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Could have easily pulled back from offering Ukraine NATO expansion possibilities.
by mensetmanusman 2y ago
Could have easily pulled back from offering Ukraine NATO expansion possibilities.
- adamnemecek 2y agoThat's what Ukraine wants though.
- LtWorf 2y agoAnd the parties who don't want it are now illegal so… 100% of the parties want it.
- adamnemecek 2y agoDid they have ties to Russia?
- Calavar 2y agoIf you believe the Kremlin narrative around their motivations for the war, and I think there are a LOT of reasons to be skeptical of that narrative, but even if you believe it, the 2022 invasion plans were likely already well underway in 2020. These things are planned years in advance (Bush was already working on an Iraq invasion plan pre 9/11, for example) and once things are in motion the stakeholders are not easily turned around.
- mensetmanusman 2y agoIt’s not just Kremlin narrative, a large wing of the foreign policy establishment also recognized the risk in published articles as far back as the mid 90s.
- LtWorf 2y agoMilitary people do planning at all times. Doesn't mean that the plans will surely be applied.
- Calavar 2y agoVery much a false equivalence to the point that it sounds like a bad faith argument. There's a massive difference between contingency planning for a hypothetical versus actively planning for something that's is intended to be agenda item #1. The first clue to differentiating a contingency from an active plan is resource allocation. Russia moved about 80,000 troops to the Ukrainian border a full 13 months before the invasion. That's over 50% of the force that would eventually enter Ukraine in February 2022 and also about 25% to 35% of Russia's entire non-conscript military force.
- LtWorf 2y agoAre you skipping the part where NATO was arming and having people in ukraine in the same period?
- rsynnott 2y agoAh, appeasement? Yeah, that famously always works.
- tmnvix 2y agoWorked for resolving the Cuban missile crisis (agreeing to remove missiles from Turkey).
- yakshaving_jgt 2y agoThe war is not about NATO.
- bojan 2y agoBut why? That would be a concession to a criminal dictator, and, historically, that _never_ works. Putin would have just thought up another "reason" to invade in a year or two.