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There's a much more relevant difference: The Russians are blowing up culturally similar people just 1000 km away and they outright announced we would be next. A lot of Americans keep forgetting that Ukraine isn't some distant country but right next to a lot of western world, namely Europe.
I can't really understand this comment with the full context of American action in the Ukraine in the decade leading up to the conflict, nor do I recall Russia ever officially announcing that they would then move on to conquer the rest of Europe after Ukraine (provoking a nuclear conflict and the end of the world in the process). Can you please provide some citations for Russia announcing FIRST UKRAINE, THEN EUROPE? I was under the impression that Russia was taking action in order to prevent the US from setting up a client state next door, as opposed to a world conquest plan.
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Yes but why should Americans care?
Were trillions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of lives wasted over that continent not enough?
And why does proximity affect the ethics of it. America arms and funds dozens of crappy countries doing vastly worse. I haven't read of Russians doing anything to Ukrainian civilians under its territorial control comparable to what Israel does to Palestinians...
And as for unmotivated wars of aggression... Russia had a vastly better case for invading Ukraine, right next door/already waging war agianst ethnic russians, than the US ever had for invading Iraq
If they don't care, what point is there to their empire? What claim to moral superiority would they have if they abandoned even Western Europe? You don't believe empires, religions and peoples can have a point. But most believe that some of those are vehicles for genuine values of individual humans to affect reality. Some to good, some to bad ends.
Sure it's mostly bullshit, sure American elites are cynical and exploitative in their own right, sure there's the meta game where unipolarity will probably be catastrophic. Yet Pelosi is making noises supporting Armenia – a de facto unfriendly state – in its time of trial, and Putin is opening a Ferris wheel in Moscow while scores of 200's are rolling into Rostov or are left to rot in Ukrainian soil. It's pretty much impossible to make a coherent moral case for why he's less in the wrong here. As for naked geopolitics, you'll have to invent better epicycles to explain how a hostile empire is better than one you live in.
Kulak. I've brought it up before. My great-grandparents were Kulak Cossacks. They had their own little «revolt» and were curbstomped so hard I only had one blanket and two torn-up photos left as mementos. The folks in Kremlin are institutional, spiritual, legal inheritors of that system. To support them, to excuse them, to downplay their evil is morally bankrupt, and in your particular case plain ridiculous.
Contrarianism is not good enough, because it eventually leads one to contradict oneself right at the core. Please stop doubling down.
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