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There is always this stupid idea that if only we were a bit kinder with those leaders (be it Hitler, Putin or others), if we had made just one or two small concessions, there would have been no war. But this is a complete misunderstanding of the nature of their regime. Whatever you give them, they see as a sign of weakness, a proof that they can push harder. You negociated with me about Syria, so that I can do anything there? I will also take Ukraine. You give me Danzig? I will also take Alsace. It's a game where they can only win: either you give them what they want, and they are stronger and can push for more, or you don't, and they get a casus belli.
EDIT:
By the way, I remember quite precisely what happened, and the jews were not responsible of it. All of America wanted this war. The people who opposed it took a ton of shit. You probably wanted this war yourself. But I guess it is easier to blame the stupid choices you made on the jews.
Can you flesh out your argument for why it was the smart thing to promote Ukraine entering NATO, rather than negotiating Ukraine as a neutral region? Given that this was their red line since the early 2000s, I have no idea how someone could consider it “appeasement”. It seems to me that the worst case scenario has transpired: our continual pressure and influence in Ukraine has destroyed the country, probably forever (given fertility rates), has cost enormous sums of money, has wasted American influence in Ukraine, has pressured Russia into developing better drone technology, has finalized the alienation of Russia from the West, has influenced Arab nations into cozying with Russia, and all we get in return is some dead Russians, and maybe we will increase German weariness to America given we destroyed their pipeline. This was a bad decision, unless we only care about dead Russians. What will we gain in five years from it all?
Because Russia would still try to take over Ukraine, by war if necessary and it would put Ukraine in worse position?
The worst case would be Russia taking over Ukraine, murdering whoever opposed their regime, run russification full scale and be emboldened enough to invade Estonia or Latvia (and cause direct NATO-Russia war or collapse of NATO).
Do you REALLY think that American influence in Ukraine dropped as result of that?
It is hardly confirmed that USA did this, there are also other credible candidates.
They probably lied about this.
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Ukraine as a neutral region would require Russia giving up its naval base in Crimea, which is very important to Russian strategic interests. In detail, how would you obtain that concession from them?
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Because there can be no Ukraine "as neutral region". Russia sees Ukraine as part of the Russian Empire, detached from it by deceit and fraud. It wants it back. It will not respect any agreements or papers that would prevent that. They may say whatever it is prudent at the moment, but they will never respect it.
The only thing that can deter Russia is the perspective of the armed conflict with NATO. They are not deluded enough to think they can manage that. Thus, Ukraine in NATO means peace (with Russian seething but unable to do anything about it), and Ukraine being "neutral" means Russians are going to attack it sooner or later. And they did.
Factually. They wanted to take over Ukraine since Putin decided he's going to be Peter the Great 2.0. Once the decision was made, the question only was when they'd decide to try. They tested it out in 2014 and figured out weak and ineffectual sanctions is all the West can field. Adding commitment not to protect Ukraine would only reinforce this assessment. In 2022, they decided the opportunity is ripe - America's president is weak and senile, Europe's elites are weak and corrupt and lust after Russian oil profits, European militaries are largely a joke, US society is divided and half of the country thinks the other half is Russian agents - it's a good time to act. Appeasing them might only mean they decide the good time to act was earlier (maybe not under Trump - he's too crazy, may do something unexpected, better wait until he's out).
Bullshit, there was no "influence" there that had anything with any of Ukraine's problems. It is true that corrupt US people meddled there (yes, Burisma), but it was only an opportunistic grift. Corruption in Ukraine has been endemic without any US involvement and much of it was instigated and facilitated by Russia. Mere presence of Russia next door - where corruption is ingrained in the state structure and which is economically towering upon Ukraine, so that anybody who joins the corrupt Russians may immediately wield immense comparative power in Ukraine - is a huge corrupting factor, but much of it remained from the Soviet and early post-Soviet times too. Only the war forced Ukrainians to clean up the house a little - and much of it still remains. It's not a good time to talk much about it, but nobody who knows what's happening there can not ignore it.
As for the choice of whether to go back to the bear hug of Mother Russia or become an independent nation, they made this choice in 1991, confirmed it in 2014, and it has been made irrevocable in 2022. Nothing about it had much to do with the West - in fact, the West has been kinda lukewarm in treating Ukraine in any but opportunistic manner, mainly because pissing off Russia too much - before 2022 - wasn't in anybody's plans. Too much money to be made on oil and gas. Germany is a shining example of it, of course. Having a hot war in Europe changed it quite a bit. But let's not project that changed attitude back to when it didn't exist. Europeans openly laughed at Trump's suggestion that the conflict with Russia is imminent - remember?
That has been a done deal by mid-2010s. And the West couldn't do much about it, really.
Arab nations aren't idiots. When they see US is running away from Middle East, and Russia is ready to invest $$$, they know which way the wind is blowing.
That depends on whether US will dare to help Ukrainians to actually win the war. If they do - weakened Russia that would temporarily sit within their own borders and not mess with anybody else. If they don't - bloodbath in Ukraine and ultimately Russian takeover of Moldova, and possibly attacking the Baltic states. Also kiss Taiwan goodbye, if Russian can do shit like that, China certainly would want too.
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Very possible this will happen, but history will not see America as the one holding the knife, but rather the country that attacked a democracy unprovoked and during the war literally kidnapped tens of thousands of Ukrainian children.
Literally the best bang-for-buck the US Military has ever had. Less than 10% of the annual US DOD budget to thoroughly emasculate the old enemy, weaken China, zero lives lost, massive increase in US soft power for finally being on the right side of a war. Plus the true cost is probably less than half of the sticker price.
What?
Oh no we can never stand up to bullies like Russia they might -checks notes- develop better drone technology!! Who cares. Besides at this point I wouldn't trust the Russians to develop a microwave. And, more to the point, neither would the half of the planet that (used to) use Russia as their weapons dealer.
It has been obvious to anyone paying attention for the last 20-ish years that Russia was never on any kind of course to peaceful integration with the West. The Russian kleptocracy was just fundamentally incompatible.
Okay so 1) Arab nations don't give a hoot about Russia their relationship is purely mercenary, and 2) this sentence implies that we don't want Arab nations cozying with Russia which implies that their influence is a negative for the US. So then surely -from a purely realpolitik POV- it is good for the US to diminish them? you can't simultaneously hold that Russia is an irrelevant backwater and also that it is a malign influence on American interests.
A hundred things. but if you want to put blinkers on and care about literally nothing else than the American rival du jour then invasion of Taiwan looks substantially less likely now than it did at the start of the war.
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Because NATO wasn’t why the Ukraine war happened. Prighizin himself said the reasons for the war were a lie.
Joining the EU economically was the proximate cause for the war and Ukraine leaving Russian sphere of influence. Economically and culturally there was never possible to be “neutral”. Zelensky himself made a comedy routine years ago saying basically Ukraine found a new sugar daddy that was rich and it was Europe. Ukranians look over the border and see Poland on pace to be richer than the UK. Russia can’t compete with the west financially.
The choice for Ukraine was never neutrality. It was get rich forming economic and cultural unions with the rest or stay poor in a union with Russia.
The whole “NATO” thing and neutrality always was just propaganda. Peace was never possible. Russia was never going to agree to military neutrality but a rich and prosperous economically allied with the west Ukraine.
We didn’t have to imply that we were interested either. Had we said no Ukraine would have been better off because they wouldn’t have been invaded. The war buck stops with us because we kept this going.
I agree that it is Russia fault, but how this changes anything? It is not much that can be done with that except supplying Ukraine more.
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By us I assume you mean the US. First US isn’t even a member of the European Union nor a European economy that would have been Ukraines economic linkages. America literally had zero say on these issues which is why Russia invaded.
Also this removes any agency from Ukraine. They wanted something different because their neighbor Poland got rich and their economic relationships with Russia kept them poor.
They live in a Cripps neighborhood, joining the Bloods was never a viable option.
war so far seems to indicate that Russia overestimated their power
maybe they will finally get that Russian empire is done?
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Gentrification happens. And the cripps launching an attack seems to have been a miscalculation that might end up costing them their entire empire.
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Except for the four countries in the Cripps' immediate neighbourhood that joined the Bloods without any violence? And the many more countries a little further down the road in the Cripps neighbourhood who did so as well?
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Maybe if the God descended from Heavens on Dec 1 2013 before protesters and opposition politicians in Kyiv and said to them: "Go home, victory of your protest will lead to great human suffering and hundreds of thousand deaths", nothing of that would have happened. Ukraine would be just a shittier version of Belarus for perpetuity, all smart people would have left either way, even if there was no war.
But it doesn't work like that. Ukrainians wanted into the EU. EU members supported those aspirations — some more enthusiastically (like Lithuania, or Poland), some less (like France, or Germany). On the other hand Putin and his close circle have more agency than amorphous blobs like pro-Western Ukrainian population, or European bureaucracy. The onus should be on them.
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Appeasing dictators is the kind of thing that sounds good in the short-term, but can wind up being very bad later. It's also very easy to say "oh just let Hitler have Czechoslovakia" when you are British and not Czech. The strategic problem in WW2, of course, was that Hitler was never going to stop there, and letting him do what he wanted mostly just made Germany stronger. Making it easy for dictators to achieve big wins easily, just by threatening war, even encourages other dictators to threaten war and try to invade other countries. A short-term victory, but long-term loss. The humanitarian problem was that Hitler was now in charge of more people, which is obviously bad; this badness might have been more insulated from British politicians than a war involving Britain would have been, but it was still there.
What makes the Czechoslovakia situation even worse in hindsight is that there was a good chance the Heer was going to launch a coup against Hitler if the western allies hadn't backed down. Not that anyone knew this at the time.
Source on this? I'm a big WW2 fan and haven't heard of this before.
Wikipedia page
Thanks
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In practice, neutrality would have meant that Ukraine will always remain weaker than Russia and can be invaded at any time. Russia would just have to wait for a time where NATO is occupied somewhere else. Russia violated the Budapest memorandum and the Minsk agreement. How could Ukraine trust them to not invade them?
Moreover, the fact that Ukraine is or is not in NATO is not very relevant for the security of Russia. They are American nukes in the baltic countries, so the threat would not be any bigger. On the other side, Russia would still have nukes, so the invasion risks aren't any higher. So if Ukraine joining NATO does not change anything for Russia security, you have to find another reason why it matters to them. The only thing Russia can do if Ukraine is "neutral" but not if it is in NATO is invading them.
No, the invasion has.
The invasion has. The US are not responsible for it.
Are you kidding? American influence is stronger than ever in Ukraine.
No, their invasion has pressured them to do so.
Once again, it's their choice to invade Ukraine that has alienated them. Even after 2014 the west was totally OK negotiating with Russia. Have you heard about Nord Stream 2?
They always did... They are not democratic countries, they have an interest in helping authoritarian regimes. It has not much to do with Ukraine.
And the reassurance that you won't abandon your allies, which was in doubt after the Afghanistan retreat.
What drone technology? The technology of buying them in Iran, repainting them and pretending it's Russian? I think they had this technology before.
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The idea that one is not threatened by a neighboring state because there are other neighboring states unaligned with Russia doesn’t make sense. I am not threatened by five enemies because I have four? But it makes especially little sense given: the important of flat eastern Ukraine for invasion, and the importance of the Black Sea for Russia. America may very well have been threatened by the Saudis funding radical Islam, but that doesn’t mean they can just blow up Saudi Arabia. Instead we settled on lesser Arab countries.
Ukraine is small, it will always be weaker, but now it will be destroyed. This argument doesn’t hold up to either the predictions made years before (they will be annihilated), or the present data (look at the birth rates). “I will either attempt to be more significant than I am or be destroyed” is a recipe for narcissistic ego death.
NATO violated the promise not to expand east as part of the negotiations involving German reunification.
Yes, the invasion that was promised for years because of the sequence of actions that NATO + NATO-influenced Ukraine took. This is like when the Mongels invaded Iraq and destroyed Baghdad after Baghdad slew their emissaries. Sorry Baghdad, you don’t get to “be sovereign” against the Mongols, just like Cuba and Iraq don’t get to “be sovereign” against America. This isn’t how reality works, and indeed it has never worked like this in the whole history of nations. Cause and effect is a much clearer way to understand what is best for America and/or Ukraine.
"Destroyed" is a relative term.
Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania are much smaller and weaker than Ukraine, but Putin has to play nice with them, because they're in NATO. If you were Ukrainian, and you didn't know that you would be invaded, wouldn't that be attractive to you?
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Let me rephrase it: Ukraine joining NATO does not improve significantly NATO capabilities regarding Russia. I'm sorry, but the idea of a land invasion through Ukraine is ridiculous. It would mean a nuclear war. We are avoiding to send troops to Ukraine to avoid a nuclear conflict, but somehow we would invade Russia? And even if we wanted to take the risk, it would make more sense to attack from the baltic states as they are a lot closer from Moscow and Saint Petersburg than from Ukraine.
No, it won't be weaker if it has stronger allies. Russia would never have dared to invade Ukraine if it was a NATO country. And the birth rates mean nothing, as they can change fast. Russia also has declining birthrates, so the population ratio might very well be constant.
The Russian propaganda says so, but until "they told us" becomes an international treaty, it's meaningless. If those promises even existed, they were never part of a formally approved treaty. No country has ever felt bound to respect oral promises of former leaders. It is just insane to claim they should. But even assuming that those promises were formally made and broken, I don't see your point. My argument was that Ukraine could not trust Russia security guarantees because Russia violated its security guarantees toward Ukraine twice. Are you claiming that Ukraine should actually believe Russia because NATO also broke some of its promises? It makes no sense at all.
No it wasn't constant. In 1991, it was 3:1 but it soon became 4:1, as Ukraine both had less TFR and negative net migration. Russia's ethnic minorities (esp. Muslims) have greater TFR.
The future is not always like the past.
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Again the bunch of tired claims about NATO threat refuted so many times
https://youtube.com/watch?v=wjU-ve4Pn4k&t=1081
https://youtube.com/watch?v=FVmmASrAL-Q
It is beside the general point of the discussion in which I mostly agree with you but it is interesting how these videos while emphasizing agency of countries in Eastern Europe don't extend it to Abkhazia, South Ossetia or Transnistria mirroring the pro-russian talking point that foreign support equals foreign rulership.
I wish I knew more about leadership of those state-like formations. LDNR was lead by people directly affiliated with Kremlin, or unruly warlords who were eventually killed. More than half population there saw their future in Ukraine. But South Ossetia, and especially Abkhazia look much more autonomous. Of course, it doesn't cancel the fact, that a lot of ethnic Georgians were murdered or driven out, just like in LDNR — thus changing the general attitude of people there, and the ethnic composition. And Transnistria is probably somewhere in between LDNR and Abkhazia in terms of agency.
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You can refute it as many times as you like. The promises of NATO to Russia are, by this point, worth nothing, even if the West wasn't openly discussing partitioning Russia.
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Do you want to provide your ideas instead of linking to YouTube videos?
I have no desire of typing 5000 words, if everything can be found in the linked videos, or on Wikipedia, or wherever. Just put in on 2x. Arguments you present are not new, and the refutations of them are ubiquitous.
Damn, that's unfortunate, because I actually read multiple refutations of your position on TruthSocial. Your arguments are not new and have been defeated comprehensively elsewhere - but I have no desire of typing 5000 words (sic), so you'll just have to take my word for it.
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Right, I’m obviously not going to watch a random YouTube video, but here’s the archival research of a top institution in foreign policy studies
https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/russia-programs/2017-12-12/nato-expansion-what-gorbachev-heard-western-leaders-early
Afterwards, Baker wrote to Helmut Kohl who would meet with the Soviet leader on the next day, with much of the very same language. Baker reported: “And then I put the following question to him [Gorbachev]. Would you prefer to see a united Germany outside of NATO, independent and with no U.S. forces or would you prefer a unified Germany to be tied to NATO, with assurances that NATO’s jurisdiction would not shift one inch eastward from its present position? He answered that the Soviet leadership was giving real thought to all such options [….] He then added, ‘Certainly any extension of the zone of NATO would be unacceptable.’” Baker added in parentheses, for Kohl’s benefit, “By implication, NATO in its current zone might be acceptable.” (See Document 8)
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