Russian invasion of Ukraine

[Shalcker]

No it is true. For example if the leaders of Russia or China say that they ought to militarily invade Ukraine or Taiwan then almost all of the population will agree and won't levy any serious criticism against their own side. Where as Westerners do the exact opposite and complain endlessly about our leaders and our governments. The difference in our free speech values and our cultures isn't even really close, the gap is significant.

As we have seen with Bush, no, there will be no "complaining endlessly" in broad population until much later. Republicans and Democrats united in supporting wars that ended up as huge failure and giant waste of lives and money.

And Russians do complain constantly - you just need to look into opposition media outlets (often with "foreign agent" mark).

- - - Updated - - -

"Why wont't somebody de escalate the siutation!"
* Putin continues to escalate the deployment of Russian armed forces.
All 6 of Russia's landing craft have left the Baltic. - Sweden


Passing northbound under the Storebaelt Bridge.

Do you also agree that "NATO escalates situation by deploying troops to Ukraine"?

[PC2]

I'll give you a hint, no to war and not particularly happy with putin.

Oh so things are looking more optimistic than I thought. If most Russians oppose a military intervention in Ukraine and Putin's leadership then I'm confident that they can erode Putin's mandate for war or for controlling Ukraine.

As for rise up and protest? does that work anywhere, how do anti-war protests do in the USA?

They work great. They send a message to the world and our leadership that says the initiation of war is not great.

not to mention the personal risk of protesting in Russia is very high.

Exactly but why do you think that's true in Russia but not the West?

[jonnysensible]

Exactly but why do you think that's true in Russia but not the West?

a bunch of capitalist gangsters run the state and weaponize it to crush any dissent or investigation into their activities. With arbitrary and harsh rules against anyone who even slightly threatens their economic or political interests?
.

[Crispin]

Oh so things are looking more optimistic than I thought. If most Russians oppose a military intervention in Ukraine and Putin's leadership then I'm confident that they can erode Putin's mandate for war or for controlling Ukraine.


They work great. They send a message to the world and our leadership that says the initiation of war is not great.


Exactly but why do you think that's true in Russia but not the West?

Anti-govt protests in Russia tend to not do so well. They could care less about public opinion.

[Shalcker]

Anti-govt protests in Russia tend to not do so well. They could care less about public opinion.

They do care about public opinion and sometimes backtrack on various initiatives.

Don't need on-the-street protests to be heard.

[Dezerte]

Do you think name alone is going to be sufficient?

Are you willing to go defend Ukraine in case of conflict if they would be included?

What US have done is quite relevant as US are the ones pushing for Ukrainian inclusion.

And i think Ukraine should have been given option to accept Russian deal in 2013 without EU and US interference too.

But that isn't what actually happened. After EU and US supported government overthrow over allegedly purely economic arrangement of Association agreement "no interference" to military encroachment is extremely hypocritical.

All irrelevant to my original post.

The US could literally be Nazi Germany times 100 and it would still be irrelevant. Your response and behaviour only informs me that you want to be as bad as how you perceive the US to be. They don't explain why Ukraine shouldn't be a free country.

[Shalcker]

The US could literally be Nazi Germany times 100 and it would still be irrelevant. Your response and behaviour only informs me that you want to be as bad as how you perceive the US to be. They don't explain why Ukraine shouldn't be a free country.

Do you think any country should be free to join Nazi Germany then, and noone should complain about it and try to prevent it, even if they see clear threat?

[Dezerte]

Do you think any country should be free to join Nazi Germany then, and noone should complain about it and try to prevent it?

Do you think a country should be free to construct mass concentration camps then, as long as someone else also did it (or at least they thought they did)?

[Shalcker]

Do you think a country should be free to construct mass concentration camps then, as long as someone else also did it (or at least they thought they did)?

Given that there are plenty of concentration camps in modern world dealing with refugees/illegal immigrants, yes, countries are free to do so.

How does that tie to question "Should you allow country near you to ally with Nazis and use them as springboard for future invasion"?

[Dezerte]

Given that there are plenty of concentration camps in modern world dealing with refugees/illegal immigrants, yes, countries are free to do so.

How does that tie to question "Should you allow country near you to ally with Nazis and use them as springboard for future invasion"?

The implication being concentration camps in Nazi-style (i.e. mass genocide). It ties directly into the behaviour and justification being presented by you for Russia's actions.

[Shalcker]

The implication being concentration camps in Nazi-style (i.e. mass genocide). It ties directly into the behaviour and justification being presented by you for Russia's actions.

Russia doesn't do nor plan to do mass genocide though, so it hardly feels relevant. Could you explain?

Russian rationale is that US (and NATO) was, is, and will remain a threat as long as US/NATO does not consider Russian security in their decisions. And threats cannot be ignored indefinitely.

US-Ukraine relationship is quite obviously unequal, and their "freedom" is quite limited given that current US president went as far as decide which head prosecutor should be fired there while he was Vice-President.

[Dezerte]

Russia doesn't do nor plan to do mass genocide though, so it hardly feels relevant. Could you explain?

Russia thinks the US is bad, therefore Russia thinks they can be bad.

[Shalcker]

Russia thinks the US is bad, therefore Russia thinks they can be bad.

How do you think Russia should deal with bad US instead?

Given that they persistently ignore diplomacy.

[Dezerte]

How do you think Russia should deal with bad US instead?

Given that they persistently ignore diplomacy.

Stop antagonizing those who are not the US. Stop threatening them with military responses. Set a good example: cooperate and show, if not to the US, at least to the rest of the world why Russia is the better partner (i.e. not force, but actual cooperation and help). There's good reasons for why many countries do not like Russia's way of doing things that have nothing to do with the US. Respect countries freedom, sovereignty and support democracy.

[Shalcker]

Stop antagonizing those who are not the US. Stop threatening them with military responses. Set a good example: cooperate and show, if not to the US, at least to the rest of the world why Russia is the better partner (i.e. not force, but actual cooperation and help). There's good reasons for why many countries do not like Russia's way of doing things that have nothing to do with the US. Respect countries freedom, sovereignty and support democracy.

That's "how you would love Russia to deal with the rest of the world", not "How Russia should deal with US" - which doesn't respect Russian sovereignty and democracy. So, how should we deal with US?

We're quite good partners as long as you stick to agreements, as our oil and gas trade shows.

US have left plenty of critical security agreements and treaties over the years.

It is quite hard to deal with the rest of the world when US acts as spoiler.

We had 100 billion deal to buy out Opel from Germans in 2009, saving jobs there... US intervened and stopped it.

We had 10 billion deal with Bulgaria to build nuclear power plant... US intervened and forced cancellation (that was BEFORE 2014), promising other benefits; Bulgaria had to pay Russia ~2 billion penalty for breaking contract, US never compensated them.

Then there was South Stream, where US again pushed weaker countries to cancel multi-national project that was already being built and agreed at every level...

[Easo]

Ukraine is now talking about ~130k men on their borders. I will take them with a grain of salt, but if yes - first manpower increase in a long while.
In other news UK delivered bunch of NLAW's to Ukraine in military aid. Think light short range single-use ATGM with modern warhead. Internet is guessing around 1k units (UK had 20k ordered), maybe more as transport planes continue to fly in.

In other other news there is yet another proposoal in Russian Duma about recognizing the "republics".

[Marcellus1986]

Russia doesn't do nor plan to do mass genocide though, so it hardly feels relevant. Could you explain?

Russian rationale is that US (and NATO) was, is, and will remain a threat as long as US/NATO does not consider Russian security in their decisions. And threats cannot be ignored indefinitely.

US-Ukraine relationship is quite obviously unequal, and their "freedom" is quite limited given that current US president went as far as decide which head prosecutor should be fired there while he was Vice-President.

You mean Joe Biden was acting as his office entails and asking the Ukrainian government to fire the prosecutor who wasn’t investigating Burisma and other firms for corruption? You know the company his son was on the board of. The IMF and the EU/US wanted the same. Diplomatic and political pressure is fine btw.

[Shalcker]

You mean Joe Biden was acting as his office entails and asking the Ukrainian government to fire the prosecutor who wasn’t investigating Burisma and other firms for corruption? You know the company his son was on the board of. The IMF and the EU/US wanted the same. Diplomatic and political pressure is fine btw.

Well, what is happening right now is exactly just diplomatic and political pressure.

And we ask to use US political pressure to make Ukraine follow Minsk Agreements it signed.

Then escalation can be easily avoided from any side.

- - - Updated - - -

Good article on current NATO posturing:

Did this week’s US-NATO-Russia meetings push us closer to war?
------
Washington’s insistence on digging in over NATO expansion and pushing sanctions is setting up a major disaster for both sides.

January 13, 2022 Written by: Anatol Lieven

On January 12, 2022 — a date that will live in hypocrisy — NATO member states declared their heroic determination to fight to the last Ukrainian. They did this by in effect rejecting Russia’s conditions for agreement with the alliance, centered on the demand that NATO rule out further expansion to Ukraine, Georgia and other former Soviet republics.

The hypocrisy and idiocy — over which historians of the future are likely to shake their heads in bewilderment — lie in the fact that NATO has no real intention of admitting Ukraine, nor of fighting Russia in Ukraine. Both Washington and Brussels have openly ruled this out. Indeed, NATO could not do so even if it wanted to. U.S. forces in Europe are wholly inadequate to the purpose, as are what is left of the British and French armies.

Despite all the hysterical rhetoric from European politicians and journalists about the Russian threat, no serious attempt has been made or is being made to build up European armed forces; as witness the consistent refusal of most NATO states — even some of those most bitterly hostile to Russia— to raise their military spending to two percent of GDP.

The real deterrent to Russian military action against Ukraine lies in the threat of greatly intensified economic sanctions — a powerful deterrent, but one that the U.S. Senate is now threatening to throw away by imposing these sanctions in advance, when Russia has not yet taken any action.

If President Putin, and Russia itself, were the forces of instinctive, unlimited aggression and ambition that the Western media has conjured up, then the threat of economic sanctions would be ineffective. Fortunately, Putin has always operated as a ruthless but also cautious, cool-headed, and pragmatic statesman. We can still hope that this will continue to be the case.

Room for Compromise?

But just as NATO has spent the past 20 years assiduously painting itself into a corner with its empty rhetoric about keeping the possibility of NATO membership for Ukraine open, so Moscow is now painting itself into a corner with its ostensibly non-negotiable demand that the United States and NATO officially and categorically rule this out.

There is still a chance that U.S. flexibility in two other areas can avert Russian military action. The first is NATO commitment to deploy no new forces in NATO countries close to Russia’s borders, in return for Russian limits on new deployments and the stand-down of the troops now deployed on Ukraine’s borders.

The second is genuine U.S. and Western support for the Minsk II agreement on autonomy for a demilitarized Donbas region within Ukraine, and real pressure on the Ukrainian government to concede this. Donbas autonomy within Ukraine would be a serious barrier both to Ukraine seeking NATO membership, and to the development of a mono-ethnic Ukraine, and would therefore indirectly meet Russia’s key concerns.

The United States however now needs to move very fast to offer these compromises. If it does not, then a new war looks increasingly possible. This war would be a disaster for all parties concerned: for NATO, whose military impotence would be cruelly emphasised; for Russia, that would suffer severe economic damage and be forced into a position of dependency on China with grave implications for Russia’s future; and above all for the thousands of Ukrainian soldiers and civilians who would lose their lives. In fact, the only country that would benefit unequivocally from such a war would be China —and I wasn’t aware that U.S. and NATO policies are designed to further the geopolitical aims of Beijing.

A serious debate over NATO’s true function

As a result of a long series of steps, NATO today has therefore become an organization profoundly damaging to the real interests of the United States and Europe. It does not have to be this way. If it could return to its core function as the ultimate backstop of West and Central European security, it can still play a modestly useful role. To conduct a serious debate on NATO’s role however it is first necessary to examine with clear-eyed and courageous honesty the reasons why its various member states remain so attached to an alliance whose original purpose disappeared with the end of the cold war.

The reasons are clearest in the case of the United States. Militarily, NATO functions as Airstrip One (George Orwell’s name for Britain in 1984), a base for U.S. power projection in Eurasia, the Middle East and North Africa. Allied to this is the influence that it gives America over what remains — for the moment —one of the three great economic heartlands of the world. Canada, as inescapably situated in America’s sphere of influence, does what Washington says, with the occasional squeal of impotent resentment.

Among NATO’s European members, motives differ. The NATO secretariat exists to guarantee its own continued existence, by whatever means necessary. Some of the East Europeans suffer from understandable paranoia vis a vis Russia as a result of their past sufferings at the hands of Moscow — though as with our attitude to any victim of crime, we should not confuse sympathy for their past suffering with acceptance of the resulting paranoia as rational. As for Turkey, it is still in NATO partly to stop it becoming even more of an enemy, and partly because of the procedural difficulty of kicking it out.

Britain supports NATO essentially as part of the alliance with the United States, which allows Britain to posture as a great power on the world stage by riding on America’s shoulders. France does so for much the same reason, with the difference that while Britain’s interests in this are almost wholly to do with national self-image, France needs the U.S. alliance for a very concrete reason: the increasing necessity of U.S. military support to maintain France’s sphere of influence in Francophone Africa and fight Islamist insurgencies there.

As far as the other West European members of NATO are concerned, the essential reason for their adherence to the alliance is fear — fear of Russia —but above all fear of each other and of themselves. Much of this is due to the Second World War and the ease with which a row of countries surrendered to Germany, while in Germany’s own case there is still a degree to which they fear themselves.

A new and disastrous twist to European fears was given by the shameful European failure in the Bosnian war of the early 1990s. This has left the Europeans with a deep sense (openly acknowledged by German officials in private) that they cannot solve even what (in military terms) are small problems on their own continent without the full involvement of the United States, guaranteed by NATO. And finally of course, America’s military presence as part of NATO spares the Europeans the military spending and the painful military reforms that they would need to undertake if they were to take responsibility for their own security.

These motives may be mildly contemptible, but they are at least modest and rational. The problem is that they have been ingested by two other ambitions that are not modest and rational at all. The first is the U.S. desire for universal hegemony, including the right to dictate other countries’ political systems and what influence they will be allowed to possess beyond their own borders.

The second is the European elites’ belief in the European Union of as a kind of moral superpower, expanding to embrace the whole of Europe (without Russia of course), and setting a liberal internationalist example to the world; but a militarily impotent superpower that relies for security on the United States, via NATO.

These projects have now manifestly failed. The U.S. project for universal global hegemony was shattered by Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and above all the economic rise of China.The European project has been rejected by large numbers of Europeans; and the failure to establish stable liberal democracy in eastern Europe and the Balkans makes it exceptionally unlikely that the EU will seriously plan to extend membership to Ukraine in the foreseeable future.

If we can recognize this failure and return to a more modest view of ourselves and our role in the world, we can also abandon the empty and hypocritical false promise of further NATO expansion and seek a reasonably cooperative relationship with Russia. Or we can go on living in our world of make-believe, though make-believe worlds have a way of being shattered by harsh realities.
---

[Marcellus1986]

Well, what is happening right now is exactly just diplomatic and political pressure.

And we ask to use US political pressure to make Ukraine follow Minsk Agreements it signed.

Then escalation can be easily avoided from any side.

- - - Updated - - -

Good article on current NATO posturing:

Did this week’s US-NATO-Russia meetings push us closer to war?
------
Washington’s insistence on digging in over NATO expansion and pushing sanctions is setting up a major disaster for both sides.

January 13, 2022 Written by: Anatol Lieven

On January 12, 2022 — a date that will live in hypocrisy — NATO member states declared their heroic determination to fight to the last Ukrainian. They did this by in effect rejecting Russia’s conditions for agreement with the alliance, centered on the demand that NATO rule out further expansion to Ukraine, Georgia and other former Soviet republics.

The hypocrisy and idiocy — over which historians of the future are likely to shake their heads in bewilderment — lie in the fact that NATO has no real intention of admitting Ukraine, nor of fighting Russia in Ukraine. Both Washington and Brussels have openly ruled this out. Indeed, NATO could not do so even if it wanted to. U.S. forces in Europe are wholly inadequate to the purpose, as are what is left of the British and French armies.

Despite all the hysterical rhetoric from European politicians and journalists about the Russian threat, no serious attempt has been made or is being made to build up European armed forces; as witness the consistent refusal of most NATO states — even some of those most bitterly hostile to Russia— to raise their military spending to two percent of GDP.

The real deterrent to Russian military action against Ukraine lies in the threat of greatly intensified economic sanctions — a powerful deterrent, but one that the U.S. Senate is now threatening to throw away by imposing these sanctions in advance, when Russia has not yet taken any action.

If President Putin, and Russia itself, were the forces of instinctive, unlimited aggression and ambition that the Western media has conjured up, then the threat of economic sanctions would be ineffective. Fortunately, Putin has always operated as a ruthless but also cautious, cool-headed, and pragmatic statesman. We can still hope that this will continue to be the case.

Room for Compromise?

But just as NATO has spent the past 20 years assiduously painting itself into a corner with its empty rhetoric about keeping the possibility of NATO membership for Ukraine open, so Moscow is now painting itself into a corner with its ostensibly non-negotiable demand that the United States and NATO officially and categorically rule this out.

There is still a chance that U.S. flexibility in two other areas can avert Russian military action. The first is NATO commitment to deploy no new forces in NATO countries close to Russia’s borders, in return for Russian limits on new deployments and the stand-down of the troops now deployed on Ukraine’s borders.

The second is genuine U.S. and Western support for the Minsk II agreement on autonomy for a demilitarized Donbas region within Ukraine, and real pressure on the Ukrainian government to concede this. Donbas autonomy within Ukraine would be a serious barrier both to Ukraine seeking NATO membership, and to the development of a mono-ethnic Ukraine, and would therefore indirectly meet Russia’s key concerns.

The United States however now needs to move very fast to offer these compromises. If it does not, then a new war looks increasingly possible. This war would be a disaster for all parties concerned: for NATO, whose military impotence would be cruelly emphasised; for Russia, that would suffer severe economic damage and be forced into a position of dependency on China with grave implications for Russia’s future; and above all for the thousands of Ukrainian soldiers and civilians who would lose their lives. In fact, the only country that would benefit unequivocally from such a war would be China —and I wasn’t aware that U.S. and NATO policies are designed to further the geopolitical aims of Beijing.

A serious debate over NATO’s true function

As a result of a long series of steps, NATO today has therefore become an organization profoundly damaging to the real interests of the United States and Europe. It does not have to be this way. If it could return to its core function as the ultimate backstop of West and Central European security, it can still play a modestly useful role. To conduct a serious debate on NATO’s role however it is first necessary to examine with clear-eyed and courageous honesty the reasons why its various member states remain so attached to an alliance whose original purpose disappeared with the end of the cold war.

The reasons are clearest in the case of the United States. Militarily, NATO functions as Airstrip One (George Orwell’s name for Britain in 1984), a base for U.S. power projection in Eurasia, the Middle East and North Africa. Allied to this is the influence that it gives America over what remains — for the moment —one of the three great economic heartlands of the world. Canada, as inescapably situated in America’s sphere of influence, does what Washington says, with the occasional squeal of impotent resentment.

Among NATO’s European members, motives differ. The NATO secretariat exists to guarantee its own continued existence, by whatever means necessary. Some of the East Europeans suffer from understandable paranoia vis a vis Russia as a result of their past sufferings at the hands of Moscow — though as with our attitude to any victim of crime, we should not confuse sympathy for their past suffering with acceptance of the resulting paranoia as rational. As for Turkey, it is still in NATO partly to stop it becoming even more of an enemy, and partly because of the procedural difficulty of kicking it out.

Britain supports NATO essentially as part of the alliance with the United States, which allows Britain to posture as a great power on the world stage by riding on America’s shoulders. France does so for much the same reason, with the difference that while Britain’s interests in this are almost wholly to do with national self-image, France needs the U.S. alliance for a very concrete reason: the increasing necessity of U.S. military support to maintain France’s sphere of influence in Francophone Africa and fight Islamist insurgencies there.

As far as the other West European members of NATO are concerned, the essential reason for their adherence to the alliance is fear — fear of Russia —but above all fear of each other and of themselves. Much of this is due to the Second World War and the ease with which a row of countries surrendered to Germany, while in Germany’s own case there is still a degree to which they fear themselves.

A new and disastrous twist to European fears was given by the shameful European failure in the Bosnian war of the early 1990s. This has left the Europeans with a deep sense (openly acknowledged by German officials in private) that they cannot solve even what (in military terms) are small problems on their own continent without the full involvement of the United States, guaranteed by NATO. And finally of course, America’s military presence as part of NATO spares the Europeans the military spending and the painful military reforms that they would need to undertake if they were to take responsibility for their own security.

These motives may be mildly contemptible, but they are at least modest and rational. The problem is that they have been ingested by two other ambitions that are not modest and rational at all. The first is the U.S. desire for universal hegemony, including the right to dictate other countries’ political systems and what influence they will be allowed to possess beyond their own borders.

The second is the European elites’ belief in the European Union of as a kind of moral superpower, expanding to embrace the whole of Europe (without Russia of course), and setting a liberal internationalist example to the world; but a militarily impotent superpower that relies for security on the United States, via NATO.

These projects have now manifestly failed. The U.S. project for universal global hegemony was shattered by Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and above all the economic rise of China.The European project has been rejected by large numbers of Europeans; and the failure to establish stable liberal democracy in eastern Europe and the Balkans makes it exceptionally unlikely that the EU will seriously plan to extend membership to Ukraine in the foreseeable future.

If we can recognize this failure and return to a more modest view of ourselves and our role in the world, we can also abandon the empty and hypocritical false promise of further NATO expansion and seek a reasonably cooperative relationship with Russia. Or we can go on living in our world of make-believe, though make-believe worlds have a way of being shattered by harsh realities.
---

Pretty sure surrounding a country with 100,000+ troops and using militaristic rhetoric isn’t diplomatic/political pressure.

[Xyonai]

So what's even Russia's end goal with this?

It's pretty much just them and Belarus against everyone else right now and, while I don't downplay Russia's probable military might, I don't think it's nearly strong enough to contend with the lion they seem so adamant about prodding with a stick. Is it just posturing by Putin to shore up domestic support? Is he -actually- paranoid that 'The Evil West!' will want to invade his country for some reason despite having no inkling or desire to? Or is he just going for a North Korea style 'We'll stop acting unhinged and crazy if you give into our demands!' approach?

Or does the crazy son of a bitch actually think that Europe will just let him sweep in and carve out chunks of neighboring countries in an ironic bid to halt 'unprovoked western aggression'?