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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 12, 2023

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Like most people I expected the Donbass to collapse within days of invasion, but what I saw instead was video after video of Russian-speaking Ukrainians fighting to the death to defend Sumy and Kharkov from their nominal brethren.

This is happening but there are also a significant number of people in the former Donetsk and Luhansk Republics fighting for Russia, plus there's Crimea. All of these places are recognized by the US to be part of Ukraine and those are the territories that Western weapons are formally being supplied to retake.

The European members of NATO

They had grave doubts about NATO expansion eastwards for decades and were pulled along by the US from 2008 onwards.

All of these places are recognized by the US to be part of Ukraine and those are the territories that Western weapons are formally being supplied to retake.

The current flow of weapons is a direct result of Russia's invasion of the non-DPR/LPR portions of Ukraine. During the preceding eight years there was a smaller level of support proportional to how much the US cared about the Ukrainians retaking the rebel territories in and of themselves i.e. not nearly as much. Recognizing Crimea and the entire Donbass as Ukrainian is just a diplomatic formality, as they are unlikely to ever retake those regions.

They had grave doubts about NATO expansion eastwards for decades and were pulled along by the US from 2008 onwards.

They didn't seem to have had any problems with the Visegrád countries joining, with the US actually blocking France's proposal for immediate accession of Romania and Slovenia in 1997. In 2008 there was a split on further expansion, with the US and Visegrád countries on one side, Germany and France on the other, and the UK in the middle. Now, you can say that Poland and Romania's opinions shouldn't count as much as France or Germany's, but the latter wanted to let the former into the club. At best then opinion among European NATO members was divided, rather than unanimously opposed to further expansion.