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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.
There’s no peace deal on the table. It feels like your just building a strawman. You don’t end a war just to leave military positions that can turn into a hot war whenever Russia decides to.
If Russia put together a peace deal that is viable and would end hostilities for a generation then Ukraine should consider it. They haven’t. The only offer Ukraine has received is a ceasefire until Russia is ready to start the war again. From Ukraines perspective it’s better to win or lose now. Not have purgatory and new war in a year.
I think Russia made an ultimatum based on the Minsk agreement right before the war, telling Ukraine to stop their little game of seeking favors with the West or else.
Ukraine also had the option of not bombing civilians for years in Eastern Ukraine and they chose not to. From the perspective of civilians in the Eastern Ukraine, Russia has only joined a war that Ukraine was waging against them for years.
There is no realistic path for an independent Ukraine victory in my opinion, it's a matter of Americans and Europeans deciding that tanking their own economy is not worth preserving the borders of some random post-soviet state.
From the Ukrainian man's perspective, it's better to see their leadership surrender than to get sent to the die in a war that they have nothing to gain from.
Do you think they "bombed civilians for years in Eastern Ukraine" just for the evulz?
Ukraine fought back in a war initiated by separatists and instigated, indirectly or directly, by Russia. If Ukraine hadn't fought back, the separatists would have kept pushing and pushing, beyond the January 2022 frontline already in 2014 or 2015
Kind of the opposite of pushing, really. The Donetsk and Luhansk separists, who started their uprising in April 2014, were only spared a quick defeat in 2014 due to the direct intervention of conventional Russian forces in August, about five months later. Before they did so, the separatists were basically being blockaded in the cities they controlled, as the broader pro-Russian/anti-maidan uprising the Russians were expecting fell flat.
Eastern Ukraine since 2014 is absolutely one of those contexts where the war only lasted as a long as it did due to external life-support and regular intervention. Donetsk and Luhansk had more in common with Kabul than Ukraine vis-a-vis Russia, right down to the tepid-at-best local support making local fighters dependent on external military forces.
If the goal was to protect ethnic Russians, the best course of action would have been to let the separatist states fall. Not only would there have been no war around the two cities, but they would have been quickly re-integrated into the post-Maidan political system, which actually would have allowed pro-Russian interest groups a chance to affect internal Ukrainian politics, rather than Russia's attempt to force the Minsk II constitution order change as peace terms. That method had the effect of taking all the pro-Russian influence groups out of Ukraine's politics, a mistake that was noted at the time as a gamble.
Well, yes, that's exactly because Ukraine - or perhaps, one might say, Ukrainian nationalists - fought back. What I meant was that the separatists certainly intended to expand to a vastly larger area than what they controlled in Jan 2022, as indicated by the early attempts to establish DPR/LPR like entities in Herson, Kharkiv etc.
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