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Between this, and the comment below pointing out how most women of child bearing age have fled Ukraine, the outcome seems obvious. We pressured Ukraine into committing suicide. There won't be a Ukraine in 50 years. It will be an economic zone virtually devoid of native Ukrainians. If the world is lucky, it will be relatively well managed by Russian interest (minus the obligatory corruption, not like that is anything new in Ukraine), and mostly function as the bread basket of Europe same as it used to. If the world is unlucky, it will get flooded with sub room temperature IQ migrants by neoliberal NGOs and utterly cease to function in any recognizable fashion.
But the Ukrainians are over. The only question in 50 years will be, who was morally culpable for the genocide? Russia for starting the war, or the US for not letting Ukraine negotiate a peace back when their demographics would merely decline slowly, as opposed to fall off a cliff? If NATO had been hands off and Russia had won the war, there'd probably be more Ukrainians in 50 years than there will be now. I doubt there will be a million in 100 years.
US hyperagency/rest of world hypoagency is not just for left wingers it seems.
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This was the UK, not the US. And by UK, it was really just Boris Johnson, and it's not like he was strong arming them to prevent them from making peace, but rather encouraging them to stay in the fight. It still looks bad in hindsight, but there's a large gulf between one head of state saying essentially "hey you guys can do this and we'll help you" vs the implied notion of forcing them into a voluntary conflict.
The US has been lightly pushing for peace behind closed doors since at least November 2022.
I don’t think peace was ever on the table unless it meant return to pure vassal state. And Ukraine stays poor. Poland very well may be the strongest country in Europe in our lifetime. That’s a tough trade to do when you see how well being a real people like the Polish is.
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That's not how it happened. The west originally assumed that Ukraine would be conquered in three days. It was only after the Ukrainians themselves demonstrated their will to fight against Russia (and their success doing so) that NATO et al started arming Ukraine.
America is not the only country in the world with agency.
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No, it will not. Ukraine is the poorest country in Europe for the foreseeable future- it was before the war, and getting bombed flat didn’t help. It’s poorer than South Africa. Even third worlders do not want to live there, and if forced to- well, they’re third worlders, they can walk from there to a nicer country- which is such a low bar to clear that it includes the entirety of the balkans. Notably, Romania and Bulgaria, which are both several times wealthier than Ukraine, have functionally no third world migrants.
You have to be at least as wealthy as Mexico or Russia to attract migrants. Ukraine is as poor compared to those countries as they are to the US and Germany.
My uneducated question to all this is - dude, why does Russia want Ukraine so bad if it was poor before and it's even poorer now? That's like China absorbing North Korea, isn't it? How is this not a net loss for Russia? They spend a bunch of money, catch a bunch of sanctions, kill a lot of people, and get a crappy broken country when they inevitably win.
Because much of Ukraine is Russian. They speak Russian. They are Russian ethnically and live in a region historically called Novorossiya. The Eastern half of Ukraine is particularly Russian and there are considerable nationalist feelings within Russia about their co-Russians - which prompted the initial civil war in 2014. Strelkov and his band showed up and joined with locals to fight the Ukrainian army in Donetsk and Luhansk, now annexed. Strelkov is not the biggest Putin supporter in the world, he was imprisoned by the authorities. There's grassroots nationalist feeling in Russia that Putin has to respond to - formerly by suppression and now by encouragement.
The western part of Ukraine actually speak Ukrainian and can't be considered Russian. They hate Russians for a bunch of reasons, including the Holodomor. They sought to celebrate Stephen Bandera as a founding father. The Russians (and Poles) consider him a genocidal war criminal. The new 2014 regime sought to restrict the Russian language and Ukrainize the population, prompting the unrest in the east of Ukraine. Russia does not want a Russia-hating state ruling over large number of Russians right next door, aligned with the West.
Furthermore, the Eastern half of Ukraine is fairly industrialized. In the Soviet era it was supposed to be interoperable with the rest of the military industrial complex, engines for Russian helicopter gunships were made there amongst other things. There's lots of mines, coal and factories, the west is more agricultural. Eastern Ukraine also is the gateway to Crimea which is the most Russian part of Ukraine. Eastern Ukraine controls water and power supplies to the quasi-island. The land bridge and Mariupol region Russia took back in 2022 is key to holding Crimea, also a major naval base.
"Historically" is less impressive if one looks at the history: Novorussiya originates from the 18th century, roughly contemporary with Voltaire. Not yesterday but neither Ye Olde Times.
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Russian-speaking Ukrainians are not the same as the ethnic Russians, especially now. My anecdotal experience and what I've heard of Ukrainian refugees in Finland is that clear majority speaks Russian (they're usually from Eastern areas since that's where the fighting is) and a clear majority also firmly supports the Ukrainian war effort. The actual ethnic Russian areas (ie. the separatist-controlled areas before 2022 and Crimea) had already been detached from Ukrainian control before 2022.
Nobody thinks that the Irish speaking English means they consider themselves English, but for some reason the idea of someone speaking Russian yet not being Russian seems very hard to understand for many.
There are some born-in-Russia Russians actively fighting against Russia, that doesn't mean they're not Russian. The commander in chief of the Ukrainian army is Russian! There are also many Ukrainians (in the geographic sense) fighting against Ukraine. This conflict has dynamics of both a civil and interstate war, identity is complicated.
Those who fled to Finland would logically be anti-Russian. The Ukrainians who fled to Russia would presumably be the opposite.
Sure, there are all sorts of people. The point is that Ukrainian-speaking Russians and ethnic Russians in Ukraine are two wholly different categories, and even if someone was applying some sort of "liberating the ethnic Russians" logic to pre-2022 conquests, it no longer would apply to the post-2022 conquests basically in any sense.
Ukraine and the West's official war aim is to retake all Ukraine's 2014 territories which include millions of Russians. There are many more inside Ukraine's currently controlled territory, where being Russian is not very popular. There are fundamental differences between the two states that can no longer be resolved diplomatically.
There's also the strategic dimension regarding control in the Black Sea, bases and so on.
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First, their gas and oil pipes to Central Europe go through Ukraine. This is both bad for security and for financial reasons. Second, Russia has wanted a warm sea port for approximately the entirety of their existence. Third, Ukraine and Belarus form something of a wall to defend against NATO. Yes, Putin feels very threatened by NATO. I realize that might sound absurd on a mostly western-centric forum. If you're curious about Putin's perspective, here's a great video going over his life and beliefs.
TL;DR: He's actually very easy to understand, all he wants is a stable and safe Russia that is slightly better tomorrow than it was yesterday. He was mildly pro-US before Bush ruined everything. Nowadays, he sees the US as hypocrites telling him to stop his imperialism while acting in a very imperialist way themselves. And in the case of Ukraine, it was a Russian puppet just like Belarus until a violent uprising toppled the government. Putin saw this as proof of the US and NATO meddling with what he considers to be the Russian sphere of influence.
Here's more context for the current situation, if you want it.
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If North Korea was cozying up to an alliance created for the sole purpose of keeping China in check then China just might feel the need to not let a border state join that alliance, costly as that may be.
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Russia believes that Ukraine is a core interest, and NATO encroaching on Ukraine violated their security. Even if the war is a net loss (a debatable question), they model it as a smaller loss than Ukraine joining NATO (de facto or outright).
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If you want to steelman it you would probably say Russia is thinking in centuries. Break Ukraine today and permenently put them in their sphere of influence. Then population rebounds and Ukraine maintains its historical place in the greater Slavic empire.
Of course that works in the 12th century but the world today feels less and less like land etc is going to matter.
That backfired horribly then, since the invasion turned the UA-RU relationship from something that resembled the USA and Canada, to something that resembles RU vs Poland. The Russians might get the land in the end, but they've lost the Ukrainians themselves who were mostly loyal during the USSR. The best Russia can really hope for now is that Ukrainians take a "slavery is better than death" attitude, but that hardly makes for a strong empire.
Sure for 50 years. I was trying to steelman. In 150 years it’s back to Canada and US in the view from Moscow.
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I think this comes down to the neoliberal obsession with GDP. It completely obfuscates strategic importance and control. It's the sort of myopic focus that allowed us to outsource critical infrastructure to China, and then we got bent over when COVID hit. Because to the neoliberal, if number goes up, who cares who controls a thing? Money is power, not actual physical possession of a strategic resource... right?
Ukraine is the breadbasket of Europe. It's coast are Russia's only warm water port. It's an important strategic buffer between Russia and keeping their enemies less than 2 hours away from their capital. How "poor" Ukraine is, however shitty their stock market is doing, however bad their GDP is changes none of those fundamentals.
Russia itself was mocked as being a third world country with a gas station. That hasn't exactly aged well.
Have you ever interacted with russian citizens outside the moscow and st. petersburg elite? They are poor as shit. Russia is a 3rd world country, this whole war has been an embarrassment. They can't even take over the poorest country in europe.
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It was mocked as a gas station with nukes. Nobody ever said Russia couldn't be dangerous if it wanted to.
My recollection is that one person mocked Russia as being a gas station, and a second person mocked the first saying it was a gas station with nukes.
Sadly my memory has rotted to the point where I can't recollect whether it was Obama directly who was person one, or a surrogate/policy expert of his. Likewise I can't recall if person two was Romney/McCain or other person in their orbit.
Alas.
"Russia is a gas station masquerading as a country" was McCain's version. I'm finding claims that it was Romney who turned that into "gas station with nukes", though not particularly mocking of McCain, and that Obama's contribution to Putin's seething was to call Russia "a regional power".
Although, apparently this sort of metaphor is way way older than that. "Upper Volta with rockets" was the phrase coined (possibly by a British journalist) in the 80s, updating the German "Congo with Rockets" from the 70s and "Genghis Khan with a hydrogen bomb" from the 50s, and all of this dates back as far as a sentiment from the 1850s, popularized by Tolstoy after Emperor Alexander III's counter-reforms in the 1880s,
"It was not without reason that Herzen spoke of how terrible Genghis Khan would have been with telegraphs, with railways, with journalism. This is exactly what has happened in our country."
Research by Russia Today, so they make it clear from the title onward that these are all variants on "a lazy Russophobic slur", but frankly I'm still impressed they didn't kill the article outright.
It was actually coined by Chancellor Helmut Schmidt.
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The rational thing for Russia to do would be to not invade Ukraine, but for regime-legitimacy reasons they’re kinda committed to winning the war.
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To what does this refer? It seems to me that the Ukrainians are no more eager for a negotiated settlement than the U.S. is. Now, it might be in their national interests to negotiate a peace, but they still have to want it to go down that route.
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2022/05/06/boris-johnson-pressured-zelenskyy-ditch-peace-talks-russia-ukrainian-paper
https://www.globalresearch.ca/diplomacy-watch-did-boris-johnson-help-stop-peace-deal-ukraine/5792502
https://dailysceptic.org/2022/09/01/did-boris-scuttle-talks-between-ukraine-and-russia/
Setting aside that you confused two different countries in two different hemispheres with over 200 million population difference, your own article has the slight issue with ignoring some inconvenience context- like the numerous Russian demands that were rather obviously not close to being agreed to.
For example, terms like what Ukraine could defend itself with if Russia launched a third continuation war-
-or who the question of security guarantors for Ukraine in lieu of NATO-
In other words, Russia was perfectly willing to accept a peace in which Ukraine dismantled the military that had just stopped it's advance, Ukraine limit itself to being unable to hit back to any significant distance against the extensive Russian use of long range fires, and so long as Russia could veto any external support to Ukraine in case it invaded a fourth time.
Truly, the Ukrainians and Russians negotiators were close to the same page.
Now, there might also be the minor factor that the negotiations in March and April coincided with the discovery and spread of awareness of the Bucha Massacre following the Russian retreat from Kyiv, which might have shaped Ukrainian perception on the trustworthiness of the Russians to bide by a deal and willingness of the public to accept.
Or, alternatively, the Ukrainians lack agency, and the UK-US-ians are to blame.
But my money is that history will remember that the people who launched the war of national destruction, on claims that there was no Ukrainian nation, who went prepared for mass graves and torture chambers and kill lists, and who deliberately attempted to trigger humanitarian crisis of winter power outages and mass floodings and endangering nuclear reactor plants... I suspect they'll be the one blamed for any genocide they cause.
The history will do so iff the GAE wins, which it without a doubt will, because it is invincible, from now and to the end of the human history. I hope I won't wake up tomorrow.
This acronym is impossible to take seriously. It's like if the dissident right came up with some acronym that spelled HOMO, then told you to "fear the HOMO".
While not strictly an acronym, this already exists as the short form of "global homogeneity/homogenization". It is used in the same way for the same reasons.
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Boris Johnson is the UK, not the US. The US has been lightly pushing for peace behind closed doors for a while now.
Also, encouraging war from one head of government is very different from "not letting Ukraine negotiate a peace". Total motte and bailey here.
I haven’t seen anything specific but based on Biden not sending more equipment it seems true. They will blame the GOP for not passing bills but supposedly he’s had plenty of authorization.
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