4 ms·

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.
      - vkou 2y ago
        I don't think splitting hairs about "Oh, that was just a broken promise, not a broken contract" is the win that you're looking for, when it comes to answering the question of "Did NATO behave in an antagonistic/untrustworthy/threatening manner against Russia during its decade of weakness." You ask about olive branches, I give you examples, you say that those examples were legally allowed. Okay, sure, they were, but that's got nothing to do with the price of butter. Just because you can do something from a position of strength doesn't mean doing it was a good idea, or served your long-term aims in a relationship.
        aguaviva 2y ago
        It can certainly be argued that NATO expansion was bad policy, intrinsically antagonistic, and basically in the wrong spirit of the way the world should have re-organized itself post-1989. That's actually my gut feeling as well. But it doesn't rise to level of casus belli or even a rational reason for Russia to feel directly (tangibly) threatened. And it's definitely not the "reason" Putin started the war. And you're leaving out other stuff, such as the fact that Yeltsin greenlighted the earliest round of new admissions (PL, CZ, HU), and that Gorbachev himself downplayed the significance of the expansion issue during negotiations to which you are referring -- as he made clear in that famous RBTH interview: "The topic of 'NATO expansion' was not discussed at all, and it wasn't brought up in those years. I say this with full responsibility. Not a single Eastern European country raised the issue, not even after the Warsaw Pact ceased to exist in 1991. Western leaders didn't bring it up either." And that while it was a constant source of tension and grumbling -- the NATO issue never seemed to matter all that much to Russia until the Rose and Orange revolutions in 2003/2004. That's what really started to make Putin's back arch -- not any paramount concerns about NATO expansion itself. As far as "antagonistic" is concerned, I think there's a much stronger case to be made in regard to the intentional decision by US policy makers not to provide extensive economic aid (a "Marshall Plan") to its former adversary, its insistence on shock reforms, and so on. But this is another topic. And it's not as if Russia didn' also "behave in an antagonistic/untrustworthy/threatening manner" against its would-be benefactor during its hour of need.[0][1] [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aldrich_Ames https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aldrich_Ames [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Hanssen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Hanssen

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.
    - vkou 2y ago
      I don't think splitting hairs about "Oh, that was just a broken promise, not a broken contract" is the win that you're looking for, when it comes to answering the question of "Did NATO behave in an antagonistic/untrustworthy/threatening manner against Russia during its decade of weakness." You ask about olive branches, I give you examples, you say that those examples were legally allowed. Okay, sure, they were, but that's got nothing to do with the price of butter. Just because you can do something from a position of strength doesn't mean doing it was a good idea, or served your long-term aims in a relationship.
      - aguaviva 2y ago
        It can certainly be argued that NATO expansion was bad policy, intrinsically antagonistic, and basically in the wrong spirit of the way the world should have re-organized itself post-1989. That's actually my gut feeling as well. But it doesn't rise to level of casus belli or even a rational reason for Russia to feel directly (tangibly) threatened. And it's definitely not the "reason" Putin started the war. And you're leaving out other stuff, such as the fact that Yeltsin greenlighted the earliest round of new admissions (PL, CZ, HU), and that Gorbachev himself downplayed the significance of the expansion issue during negotiations to which you are referring -- as he made clear in that famous RBTH interview: "The topic of 'NATO expansion' was not discussed at all, and it wasn't brought up in those years. I say this with full responsibility. Not a single Eastern European country raised the issue, not even after the Warsaw Pact ceased to exist in 1991. Western leaders didn't bring it up either." And that while it was a constant source of tension and grumbling -- the NATO issue never seemed to matter all that much to Russia until the Rose and Orange revolutions in 2003/2004. That's what really started to make Putin's back arch -- not any paramount concerns about NATO expansion itself. As far as "antagonistic" is concerned, I think there's a much stronger case to be made in regard to the intentional decision by US policy makers not to provide extensive economic aid (a "Marshall Plan") to its former adversary, its insistence on shock reforms, and so on. But this is another topic. And it's not as if Russia didn' also "behave in an antagonistic/untrustworthy/threatening manner" against its would-be benefactor during its hour of need.[0][1] [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aldrich_Ames https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aldrich_Ames [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Hanssen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Hanssen