Ok OP, I’ve been seeing your posts here and they almost always seem to have an anti-west take on things. I try to read news from both sides of the aisle and make my own conclusions, so I’m genuinely curious: why do you think Ukraine should roll over and hand over their lands to Russia, or alternately, why is Russia justified in this war (that apparently they did provoke)?
Because it’s obvious to anybody with a functioning brain that Ukraine will lose this war, and the only thing that’s being accomplished in the process is that hundreds of thousands people die, and millions more have their lives ruined. Prolonging the conflict will not change the outcome.
The whole angle to talk about justifying the war is just empty moralizing. The reality of geopolitics is that might makes right. This is what US led “rules based” order has established since the fall of USSR. NATO has invaded and destroyed numerous countries, and they were able to do that because nobody could stand up to them. There were no consequences for any western leaders, and no justifications are necessary. Now Russia is doing the same, the only reason westerners seem to be upset about it is because it’s somebody else doing the same things the west has been doing.
NATO has invaded and destroyed numerous countries
No. Some countries, also part of NATO, invaded other countries.
Don’t put the blame on NATO when some countries disregard international laws.
And no, Ukraine won’t loose the war. At minimum, it will be a draw.
At minimum, it will be a draw.
That would be, as far as Ukraine’s current public statements and NATO’s as well, a loss.
Ukraine’s military can’t push the Russian military back to the Russian border and Russia isn’t going to agree to handing most of the places along the border that are currently being occupied by Russian troops back Ukraine/NATO.
What do you call it when you have an alliance that will defend you from the repercussions of your illegal actions, as NATO would have shielded France from any Libyan counterattack?
🙄
Not OP but Ukraine should grant the people they’ve been oppressing their right to self determination. This is not rolling over, it’s stopping their belligerent occupation.
Russia is justified in seeking its security from the provocations of a fascist puppet state dictatorship of the USA, the world greatest mass murdering warmonger, currently engaged in an ongoing genocide elsewhere.
Ukraine should grant the people they’ve been oppressing their right to self determination.
Not sure I understand this. You mean people on Crimea and maybe east Ukraine that would be in majority ethnically Russian, or is it something else? Sorry if it’s daft question, I don’t really know the geopolitics in this region.
Mearsheimer gave a whole lecture on this subject back in 2016 that I highly recommend watching. Mearsheimer is certainly not pro Russian in any sense, and he comes from the realist school of US politics. First, here’s the demographic breakdown of Ukraine:
here’s how the election in 2004 went:
this is the 2010 election:
As we can clearly see from the voting patterns in both elections, the country is divided exactly across the current line of conflict. Furthermore, a survey conducted in 2015 further shows that there is a sharp division between people of eastern and western Ukraine on which economic bloc they would rather belong to:
After a violent nationalist coup overthrew the government back in 2014, the eastern parts of Ukraine declared independence. Ukraine has been in a civil war since that time. There were attempts to resolve this with Minsk agreements, which the regime in Ukraine and its western backers ignored. We’ve now had admissions from prominent western politicians that the goal of the agreements wasn’t to implement them faithfully, but to buy time.
Furthermore, lots of prominent western scholars, like Chomsky, have explained in detail why Russia ended up going to war:
- https://truthout.org/articles/us-approach-to-ukraine-and-russia-has-left-the-domain-of-rational-discourse/
- https://truthout.org/articles/noam-chomsky-us-military-escalation-against-russia-would-have-no-victors/
Even Stoltenberg admitted that the war was ultimately a result of NATO expansion, and could have been avoided:
He wanted us to remove our military infrastructure in all Allies that have joined NATO since 1997, meaning half of NATO, all the Central and Eastern Europe, we should remove NATO from that part of our Alliance, introducing some kind of B, or second class membership. We rejected that. So he went to war to prevent NATO, more NATO, close to his borders. He has got the exact opposite.
https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/opinions_218172.htm
50 prominent foreign policy experts (former senators, military officers, diplomats, etc.) sent an open letter to Clinton outlining their opposition to NATO expansion back in 1997:
George Kennan, arguably America’s greatest ever foreign policy strategist, the architect of the U.S. cold war strategy warned that NATO expansion was a “tragic mistake” that ought to ultimately provoke a “bad reaction from Russia” back in 1998.
Jack F. Matlock Jr., US Ambassador to the Soviet Union from 1987-1991, warning in 1997 that NATO expansion was “the most profound strategic blunder, [encouraging] a chain of events that could produce the most serious security threat […] since the Soviet Union collapsed”
Even Gorbachev warned about this. All these experts were marginalized, silenced, and ignored. Yet, now the history is being rewritten in the west to pretend that Russia attacked Ukraine out of the blue and completely unprovoked. The reality is that Ukraine is simply a western proxy in a war between Russia and NATO.
Thanks for this write up. I still can’t say I condone some of Russia’s decisions and posturing even in light of the data you presented, but these data certainly paints a more nuanced picture than people are usually led to believe, I think.
Things are never black and white, and it’s not necessary to condone Russian invasion to understand the rationale behind it. I think the fact that the war happened is absolutely tragic, and millions of people have had their lives ruined as a result. Ukraine had the misfortune of being stuck between two major political powers, and it’s now being torn apart as a result.
Hadn’t the Ukraine military been attacking its own cities in the border territories since 2015? Seems like the Ukrainians didn’t really want the areas that much to begin with, so why not let those areas be taken by Russia?
