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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.
Pro-Ukrainians don’t usually grapple with the hard issues that make Ukraine a unique and complex case.
America meddling in Ukrainian elections. America promoted an insurrection in the Ukrainian capitol, changing the results of their presidential election, by funding fake news media that pushed debunked stories. (The irony should not be lost on us.)
NATO expansion onto the doorstep of Russia, the enshrining of NATO membership into the Ukrainian constitution, and joint naval drills and training for when membership became safe.
The cultural continuity between eastern Ukraine and Russia
The soft “cultural genocide” of indigenous ethnic Russians in the east of Ukraine via oppression on Russian-language small businesses and journalists, forcing them to speak Ukrainian in shops, publishing in Ukrainian on the front page whether offline or online.
The will of the people of Crimea to join with Russia in 2014, not just evidenced by their election but by our own government’s polling done by the the broadcast board of governors. This was unacceptable to Ukraine.
An obvious hypothetical is, what would we do if Cuba decided to host Russian nukes? How about if Canada joined a “defensive” alliance with China? We would obviously do the same thing that Russia is doing with Ukraine. When a rival superpower uses corruption and media propaganda to influence elections of your neighbor, which results in a push toward joining their military bloc, you take action. It’s that simple.
If you support America’s exclusive hegemony, this is probably a good idea (fuck Russia!). If you support Western civilization, this is probably a bad idea.
You'd think there would be more than a few "unique and complex" aspects to take into account to the other direction, such as:
the long history of Russia/SU violently stamping down on Ukrainian national consciousness reflected in things like Czarist language bans, the Stalinist anti-Ukrainian turn etc.
the pre-2014 (one might even say pre-2022) process of slow death Ukrainian language in face of Russian minority's unwillingness to use Ukrainian in daily life necessitating the use of special privileges for Ukrainian language to prevent this language death
Russia's long history of considering the ex-Soviet states as its special playground for intervening at will right out of gate (Abkhazia/South Ossetia/Transnistria), as well by fomenting hybrid operations in eg. Baltic countries, considerably contributing to the attraction
Russia's specific past confirmation of Ukraine's borders including Crimea as valid, flagrantly violated in 2014 and then violated even moreso in 2022 (whatever polling of Crimea's population is immaterial when considering this violation - the German seizure of Sudetenland in 1938 was surely supported by the great majority of local population, that did not make it any more valid)
the general role of the seizure of Crimea in hypercharging the conflict in Eastern Ukraine and turning it into an Ukrainian/Russian one - something pro-Russians, as a rule, almost seem to treat as an individual event with no particular connection to the rest of the conflict
Even if one still would believe in the justification of the seizure of Crimea, opposition to Ukraine's NATO quest (a post-Euromaidan development BTW - NATO membership was not at a stake at any part of Euromaidan, and even the immediate post-Yanukovich govt at first eschewed NATO), opposition to Ukraine's language laws, one might still expect these things to be taken into account or noted in some way, but no, it's all just about Ukrainians hating Russia and Russian language for seemingly no reason at all and eight-years-of-bombing-Donetsk, again, for seemingly no reason at all.
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Because none of that is factual.
West had limited involvement in maiden. It was mostly their own decision. Probably because they look west and Poland is getting rich and they look east and there’s a bunch of poor peasants
nato isn’t a threat to a nuclear power. And as this was has proven Ukraine has no choice but to join nato be an independent country
there’s some truth to suppression of Russian culture
Russia has at no point offered Crimea or the Eastern regions independence. Russia at no point has had a goal of less than regaining the all of Ukraine. Those regions were used as attempts to interfere with Ukranian politics and eventually reestablish control of kyiv
Not all countries get to control their neighbors. If we stop with an assumption that every country gets to dictate terms of their neighbors then every country would be at war constantly trying to establish that. Russia is clearly NOT capable of projecting force outside their borders anymore.
looking at history theirs a huge difference between being in American sphere of influence and in Russias sphere. Russians sphere well has things like Holodomore happen to them. The American sphere even when we do bad things has limited bad things happen to the people of the country. One can look at population charts and places like Iraq/Afghanistan barely see population drops and then they boom, while places like syria or Ukraine see huge pop drops when Russia gets involved.
Also saying something is a complex case and your opponents don’t think about those things isn’t true. We do think about those things. We just don’t find those as dominating factors.
You write
and then almost immediately
Which fraction of pop of Russia involved in agriculture, what do you think? It's not a first time you throw 'peasants' just for fun.
Not referring to being farmers. But a more general being poor.
I can just use Russian own propaganda to justify my position. They literally tell us their people are
poor.
https://twitter.com/visegrad24/status/1604548265802096641?s=46&t=cJUMoctDB-RQWpQq-S5_qQ
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I don't necessarily disagree with your general point but this is just a lazy argument. There are obviously breaks in political continuity in Russian history that aren't present in American history. For better or worse, contemporary Russia isn't the USSR or the Russian Tsardom.
If I made an argument that a country being under German influence today is a bad thing because Nazis and Holocaust, people would rightfully laugh at me.
This is not to say that being under contemporary Russian influence is a good thing - it's probably not - but actually make the argument about why this is the case and don't just make lazy appeals to history. And preferably an argument that doesn't refer to the supposed 'innate barbarity' of the Russian people that I've seen crop up a lot.
I literally quoted population charts of Iraq/Afghanistan versus Syria/Ukraine. And the Holdomore. Yea I could have gone out and likely found 50 more examples but honestly some times you don’t feel like writing novels. Sure I could have quoted more bad things Stalin did. I could have quoted how serfdom in Russia became nearly indistinguishable from chattel slavery which no civilized country was doing to people of the same skin color. And I can quote the current war and the human rights abuses being committed in Ukraine and direct targeting of civilians and civilian infrastructure with artillery.
Holodomor occured because of economist policy of that government. Turning Holodomor into a tribal issue is a way to make more hostility and real corpses in future.
Meanwhile, in Ukraine private ownership of land wasn't working until as recently as 2019. In many ways post-1991 Ukraine was more sovok than post-1991 Russia
What Russia isn’t responsible for causing a famine because it was just “economic” policy? What kind of logic is that? A government is not responsible for their own economic policy that led to millions dying in famine.
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