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There is already a thread on this, but I wanted to continue the discussion regarding the Lex/Zelenskyy interview. The other thread is mainly focused on Lex's language choice, and Lex's skills as an interviewer. I'm not very interested in this whole debate - it is pointless internet drama, and a modern form of celebrity worship. It's very disappointing that most people's takeaway "yay Lex" or "boo Lex" and not anything even slightly relevant to the actual war that is taking place.
My takeaway from the interview was that I think much less of Zelenskyy. This was his chance to explain the war from Ukraine's perspective, and the best he could come up with was a braindead "Putin = Hitler" take. People who rely on the "X = Hitler" argument are currently on a losing streak, and I am now more convinced than ever that Zelenskyy will continue that losing streak. I completely agree with Lex that if Zelenskyy believes that Putin is some mutant combination of Hitler and Stalin, yet somehow worse than both, compromise is not on the table. Zelenskyy dies or is forced into exile, or Putin dies or is forced into exile. In spite of biased media coverage in the West that only highlights Ukraine's successes and Russian setbacks, it's pretty clear at this point that if the status quo continues, Ukraine will lose a war of attrition first.
Zelenskyy could have tried to explain why Putin's narrative on the 2014 coup, or the ensuing War in Donbas, is incorrect. Instead, in 3 hours I don't remember him discussing Donbas even once. Maybe this is partially on Lex for not driving home the specifics. While Zelenskyy did not have time to address the core premise of the entire war, he did have time to engage in some psychotic rambling about how Putin would conquer all of Europe.
Maybe Zelenskyy is actually more reasonable in his private views, and he is simply running an outdated propaganda playbook that would have worked in the 1940's, or even the 2000's. But in today's age of high information availability, more subtlety is required. Even if you can convince the average person with a braindead argument like "Putin = Hitler", there will always be a subset of more intelligent people who demand a real argument. Since the more intelligent people tend to have out-sized influence, if you fail to offer them anything, they will not truly support you, or may even undermine you. If you are an intelligent person who doesn't really know much about the war, Zelenskyy offered nothing of substance. "Putin = Hitler" is not substance.
Maybe one possibility is that the two sides of the war are actually:
If these are the options, I'm afraid I have no choice but to take Russia's side. The coup and the War in Donbas, at minimum, happened and were upsetting to Russia, and it is not even remotely outside of the historical norm for such situations to eventually escalate into a full-blown war. On the other hand, 2 is a merely deflection of 1 - not a real argument, just a poor attempt at psychologizing why Putin's motivations aren't his stated motivations, which at least described by Putin are quite logical, but actually just that he is secretly Hitler for some reason. If there is an alternative version of 2, that actually addresses 1, I am certainly open to it.
This has been my experience with trying to talk to Ukraine supporters so far. It's basically how Zelenskyy talked to Lex as well. They do not seem to be able to form a coherent argument; instead they simply attempt to mock anybody who wants to hear someone address Russia's arguments directly from a pro-Ukraine perspective. Trying to shame people into supporting Ukraine, without actually addressing Russia's rationale for invading, is not going to work.
I believe that the reason Ukraine supporters refuse to address the history of the war is that the entire situation becomes more complex in a way that is unhelpful to their cause. Under certain ethical frames, even under Putin's assertions, Russia's invasion of Ukraine is still unquestionably wrong. However, to even make this observation, you admit that there is a question of ethical frame and values. Under some frames, Putin has some reasonable argument, assuming the facts are true. Some commentary has compared him to a "20th century statesman" in how he thinks about things. However, then you have a more difficult task of either refuting the facts or challenging the moral frame. Better then, to simply say "Putin = Hitler, anyone who doesn't agree with my ethical frame is a pyscho maniac murder," and avoid the conversation altogether. I understand this rationale, but I think it is the wrong approach for 2025, and it is certainly not any basis for negotiating an end to the war.
Trump wants to make peace, but it certainly appears that Zelenskyy is not open to it. He did talk about security guarantees - I think this is reasonable, depending on the specifics of the guarantees. Maybe even NATO membership. But he has to let go of the idea that he will get all of the land back. There is no universe in which the Putin regime stays and power and this happens, unless Ukraine achieves some military miracle. At an absolute minimum, the eastern Donbas is gone.
Where does this leave Trump? Obviously he is going to threaten Zelenskyy in various ways, such as threatening to completely ban the export of weapons to Ukraine, sanctions on Ukraine, sanctions on anyone who continues to support Ukraine until Zelenskyy is willing to come to the negotiating table, etc.. This is my prediction for how the war ends: Trump threatens Zelenskyy, Zelenskyy eventually gives in and negotiates, Russia gets some of the land, and Ukraine gets security guarantees backed by the US. The devil will be in the details, of course.
I am not, I am merely a casually observer who spends too much time online, and I am happy to hear your takes on XYZ. I'm not pro-Russia, I am just anti-terrible discourse, and the pro-Ukrainian discourse that I have observed has been horrendously poor. Disappointingly, Zelenskyy continued this. On the other hand, Putin's speeches were highly intellectual and several levels above any speech I have ever heard a Western leader give in terms of sophistication. I am also secure enough in myself that "well if you think that, it proves you're retarded" will not change my view. In the modern information environment, this argument is in fact less effective than ever.
Is it really brain dead though? Zelenskyy is to all apperances correct that Putin's position in 2024 is analogous to Hitler's in 1938, complete with appeals to anschlaus and rightful dominion over all
GermanRussian Speaking peoples. Durring the lead up to and early stages of Russian pundits were talking openly about eliminating Ukrainian as a spoken language to dissuade any future notions of independence. Given the above I think it is reasonable for the Ukrainians to view this war as an existential one.As @The_Golem101 observes, Putin has already made and broken treaty commitments within the context of this conflict so some sort of guarantee from the US and/or EU to ensure that Putin doesn't just come back in a year after his forces have had an opportunity to rearm and regroup is going to be the bare minimum for any agreement.
I think this is a mixture of nutpicking (which is your fault) and weaponised nuts, as in the practice of keeping around extremists to send a message along the lines of "if you get rid of me you could get much worse" (which is Putin's fault). The reality seems to be that in Russian-occupied parts of Ukraine Ukrainian is still offered as a first language at school at least as of last year (Russian MoE claims 43% chose it in Zaporizhia), while Ukraine started restricting books in Russian back in 2016 and has since 2023 also banned publishing in it. I would assume this entails no education in it, either (and if you speak it a friendly language inspector might just ask you if you got a loicense for that). This is not a matter of "well, it's Ukraine, so the correct percentage is 100% Ukrainian", either; many parts of modern Ukrainian territory historically never spoke the Ukrainian language. (Should India be allowed to stamp out non-Hindi speakers because the name of the language is related to the name of the country?)
I don't think there is much evidence of claimed dominion over all Russian-speaking peoples - there are large minorities in almost every country neighbouring Russia that they have not made any particular moves to claim dominion over, and conversely the Russian interest in Ukrainian alignment exists without the language/ethnicity component. Do Australian threats against the Solomon Islands to prevent a Chinese base in their backyard suggest a desire for dominion over all English-speaking peoples, because the Solomonese happen to speak English?
I feel like this just begs the questions; How high does someone have to be on the food chain before pointing out thier crazyness stops being "nut-picking"? and how many extremists does Putin get to endorse and support before it becomes "reasonable" to say that he supports and endorses extremism?
So what you're saying is that two years after Russia invaded Ukraine under the guise of "liberating Russian speakers" the Ukrainian government stopped teaching Russian in its schools, and a year after Russia invaded them for a second time under similar pretenses they banned publishing in Russian as well. Oh Dear, Anyway.
Putin (in his interview with Tucker Carlson), as well as several of the "weaponised nuts" he keeps around, IE Alexander Dugin, Timothy Sergetsev, and Moscow's Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church have all made claims to this effect.
Again, how far up the food chain does somone have to be before citing them changes from "nut-picking" to "evidence"
I haven't seen much in the way of endorsement and support presented. In terms of talking heads that can be in some sense argued to be in good standing with the Russian state, approximately an infinite amount - what matters is policy, not talk.
So what you're saying is that eliminating a language to dissuade any future notions of independence can be acceptable, and we are just haggling over the price?
Comparable to holding Trump accountable for things that Alex Jones says, maybe. As far as I can tell Putin-Dugin connections are on the level of "someone claimed..." and supposed dogwhistles.
Literally who? I had to google him (your misspelling of the name didn't help), and it sounds like... he is someone who wrote an inflammatory thinkpiece that was published on RIAN? I'm sure you can find some crazy editorials in Western flagship media (like the WaPo's cheerleading for invading Iraq), and for actual government media on Ukraine, here's VoA echoing Ukrainian conspiracy theories that the Russians are bombing themselves. I doubt every opinion piece they publish is ordered from the top.
Can I one-up this with Rumsfeld's creepy Bible quotes for invading Iraq? That one's even from an actual official member of government.
All in all, I think you could make a similar and stronger case that the American elites of the time endorsed and supported the actual idea of launching an honest-to-god religious crusade into Iraq. As much as I like smearing neocons, I don't think this would be accurate either.
Then you have not been paying attention, I am not citing random edgelords on 4chan or Tumblr, I am cititing prime-time comentators on a state-owned news agency.
Look, i get it. As a German Socialist, your natural inclination is to blame the Poles for starting WWII, and the Jews for causing the Holocuast. Because the alternative is the uncomfortable idea that choices have consequences.
If Russia had wanted to avoid a conflict with Ukraine they could have simply not started one.
As far as i know Rumsfeld is not an ordained priest (nor even a Republican in good standing at this stage) so no, they are not equivalent.
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I think it is a completely unreasonable position to say that if there is a border war between a larger state and smaller state, and the area under question contains people who have historical connections to the larger state, then the leader of the larger state = Hitler. This must have happened a million times across history, and almost every time the leader was somebody other than Hitler.
It's not a "border war" though. It only superficially resembles one because the Ukrainians have put up stiffer resistance than anyone expected them to. @Dean correctly points out that Russia's stated war goals basically amount the elimination of Ukraine as an independent entity, and that the Ukrainians have responded accordingly.
Likewise the Hitler / Putin comparisons are not about geography or facial hair (Hitler wins on the latter front if you ask me) as much as it is about both of them being grievance-mongering dictators who take a very "everything for the state, nothing outside the state" approach to politics, while waging wars of expansion against thier nieghbors under the guise of supporting identity politics.
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Is it fair to say that it’s a situation which often boils over to genocides?
Yugoslavia, Greece-Turkey, the Hutus and Tutsis, etc.
I probably lack full historical literacy of all the details but any time a country sends their military to another to protect their ethnicity as a minority there, or try to annex them into their own I feel like it tends to end up in horrible bloodshed.
I think the principle of sovereignty, respect for territorial boundaries, and relative freedom of movement has been a good salve for this recurring pattern of warfare.
Who follows that principle, though? Certainly the US (Kosovo, ...) and allies (Israel) don't.
I think a significant tension in these debates that is seldom discussed explicitly is between the position that it is going to be inevitable that the hegemon (US) gets to bend/violate the principles a little and we should feel blessed with a hegemon that has been doing it so sparingly and judiciously on one hand, and the position that after a world in which 0 parties get to violate the principle the next best one is one in which 2+ parties get to on the other. I'm firmly in the second camp for what I'd like to think is a good assortment of reasons, while the majority of nuanced political thinkers in the West tends to be in the former. (There are of course also louder, and less interesting, positions, amounting to "the US never violated any principle, NATO is a defensive alliance, go back to your bot farm" and "America fuck yeah, cry about it". There isn't really much to discuss with the latter, and the former is hard to get through to.)
The difference usually boils down to questions of how sparing and judicious US violations really are, how reassuring it is to hope that they will always remain as sparing and judicious as they are now, and whether game theory does or doesn't mean that the understanding that the US alone could go on an unrestrained spree of conquest and meddling with impunity lets them reap many of the boons of doing so without actually having to transgress, much like nuclear-armed states reap benefits without ever firing a single nuke in anger.
I also tend to think that as a lowly civilian, my rulers facing adversity and competition is almost always good - if they can stand unopposed, they don't need to do anything for me, but if they are locked in a knife's-edge struggle with a mortal enemy, they are incentivised to buy my support lest I throw my minuscule worth in for the other side and tip the balance. ("For any German politicians reading this: Do I sound like a Putin bot? Are you afraid of losing the upcoming election to Putin bot parties? We can discuss terms!")
Odd choice of examples if those are your examples.
Different entities may not follow the principle as you'd prefer to understand it, but that doesn't mean they don't follow it as they understand it. Being different entities naturally they would understand with their own differences, even as those entities are themselves composed of different people over time.
Kosovo is a trivial example of sovereignty-principle compliance- the American (and many others) concept of the principle sovereignty is that sovereignty is not absolute. There are decades of internal law theory and practice as to why this is not only not at odds with international law, but required by international law to not consider sovereignty absolute.
Complying with the principle of [X] as it interacts with other principles is not an abandonment of a principle just because you have your own geopolitical preferences.
Principles are only really worth anything if they meaningfully constrain behaviour, and if their application is sufficiently predictable that others can anticipate in what way behaviour will be constrained by them. As a hypothetical country opposing the US, are there behaviours I could actually confidently predict the US would or would not take, which would not be sufficiently predicted by a model in which the US always acts to maximise its own wealth and power?
Supreme Court rulings that can be completely predicted by knowing the political alignment of the judges and valence of the possible rulings still come with a text, which you could think of as a sort of parallel construction, presenting the illusion that law is created by application of legal principles. This undoubtedly helps the peace-keeping function of national law (as the belief that procedurally impartial justice is available saps the will to take matters into your own hands), and I'm sure that the way that "decades of international law theory" tend to turn up afterwards whenever the US does what it must serve a similar function for those under its wing that wish to remain at peace with a situation they can't do anything about anyway. However, in a situation like this, at least those of us outside of the US are not actually so completely powerless that the best course of action is to believe whatever will make us the happiest. We're facing decisions that have some real impact on things like whether our country remains aligned with US goals and whether we personally help or subvert those goals every day, and for that purpose it would be useful to have a correct model of how the US would act in different situations.
As a concrete example, if I as a German voter were to vote in the AfD or BSW and they seek business with Russia, should I expect more US attacks on our infrastructure? Suppose I would not vote for them if I knew that this would happen, but I fall for the "sovereignty principle" as naively understood by me (and there's no doubt the cheerleaders are perfectly happy with me having this naive understanding!), or believe that the professed principles of European solidarity and mutual security assistance mean that if such a thing were to happen the other EU countries would help uncover and oppose it. They get elected by a narrow margin, a great MR-two-point-oh rapprochement occurs, and then the pipelines and train lines start mysteriously blowing up. I have a pretty good hunch who did it, but all the Baltics stonewall us so I can't even coordinate a protest, and our economy is once again in shambles. Will the inevitable fifty-page treatise of international law theory that explains how this is actually fully in line with all professed principles be of any solace to me, after I made a decision based on a flawed world model and reaped a catastrophic outcome?
Criteria met.
Criteria also met.
Yup. There are many ways to describe the US policies of the last century or so, but 'always act to maximize its own wealth and power' isn't a competent characterization of it.
Given how simple this opening premise was, and how you didn't even try to argue about Kosovo, I think we can move on from the US to what you actually care about.
Nope. Not unless you want to insinuate AfD or BSW voters are morally obliged to subscribe to certain conspiracy theories.
Do you? I'm pretty open that I think it was plausibly Ukraine, and I've written to that multiple times over the years, but then there are holdouts and you did insinuate 'more' US attacks, so your position is not particularly clear.
I am also not convinced you cannot coordinate a protest so much as your protest is sufficiently unsympathetic enough to garner support you feel you are owed in the way you want it. In so much that our economy is in shambles, some of that seems unavoidable to any reasonable agency and some of that is a well-earned consequence of sovereign prerogative to make bad macroeconomic decisions and take macroeconomic risks that turn bad, even against the advice of partners and allies.
Does your solace or lack thereof serve any relevant form of proof or disproof to whether the professed principles were actually held and adhered to or not?
There was nothing to argue with there - you said a thing that on its own means nothing other than "the principle constrains US actions less than you think it does" (which can mean anything from "the principle means sovereignty is absolute in all cases that are not the US attacking Serbia" to "actually the principle means nothing") and pointed at "decades of international law theory", which it is hardly reasonable of you to expect me to go read up on for the sake of this thread.
I don't get the sense that you really addressed my points at all. Can you spell out exactly what are the constraints on US behaviour that you believe result from this principle of sovereignty (not absolute) that the US adheres to? I understand that you predict in concrete terms that it will not physically attack German infrastructure even in the event of German rapprochement with Russia (of course assuming no additional contingencies), but that alone could be equally predicted from self-interest (an open attack could cause enough negative sentiment to reduce German cooperation with other US endeavours). Do you think the US would...
...do it if they were assured that mainstream media in all involved countries will refuse to entertain the theory that the US did it?
...provide material support to non-US actors to do it?
...ignore and conceal (and instruct allies to do so) evidence they obtained that non-US actors would do it? (I think this represents a minimum of what they almost certainly did for NS2; even WaPo asserted the first part )
...engage in economic warfare with the purpose of preventing operation of another country's infrastructure? (They explicitly threatened this for NS2.)
...do any of the above with some other country, whose support may be less important for them than Germany's?
...engage in other acts that are commonly seen as violations of sovereignty: arming and equipping a coup, funding a coup, funding opposition parties?
...any of the above, for countries whose support is less important and/or can be sufficiently assured by the coup or opposition election succeeding? (If you say no here, I could bring such a wall of counterexamples that the discussion wouldn't really be worth having.)
And, is there some compact representation of what the actual principle is that I could apply to generate the same predictions myself without reference to "decades of international law theory"?
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People don't say Putin = Hitler because the nature of a border between a larger state and a smaller state with an ethnic dispute.
People make the Putin = Hitler comparison on the basis of historical revisionist warmongering based on fantasies of cultural identity and exaggerated grievance, plus systemic war crimes mixed with strategic incompetence born of arrogance and self-delusion.
This can still be a wrong basis for the comparison- the thing that makes Hitler historically distinct is the genocide camps rather than the warmongering or even the war crimes- but people are not making the comparison on the basis of the map.
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Russia tried for much more, it's only a boarder war because Russia's military sucks.
During the American Civil War, there were a number of European military observers who came, looked around, looked at the horrific loss of bloodshed and things like elaborate trench fortifications, and came to a conclusion: the Yanks didn't know how to fight. They went home satisfied with themselves and unprepared for 1914 because they did not realize they were witnessing a revolution in military affairs, as the lethality of fires increased without a corresponding revolution in maneuver.
A lot of Ukrainians and Russians are dying and since where I am we get the privilege of sitting this round out, I really, really hope that we're able to take away something from it besides "Russia's military sucks" this time.
What are you on about? You falsely said this was a border dispute. I was informing you if you were ignorant or calling out a lie.
I think you are confusing me with another poster. I am not the poster you replied to.
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1870 also probably didn't help the European impression that elan beats machine guns. Shows how easy it is to draw incorrect lessons from major events
I think the modern equivalent of the Franco-Prussian War (in terms of drastically misleading future military planners) is probably the Gulf War. Especially the battle of 73 Easting.
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The South is a prime example of this (analogizing their situation to the Revolutionary War, which proved to be misleading) but you're going to have to fill me in or at least jog my memory on what happened in 1870.
The Franco-prussian walkover, which reinforced the European belief that elite troops and violence of action would always trump artillery and fancy guns.
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"Drones suck."
I've made the point more at length before, but I view the advent of drones, as demonstrated in the Ukraine War, as both a military revolution and a revolution in military affairs. It's changed the nature of the civil-populace's relationship with war, as drones have been a democratization of airpower that almost anyone can both contribute to (via the affordability / ease of maintenance) or participate in (ease of piloting / utility).
This wouldn't have mattered as much as it has if the Russians didn't suck- there were severe and fundamental mistakes in the Russian strategy from planning assumptions to allocations of manpower- but the technological innovation of drones is the hard lesson learned.
I agree about drones.
I also agree that the Russians made very severe mistakes going in (contra some people, I tend to believe that after several years of war the Russian and Ukrainian armies are now arguably the most capable ground forces in the world man for man, simply because exposure to peer conflict tends to result in the swift development of military skill – even if it is not true, I think it is good to behave as if it were rather than making the opposite mistake I detail above. I do not believe this applies to their air or especially their naval arms, although I think the Russians in particular have learned a lot from the air war, a lot of it was lessons the US has known for twenty-forty years.)
I would add to this – personally – mines, mines mines. Not as big a revolution as drones, obviously, but it seems fairly likely to me, in hindsight, that NATO planners were unprepared for the volume of mines the Russians were prepared to field.
That would be an argument that assumes effective Darwinian processes. It really doesn't work that way in a force-generation contest like Ukraine.
While the Russian staff officer level is able to adjust and improve at a planning level, the quality of ground forces has degraded on both equipment and personnel quality levels. It started with the short-signed seed-corn strategy in 2022 when the Russians canibalized its training corps for front line forces for conscription, and the consumption of 'quality' with low-quality replacements has only increased. Russia continued to commit and recommit forces until their functional dissolution and necessary reconstitution.
Rather than build up combat-tested elite veterans, Russia has mostly expended its elites and replaced them with less and less capable replacements who are less trained, less equiped, and more prone to drugs and ill-discipline. The most capable elements of the ground forces are those that aren't exposed to fires, namely the EW, drone, and missile corps.
The war I am most familiar with is probably the American Civil War, which was at least in part a force-generation contest. The Union followed a similarly stupid pattern of force generation – unlike the South, which backfilled depleted units with fresh troops, the Union raised entire new fresh inexperienced companies and sent them into battle. You speak with a level of sophistication about such things that indicates to me that I do not need to explain why this is a terrible idea.
Nevertheless, I think it would be a mistake, based on anything I've read, to presume the U.S. Army was less competent or equally competent in 1864 compared to 1860. In fact, my impression is that they were considerably improved by the end of the war.
This doesn't get into the other elements you mention (EW, drone, missiles) where testing their technology against frontline NATO assets is only going to enhance their capabilities.
Now, it's possible that experiences from the American Civil War don't cross-apply here, and that I'm the proverbial drunk searching for his keys under a streetlight. But I suspect they hold at least partially.
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Particularly given the capture/kill lists that went on in occupied territories along with the systemic torture chambers, with criteria reportedly including things like 'spoke out against Russia' or 'served in the Ukrainian military post-Maidan.' The liquidation criteria has since been met by considerably larger proportions of the Ukrainian population.
The Ukrainian perspective has consistently considered not just the implications of this war, but what the peace terms imply for the prospects and survivability for the next war.
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