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Notes -
To anyone who has discussed the issue with pro-Ukraine people.
Why do people support Ukraine fighting against Russia, with a strange militaristic fervor, instead of supporting surrendering / negotiating peace?
Anglin makes the points that:
-the war is severely impoverishing Europe due to high energy costs
-the war is destroying Ukraine ( population + territory / infrastructures / institutions)
-continuing the war increases the chances of a world war
Is it cheering for the possible destruction of Russia?
Something to do with the current leadership of Russia, anti-LGBTQ, pro-family policies?
Is it about the 1991 borders of Ukraine, issues with post-Soviet Union border disputes?
Notion that 'if we don't stop Putin now he will never stop no matter what'? Is it something about broadly standing up against aggression of one state vs another, supporting the 'underdog'?
The issue with that one which seems to be central to Alexander's March 22 post is that there isn't much that seems capable of stopping Russia.
Sending another 100k Ukrainians to the meatgrinder for that end seems a little bit harsh coming from people with very little skin in the game.
Just signaling what they are told is the correct opinion?
Is it about saving face, sunk cost at this point?
What would be the best case scenario for a Ukraine/State Department victory?
To my understanding, Putin is not the most radical or dangerous politician in Russia, and an implosion into ethnicity-based sub-regions would cause similar problems to the 'Arab Spring'. Chechens for example would not appear very West-friendly once 'liberated' from Russia.
Not only that, but economic crisis in Europe could generate additional security risks.
I don't even really understand the question. People, at least in wester democratic countries, believe that the legitimacy of rule comes from the consent of the governed. This isn't a perfectly consistent belief as few beliefs are shown in a kind of status quo bias that has them opposing forcible annexation but also opposing many secessions. But the underlying belief is quite simple. It is axiomatically evil to use force to make people join compacts that they do not want to join, Russia is doing this with their invasion and allowing Russia to be reward for breaking this rule sets an unacceptable precedent.
You seem to think they should be operating on some crude non-iterative maximization of total utility in the near term like unthinking animals. But they learned from the Nazi days that appeasement doesn't work and expansionist tyrants can only be adequately answered with absolutely no tolerance.
Ukraine has been bombing civilians in the Eastern parts of the country, and is forcing men within its borders to join its armies, it's not exactly a model of 'consent to be governed'.
Here is on the other hand John Bolton bragging about overtaking other countries' governments.
Why do I somehow doubt the people on the side of John Bolton when they tell me that Russia has no good reason to be wary of their next-door neighbor inviting John Bolton and his buddies to build up military installations on their border?
Expansionist tyrants like the ones attacking North Africa, the Middle-East, setting up puppet regimes in South America for decades...?
Sure it is. Ukraine has been bombing the eastern parts of the country because the Russians militarily intervened and have been occupying it for several years, a counter-intervention effort that remains extremely popular within the Ukrainian demos-politic with access to the Ukrainian electoral processes, which consists of non-Russian disrupted parts of Ukraine. Conscription is not controversial.
As John Bolton is not a Russian, and also did not lead wars of conquest, it's not really relevant to perception of Russia being rewarded.
Possibly because of your skill level at understanding the implications of Russian nukes on neighbors desire to invade Russia.
Since no one has been conquering nations for their territory in North Africa, the Middle-East, or South America for decades, apparently not, since those were neither expansion-wars or recent.
Kind of an own-goal on that one, not going to lie. If you're going to do false equivalence, at least drop the qualifier for what kind of war.
The US-led 'rule-based international order' defines 'bad wars' as 'wars of conquest' where one country takes some territory from another country.
Of course they do not include in that definition setting up military bases and secret prisons in foreign countries, murdering and replacing foreign countries' government with vassal governments, corporations taking control of large swaths of territories with underlying support from intelligence assets... Expanding power and control does not necessarily require expanding territory, which the US still do anyway with their military/intelligence bases.
Within that context, the US can more or less claim that they are following the rules, most of the time.
Why should we expect America's adversaries to play by the same rule-book?
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I'm not super interested in debating the specifics of who has shader allies, I'm simply explaining that it is very hard to invade a country explicitly to conquer it and not look like an aggressor. If putin got backed into it by Bolton out playing him at 8 dimensional 52 card pickup then putin really really sucks at 8 dimensional 52 card pickup.
History is written by the victors, that's true. Russia looks like an aggressor to you but everyone else sees their behavior as restrained compared to US hegemony.
US might win that game, at the cost of destroying all their Western European allies.
Nobody else cares about Putin invading his neighbor.
If anything else, every other country is going to be even more distrustful of the US, as they can just break all rules of international trade and blockade you for minor border disputes.
Not really. Enduring histories have frequently been by the losers with more time to grouse than the winners too busy with leading to focus on their memoirs.
But, if we do take what you say as true, then Russia' strategic defeat will be appropriately recorded by the victors.
*Citation needed on everyone.
There is no credible scenario in which all of the US's Western European allies are destroyed. Or any of them, really.
Germany is a central-European state, and while the disruption to their economic model will truly be difficult for them, it was the predictable consequence of decades of German industrial policy that they were warned about by other partners.
This is, of course, why majorities in the UN condemned the Russian invasion, and the Russian annexation, and why Russia's closest allies have been so generous with their economic and military support, to the extent that CSTO is not at all floundering.
*Citation needed on every other country
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The alternative to expensive heating is maintaining a substantial military that occasionally kills an appreciable portion of your workforce. Europeans of the future will count this as an unmitigated win.
This is incredibly naïve. In what universe does successfully defeating your rivals and preserving the sovereignty of not even allies harm one's credibility? Are you actually able to look at the Russia Ukraine conflict and conclude that nations should strive to be on the Russian side of the equation? If you're an Eastern European country watching this go down you'd trade just about anything to be in the good graces of uncle Sam. I bet you can find that "America, world police" song on juke boxes in Poland.
Expensive heating and expensive power. The kind of stuff you need to run factories that would help you equip an army when you inevitably come to need one.
Successfully defeating your rivals? First they could start by successfully defeating the Taliban.
Guess what, they celebrate the coincidence of getting out of Afghanistan in time to have the resources to tackle Ukraine.
At least the Russians have the balls to resist American commands. I imagine a number of Eastern-Europeans would understand that.
Yes just like the Poles strove to be on the good side of Britain and France, how'd that work out for them at the time?
Maybe they should remember that the Soviet conquest of Poland was possible thanks to the American lend-lease?
Yep and that should be incredibly shameful.
Here's Germany 40 years under America vs 40 years under Soviet Union.
Great job, russia! Fucked up East Germany so badly that not even muslim immigrants want to live there.
How many muslims live in Russia, again?
Plenty of muslims living in Russians but they are not purposefully importing them afaik.
Russia is arguably better at managing multiculturalism than NATO.
That's one way of looking at it. Another way to look at it is that an atheistic or muslim Germany would not be very much German at all.
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I find it hard to believe you're arguing in good faith when you so carelessly whistle while ignoring Russian conscription. I guess those Mobiks mean as little to you as they do to Putin eh?
Isn't it worth it to start conscription when the US are attacking you in a proxy war?
My understanding of the Russian situation is that Russians as a people have a very high level of resilience.
Life in Russia generally sucks, it sucking a little bit more than usual is a common, accepted occurrence.
On the other hand the EU are made up of a bunch of individuals looking to increase their own personal comfort and who are really inconvenienced by energy prices going up.
Russia can still cut its fertilizer exports if they decide that they really want to go all out against the rest of the world.
It's possible that Russia will suddenly collapse in a hundred internal revolutions or something, but that does not strike me as a good outcome for somebody that values the overall safety of the world.
If you're stupid, sure.
Setting aside that the US is not attacking Russia in a proxy war, resorting to conscription in the face of a proxy war is missing the point of asymmetry in proxy wars. In strategy terms the worth/cost/value-analysis of a proxy war is not for the proxy to win at any cost, but for the cost of aid given to the proxies to increase the costs incurred by the parties fighting the proxy. Mass conscription is an exceptionally expensive way to fight a conflict, as it generally combines increasing military costs and inflicting political costs and economic opportunity-loss costs of robbing the civilian economy, and often does so for marginal military utility. Directly fighting the proxies is the proxy-fighter win state, and thus the worth/value state to be avoided by the person fighting the proxies.
For a power facing proxy war, value-strategies of worth are cost-mitigation strategies. You either interdict the proxies with cost-efficient interventions, you bypass/ignore the proxies to the best of your ability in order to complete your objective and minimize the wasted time/resources spent dealing with proxies, or you cut losses and no longer engage, withdrawing as needed.
The Russians are unable to interdict western aid to Ukraine, and cannot bypass/ignore the Ukrainians who have received western aid. From the worth/value model, the best worth response remaining is to cut losses, which in the context of Ukraine would mean withdrawing from Ukrainian territory.
The average lifespan, suicide, and emmigration statistics indicate otherwise.
Not really relevant, since it's as credible and helpful to the Russians as saying they could nuke random countries. Less credible, actually, since famine is a self-resolving problem that, while terrible, is rarely state destroying, and wouldn't be benefiting Russia much in the interim.
Accepting the gains of a nuclear armed power conducting a war of territorial conquest against one of the few countries in the world to have actually given up nuclear weapons in exchange for security guarantees by said power is considerably worse. Libya was bad enough, but Gaddafi didn't actually have nukes, just the program. In Ukraine, Russia created direct nuclear proliferation justification for any power with either territorial designs or fear of territorial designs from nuclear weapons, and only a comprehensive Russian defeat will demonstrate on a world-level that both sides of the paradigm (that nuclear weapons enable territorial conquest / that nuclear weapons are required to resist conquest by larger powers) are false. Minimizing / delaying proliferation requires that both aggressors and defenders not feel that nukes are decisive/critical enablers.
A Russian collapse is bad from a nuclear proliferation perspective in the sense of nuclear terrorism from loose nukes, and some countries aquiring a nuclear deterrent without the production capability. A Russian victory is terrible from a nuclear proliferation perspective in the sense of mass production capability proliferation corresponding with territorial wars of conquest, which will also provide loose nuke risk.
While the preferable option is a comprehensive Russian defeat without a crack-up, there are bad problems and there are worse problems.
Withdrawing from Ukraine would mean that Russia is essentially allowing NATO to forever expand and threaten its borders, and also that genociding Russian minorities on Russia's borders is not a big deal.
That's not cutting losses.
Sounds like head cannon from the same people that came up with WMD in Iraq for what? To a lot of countries the problem of nuclear proliferation is probably not whether or not it's happening but who is holding the nukes above their head.
Western intelligence unilaterally deciding that such or such 'aggression' is worth 'sanctioning' or not a given country does not make it an absolute moral rule.
Go tell the Donbass civilans they gotta keep taking the bombs because otherwise nuclear proliferation bad.
Russia has neither the authority to allow or not allow other countries to have their own relations. Russia does, however, have a nuclear deterrent if faced with invasion.
The Russian minorities on Russia's borders are not being genocided.
Per the standing international law defining genocide, the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide-
Article II
In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with
intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as
such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its
physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
The Russian state's claims of genocide of Russian ethnic groups tends to rely on language policies, such as whether Russian is taught in schools or as a language of governance. Language policies of these sort do not constitute genocide. While the Russian intervention in the Donbas has been used to claim the Ukrainians are targeting the citizens there, this has not been reflected in areas under Ukrainian control, indicating a lack of deliberate targetting.
By contrast, the Russian policies in Ukraine, ranging from filtration camps, torture centers, artillery campaigns on civilian infrastructure, targeting of essential power infrastructure during the winter, and the population relocations of Ukrainian civilians into Russia would qualify.
Accepting an undesirable state is precisely what cutting losses entails. Even if what you claimed were all true, it would still be a lower cost than suffering the Ukraine disaster AND having all of the other items still occur.
Your hearing and/or memory is off.
You framed in a global perspective, you get a global perspective response. The regional/local perspective will, of course, be based on observation of what other nuclear users are able to get away with in the multi-polar order that Russia pre-emptively claimed success in creating.
The Donbass civilians are being bombed because of a multi-year Russian intervention in the Donbass following the failed NovaRussia campaign intended to spark an anti-maiden counter-uprising, not because nuclear proliferation is bad. The Russians turning the Donbass into a warzone was a policy choice.
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This.
If, as OP proposes, US currently changes course by 180 degrees and abandons Ukraine (similar shifts happened previously, many such cases), Central and Eastern European countries (and others) will know they can rely only on themselves.
If you want world with Finnish, Swedish, Polish, Czech, Romanian, Turkish etc.. nuclear weapons on hair trigger, this is the way you would get it.
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That's one way of describing Russia launching an invasion of a neighbor, and the US selling them guns to shoot back.
Perhaps Putin could have avoided this "attack" by cunningly not sending his army into someone else's country.
They sold them the Patriot missile system, and F-16s allegedly on the way.
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So if Saddam Hussein is gassing civilians and the US invades to protect the civilians, then it's alright if Russia starts supplying weapons to Saddam?
You could decline this a hundred times really.
Ukraine was gassing civilians now?
IIRC, there was one amusing point in the Minsk negotiations where Russia was demanding the Ukrainians pay for the gas bills of the separatist states. So there was that point where they were NOT gassing.
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