4 ms·

In fact the west was acting as a partner and NS2 was a physical manifestation of that any sane russian could not have ignored.

vkou 2y ago
NS2 work started in 2011, Russia needed help twenty years earlier. But yes, alt history is bullshit, and nobody knows what would have if-only, if-only, if-only, but we can observe and shoot the shit about what did happen. And what did happen did not win many friends in it. There's no shortage of blame to go around within Russia. Yeltsin was a walking autocratic disaster, and handed the country right over to Putin.
- HellDunkel 2y ago
  You mean in the early 90ies? And what kind of? Does the Budapest Memorandum qualify as „help“ or is it only vasts amout of cash that count?
  - vkou 2y ago
    We were talking about economic aid, but if you want to talk about broken promises... I'm sure if you dig just a bit further you might find some other agreements that have been made, and then broken (by NATO nations), prior to the start of the war in Lugansk/Donetsk/Ukraine as a whole. Gorbachev - one of Russia's few non-shitty statesmen, after his resignation, took a lot of issue with those violations of them, and you're going to have a hard time describing him as either an expansionist warhawk, or an enemy of the West. (The guy spent spent the last three decades of his life trying to patch up east-west relations, and was appalled and devastated by the war in Ukraine. If he thinks that there's something rotten about how NATO behaved in the late-90s and 00s, listen to him.) Combined with large parts of NATO starting (for the first time in it's history) a string of offensive operations (some on good pretenses, and some on absolutely terrible, illegal ones), and even a dove will start getting security anxieties.
    - aguaviva 2y ago
      I'm sure if you dig just a bit further you might find some other agreements that have been made, and then broken (by NATO nations), prior to the start of the war in Lugansk/Donetsk/Ukraine as a whole. Except you can't, because no (legal) "agreements" as such were ever made. Meanwhile the Budapest Memorandum is an agreement with treaty status, and it was unequivocally violated by Russia starting with the 2014 invasion.
      - vkou 2y ago
        > Except you can't, because no (legal) "agreements" as such were ever made. Nobody's ever considered those promises to be legal. They were just that - promises. The thing about promises is that when you break them, you shouldn't be surprised that your counterparty stops trusting anything else you do. You no longer have a co-operative or neutral relationship, you've turned it adversarial. The transition from NATO being a defensive alliance (Against Warsaw pact aggression) to an offensive alliance (Second part of Yugoslavia, Iraq[1], Libya, Syria[1])[2] was a huge shift that took place in the 90s-00s. This was the root of Gorbachev's anxieties, and it is nothing but fuel for Putin's 'they are all conspiring against us' rhetoric. Which didn't begin in 2000, by the way, but closer to 2008, with the Ruso-Georgian war being fought over an Ossetian pretext, but really about NATO expansion. --- [1] Not per-se NATO operations, but both with an incredible overlap with its membership. [2] Afghanistan omitted because it was both defensive (an Article 5 invocation), and internationally sanctioned.
        aguaviva 2y ago
        If the context starts with the Budapest Memorandum, then you mention "other agreements", it's natural to assume you meant legal agreements. And unless we're going to talk about legal agreements -- none of this dissecting of what was said verbally or how it was understood at the time has any bearing on how the West should respond to the current situation. Now that Russia has made unilateral decision to move the relationship beyond merely "adversarial", and into the realm of outright aggression.
        2y ago

vkou 2y ago

NS2 work started in 2011, Russia needed help twenty years earlier. But yes, alt history is bullshit, and nobody knows what would have if-only, if-only, if-only, but we can observe and shoot the shit about what did happen. And what did happen did not win many friends in it. There's no shortage of blame to go around within Russia. Yeltsin was a walking autocratic disaster, and handed the country right over to Putin.

HellDunkel 2y ago
You mean in the early 90ies? And what kind of? Does the Budapest Memorandum qualify as „help“ or is it only vasts amout of cash that count?
- vkou 2y ago
  We were talking about economic aid, but if you want to talk about broken promises... I'm sure if you dig just a bit further you might find some other agreements that have been made, and then broken (by NATO nations), prior to the start of the war in Lugansk/Donetsk/Ukraine as a whole. Gorbachev - one of Russia's few non-shitty statesmen, after his resignation, took a lot of issue with those violations of them, and you're going to have a hard time describing him as either an expansionist warhawk, or an enemy of the West. (The guy spent spent the last three decades of his life trying to patch up east-west relations, and was appalled and devastated by the war in Ukraine. If he thinks that there's something rotten about how NATO behaved in the late-90s and 00s, listen to him.) Combined with large parts of NATO starting (for the first time in it's history) a string of offensive operations (some on good pretenses, and some on absolutely terrible, illegal ones), and even a dove will start getting security anxieties.
  - aguaviva 2y ago
    I'm sure if you dig just a bit further you might find some other agreements that have been made, and then broken (by NATO nations), prior to the start of the war in Lugansk/Donetsk/Ukraine as a whole. Except you can't, because no (legal) "agreements" as such were ever made. Meanwhile the Budapest Memorandum is an agreement with treaty status, and it was unequivocally violated by Russia starting with the 2014 invasion.
    - vkou 2y ago
      > Except you can't, because no (legal) "agreements" as such were ever made. Nobody's ever considered those promises to be legal. They were just that - promises. The thing about promises is that when you break them, you shouldn't be surprised that your counterparty stops trusting anything else you do. You no longer have a co-operative or neutral relationship, you've turned it adversarial. The transition from NATO being a defensive alliance (Against Warsaw pact aggression) to an offensive alliance (Second part of Yugoslavia, Iraq[1], Libya, Syria[1])[2] was a huge shift that took place in the 90s-00s. This was the root of Gorbachev's anxieties, and it is nothing but fuel for Putin's 'they are all conspiring against us' rhetoric. Which didn't begin in 2000, by the way, but closer to 2008, with the Ruso-Georgian war being fought over an Ossetian pretext, but really about NATO expansion. --- [1] Not per-se NATO operations, but both with an incredible overlap with its membership. [2] Afghanistan omitted because it was both defensive (an Article 5 invocation), and internationally sanctioned.
      - aguaviva 2y ago
        If the context starts with the Budapest Memorandum, then you mention "other agreements", it's natural to assume you meant legal agreements. And unless we're going to talk about legal agreements -- none of this dissecting of what was said verbally or how it was understood at the time has any bearing on how the West should respond to the current situation. Now that Russia has made unilateral decision to move the relationship beyond merely "adversarial", and into the realm of outright aggression.
        2y ago