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I think the most disturbing type of argument around Ukraine is the one that pretends to be doing it "for their own good". Like "Why don't you want peace, why don't you want peace? Why do you want your people to die?" to the victims of a dictator invading their home, bombing their cities, kidnapping their children and stealing their land. If they aren't settling for your offer it's probably because they don't think your offer is good enough to actually protect them. They're in desperation, if an offer was convincing they would take it. So why not?
They've been promised security before, they gave up their nukes for it. They sign a deal that Russia won't punch them in the face, Russia violates it twice and if they don't want to just sign another without a stronger third party guarantee, it's not because they don't want peace. It's because they know Russia can't be trusted.
They don't think American investments means much, before the war there was that joke rule of "no two countries with a McDonald's have ever been at war" which was essentially emblematic of this concept. That international business interests for peace were simply too strong for a country to overcome, and yet the war happened anyway.
If someone doesn't want to support Ukraine fine, there's lots of other bad stuff we ignore and don't help out with. But those people spreading this idea that "they must want to be invaded and die so not helping them is actually the best help", I just find that really sickening.
This is a Reddit-tier strawman. Find one person one /r/themotte who ever said "they wanted to be invaded".
But yes, if the U.S. is going to provide Ukraine with weapons, which it is under no obligation to do, then it is incumbent on the US to decide if those weapons are doing more harm than good. The US is sovereign. It alone should decide which countries to help and why.
More importantly, we have no idea what supporting the people of Ukraine even means any more. Elections have been suspended. Does the average Ukrainian want to continue prosecute the war? Nobody knows. But we definitely know that many of the soldiers don't want to fight. Otherwise they wouldn't have to be kidnapped off the streets to fight and die on the front lines.
The war should be easy to end. Take the current front line. These are the new borders.
Is it just? No. Is it peace? Yes. The US must stop funding a meat grinder which kills real men every day. Once there is peace, then there can be money for weapons to secure it.
And anyone who want to support Ukraine more meaningfully can do so right now. Put your own life on the line instead of another man's.
Why are you and every other pro-russian so consistently dishonest about this? You say that elections have been suspended as if that was somehow a point in favour of Russia.
Let's first ignore the fact that Ukraine can't hold elections. Elections during war is illegal under Ukranian law. Even if they weren't, what do you propose they do?
Either they just let the Russian occupiers conduct elections on the Russian side of the front line, in which case these areas would of course have the electroral outcomes that most favour Russia, or they could have elections only in the parts of the country the Ukranian state controls, in which case you'd be on here whining about the elections not being fair because people in the eastern parts of the country couldn't vote.
In America we had an election in the middle of our civil war. We had elections on time and on schedule no matter what.
And so we expect others to hold themselves to the same standard.
This is an irrelevant argument. It is as relevant to the current situation as a point than ancient Athenians had elections during Peloponnesian War. A better (since more recent) parallel is the suspension of elections by UK during WWII. It is definitely easier to conduct elections before the age of bombers and missiles hitting your polling stations.
However, what matters is that elections are suspended during the state of war according to the Ukrainian Constitution. Lifting the state of war would be criminally stupid when there is an ongoing war (the state of war allows some actions that are illegal during peace, like having a firing positions in private property by the military). Surely, there can be some legal trickery, like rolling suspension of state of war or some other legal tricks but this will not make it any more democratic that what it is now and there is still a matter of missiles raining from the sky. I would not like to see a headline "Presidential elections conducted in Ukraine. 25 dead, 150 injured, and 25,000 ballots destroyed in fires".
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The South was not included.
Also postwar political violence in the South meant that the 1876 Presidential election could not be counted. Hayes was not chosen as POTUS over Tilden as the result of votes being cast and counted, but because a botched Democratic scheme to bribe the neutral chair of the Electoral Commission led to him resigning.
The US elections that happened in the worst security situation were the 1862 midterms. I haven't found any detailed account of how they were run.
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Somehow didn't stop them from getting Virginia's permission to split in half! American democracy is truly incredible.
Vae victis.
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The election in 1864 explicitly excluded the seceded states / confederacy, which is exactly what the previous post was talking about. You would consider it fully democratic for the Ukraine government to hold an election only in regions under full control of the Kiev government, then?
no, but at least it would be like the election in 2019 which brought the current government and Zelensky into political office originally
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Certainly a lot more reasonable compared to “no election.”
I fail to see how holding elections only in the part of the country that isn't guaranteed to vote wrong, implicitly signing off on the rest, is "a lot more reasonable" than suspending elections.
It's especially funny to see people suddenly care about the legitimacy of Ukrainian elections despite normally acting like their elections, along with any elections that aren't the glorious USA true freedom elections, are worth nothing.
I think the payoff is that it slightly expands the options of the Ukrainian public (that is, the portion of the country that would get to vote in the election).
They could conceivably be against the war and vote out Zelensky, an option which they don't really currently have: the press is censored and the country is under martial law, speaking out publicly to overturn Zelensky is probably pretty dangerous.
If they just vote Zelensky back in with overwhelming approval, then things end up exactly as they are with elections suspended, but we at least have the information that their heart is still in the fight, that they had the opportunity to back down in a secret ballot and chose not to take it.
Of course, this is dependent on the elections being conducted fairly, which may not be the case. But if Zelensky holds an election and rigs it/intimidates voters/whatever, that would just put him in the same position he is right now, but with the added risk of information on his actions leaking out.
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