, once that happened, I said: 'It's over,'" Bennett recalled. If you want to argue over timelines, then I'm sure he'll appreciate your input. Bucha was uncovered in early April 2022 and external pressure on Ukraine to make peace with Russia dissipated quickly after that. There was no way to keep making such demands to Ukraine while they were excavating mass graves. There was no option to give up and leave people on occupied territories to that fate. Overall, your entire premise how the US is forcing Ukraine into war against their will is deeply flawed. Fighting off Russian invaders has near-universal support in Ukraine. This is not something they have to be coerced into.
  - EGreg 3y ago
    Look, I know that’s an easy one-dimensional narrative. All Ukraine wants to fight off Russiam invaders and we’re just helping them. Too bad reality is never that simple. I have Ukrainian developers. I visited them in Ukraine. I was at their wedding in Chernivtsy when they got married years ago. I was in Kyiv multiple times. I have lots of info from the inside. Let’s leave aside the residents of Donetsk, Luhansk etc. who clearly “don’t count” for you in this analysis. Although it would be interesting to hear what you think their position is regarding Russians. Let’s also leave out the entire republic of Crimea, which in 1991 voted to be INDEPENDENT of Ukraine with overwhelming majority (over 95%), but was ignored, then got absorbed into Ukraine by a 54% majority vote… and has since repeatedly insisted on autonomy in Ukraine, signed agreements which Ukraine’s federal government renegged on, etc. And then finally voted in 2014, unsurprisingly, to leave Ukraine, and Ukraine retaliated by cutting off their water. Never mind all that. Let’s focus ONLY on the people on “the true Ukraine”, you know, the one dominated by Ukrainian armed forces and not Russian armed forces. (Because no matter who is in charge, someone is always keeping the monopoly of force there — look at Catalonia’s independence referendum.) OK so what do we know about this population? The support for continuing the war with Russia is only around 54-58% in EASTERN AND SOUTHERN UKRAINE — the ones most affected by the war. Hardly the “near-universal” consensus that you claim: https://news.gallup.com/poll/403133/ukrainians-support-fighting-until-victory.aspx https://news.gallup.com/poll/403133/ukrainians-support-fight... THAT IS SUPER SIGNIFICANT if you care about actual humans who are affected, and not just flags and countries. I claim that if the war or the draft seriously came to Northern and Western Ukraine, many would suddenly want it to end. Very easy to be a keyboard warrior from your couch — but obscene to volunteer OTHERS to die for your geopolitical ambitions. Same here: https://news.gallup.com/poll/508037/americans-support-ukraine-war-effort.aspx https://news.gallup.com/poll/508037/americans-support-ukrain...

EGreg 3y ago

I don’t follow “Russian propaganda”, I think for myself. Every source I have shared with you is a mainstream Western source, including experts whose JOB it was to deliver analyses for their governments. If I lived in Russia, I’d be surrounded by Russian propaganda and also would have to cut through it like any independently-thinking person. If anything, I am constantly exposed to “US propaganda” since I live here, and it is a concerted effort to shut out anything that is even slightly away from the predetermined, official line, (in this case that the invasion is “unjustified and unprovoked”). After 9-11 it was going to be “Islamofascism” but that didn’t poll well, so they switched to “they hate us for our freedoms” and “weapons of mass destruction”. You can sometimes tell propaganda by how contrived the phrase is (eg “hacking the election”) and how it is repeated verbatim like it was normal and not contribed at all. In Russia it is “special military operation”. Everyone has propaganda. The attempt to label what half the world believes as “Russian Propaganda” is itseld a deligitimization tactic. Even within the most hawkish countries (like UK) there have been tons of voices clearly not on Russia’s payroll, but just as systematically ignored. This is a systemic problem: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/apr/30/russia-ukraine-war-kiev-conflict https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/apr/30/russia... https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KqE7UTptgGg https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KqE7UTptgGg https://www.wsj.com/articles/pope-francis-blames-nato-russia-ukraine-11651598988 https://www.wsj.com/articles/pope-francis-blames-nato-russia... https://theconversation.com/amp/ukraine-war-follows-decades-of-warnings-that-nato-expansion-into-eastern-europe-could-provoke-russia-177999 https://theconversation.com/amp/ukraine-war-follows-decades-... The Israeli PM walked back No, that lame attempt by someone at Business Insider to try to spin it was already addressed in the Krystal Ball video I posted. Did you watch it? They argued that it was a mistranslation and the US “stopped” the peace deal, rather than “killing” it. Oh great. Not exactly “walking back” anything, the title is misleading. Any other sources for this? When the war started, the Weat was pressuring Ukraine into a peace deal with Russia at any cost. This seems… untrue. Nah, stronger than that, every available piece of evidence points the other way. Almost like Ukraine was led down a path where all pro-Russian doves were sidelined or eliminated, and all hawks were promised EU and NATO membership if they stayed the course. What you said can’t possibly be true starting with the fact that the real-life timeline doesn’t match up. Bucha happened in late March, while the US killed the Bennett negotiation in early March. Even solidly pro-Ukrainian media in Ukraine admitted that Boris Johnson traveled to Kyiv to kill any peace deal. To quote this Ukrainskaya Pravda article: As soon as the Ukrainian negotiators and Abramovich/Medinsky, following the outcome of Istanbul, had agreed on the structure of a future possible agreement in general terms, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson appeared in Kyiv almost without warning. "Johnson brought two simple messages to Kyiv. The first is that Putin is a war criminal; he should be pressured, not negotiated with. And the second is that even if Ukraine is ready to sign some agreements on guarantees with Putin, they are not. We can sign [an agreement] with you [Ukraine], but not with him. Anyway, he will screw everyone over", is how one of Zelenskyy's close associates summed up the essence of Johnson's visit. Behind this visit and Johnson's words, there is much more than a simple reluctance to get involved in agreements with Russia. Johnson’s position was that the collective West, which back in February had suggested Zelenskyy should surrender and flee, now felt that Putin was not really as powerful as they had previously imagined. https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/articles/2022/05/5/7344096/ https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/articles/2022/05/5/7344096/ This totally contradicts your narrative, but to any person who’s been following the events since 2014 it makes sense that US and UK promised great things to Ukraine if they would leave Russia’s orbit up to and including having their population having a war with Russia. That’s been their MO since the beginning so it would be very strange if suddenly they would be “pressuring” Ukraine into an agreement. 2013: Before any invasions, armed conflicts, here is USA’s top people (including the very recently candidate for President, who hated Russia as he was a PoW in a USSR prison) fomenting a revolution against any Pro-Russian government — in this case Yanukovich who killed the extremely unpopular NATO integration that pro-NATO Yuschenko was pushing through against the wishes of the majority of Ukrainians … so McCain openly advocated for regime change: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=93eyhO8VTdg https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=93eyhO8VTdg 2015-2019 Angela Merkel, Zelensky and Poroshenko all admitted that Minsk II was just “a way to give Ukraine the time it needed to build up its armed forces”. Poroshenko even calls the army “his baby”. The same army that is now conscripting and sacrificing huge numbers of men to double down on the counteroffensive: At least they stopped the nonsense about people “lining up around the block to fight” and saying Ukraine doesn’t need to forcibly draft men into the war, while most propaganda says that Ukrainian men lined up around the block to fight: https://www.economist.com/europe/2023/02/26/ukraine-finds-stepping-up-mobilisation-is-not-so-easy https://www.economist.com/europe/2023/02/26/ukraine-finds-st... 2015-2018 - constant training and arming of radical groups, including neo-nazi elements, just as we have been arming radical groips with jihadist elements in parts of the world: https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2018-07-09/ty-article/rights-groups-demand-israel-stop-arming-neo-nazis-in-the-ukraine/0000017f-e080-d7b2-a77f-e3870e1c0000 https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2018-07-09/ty-article/ri... 2019 - Arestovich openly says Ukraine needs a big war with Russia so it can emerge victorious as part of NATO. He eerily predicts all the elements of the war (like Dick Cheney 1994 video about Iraq) and then says it is preferable to being in Russia’s orbit 10 years later. He became the advisor to Zelensky, like Kellyann Conway was to Trump: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1xNHmHpERH8 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1xNHmHpERH8 2021 - Ukraine absorbed the radical paramilitary groups into its army and they have been trained and armed for years to take on Russia. USA wants to avoid the “failure scenario” of how the Russo-Georgian war was brought to a quick end by Sarkozy. There has been peace and relative prosperity ever since. (I was in Georgia a few weeks ago, and it’s still a very poor country, but its economy was not destroyed, its population didn’t flee in the millions, and it doesn’t fear Russian attack at all. That is the result most reasonable people would want.) US killed the deal with Bennett, and Boris Johnson personally told Zelensky to keep fighting since Russia appeared much weaker to the West than thought. Here we are a year later - and USA doesn’t want any peace agreements to happen. Non-mainstream media in US, such as The Hill, Kim Iverson, Krystal Ball, progressive voices, conservative voices, Tulsi Gabbard, etc. are not all “Russian Propagandists”, despite what major hawks like Hillary or John Bolton would say, neither is the pope or the entire population or India or China or the heads of state if Brazil etc. Something else is going on here.

chrysler 3y ago
You said that Naftali Bennett was prevented from brokering a peace deal. He said that it was not the US, France, or Germany that put an end to any peace talks. Rather, it was Russia slaughtering hundreds of civilians. "The Bucha massacre, once that happened, I said: 'It's over,'" Bennett recalled. If you want to argue over timelines, then I'm sure he'll appreciate your input. Bucha was uncovered in early April 2022 and external pressure on Ukraine to make peace with Russia dissipated quickly after that. There was no way to keep making such demands to Ukraine while they were excavating mass graves. There was no option to give up and leave people on occupied territories to that fate. Overall, your entire premise how the US is forcing Ukraine into war against their will is deeply flawed. Fighting off Russian invaders has near-universal support in Ukraine. This is not something they have to be coerced into.
- EGreg 3y ago
  Look, I know that’s an easy one-dimensional narrative. All Ukraine wants to fight off Russiam invaders and we’re just helping them. Too bad reality is never that simple. I have Ukrainian developers. I visited them in Ukraine. I was at their wedding in Chernivtsy when they got married years ago. I was in Kyiv multiple times. I have lots of info from the inside. Let’s leave aside the residents of Donetsk, Luhansk etc. who clearly “don’t count” for you in this analysis. Although it would be interesting to hear what you think their position is regarding Russians. Let’s also leave out the entire republic of Crimea, which in 1991 voted to be INDEPENDENT of Ukraine with overwhelming majority (over 95%), but was ignored, then got absorbed into Ukraine by a 54% majority vote… and has since repeatedly insisted on autonomy in Ukraine, signed agreements which Ukraine’s federal government renegged on, etc. And then finally voted in 2014, unsurprisingly, to leave Ukraine, and Ukraine retaliated by cutting off their water. Never mind all that. Let’s focus ONLY on the people on “the true Ukraine”, you know, the one dominated by Ukrainian armed forces and not Russian armed forces. (Because no matter who is in charge, someone is always keeping the monopoly of force there — look at Catalonia’s independence referendum.) OK so what do we know about this population? The support for continuing the war with Russia is only around 54-58% in EASTERN AND SOUTHERN UKRAINE — the ones most affected by the war. Hardly the “near-universal” consensus that you claim: https://news.gallup.com/poll/403133/ukrainians-support-fighting-until-victory.aspx https://news.gallup.com/poll/403133/ukrainians-support-fight... THAT IS SUPER SIGNIFICANT if you care about actual humans who are affected, and not just flags and countries. I claim that if the war or the draft seriously came to Northern and Western Ukraine, many would suddenly want it to end. Very easy to be a keyboard warrior from your couch — but obscene to volunteer OTHERS to die for your geopolitical ambitions. Same here: https://news.gallup.com/poll/508037/americans-support-ukraine-war-effort.aspx https://news.gallup.com/poll/508037/americans-support-ukrain...