This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
A Tone-Shift in the Ukraine War
Lately, I've noticed that the tone of the discussion regarding Ukraine both on the Motte and on X has changed considerably. Notably, it seems that people are taking a much more pessimistic view of Ukraine's chances. The default assumption now is that Ukraine will lose the war.
I think a stalemate is still quite possible, but the more optimistic assumptions that Ukraine would regain lost territory (or comically, Crimea) are now a dead letter. So what, exactly, are our leaders thinking? Recently, Macron went off-narrative a bit, suggesting that France could send troops into Ukraine. More ominously, Secretary of State Blinken said that Ukraine will join NATO.
Perhaps Western leaders view this sabre-rattling as good for their electoral chances. And, until recently, the war was seen as a relatively cost-effective way to weaken Russia. (Sadly, this seems to have failed as Russia has freely exported oil to India and China and is making armaments in great numbers).
But what of Ukrainians themselves? Will they tire of being NATO's cat's paw? It's impossible to find good numbers on how many Ukrainian men have been killed so far in this war. It's likely in the hundreds of thousands. Towns and villages throughout the country are devoid of men, as the men (hunted by conscription) either flee, hide, or are sent to the fronts.
User @Sloot shared this nuclear-grade propoganda. While Ukrainian men fight and die in some trench, an increasing number of Ukrainian women are finding new homes (and Tinder dates) in Germany. Concern about female fidelity has always been a prominent feature of wartime propaganda. But, this takes it to a new level, since the women are in a different country, making new, better lives for themselves. How many will ever even return to Ukraine?
Ukrainian men are getting a raw deal in an effort to reconquer lost territory, whose residents probably want to be part of Russia anyway. Why should Ukrainians fight and die for some abstract geopolitical goal of NATO?
I think this map from /pol/ is great for understanding who is winning. Right now even with the failed counteroffensive war is on a path to the Ukraine's pyrrhic victory, maybe without control of the coast, but with more land in the Donetsk region. If you were mugged in the alley by five guys and they stole your watch, but you KO'ed two of them and successfully run of with your remaining belongings it's still a victory.
I think the current map looks more like Russian Pyrrhic Victory than Ukrainian Pyrrhic Victory. With the caveat that final borders are not yet drawn.
Yeah, it looks more like it in the sense of shape, but it's actually quite important that Russia doesn't control large parts of the annexed regions. I think it is not likely that they will succefuly take control of them before the war end.
More options
Context Copy link
Russia has much more to lose than Ukraine. Sure, Ukraine loses more as a percentage of its original reputation/territory/resources/material, but by absolute quantity Russian pyrrhic victory has lost more, and nothing can rebuild the Russian arms export market.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
As others said, this is absurd version of the events at hand. If Ukraine loses this war, they are fucked in the same way Donetsk and Luhansk are fucked now, only worse. It may very well happen that they will end up according to the map that Medvedev shown with Ukraine being what Donetsk/Luhansk was in since 2014 - just a puppet state and source of expendable shock troops for the new Russian Empire. The next move? Putin attacks Moldova with forced conscripts from newly annexed Ukraine thus potentially solving two problems at once by expanding the territory and sending potential rebels into the meatgrinder. He already uses this tactics to some extent by conscripting mostly ethnic minorities and rural population. The same tactics Mao utilized when he sent surrendered Kuomintang soldiers to Korea: win-win scenario for him.
And we are not even talking about a scenario where Putin with his newfound strength may test the article 5 and actually conduct Baltic offensive on Estonia/Latvia/Lithuania. It is not as if NATO will fire nukes in face of conventional assault - so what will they do? Will Spaniards and French and Italians send enough troops to the meatgrinder to save some faraway countries? At worst Putin can always say "my bad, I just want part of Estonia and make peace" and play peacemaker or he can withdraw after testing the waters. It is not as if NATO countries will ever muster courage to actually wage full fledged war with the aim to physically oust Putin from Kremlin when he hides behind nuclear ICBMs and torpedoes. And in the meantime Putin will have enough Ukrainians to send ahead of his barrier troops.
Don't forget, things are never so bad that they cannot get worse.
Where does it come from? Belarus is often seen as a Russia puppet state yet contributed not a single soldier to Russia wars.
More options
Context Copy link
If NATO, with cca what, 900 million population, GDP (ppp adjusted) maybe 4x of Russia, cannot somehow manage to have conventional forces supremacy in Eastern Europe to prevent Russia from attacking, what use is NATO?
That's almost exactly the disparity in population, GDP between Russia and Ukraine. In any reasonable war, conventional war between Russia and NATO should go far, far better than between Russia and Ukraine alone. After all, the developed West has much better everything. It has rule of law, human rights, less corruption, much better R&D sector, better education. One could go on.
So why am I now hearing this defeatism ? Eastern European countries joined NATO because they were told it'd make them 'safe' against Russia ? Was that just a bluff ?
I'm pretty sure that's what Oppenheimer meant when he said "lot of boys not yet born will owe their life to the bomb". You know well from history how "waging full scale war to oust the despot in Moscow" usually goes. Especially when he has the support of world's biggest industrial power.
I doubt Putin would try to take Baltics unless there's a WW3 going on. There's nothing there, they barely have any forces worth speaking about, it's not defensible at all (or so was the usual expert talk) and all the forces there are just tripwire forces.
What use is NATO if it's unwilling to use nuclear weapons to defend the territory of its members? Was it all a big bluff or what ?
Exactly, and Putin may put this into a test, especially to test how will let's say countries like Portugal or Italy or even Hungary or Slovakia or Finland or Romania react to the situation when their soldiers will return in cardboxes by thousands in peer-to-peer warfare. And we already see the pathetic situation we are in right now - US cannot get a bill of $60 billion passed to support Ukraine, and even that has some Israel support as well as organizational support for European theater inside. And we are still talking about 7% of US military budget and 0.2% of US GDP. And let's not forget that USA and UK actually have some obligations towards Ukraine as part of Budapest memorandum where Ukrainians gave up their nuclear arsenal in exchange for guarantees of territorial integrity from US, UK and Russia. Of course Russian word is as usual not worth the paper it was put onto and US/UK try to weasel out of it by saying it was actually "assurance" and not "guarantee". Anyways even besides that, this is still seems crazy to me - you are supposedly willing to pour trillions of dollars to build up defense against hostile power threatening NATO but you are unable to spend comparatively infinitesimal fraction of money to actually fight it? To me it seems like an invitation for Putin to test the resolve.
Plus the reality check of actual efficacy of all that GDP put into military. Fucking North Korea who is economical dwarf was able to send 3 million shells to Russia. US production is around 30,000 a month so North Korea was able to send years of production to Russia. And we are not even talking about what Russia was able to do since the war started - triple the production of artillery shells to 300,000 a month.
I actually see it as the opposite. The ultimate defeatism is things I reacted to such as "too many Ukrainians are dying, let's give Putin what he wants" or "don't support Ukrainians by 0.2% of GDP when they are in hot war against an actor that threatens NATO, it is too much money that can be spent on social security". So if we care about non-NATO soldiers dying and spending on level of peanunts, then how is NATO going to absorb tens of thousands of their own citizens dying or spending hundreds of billions or even trillions on potential hot war? Will it not be too tempting to again give Putin what he wants and effectively dissolve NATO as a defensive alliance? These two things are related in my eyes and I bet that those new NATO members are watching it in disbelief, they may have been hoodwinked by mushy allies. Also it is not as if this happened for the first time, Czechoslovakia could talk about that a little bit
Now you're getting it. People have been talking about how a green service economy with little actual industry isn't actually useful when you need to like, blow stuff up or build it.
You know, it does takes years to build up big armies and industries. Germany was cheating in 1930s because their entire army was designed around re-expanding. They hired the best, they had WW1 veterans, everyone was trained on things a couple levels above him. And even then it took them like 6 years to build up. In a militaristic regime with relatively high approval rates, plenty of young people and so on.
Look at Biden or von der Leyen. Look at the green energy 20 year shamble.
Not gonna happen. It's late stage regime, the best it can do is suppress political opposition
Russia meanwhile doesn't have enough people to occupy Ukraine. It's not the world-conquering totalitarian state of scare propaganda. If they were, they'd not be hiring Nepalis, but everyone youngish but essential workers would be in the army and it'd be 4 million strong.
They could, if Putin was feeling insane enough try to take over Baltics and maybe (I give this low probability) Russian missile attack could wreck enough of NATO airbases (which I'm not even sure have solid air defenses against maneuvering, fast missile salvos) and then if NATO wasn't resolute enough to H-bomb Russian formations on the wrong side of the border in Baltics, then yeah, maybe they'll get taken over.
Which would be a net benefit to EU because 60-90% of working age non-Russians will just move away.
Would even a conventional war between NATO and Russia really be decided by artillery shell production rates?
It'd matter quite a bit.
Maybe 20-30%. Shells are very hard to intercept and potent, when aimed properly. Artillery caused like 50% of casualties when used with ground spotting with line of sight or plane directed. (was nowhere near universal, iirc only Americans did it)
Missile systems like HIMARS and Smerch and Tornado allow hitting targets up to 100 km in. Tactical missiles, for which Russia is characteristically making with huge warheads of up to 800 kg, [can accurately hit targets at 400 km.] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9K720_Iskander#Iskander-M). Unless you can prevent enemy from sneaking drones all over your airspace, there's no such thing as a 'front line'. There's just a region of pain where the slightest mistake can result in getting the equivalent of a 3-4 ton bomb falling at you with a 1-2 minute warning. Fuel-air explosives are more potent than high explosives.
But what about the NATO air forces? Well, even if missiles strikes disabling airbases are avoided, the expectation is reducing air defense to allow combat missions that aren't suicidal would take weeks to months. Yeah, you could whittle that down fast if you had thousands of AI-guided small drones outranging big SAMs ready to go, but NATO doesn't have that. And i've seen no indication they want to procure such. What's going on is they're buying Israeli 'stand-off' munitions at outrageous cost (something like $500k per one drone). That's probably, not gonna cut it unless cost goes down by a factor of 10-50x.
Modern war is just a whole different beast than what it used to be.
Let's remember that western military doesn't have a stealthy drone with ~100 km range and hours of loiter capacity per each howitzer. Even though it very well could. At some point, we're going to get a whole ecosystem of autonomous drones patrolling the airspace to prevent enemy recon, laser dazzlers to prevent satellite recon. But we're not there. Even if SV won over the MIC and started making these air-defense drones in bulk, it'd take 5 years to build up enough to matter for NATO. And they won't win. Billions in stock valuations are at stake here!
More important stuff:
-anti-aircraft missile production (US Patriot production is expected to go up to 600 a year. A year!). I've never seen figures on Russia but they seem well aware of the utility so it was likely a lot higher.
US has nothing like the Pantsir system, which is designed to be economical, with cheap, high performance missiles. No expensive seeker, basically a fast missile guided by impossible to jam commands from the radar and a proximity fuze).
-whether stealth actually works (unclear. You can detect stealth aircraft using bounces to places other than the radar, so called 'multilateration. With satellite comms, you don't even need to set up microwave relays between these sites.)
-degree of dysfunction in western militaries. Oppressing sand people doesn't translate well to contending with an enemy who can't wait but put a small, tiny drone above your unit and blow your entire headquarters section up with a 300mm missile. (Himars, Tornado-U?, beats me what Chinese call theirs). You need completely different tactics, weapons to kill and detect small drones etc. Winning at such a conflict would be hard even if you had an infinite budget and enough competent, serious people.
-whether China gets involved (imo a certainty, China allowing Russia to fall due to a lost conventional war would put more enemy bases on their borders. And allow yanks to embargo them almost totally on gas and oil).
I am certain no one here has ever actually used a fucking FCR or even a operated a boat with a commercial nav radar. All this 'stealth doesn't work' smugposting to portend the sheer stupidity of NATO in developing a white elephant fails to consider the corpus of historical evidence for low observable UCAVs in penetrating contested environments, not to mention literally every Red Flag exercise seeing F35s curbstomp 4.5G unless things are stacked specifically against the F35. Stealth aircraft are incredibly difficult to detect much less differentiate from atmospheric pickup, and not even 2010s tech is able to do variable gain adjustment and track reacquisition. Every nation is either looking to buy or indigenously develop 5G+ stealth planes because right off the bat stealth strangles your opponents aerial inventory and capability. No CAP, CAS or ISR if you can never confirm if even your own airspace is clear and if you lose automatically lose any contest. Ground Based Air Defense spam is cope when GBAD all requires a first track to be established by a radar station and thus is itself subject to the 'contested' matrix outlined above.
This doesnt change (much) the points raised about drones and artillery spam, but that might require a seperate effortpost. Suffice to say, artillery now has to include a wider variety of counter battery threat vectors and drones... well let me just say I am really excited for sci fi lasers to finally manifest in reality.
Carriers are also obsolete against peer forces who are just going to launch a hundred supersonic missiles at them a salvo of strategic air above to give planes something to dodge & overwhelm point defense and simply sink them.
That doesn't prevent them being useful against people who don't have hundreds of good ASMs on hand. That's why Chinese are building two.
If you can make a plane stealthy at a reasonable cost, it's still worth it, because it's going to make it a harder target against simple radar systems.
Multilateration aside which is kinda not talked about much but probably works...
You ever heard of IR sensors ? Yeah, sure, you say you can hide a MW level heat source against the cold sky. No, you can't. Even Yuropoor systems like the Eurofighter have IRST that detects planes up to 50 km from the front.. You think China's unable to manufacture similar sensors and stick one on a high pole in every square 100 kms and connect them by fibre? You think unless there's total overcast, a stealth plane with a 3 MW engine on cruise can just waltz through ?
Detecting IR is 1980s technology. Most air defence now comes with it. America is refitting such on its older warplanes.
Stealth works against countries with bad equipment. That doesn't mean it's going to work against a sophisticated enemy.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Russia demonstrably can’t even make convoys happen efficiently.
The US military would wipe the floor with Russia, even before they burned up the bulk of their forces against a far weaker opponent than the US.
The Russian military underperformed expectations quite badly.
In contrast, the US military wiped the floor with the Iraqis twice. People forget that Saddam had, on paper, one of the best militaries in the world.
It’s easy to focus on the challenges of COIN and forget the massively successful campaigns in IQ and AF that proceeded the occupation phase.
By CNN metrics.
No, export models of Soviet and Western equipment armed with obsolete ammunition operated by Arabs whose average IQ is estimated to be 89. US army cutoff for recruitment back when there was a draft was 85. Anyone under that was just not worth having even in the rear echelon.
By CNN / newspaper chart metrics yes. By any actual metrics, no. It's a laughable claim.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Kind of a rosy assessment of Russian military power given they are bogged down in the poorest European country right now. This whole war can be seen as nothing but a failure by any objective observer. It is pathetic. They thought they could take Ukraine in a week and now we're watching years go by. It is just sad and I was much more worried about Russia before they revealed exactly how weak they are.
Bogged down in the poorest European country
1 ) Ukraine isn't the poorest. Moldova is, iirc.
From less high tech weapons, it got ~1000 tanks, 1000s of IFVs, most of its artillery shells and so on.
Poorest country except it got military equipment on par with the French army, at least artillery wise.
Without that help and those supplies, it'd have been over for Ukraine by fall of '22 probably.
you're also eliding that it gets specialist foreign troops operating air defense and elint equipment. (no, they didn't train Ukes to operate it. It takes years of training just to get basic familiarity. )
but a failure by any objective observer. Yeah, the initial plan A (watch the bribed government scram) was a failure.
Plan B, grind down Ukrainian army to the point they can't go on is ongoing. Even Americans are now admitting it's unwinnable.
But it is also showing how faithless Americans are. Despite all their big words, they're unable to even provide Ukraine with something as basic as air defenses. Richest country in the world can't or won't give out thousands of radar guided missiles. Could it? (honestly don't know, but I suspect it has thousands of Aim-120 which should be adaptable for ground launch)
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The terms of the agreement are right there in your link, can you please point to the one you think obligates the US to guarantee the territorial integrity of Ukraine? As far as I can tell this claim is pure /r/worldnews tier cope crossing the line into blatant lying.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
How hard do you think it would be to decapitate or disfigure the regime without nukes? Like a heart attack gun, but for a country. Drones, lasers, hacking, etcetera. There are many ways to escalate, NATO only has to convince itself that just one of them doesn't require that much courage to pursue. The plans probably already exist, just as a framework, created as practice in the art of developing tactical plans rather than out of expectation that they would ever be used, but they do exist. I'm not saying this will happen, but if Russia does push NATO too far then these options will be seriously considered.
The problem is that logic goes both ways. A state actor could simultaneously collapse the US power grid and destroy the entire US petroleum industry with one submarine and 50 special forces troops.
I don't want to get you on a no-fly list, but purely hypothetically how would one accomplish that with a submarine and Twenty Good Men?
The vast majority of America’s petroleum refining facilities are right on the coast in Louisiana and Texas. That’s why gas prices shot up to 7 dollars a gallon nationwide after hurricane Katrina. Most standard non-nuclear attack submarines can launch ground strike cruise missiles out the torpedo tubes. I won’t get into the other stuff because I don’t want to end up on a watch list either.
I would argue you almost certainly don't need the submarine, and probably don't need 45 of the men.
People do not appreciate how delicate the modern world is, which is why they also do not appreciate how dangerous the culture war is.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
So if they lose they end up being in exactly the same place they are now but for the Russian Empire instead of the Atlanticist Empire?
Even taking your assumptions as true: Russian Empire is worse than Atlanticist Empire anyway.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
There is no deliberate forceful conscription for ethnic minorities in Russia, generally mobilization impacted everybody proportionally to the size of young male population strata(of course on average poorer ones, because of bribing for protection). Large part of Russian forces now consist of people who decided to sign up their life for money and as you can expect more of them would be poor, and like in many other countries Russian minorities are relatively poor(not all of them, Armenians are having it pretty good). There is almost no military tradition among Russians in modern day to counteract this.
More options
Context Copy link
But why would Putin attack the Baltics? The only situation in which I can imagine it making sense for him is if they escalate their own hostility to the point that he has no choice with the alternative being a path that leads to him losing control internally - say, by them engaging in a boots-on-the-ground intervention to aid Ukraine, or a full blockade of Kaliningrad. Such actions would almost certainly be justified by rhetoric like yours, arguing that they must strike the Russians while they are weak because surely Putin will come for them afterwards otherwise, leading to the usual crybully escalation cycle that should be familiar from the CW setting ("They're dangerous! We must punch them! They punched back? See, I told you how dangerous they were! You were an idiot for arguing against punching them! In fact this situation is your fault, because we should have punched harder!").
The man has gone full shitposter in his political afterlife; quotes from him should be treated like the "former British intelligence specialists" Russian channels like parading around claiming that UA collapse is imminent every week.
Well, they did that for America's middle eastern meatgrinders. Besides, Ukraine has shown how much the effectivity of any army is magnified when backed by operational depth and modern C&C (satellites, patrol planes, analysis) that for political reasons can't be touched by their adversary. I imagine the effect would be increased manifold if there were no sanitary barrier of the kind that requires manually preprocessing intel that is passed to Ukraine lest the crown jewels of alliance capabilities leak to an adversary. In a battle of Estonia plus NATO minus non-Estonian NATO meat vs. Russia on Estonian territory I would not bet on the Russians, and I don't think the Russians would either.
I thought we are beyond this already, the same was said before invasion of Ukraine. If anything - why should he not invade? He is already considered a pariah, Russia is sanctioned, NATO already sent a lot of available weapons from their military storage and with other conflicts in Middle East and potential issues with Taiwan he may just try it. Rhetorically Russia already claims that they are effectively at war with NATO so it is also nothing that the Russians themselves would be shocked about.
But this was not even the point of my post, which was focused more on Ukraine and Ukrainians who would be at the mercy of what whatever Putin sees as his pet project and his legacy. They would be the buffer zone, they would be Putin's shocktroops and their role would be to do whatever is needed in order for the Russian core to be as shielded from any negative impacts of regimes decisions as possible. I can imagine imposing some sort of reparations in the same way Soviets did it to East Germany. We can see more pressure for russification and myriads of other things that could ruin the nation culturally, economically and morally. So the point is that just saying "Ukrainians are dying" is not some ultimate argument it seems to be, one always has to also add "compared to what" - as they may continue dying while achieving nothing after "peace" with Russia. Again it would be good to ask people in Luhansk and Donetsk or even people now living in other occupied territories in Ukraine about how happy are they not being "pawns of NATO" but being part of Russian Mir nine years after "peace" negotiated in Minsk. What an upgrade.
People in the know (Mearsheimer had a talk on this in '14, Bill Burns-the ambassador said as much in his leaked 2008 memo etc) have been saying Ukraine is liable to get invaded if US tries to integrate it into NATO.
US:
So who exactly was saying Ukraine won't get attacked?
Russia, repeatedly, for months before the attack (while marshalling troops to the order and conducting exercises). See this or this or this. Similar indications were repeated by Very Respectable Western commentators ("Russia won't invade Ukraine, what would it gain from it?") for the same duration.
Look, unless you're a 13 year old girl, you should probably understand by now that almost anything any government says that's not in an ultimatum is either lies or bullshit. And even the ultimatums can be bullshit, e.g. bluffing. Historical record is full of lies of this kind.
"I don't believe anything until it has been officially denied" is a 19th century saying.
So why this insistence that what is officially being said by people who are unlikely to be privy to the real plans matters ?
What is said in ultimatums (government to government communications) or in secret cables matters far, far more. Anything for public consumption is typically fake.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
For the same reasons as Russia invaded Ukraine? Both actual reasons and claimed reasons would be recycled.
Because... they were client states where a pro-Russian government was removed by a Western-backed revolution with subsequent repression of the remaining pro-Russian elements? Because they were hosting strategically important Russian military bases and threatening to seize/expel them? Because they were about to ramp up their integration with US military structures and an intervention may yet preempt that? None of these justifications are applicable.
The only relevant ones could be blockade of already Russian-held territories (water supply to Crimea was a factor in the 2022 escalation, and a blockade of Kaliningrad would be more stark since there are fewer alternative routes to supply it), disenfrachisement of Russian speakers (arguably that ship has already sailed, they haven't been particularly enfranchised in the Baltics in a long time) and interference with transit of goods/resources as with the Ukrainian gas siphoning story (which is less relevant because the Western Europeans are probably not going to resume buying gas for a long time, and unlike Ukraine the Baltics are not so lawless that widespread stealing is likely). The Kaliningrad case would probably be a sufficient motivation, but there the ball is entirely in the Baltic court. The Russian coethnics story was always a pretext for public consumption that didn't actually figure much into the decision whether to go to war (they're getting squeezed plenty in Central Asia too, and yet Kazakhstan remains uninvaded), and as I mentioned the transit story seems to be largely moot now.
As a Motte-goer, I assume you shake your head over pronouncements of the form "Trump will enact a coup and become dictator", which are generally based on a sort of understanding that it's disloyal to the in-group to have any sort of nuanced understanding of why or how the outgroup does things. (Though maybe not, given how much air analysis of similar depth gets when it is red-against-blue?) Do you not see that "Putin will invade the Baltics" is the same sort of "of course the outgroup will do the maximally evil thing, they are motivated by evil after all" reasoning?
this is applicable, and happened in Baltics, just a bit earlier
And none of this were real reason for invasion of Ukraine (in my opinion, I may be wrong - or you may simply disagree about interpretation of situation).
Though here I agree.
This is not maximally evil thing Putin could do, I can imagine far more evil ones.
And "Russia will invade the Ukraine, then Baltics, then maybe Poland" is prediction dating back to Georgia-Russia war. And still, I would not treat it as likeliest or obvious - but as one of worse scenarios. But as being possible if things will go horribly wrong. I would note that this opinion is relatively well shared in Poland, even postcommunist and anti-Ukraine parties were supporting military builtup and fixing our military. Left one had relatively antimilitary opinion, in they program they suggested spending 3% of GDP on military without increase to 4% as some suggested.
Expecting Russian empire to try invading neighbours when possible is so far fairly well working bet, over last centuries - and there is no indicator that they plan to change it any time soon. Note my prediction is "there is a real risk of Russia invading NATO country", this is not specific to Putin. I have no great illusion that Putin disappearing would make things much better.
Also in response to @georgioz's parallel answer, if you predict that a bear will shit in the woods, then put on a jetpack and fly to the moon, the first prediction coming true does not make the second and third any more likely - even if you parade around any number of people who were absolutely insistent that the bear will never do any of the three things. There were many good reasons for them to go for Ukraine, and few reasons against (with the main ones, their revealed ineptitude and everything downstream from it, being one that they presumably were genuinely unaware of).
The military base reason loses weight if the base is already gone, and likewise none of those states have had Russian client governments since around 1990. Indeed, I think that in '91 it was eminently reasonable to expect a Russian invasion in the Baltics, but not in 2024. Conversely, if 30 years had elapsed after Maidan with nothing happening, the Russian bases in Ukraine were long gone, the ethnically Russian population thoroughly sidelined and Ukraine had joined NATO, I would also confidently predict Russia would not invade anymore.
What do you think was the reason, then?
Sure, Trump was also generally not predicted to construct the Torment Nexus. It seems like the maximally evil thing that is still somewhat plausible and more importantly demands concrete action from Western governments and citizens.
I don't think "the whole country believes this" is a particularly strong argument. There are some pretty out-there things generally believed in particular countries, and in the case of Poland there are entrenched interests quite interested in nurturing that particular belief. Don't most Poles also still actually believe that the Smolensk plane crash was orchestrated by Putin?
Well, I kept hearing from people that Georgia-Russia war is not going to happen, that supposed Russian invasion is fake and they are solely local rebels (in 2014), that Russia surely will not launch full scale invasion and any predictions about it is NATO hoax and vile russophobia and so on.
I am pretty sure that if Russia would invade Estonia people will keep telling me that idea of Russia invading Poland is absurd.
Revanchism for fall of USSR, attempt by Putin to secure his place in history and genuine belief that it will be a cakewalk.
Not claiming that, and I am aware of that. (anyone who thinks it is a strong argument should familiarise themself with what entire country believes in Russia, Israel, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Japan and Canada - this should be enough for any person to bring several blatantly idiotic widely shared beliefs).
But I mentioned it that it is not some personal witchy insanity. At the very least it is a widespread paranoid reaction to our history.
Would need to recheck but AFAIK "most" was never true (not checked this one, prefer to not get irritated - Smoleńsk was so absurd humiliating fractal fuckup that it is hard to find something comparably embarrassing in Polish history).
Well, if PO, PIS, Lewica, Tusk, Kaczyński, Miller and basically all politicians and parties (and other groups) actually agree on something it is quite strong hint that either something is widely agreed to be actually a good idea or South Korean arms manufacturers deployed mind control beams.
Though actually "surely as fuck we do not want to be invaded by Russia again, and event faint chance of that is enough to go into alarm mode" counts as "entrenched interests" in Poland.
I think you are applying inappropriate Dunbarian intuitions to the output of an algorithm that feeds on billions of people here. "Someone said X" is really not a statement that is surprising or has any information content, and consequently "I kept hearing X" is not surprising either as long as some entity stands to benefit (clicks, engagement, whatever) from funnelling that opinion to you.
The third one seems plausible enough, but do you have any concrete evidence for the former two? Is there something you consider sufficient proof that the former were not reasons or at least not primary reasons, or is this an irrefutable belief?
That's fair, but where for one people paranoid overreaction to their own history might still be arguably adaptive as a meta-reasoning, it seems like insanity for others to go along with it.
I checked and apparently it's only about ~35% believing in it to ca. 45% not, though the last polls are from before the war and the tendency has been slightly rising. Mea culpa for assuming it is more.
It seems to me that playing up the Russian threat has been unambiguously good for Poland's position in European politics, since as long as they position themselves as an steadfast, and morally unassailable due to personal trauma, bulwark against Russia within the EU, this assures them American backing that is qualitatively almost comparable to that given to Israel, even it's quantatively far from the latter. During the PiS years there was tremendous appetite in the rest of Europe to punish Poland somehow, for ideological nonalignment, non-cooperation within EU structures such as refusal to participate in refugee redistribution, trade scuffles with Germany, environmentalist misdeeds etc.; somehow these never went anywhere, and more than once I heard sentiments like "cracking down on Poland would just give Putin what he wants" fielded to defend that. Now there is talk that Poland is or might become the strongest land army in Europe, and their overall prestige and weight has risen in particular at the expense of their other historic enemy to the West. Surely this is tremendously appealing to politicians, who dedicate their lives to the pursuit of prestige and power.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Yeah. I mean, it would seem to be an obvious from even a cursory reading of Russian history that the one tendency that has stayed from Muscovy times to imperial times to Soviet times to current times has been the continuous tendency for expansion, either through direct annexation or the acquisition of extremely closely held client states. The only expections have been leaders who have been willing to permit territorial contraction for revolutionary purposes or to acquire personal power, and these leaders have then later been greatly denigrated due to this. The finishing of one annexation has generally just tended to be the beginning of the planning of the next acquisition. Much of the "aw, why be so scared of Russia? They clearly have very good reasons for whatever heist they're pulling now" discourse just comes off as an attempt to obfuscate this very obvious pattern.
You can basically say this about almost any state that existed for several centuries. International anarchy wasn't any different elsewhere. Moscow state was just one of the most successful at this up to the 20th century.
There are plenty of the oldest states with centuries (heck, millenia) of continuity that have not done anything interesting for a century or two. (Switzerland. Sweden. Denmark.)
But let's grant it true for great powers and aspirants. The realist argument of international anarchy doesn't really favor any side: as long as any country has sought keep or obtain greater status by periodical war, the neighbors of the same country have been wary of such attempts, or they have been its willing dominions, or its already conquered unwilling puppets. In international anarchy, it is natural for Russia's neighbors to seek to preempt Russian actions (unless Russia can win them with soft power).
More options
Context Copy link
The difference is that Russia is still doing it. And to a lesser extent so is China.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The Baltic offensive theory isn’t watertight. For example, CIA and MI6 intelligence is clearly good enough inside Russia to have been able to predict the Ukraine invasion several months in advance. We can only assume investment (both in covert sources and hacking/signals intelligence) has been strengthened since then.
At very short notice NATO could send an expeditionary force to the Baltics of at least 150,000 men. Even the European Union + UK, if America decided not to participate, could field at very short notice perhaps 75-80,000 men (UK 10-15k, France 20-25k etc). Given how much elite Russian military experience was killed in the first few months of Ukraine that’s a relatively tough foe for Russia.
The ‘Baltic Blitzkrieg’ scenario therefore only works if either Russia is able to plan, stage and execute the operation without any signs being intercepted by the West, or if NATO countries don’t even care to send forces to the Baltics to scare Putin off, which seems unlikely given it’s already happening.
True enough, if it happened today, or next year. But who knows about 2030, or 2035?
Russo-Georgian war happened in 2008. The war in Donetsk started in 2014. The current war started in 2022. As far as the political climate is concerned, a great many things may change in 6 years.
More options
Context Copy link
I agree that if NATO takes proper steps then invasion will not be a clear success for Russia.
It does not mean at all that Russia will not invade.
More options
Context Copy link
It might depend on what level of salami slicing is attempted. Estonia is a very soft target; there doesn't need to be some massive build-up of force to seize most or all of it. So let's say you have a normal force distribution at standard readiness in the Leningrad Military District. All of a sudden the wire comes in - ethnic Russians have been killed by the government of Estonia, and the rest need immediate protection to prevent the same! It's only a 200 km drive to Tallinn from the border. There are negligible forces in your way. How much preparation is actually needed at this point?
I would like to highlight that one reason the Ukrainians thought the Russians were not actually going to invade was that reports of the Russian "forward" buildup especially in Belarus indicated extremely poor readiness and logistical buildup, past the point of sustainment for a narrow-deep or wide-shallow push, much less the wide-deep required for the Kyiv assault. Any presumption that the LMD has a high force readiness is... well I think the 4 GTD and 2 MRD around Moscow are the only ones actually cited as a fully kitted and prepared units, with everyone else basically being your conscript cadre fillout. I really don't see the balloon rising in your specific scenario without it being telegraphed. Wagners thunder run to Moscow (Prigozhin my beloved) was not telegraphed at all and thats what caught Rostov totally unaware.
edited to rephrase a term
More options
Context Copy link
But then there would be a huge retaliation from NATO that would make NATO's support for Ukraine look rather restrained by comparison (and maybe it kinda was).
Would there be? Does NATO risk nuclear war for the sake of Estonia?
What if it's just a border incursion? The Russians penetrate some 20 or 30 km and then stop. What if it's just shelling or a few bombs dropped on military bases?
I don't think this is something particularly likely, but the Russians might think it valuable to test the waters on how united NATO really is, especially if Trump is elected again.
I think it's probably not a coincidence that Russia waited until after Trump left office to invade Ukraine. I realize that sounds crazy to most MSNBC watchers. At the very least, it seems like they were unaffected by who the US president is.
Russia waited until after the pandemic, then waited a bit longer because the Chinese wouldn't support an invasion that could disrupt the Beijing Winter Olympics. I don't think we can draw any conclusions about their preferred timing via-a-viz US domestic politics. Pre-pandemic conventional wisdom among the "Trump will let the Ruzzians invade NATO because Putin owns him" crowd was that the best time for Putin to start shit was after the 2020 election.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
If NATO turn out to be such pussies that they're afraid of shitkicking a platoon of vatniks salami slicing into an ally then honestly kudos to Russia, they deserve the win. NATO doesn't get to pretend they're the biggest boys on the block if Putin can just say 'I DECLARE NUKE' and the NATO cowards roll over to sacrifice their smaller members.
Of course, this brings us full circle to whether it was a good idea to add a country like Estonia to NATO when they offer almost nothing in return. The reason to add Estonia isn't to improve the alliance, it's to put a thumb in Russia's eye and attempt to create a definitive anti-Russian border rather than keeping the buffer-state model in place. Is that a good idea? I don't know, that's above my pay grade, but it's definitely a stupid idea if you're not actually willing to bleed for Estonians. Any time you lack the resolve to keep a commitment, you should not make that commitment.
Charitably, the acceptance of Estonias request to join NATO is itself a signal that NATO would resolve to make the commitment to defend Estonia or any other invoker of Article 5. Estonia asked to join NATO because Russia has attacked the Baltics and subjugated them, not because the Baltics really just want to stick it to the poor innocent Russians.
Others here have pointed out that if not NATO we would likely see the Baltics aggressively attempt to form a different form of defensive alliance, like a new Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth with Karelia DLC. Again, it really must be pointed out that most of these states were aggressively TRYING to join NATO, not coerced into it by shady DGSE agents. The amount of charity extended to Russian intentions strains the boundaries of good faith presumptions, much less credibility.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The ‘facts’ here seem obvious, and don’t necessarily favor either side’s story:
The ‘West’ is bleeding Russia for cheap and with no military or civilian casualties, but military experience is useful for an army and the Russian conscripts are largely Central Asian peasants, not higher IQ Muscovites and Peterburgians whose loss would actually damage Russia’s long term prospects. On the other hand, many high IQ Russians in tech and other industries have fled, there has been a brain drain (which was already happening before the war and has now accelerated). Russia has no good long term prospects. The birth rate is shit, demographically the Muslims from Central Asia are ascendant, the culture certainly isn’t ’based and trad’, and were still talking about a relatively poor country (certainly by Western standards) on every indicator.
Russia’s industrial capacity has improved, and as someone here said last week re. Wirecard, if desperation even slightly reduces Russian corruption, that’s a very bad thing for the West in the long term since elite Russians are very competent when not hamstrung by their own corrupt tendencies. On the other hand, Russia’s defense export business has declined while that of core Western provinces like France and South Korea has increased, which is good for the West both economically and in terms of building up production capacity for future conflict.
While the lack of munitions production capacity in the US, UK and much of Western Europe has been noted, it is slowly starting to be rectified. Consider the counterfactual where we don’t ‘realize’ this until we’re about to fight China. 10 or 15 years from now the Ukraine war will have led to a major increase in Western defense production capacity, which is more useful against the primary threat. Better to find out the stores are empty in a largely irrelevant little post-Soviet proxy conflict with Putin than in the big war everyone knows could be coming.
While fighting this war is genuinely disastrous for the Ukrainian people for the many reasons raised in this thread, they seem to want to do it. This can’t merely be dismissed or ignored, there seems to be a genuinely popular will to resist the Russians. The West predicted Kiev would fall in 3 days, literally pulling out embassy staff temporarily so they didn’t accidentally die and cause a diplomatic incident with Russia as new landlord. The Ukrainian army didn’t collapse. Therefore game theoretic reasons why they’re retarded are manifestly subjugated to romantic or other desires for nationalism (a useful lesson in any case).
My opinion? Thy shall know them by their fruits. Russia is a shithole that most intelligent and wealthy people are fleeing, at least in part. It simply isn’t a good place to live, it has no glorious civilizational trajectory, and it’s an afterthought in the broader geopolitical conflict with China. Ukraine is a failed country with a sublevel tier GDP (one of the worst IQ to GDP/capita ratios in the entire world) that has no future. But, they want to fight and to die, so I don’t think giving them some old munitions is really disastrous for the West.
Russian aggression has a lot to do with why Ukraine's economy is doing so badly, I should think.
Ukraine was also poor before war.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The moment Israel got into any danger, Ukraine basically lost this war. Big bad brainwashed trump republicans holding off the aid is just a cope narrative to avoid discussing the real intended beneficiary of the air defense systems. Those systems will never go to Ukraine as they are needed to protect Israel.
The actual reason is that the air defense systems won’t really work well or efficiently for Ukraine. Air defense is uniquely viable in Israel because Israel is extremely small and quite rich, and so a density of systems is possible that wouldn’t even be viable somewhere like Germany or France, let alone a more sparsely populated Western country like the US, let alone a poor and sparsely populated country like Ukraine. Also, Russians aren’t firing homemade Hamas dumb rockets vaguely targeted toward Israel; defending against more modern missiles is harder and even in the recent attack a few Iranian missiles seem to have gotten through into Israel.
For Ukraine, while air defence against drones and cruise misiles is important, keeping Russian bombers away from the frontlines is absolutely crucial. It’s quite clear that Russia can’t mass produce the first in numbers big enough to really win the war. But they have a world class air force and basically infinite supply of bombs to be retrofitted as glide bombs if there is no concern for planes getting shut down.
If the Russian air force gets free rein over the frontline then the war is over. Due to a mix of inherited Soviet air defense (which was quite substantial as Soviet western armies had enormous stockpiles from what I understand), gifts systems from the west and manpads the Russian planes were essentially missing.
This is changing rapidly right now and there is big panic on the Ukrainian side. It should be visible to the leadership that the loss ratios are becoming untenable and the fortifications just can’t stand.
Itll be interesting to see if the f16s coming soon can change that.
I'll spoil the surprise: they can't. Too little, too late - and Ukraine cannot support or defend the infrastructure required to maintain them in the current state of the war.
More options
Context Copy link
Here’s the problem with F-16s. They need a very long paved runway. The Soviet MiGs they had been using before are designed with filters over the engine intakes, so they can take off from improvised dirt or gravel runways. F-16s can’t do that, the runway has to be paved. That means you can’t move the F-16 squadrons around well or disperse forces, because the number of runways that can host them are very limited. So The two options are: 1. bunch them all up in a couple of runways and wait for them to get blown up with cruise missiles or 2. Base them out of Poland and risk making Poland a party to the conflict in a way that doesn’t easily allow them to claim article 5 if those runways are attacked. Which is why the US has been so hesitant to give them F16s in the first place.
More options
Context Copy link
Certainly “interesting” (I just wish they stop fighting by then so we never have to find out..)
On the one hand, the naive voice in me says if it wasn’t going to be effective (and they didn’t have a good plan for it) then western governments would surely not waste such a valuable piece of tech. But lol.
On the other hand, the other naive voice says that since it has been announced she’s ago, Russians surely took necessary countermeasures. But again, lol.
F16 valuable tech? Its going to be European Block 15 MLU, worse even than 90s block 50s which were a last gasp of GodDamn before getting bought by LockMart.
The main benefit of the F16 isnt its high technology, better than a mig29 though it may be, but just how fucking many of them there are. NATO is hurting for artillery for Ukraine because the entire NATO conops is precision air dominance, making them stuffed to the gills with excess AIM 120 and AMRAAMS to go on the hundreds of airframes slated for the boneyards. I doubt the paltry number will make a difference for ground ops, but the A2 space will be much less free for Russians .
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Propaganda about female infidelity while men die in the trenches is as old as language has been invented. Even now there are constant jokes about Navy wives being Coastie girlfriends, and thats peacetime. This propaganda is more for internal consumption of the propaganda generator (look how stupid they are for continuing to fight us!) instead of the propaganda receiver.
I also think 'residents want to part of russia anyways' is pretty disingenuous. Slovyansk and Mariupol both told Russia to fuck off, not to mention Odessa and Kharkiv. Crimea, meaning Sevastapol only, is about the only case where arguing for Russian loyalty is possible, since Donestk and Luhansk needed Little Green Men to invade. Nevertheless, Donestk and aluhansk likely hold little love for Kyiv, so Novorissiya is still extant.
The simple fact is that Ukrainians aren't fighting for NATO, they're fighting to not he Russia. There is direct evidence of how Russia treated its holdings in Ukraine, with Mariupol being a wasteland and torture centers being set up in Kherson. One can readily calculate that while the west may be hypocrites, the Russians will not be kind masters as weirdly envisioned by anti-progressives.
Without having much of a stake in this discussion, I can confidently tell you that you can go to any bar in Europe or Turkey tonight and signal some affluence as a man and check for yourself if the rumours about Ukrainian women are correct.
Honestly, I am very curious to see what the difference between this and the pre-war state was. Every fucking bar in Dubai was filled with anorexic slavs and Chinese, and my understanding was that most hotel bars in Central Europe were the same. My understanding of London at least is that the local watering holes have not seen a notable uptick of Ukrainian women, and the current state of Tinder is that of a bot farm. I don't doubt that the possibility is VERY strong that Georgia Poland Germany and Turkey are filled with hot and single Slavs, but I really have no direct evidence.
For my own contribution of evidence, Tel Aviv, Bali and Pattaya in 2023 had a surplus of Russians, but those were largely coupled (singles in Tel Aviv but those were just young sluts). I saw no difference in Hong Kong, Singapore, Bangkok, Shenzhen, Dubai, KL. Am quite interested to hear field reports from others.
The kind of Ukrainian woman who wanted to make quick money or find a rich Arab/Chinese/etc man to be a mistress to would have left as easily in 2019 as in 2023. And of course the Belarusian contingent is still substantial despite no official involvement in the war from that country. And the same is true on a proportional basis for other countries like Moldova and so on.
Again I think these cultures are just more tolerant of what is effectively prostitution. Perhaps not openly but on some level. I spend time regularly in the cities you mention (Dubai, KL, Singapore, Bangkok) where hookers are extremely noticeable (30-40% of the female customers at Nobu KL lol) and even at the most expensive places it’s very rare to find white English or American prostitutes. I once had breakfast next to an African American woman I strongly suspect was a working girl in Singapore, but that’s an edge case.
Almost half of Europeans are Slavic and there would have been much more than half without commies, they are also the reason why slavs are so much poorer than westerners. So if you look at the poor white women population numbers slavs dominate, you don't need some cultural effects for this.
More options
Context Copy link
Moldovans seem to the furthest east it goes. Maybe something about Tito inspires surprising chasteness in the mountain slavs, much to my disappointment.
Edited my comment to add another observation, but yeah, it’s an interesting topic. You can’t be a woman in these places without at least observing the dynamics here. My guess is that Slavs have almost single handedly made prostitution non-viable in a lot of these wealthier EM cities for American and Western European women since they absorb pretty much all the demand for blonde white women, and it’s not like the average Chinese or Qatari businessman cares much about whether his blondes are Belarusian or, like, Scottish or something. At the top top end the sheikhs and billionaires might order models or OnlyFans girls, but in terms of who you see around, pretty much all white prostitutes are from the Slavic world.
My own experience is that the only non-slav white women are south american, who for geographical reasons are rarely present in these eastern markets. Market forces could also make it fairly obvious that a pretty western european can find easier ways to make and maintain their money compared to the honestly rough life of an international working girl.
My observations concur in that the top end of the onlyfans/influencer girls are indeed imported by sheikhs, but a strange aspect there is the negative bargaining power of slavs in that specific top end . Perhaps it is my specific circles of depravity, but specifically Australian, South African Irish stewardesses were in demand for whites, with a surprising amount of African influencers being pushed.
And as again, my mountain slav waifu remains elusive.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
But again, that was true of Ukrainians and Russians in every expensive bar in Dubai or Hong Kong for decades before this war. These are some of the top exporters of working girls. Some of the stories about 90s Moscow are also wild.
Prostitution or extreme hypergamy just seems to be more socially acceptable in these Slavic cultures than in others.
Yes of course. Syria and Afghanistan experienced devastation and migration outflows at a much bigger scale yet you don’t see many Syrian or Afghan prostitutes/gold diggers.
My point wasn’t that this situation didn’t exist before the war. It’s that, this situation exists! It got hyper turbo charged because of the war. It can’t be dismissed as silly propaganda
The evidence presented can be dismissed as silly propaganda. The original comment had a link to tweet with evidence that consisted of some claims and 4 photos presumably from Tinder. Same level of evidence would have been present before the war. Claims "go to any bar in Europe" are cheap.
At minimum, one would need statistics to prove it. (Recollections of experiences with/observing presumed hookers in MENA countries and engaging in hypotheses about cultural factors of mountain Slaves does not count as interrogating the evidence.) How many of Ukrainians in Europe are women? Apparently approx 4 million. How many relative to respective demographics stayed in Ukraine? Apparently there was 12 million women aged 14-54 in Ukraine in 2018. Assuming everyone of the 4 million were women from the 12 million, it is a Large fraction, but not all or a majority. More exact statistics would be needed, because I presume there are kids and grandmas included in the 4 million. How many of the women of relevant are single, and how many are engaging in low-grade prostitution, how many are engaging more chaste forms of dating? Evidence not easily found. How many of sex workers are voluntary versus coerced? Evidence not easily found.
edited to clarify: i am at zero level claiming my surfing of telegrams or field reports is in any way substantive evidence. please do not under any circumstance in any conversation or discussion here or outside say 'hey this pervo didn't see to many Ukie hookers around so they're all chaste damsels' or whatever.
Unedited text: I am, in all an explicit seriousness, appreciative of any sincere longitudinal or latitudinal 'study' proving that slavs - ukrainian or russian or whatever - are present in greater numbers to disrupt relationship or, more specific to my curiosity, sex worker markets.
Intuitively it makes perfect sense that we SHOULD see more hot single Ukrainians seeking comfort in the wallets of generous men within the new host countries they reside in, others have accurately noted that infidelity and hypergamy seem to be more present in Eastern Europeans sui generis.
BUT In my own explicit attempts to canvass the issue, I have observed zero uptick in Ukrainians in any of the markets I am aware of, including the ostensible hotbed of Dubai. I recognize that the physical distance means I'm not seeing refugees, but a quick gander at punter boards all don't see a surplus of Ukrainians at all.
If I am forced to drag this back to the culture war, where we boo Ukrainian men for being so stupid to die for NATO while their women shack up with lecherous exploitative Germans or Finns or whatever, I can confidently say I have NOT actually seen this in my depraved circles. Admittedly my own research for that is EXTREMELY low grade, but come on surely we would have at least a shitload of Polish or English forums complaining about Ukrainians stealing their blokes!
More options
Context Copy link
Do you normally refuse to entertain any opinions based on your own experiences as long as someone did not go through the trouble of collecting or locating almost impossible to find data? Or is this an isolated demand for rigour you are applying to this specific subject?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The syrian and afghan prostitutes/gold diggers don't exist because they get stoned to death by their family members for stepping outside without a veil. This exaggerations is only a mild one, any requests for muslim working girls is met with extreme deflection due to scarcity of supply (there is also the aforementioned cultural 'acceptance' of sex work extant in other cultures that 2rafa highlighted, which does play a contributing though not exhaustive part).
The exception is Southeast Asia. A man can do EXTREMELY well passing as Arab to the local muslimahs, who if anything get praise for managing to sleep with an Arab.
I fail to see how this goes against anything I have said.
It’s trivial to observe that due to cultural factors eastern Slavic women have a tendency to easily become gold diggers or prostitutes under certain adverse conditions, while for example Muslim women don’t have this tendency under even more extreme adverse conditions. Your male relatives being prepared to use violence to keep your sexual purity is one of these cultural factors.
This doesn’t distract from my point at all.
Slavs are sluts and while Muslims are chaste (zero value judgment to those appellations) seems somewhat reductive but I do wonder if the axis is 'purity vs starvation' as opposed to innate sexual proclivities in the differing cultures. This is an idle thought not worth expending too many brain cells on; at least within the confined of this topics original bearing which I have risked derailing by thoughtlessly discussing perversions.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Exactly! I am an unashamed punter, so I can claim to have direct observable experience with the working girls in various countries, and so I am legit curious if the slavs (highest point on the price to quality curve) have increased in quantity. Cheaper slavs is generally a good thing for punters looking for a good time.
Can't comment on the hypergamy, I think thats a function of economics - the Dubai scene seems to indicate Slavs are actually more circumspect than other participants, surprisingly.
More options
Context Copy link
Socially acceptable? I don't get that impression. I would expect there to be more slut shaming in Russia than in Slovakia or Poland (are these the "others" you've been referring to?).
Can't be slutshamed in Russia if you snag a German husband!
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Who is saying that? Maybe someone. On this forum, the idea that Russia is some sort of right-wing paradise has been debunked many times. For one, Russia practices a model of top-down state control that aligns tightly with the modern left. The reality is that Russia is neither right nor left by American standards and is not a useful model to either party.
You can be anti-war without being pro-Russia. And you can also recognize that Russian victory is preferable to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of additional Ukrainian men. And even if you don't recognize this, Russia might win anyway.
Will Russia be kind masters of Ukrainian territories? I don't know. It won't be a paradise. But it beats dying in a ditch. And even if you personally don't think so, you have no moral right to condemn other people to die in a ditch against their will.
It's bad when criminals steal priceless things. If you can't prevent them from doing so, you can at least make them pay a high price, and deal them a grievous wound which will make it harder to do the same thing again.
More options
Context Copy link
True. Yet the arguments that amount "it doesn't make sense for Ukraine to fight, the peace would be a better deal for them" keep coming back in some form of other. The level of benevolence of Russian masters directly contributes to calculation of the cost of the peace.
More options
Context Copy link
Similarly you have no moral right to decry people who wish to fight against an aggressor. This presumption that being Russian beats dying in a ditch is a tautology. Perhaps there is a state where you don't die in a ditch, having fought off the Russians. Perhaps there is a state that you have died in a ditch for nothing and Russia reigns supreme forever. But presuming an inevitable Russian victory as the starting point for discussion betrays biases that colour all points made downstream.
The point remains that people have choice: Ukraine govt chose to fight against Russia, Western govt chose to support a degree of that fight, and Russia agreed to fight against a mildly empowered enemy. Screeching 'just surrender you Ukrainian stooges' is insulting, just as it is insulting to scream 'just surrender you Palestinian puppets'.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I've said it before, I'll say it again: bleeding Russia is on sale right at an amazing discount right now, so we're buying a bit.
"But [list of reasons why long term Ukraine is screwed, won't be able to get back lost territory, etc, etc]." Yeah, sure. Also Russia is exhausting itself at a very small cost to the American taxpayer.
If Russia spends years grinding away to a standstill in Ukraine, then they won't have the ability to attack any further anytime soon.
And very optimistically, it serves as a warning to other countries wanting to invade their neighbors. If they badly desire a drawn out conflict that drains their resources for no obvious gain, we'll give it to them.
It serves as a warning to other countries wanting to antagonise their much bigger stronger neighbours relying on western support. Your country will be decimated and in the end you will eventually be forgotten for some other geopolitical priority and lose anyway.
I don't think it's fair to say that Ukraine antagonized Russia. They insisted upon their sovereignty. They refused to be bullied. They refused to be conquered. That's not antagonizing, that's sticking up for oneself.
I do, more so the USA and their puppets in Ukraine antagonized Russia.
No such thing.
What is this, a playground? This is realpolitik.
More options
Context Copy link
You can have your way. It serves as a warning to other countries wanting to “insist upon their sovereignty”. Does this make it any better?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I'm as pro-Ukraine as they get, but this point never seemed correct to me. Russia will be able to reconstitute itself 5-10 years max after the war is over. Rebuilding doesn't take that long. And we're mostly just burning through Russia's legacy Soviet stockpile, which would have become more and more obsolete anyways as time passed by. Even the long-term damage Russia will experience from sanctions and the like won't matter much, since Russia isn't really a long-term threat like China is.
The brain drain impact becomes more severe with time. The longer the war, the harder it is to rebuild because emigrants start to settle down in their host countries and there's less reason for them to return. Anecdotally, 2 years ago my programmer friend and his wife planned to go back after the war ends and now they are looking to buy a house and start a family here in Canada.
Sure, I have a Russian chick in my work who came to the US long before the war. She had originally intended to perhaps return to Russia one day, but the increasing totalitarianism and lack of white collar opportunities are making that vanishingly unlikely in her eyes.
That said, the benefits that the US gains from this type of thing are really quite tiny. Russia didn't have much of a good future before the invasion, and it's only gotten worse afterwards, but Russia isn't really a threat in the long-term.
It's the difference between living a block away from a vicious criminal with one leg and living a block away from a vicious criminal with no legs. Every bit of extra disability is nice.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Militarily? It certainly can. An officer corps of 20-years experience takes 20 years to build, and much of Russia's institutional experience was razed and the current crop have been resorting to much lower-level operational designs than previously done- the current generation of new direct leaders is going to have to unlearn trench infantry tactics to relearn actual Russian manevuer warfare doctrine. Similarly, building up a cold war's worth of artillery ammunition stockpiles took the Soviets literal decades, and the Russians don't have the Soviet industrial base to do so with.
Military hardware wise, also yes, in various categories. The Russian production rates of aircraft are, well, bad, and while the drone economy is a booming, it doesn't exactly enable the sort of deep-strike operations that Russia started the war off with. The naval losses will take a similarly long time to build. And while Russia can absolutely bring out raw numbers of reactivated obsolescent tanks to pad the numbers, this is the reminder that they weren't even able to get a meaningful production run of the Armata before it went back behind the lines to hide out the war. Any production run of modern tanks will be from a much deeper pit than they hadn't gotten out of before they started digging themselves into the war.
The bigger issue for the Russian military-industrial complex is the Russian arms export industry. It's been struggling for awhile, and appears to be cratering to a bare select few clients since, especially as the Russians have had clear trouble both honoring various contracts in favor of supplying their own forces. Given both the role that Russian arms exports plays in its foreign policy, and the long trail times for being displaced, one of the key Russian funding models for managing the costs of the industry is going out the window, with the longer it's out the worse it will be. Russia's ability to rebuild its arms market share is... probably dead, as people with needs will have gone elsewhere, and people with resources will have more promising partners to work with. Rather than the post-cold-war T-72 sales and such, expect Russia to be one of many drone providers, a much less lucrative and much more crowded market.
You seem like a Perun-watcher. I watch him too. He's great.
I should have specified a bit more clearly: Russia will be able to reconstitute the majority of its combat capacity in 5-10 years. There will be some lingering areas that take longer of course, but people are acting like Russia is going to be incapable of launching another invasion for 20+ years. The US army was severely battered after Vietnam, yet it reconstituted itself very effectively in 18 years to curbstomp Saddam in '91. It probably could have done so a lot earlier too.
This seems like it would be referencing NCOs, but Russia never had a robust and empowered NCO contingent. It's always been a very top-heavy organization relative to other militaries. This conflict practically erased the reforms trying to implement the Battalion Tactical Group as a coherent fighting unit, but in many ways this conflict has been a return to the basics for Russia. It's a big stupid artillery-centric army that tries to solve problems by blasting them with a truckload of artillery and frontal assaults using infiltration tactics in good scenarios and cannonfodder kamikazes in bad ones. In other words, there's not really a lot to relearn here.
Both the Russian aerospace forces and its navy would be irrelevant in any larger conflict with the West. It might be relevant if Trump causes NATO to collapse and Russia manages it's diplomacy to 1v1 a country like Finland, but otherwise it was never much of threat.
Yes, this is definitely happening. As of now this market share is mostly going to countries like France and South Korea, but in the long run it will likely go to China which will probably be a lot worse simply since they're more of a long term threat.
He is. Strongly endorsed for anyone interested in a non-American/non-European perspective from another hemisphere, and also anyone who for some strange reason has personal interest in how militaries are designed and planned for.
I concur with this recalibration, and your other points as well. I think a 5 year recovery is too short, and a 20 year too long, but 10 years is quite reasonable in general terms.
It's also one reason I don't expect the Europeans to cease support for Ukraine even if the US does, as the 10-year rebuilding point functionally starts when Ukraine ceases to cause more attrition of the important capabilities than Russia builds in a year, and the advent of drones to strike airbases / strategic infrastructure suggests that will be when the conflict more or less formally ends, or just before. Every additional year the Ukrainians hold out is a year the Europeans can continue their own military reconstitution (which itself may take the 5/10/15 year timeframe), and as the European further expand their capability, the more they can support Ukraine to prolong to further expand the European capability.
Actually a reference to the officer corps.
One of the key moments in the first year of the war that underlined to me just how bad the conflict was going to be for the Russian military as an institution was the fate of the pre-war officer corps. It's been noted in the past that much of the pre-war NATO-trained first generation of Ukrainians who have been fighting from the start have since died, but the Russian officer corps not only was devastated in the course of the conflict- see the number of generals who died early on, or the Ukrainian precision campaign against identified officer locations- but their training institutions as well. One of the (many) short-sighted things Putin did in an effort to put off having to invoke conscription was cannabilize his training units to fill the front lines.
For those unaware, the Russians don't (didn't) operate under a training-base model like the US, where soldiers would go to an installation dedicated for training before moving to the installation with their home unit. Instead, every major Russian formation had its training units built-in, where the conscripts would directly report to the main unit and be a part of the detachment before going to a 'normal' position. The implication of this is that when Putin had these training units deployed to the front line, it killed not only many of the students, but the cadres teaching them as well. This was the root of some of those videos around the first mobilization of conscripts arriving at bases and receiving next to no training before deploying to the front line- the teachers who should have been there were either dead or already forward.
As a result of both of these dynamics- the culling campaign and the loss of the cadre generation- Russia's military has lost so much institutional knowledge, and what the replacements are learning instead isn't necessarily 'better', but rather a selection effect of what works in the current, extremely atypical context. You rightly note that the Battalion Tactical Group has died- and that was relevant as the Russian strategy relied on easy-to-mobilize BTGs as the modular deployable option for various conflict scenarios- but it also goes further than that. The Russian-NATO conflict strategy typically relied on a Russian war of maneuver to rapidly attack before the US could mobilize and intervene at scale; however, the current rising war generation is one trained and pruned for slow, attritional trench warfare. And while they will certainly do that far better than the Americans, that is also exactly the wrong strategy to take against a maritime/air power dependent power like the US who- by expeditionary necessity- will be coming in behind other people's front lines. The entire Russian rapid aggression strategy was to pre-empt the American ability to enter a theater, but for the next twenty years it's going to be in the hands of people whose formative/career defining experience is closer to WW1 with drones.
That's not nothing- and that could easily be very relevant in various types of conflicts and there will be countless posts in the future of how the Russian lived experience is worth more than the American inexperience- but WW1 with drones is a strategic model that heavily, heavily favors the American strategic model of not fighting WW1 yourself, but helping someone else fight it on your behalf.
There's also a point/argument that big dumb artillery armies are as much on their way out as the Airforce-models, and for the same reason- drones and long-range fires. One of the most surprising things about the HIMARs injection into the war wasn't how much damage it did to Russia artillery stocks directly, but how much it throttled the Russian throughput of ammo-to-guns despite how few launchers were actually in the Ukrainian possession. The volume and scale of ammunition required to keep the guns firing with an overmatch to make very slow gains over relatively basic trench systems created a tension of how much is needed versus how vulnerable you are moving that much ammo forward. As drones continue to proliferate, the viability of such major ammunition reserves needed to brute force advances is likely to be a liability as drones get better and better at targeting up and down the value chain from the massed munitions to the massed artillery.
What makes you think that the current conflict is atypical and giving the Russian army the wrong lessons? How would a typical conflict with the correct lessons look like?
Among other things-
-Basically no one in the world has as artillery-centric an army as the Russians, and the implications of drones and precision munitions to throttle artillery at scale mean no one else is going to want to due to the logistical throttling they enable. Russia is using artillery in its current fashion to brute-force the offense because that's what it has on hand and can procure the ammo for, not because the artillery is doing more than alternative investments would have. Even Russia post-war is far more likely to focus on drone power expansion and precision munitions than restocking dumb rounds by the billions.
-Drone and aerial siege warfare is atypical because Russia has benefited from a political, not practical, barrier that wouldn't apply in NATO conflicts. The Russians have, for example, benefited greatly from having air-standoff superiority and both in terms of air-delivered munitions and for being able and willing to use drones to target civil infrastructure while their enemies wouldn't. The Russians would not have the former in a NATO conflict, and the later one-sided nature is due to the restrictions NATO countries impose on the Ukrainians, not restrictions NATO countries impose on themselves. A great deal of Russia's economic-destruction warfare siege alternatively would not work (heavy glide bombs) or would not be unilateral advantages in the economic struggle (infrastructure targetting), but it's the 'what worked' of the current generation.
-The current war has underscored the importance of small short wars rather than long large wars to advance the national interest. Russia is continuing the war primarily because Putin made a series of strategic mistakes most countries do not make, and then doubled down on personal reasons. However, even Putin had aimed and intended a small short war, and the contrast to the long, expensive war that has lost Russia a multitude of strategic assets (military and otherwise) will drive home a lesson to planners in Russia and abroad to limit the scope of future conflicts of choice. However, the operational experience of the Russians in Ukraine will be precisely the opposite, as the small-nimble BTGs were destroyed and grinding attritional slog is what was inefficient but effective.
-The nuclear deterrence modeling and level of economic depence between relevant parties is atypical in general. Most conflicts, and most of Russia's more likely conflicts, are not cases where a nuclear-umbrella power is backing a non-nuclear state being invaded by a nuclear power. Most countries also don't have the backers of one party be economically dependent on imports from the opposing belligerent. Both of these factors significantly shaped the Western support for Ukraine, but either of these factors could easily change in both general conflicts and for Russian conflicts in particular (not least because Europe chose a strategic break from the Russian economic dependence).
A more typical conflict with correct lessons would include... probably not doing this at all, but at the very least a more precision-munition dependent strategy, smaller scope and scale, an emphasis on rapid movement rather than trench warfare, and not relying on nuclear/economic deterence against external backers of the opponent.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Valuable comment and perspective, thanks for responding.
More options
Context Copy link
I think this statement also vindicates decades and billions of dollars of American research and deployment of precision guided weapons: the logistical tail is greatly reduced when you can just, not fire the huge fraction of dumb rounds that would miss anyway.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I think this is the rationale.
It doesn't seem to be working. The sanctions have failed. Utterly. It turns out that China, not the West, is the key trade partner of any commodity producer. Russian oil and commodities freely trade on the world market, and the West is actually afraid to sanction Russia more strongly because it hurts them more than Russia. Sanction Russian metals? Great, welcome to higher prices and China will scoop up all Russian production for cheap.
The bigger issue is that the Russian army is 15% larger than before the war and apparently Russia is outproducing the West in key armaments by large margins.
But even if this strategy was effective, killing 1 million people to "weaken" an adversary is just incredibly evil.
I think this rationale is mostly in defending military aid to Ukraine. In two years, the US spent a total of $75 billion on Ukraine aid. This is like 5% of its military budget over the same time frame. I think it is hard to overstate how much of a bargain that is. If they could keep China occupied for another 10% of their military spending a Machiavellian strategist would of course do this.
And the Ukrainian cause is quite photogenic. They are somewhat democratic and western and fighting against annexation by a much larger warmonger. Much better than previous allies the US supported against the USSR, like the Mujaheddin.
If the US was smuggling a nuke into St Petersburg and detonated it there to weaken Russia, that would be incredibly evil, yes. But this is not what is happening.
Forget about the small scale conflict of 2014. Putin has no moral claim to occupy Kiev. He is the aggressor in this conflict. NATO is not mind-controlling the Ukrainians. They want to continue to fight, foolishly dreaming of reclaiming every square meter of their country from 2014 back. I think that they might be better served by pursuing a negotiated peace where they cede the occupied parts and then join NATO so Putin can not come back for another slice.
You might be a radical pacifist who thinks that violence is always wrong, and the decent people of the world should just roll over and give the bullies what they want.
I think that fighting wars which can be won or at least fought to a stalemate is sometimes worth it. I am not even firmly opposed to fighting losing wars. Sometimes extracting the maximum cost from an enemy can be a sound strategy. It does not help you in your timeline, apart from satisfying petty feelings of revenge, but it might help you in all the other timelines. If every military operation where the attacker was twice as strong as the defender resulted in the defender surrendering without conditions and the aggressor reaping the full productivity of their new possession, a lot more aggression would happen. Instead, the mere threat of a long war followed by decades of asymmetric conflict eating up the productivity of the region is a lot of the reason why wars of conquest are rare.
I do not expect the Ukrainians to be especially grateful for NATO for the military support. They know that we treat them as pawns, with them doing all the dying. I am strictly against sending NATO troops into Ukraine, Russia and NATO shooting directly at each other is how nuclear wars start. If Ukraine was in NATO, then it would be worth risking World War III in its defense because the alternative would be to defect from the obligations of Article 5 and destroy any deterrence NATO offers, which would enable Russia to pick off European countries one by one.
More options
Context Copy link
It's not, as there is no single rational.
There are a multitude of competing interests and desires, and trying to consolidate them into a single position is going to
They really haven't, unless you misunderstood various purposes of the various differing sanctions.
These, for example, were not the goals.
In order- the Chinese have not substituted for the Europeans in Russian energy export volumes, the sanctions on Russian energy exports were about profit margins rather than keeping them out of the world market, the Western sanctions have been about driving the economic separation of the European economic system from the Russian system despite Russian attempts at triggering economic devastation via abrupt cutoffs, and keeping Russian metals off the global market was never the goal as much as to break the European supply line dependencies.
Saying 'you're failing because you're paying more to not be addicted' rather misses the point of an economic policy to break addiction to cheap commodities that were kept cheap via policies to encourage dependence that could- and was attempted to be used as- geopolitical blackmail. China's gain to Europe's pain is not a counter-argument to this, as China paying more at the cost of Europe staying dependent is not a success of a policy to economically disentangle Europe from Russia. This is simply trying to smuggle a bilateral zero-sum argument in a three-party arrangement to claim that Russia and China both have to lose simultaneously for the other parties to win. (Rather than, say, noting that China exploiting Russia and taking over European market share and more at the expense of Russian autonomy from Chinese interests is not a Russian strategic victory.)
The Russian army is 15% larger by size, not capability- which is to say, they have conscripted a lot of infantry after losing most of their professional officer corps, and their armament level devolved from late cold war technology hardware to mid- and early-cold war vehicles pulled out of storage with minimal modernization. The key armaments Russia is outproducing the West in are artillery ammunition and middle-Cold War vehicle reactivations, which- while relevant- are neither indefinite nor enduring production advantages.
Surprise surprise, it turns out that if you start war economy mobilization first, first-mover advantage allows you to have more industry mobilized than people who spent more of the first year hoping they wouldn't have to mobilize.
There are separate other assets that the Russians are utilizing to good effect- like Drones and airpower- but saying that Russia is outproducing the West in airpower assets or drones would both be quite bad takes.
That is indeed why the Russian government is incredibly evil, since they are indeed killing to the adversary they have identified in a way that war crimes have become practically a point unto themselves as proof of their power via untouchability or recourse.
Fortunately, the people assisting the Ukrainians are not killing the Ukrainians, but instead helping them resist the evil people who have been quite open on their desire to erase the Ukrainian nation in the third continuation war in a decade.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I suppose this is rational, as long as your assumptions are accurate.
Is Russia exhausting itself? I’ve seen reports that their standing army right now is far large than pre war even accounting for casualties.
It seems that the Russian army was pretty rusty during the first year of the war. Logistics issues. Command issues. Not enough bodies. Etc. that seems to have been remedied. They in fact now have a great deal of experience fighting against NATO kit. And it seems like they’re doing well adapting to drones, electronic warfare, etc. I wonder how that compares to the US and NATO. We have a great deal of experience fighting the GWOT and insurgents.
All of that is to say, I wonder how Russia today compares to Russia 2021 in terms of how much of a threat they are to NATO.
And all of that says nothing about the ethics of egging on and prolonging a doomed conflict on the chance that it might weaken a geopolitical rival.
It depends on if you consider leadership or equipment attrition relevant to exhaustion, or just manpower numbers. Really, both are true simultaneously.
The Russian army is larger than it was before the war started both because (a) it mobilized- which the pre-war military on eve of invasion hadn't, and (b) it has been drawing cold war stocks for reactivation. If you define exhaustion as an inability to form big armies of vehicles that move, the Russian army isn't exhausted.
However, many of the assets that provided capabilities beyond raw numbers- say precision weapons to take out operationally relevant objectives at range rapidly to enable a manevuer offense, tanks with modernized sensors needed to survive well against ATGMs, strategic aircraft capable of maintaining airborn AWACs coverage to identify drone intrusions, highly trained officer corps to manage complex operations- are gone, and have been replaced by inferior, not superior, quality. Other assets for maintaining strategic endurance have also shown fraying- the Russian prison system for convict conscription is not, in fact, limitless, just as Russian economic interventions are not, in fact, costless and do not disprove impacts of sanctions, and the Soviet Union stockpiles are also not infinite.
Russia is dependent on iranian-style drone swarm attacks because it ran out of its much more capable cruise missiles stockpiles, and was using them at a relatively minuscule production rate afterwards- meaning that considerably less advanced air defense capabilities are required to shoot down considerably more attempts. Russia cannibalized its officer training corps in the first year of the war, using them in the front lines even before the first mobilization, leading to far less capable officers leading far more blunt attacks that were far more prone to artillery disruption and internal report falsification. Russia's prestige units started the war with near state-of-the-art armor which included about-as-modernized-as-possible end of the cold war tank models, and many of them have begun to adopt 1950s-eras tanks simply because those were the first that could be pushed through modernization because they didn't have need for the various 60s/70s/80s and beyond capability enhancing technologies. Russia started with the largest artillery army in the war and massive artillery advantages... and now is importing ammunition from North Korea which is substandard even compared to the aging soviet ammo that the Russians were using before, which is to say it's considerably more likely to explode on the wrong side of the barrel, or not explode on target, than what Russia started with. There are more examples to, from aircraft quantities to arms exports to it's energy export portfolio- a lot of things, while still continuing, are just worse than a few years ago.
Before the war, there was a joke that Russia had a large army, and a modern army, but not a large modern army. Now the modern part is dropped: Russia has a large army, and a devolved army, and it has a large devolved army. But it's still a large devolved army.
Does the inability to maintain quality of arms mean exhaustion? You'll be forgiven for thinking not, but it does imply things about Russia's ability to maintain effective offensive operations, hence the second and third order effects of relying on high-casualty tactics for relatively marginal territorial gains... which, as far larger and more aggressive armies than the Russians have demonstrated in the past, is a path to military exhaustion.
More in the short term, less in the long term.
In the short term, while quality has devolved, quantity has increased, and quantity has a quality all of its own when it's not matched by anything on the other side. While having late-WW2 tanks with cope cages is a national disgrace as far as military prestige goes, WW2 tanks still resist small arms fire, and while the loss of anti-tank capability by Ukraine/NATO is far overstated, volume does matter. If NATO were unwilling to fight for a long time, more immediate threat is worse than less but more capable immediate threat.
On the other hand, volume can be matched and overcome with time, and while the Russians were the first to mobilize to a war economy, the Europeans both can- and more recently have begun to- recognize themselves as in a military-industrial race which they need to compensate for being late too, and as they begin to catch up in volume, quality starts to matter more again. Comparisons to the Gulf War of the 90s aren't accurate, but aren't entirely wrong either: if the only way for Russian military units to survive is under air defense bubbles, they aren't advancing and the economic differences will start to add with yet more time.
As such, the European-NATO nightmare is that they have to face the Russian mobilized force in the near term, before they have the time to re-arm. As such, the Ukrainians are both a time and a scale buffer: if the Ukrainians give up, the Europeans risk facing the threat sooner before they mobilize, but if the Ukrainians keep fighting the Europeans both increase their time to re-arm and decrease the capabilities they have to arm against (because Ukraine will continue to attrit the Russian capabilities / wear down that Soviet stockpile / eat tens of thousands of more rounds of artillery with their trench lines).
This is a significant reason as to why the Europeans will likely keep supporting Ukraine even if the US fully ceases to (say, under Trump). Ukraine capitulating increases the risk of a threat the Europeans are less likely to conventionally match (the larger-but-devolved RUS conventional forces), while Ukraine resisting increases the European posture vis-a-vis the Russians.
More options
Context Copy link
I thought the Russian economy lacked the ability to replace expended or destroyed high tech equipment. Or recently destroyed oil infrastructure for that matter. They could be throwing large amounts of effectively unreplacabe materiel at Ukraine. And then none will be left for other uses. Bleeding them.
I have little doubt in their ability to field many men for a long time and gradually grind at the Ukrainians. I don't take more men under arms as a sign of economic strength for them. But it doesn't matter since our ""allies"" in Europe will fund them more and more through oil purchases so their GDP will grow merely by being a petrostate.
Ukrainians have agency and I am not at all sympathetic to arguments we are egging them on when we give them the arms they ask for. Or that hastening their brutalization by Russia is somehow a moral good.
If Ukrainians didn't want to fight, they won't. People have their own agency, and no amount of cajoling and money got the Pashtuns to fight for 'Afghanistan' or Cubans to fight against Castro. Remember that Azov started as a wholly domestic Mariupol militia because they really really hated Russians, and Slovyansk had a shitload of people leave because they did not want to stay under Russian - sorry 'Novorossiya' rule. I maintain that if the west pulled all support entirely to Ukraine we would see many more one way suicide drone strikes against refineries, and that the west is maintaining support to Ukraine to avoid further collapse of energy market infrastructure
Most arguments about Russia busting sanctions and their army being regenerated are cope. Muscovy resents being looked down on; their pretensions of continued luxury with their cheap chinese knockoffs and inability to be seen buying the real deal in Paris or Milan smarts far more than just not wearing it, not to mention the endless bitching from Muscovites about their life now being more difficult. Similarly, the Russian army going from BMPT (or more realistically BMP3) to MTLB and BMP1 is hardly an upmuscling of the RuAF (a different argument about whether upgrading from MTLB to BMP3 makes any difference can be made but thats separate to this thread.)
Ultimately, the Russians are likely to grind through the Ukrainians regardless, but the sanctions will leave them an embittered and lesser (in their own eyes) people, deservedly disrespected for their incompetence at defeating their weak and corrupt cousins at the outset and resorting to WW2 era cope.
I'm mostly agree but it seems that most of the Ukrainians want to fight in abstract, as country, but not themselves, as the existence and unpopularity of mobilization show. You don't close the borders for fighting-age males if you aren't suspecting that they will choose to run from the country instead of risking their lives for it.
Yes, most want some other countryman to fight. Conscription always has this tension of 'are we getting the right bodies in the fight' and right now, especially since mid 2023 we can posit that war enthusiasm has died down with the calculus shifting on where Ukraines maximal capability is following Ukrainian failures even with the much vaunted European armour. Mobilization in any country has never been popular, with responses ranging 'bitching about it' to 'fragging the Lt'. On this front I will give Russians a measure of credit, the sheer number of buryats and tajiks enthusiastically clambering into shitboxes to catch a mine is quite amazing.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Idk inflation is pretty high, young Americans can't afford buying houses, nobody wants to join the US military to die for Israel or for Hunter Biden's business deals, 'Democrats' apparently feel the need to prosecute their political opponents, bridges are collapsing and planes barely going up in the sky, cops and judges don't feel like prosecuting (non-political) crimes...
According to the theory that every single bad thing that happens in the US is due to Russian agents, this war is not exactly cheap.
Yes: using a silly and false theory we can purposefully contrive false conclusions.
More options
Context Copy link
NIMBYism is hardly caused by giving away some military equipment
the same
how the fuck it is caused by aid give to Ukraine? (the same for other things you mention)
this theory is blatantly idiotic
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Are you suggesting that the existence of Ukraine is an abstract geopolitical goal of NATO? The fighting today may center around the east, but the Russian invasion was clearly aimed at decapitating the Ukrainian regime and either installing a puppet government or annexing it outright. If the Ukrainian army crumbles, is there any doubt that Russia would roll into Kyiv and Ukraine would functionally stop existing as an independent nation?
Since you seem concerned about the right to self-determination of Ukrainians, let me ask you which course of action better serves that goal - arming them so they can defend themselves, or paternalistically telling them 'Sorry, we've all decided your cause is hopeless, now you have to take peace on whatever terms you can get it. Good luck!' People below have argued that Boris Johnson (and presumably the US was on the same page at the time) sabotaged early peace talks - I'd agree with them that this was bad, and Ukraine should be able to choose for themselves - but others have linked polls showing strong support among the Ukrainian public for the war.
As for your language about Ukrainians just being our hapless puppets that we carelessly throw into the meatgrinder, I feel like you've fallen for Putin's narrative. The west has a propensity to believe that they are the only actors on the world stage with any kind of agency; see the oceans of ink spilled about how the west is solely responsible for every conflict and humanitarian crisis in the past 100 years whether they've been directly involved or not. The one actor responsible for this war is Putin, and all the kvetching about NATO expansion and Euromaidan elides the fact that Putin singlehandedly launched an expansionary war of aggression to conquer territory, massage his ego and restore the glory of the Russian empire. Putin was under no personal threat from the west, nor was Russia.
Lastly, for those complaining about the atrophied defense production capacity of the west and shipping money off to Ukraine: two thirds of the 60 billion is earmarked to be spent with American defense manufacturers. If your goal is increasing defense manufacturing capacity in the west, how would you do it if not spending money on domestic defense manufacturing?
The idea that Putin and Russia are not under threat from the US axis is I think, not on solid ground. That's been demonstrated several times over the past twenty five years. Iraq, Syria, and Libya were not under threat from the US, until suddenly they were. Fundamentally, the US believes it has the right to direct the affairs of all the world, simply waiting for crisis and opportunity to strike.
This is not to say that Russia's aggression is justified. But the notion that the West is just minding it's own business is ridiculous.
Are you seriously arguing that the US might occupy Russia in the future like they occupied Iraq?
I considered the Iraq war of Bush II a mistake when he started it and had no reason to revise my opinion. But even if Russian nukes stopped working tomorrow due to magic, invading Russia would be insane. It has been tried a few times, ask Napoleon or Hitler how it went for them. There is nothing in Russia which would justify the costs of conquering it even to the most mercenary of minds.
This is not about Putin being afraid of Stars and Stripes flying from the Kremlin.
Like most countries, the US meddles in the affair of other countries. Some of it seems net-positive, some of it seems ill-advised to me. Regional powers meddle in their sphere of interest, the US meddles globally, as did the USSR.
If the US sees a chance to fund a coup against Putin, they might take it. Likewise, if Putin saw a chance to fund a coup against Biden, I would not begrudge him for taking it. This is just how this game is played.
Since the end of the cold war, Russia has not done so well in the Great Game. While the US had its share of fuckups, a lot of countries of the former Warsaw pact decided that being allied with the US served their purposes better than being allied with Russia. This might be because the US was rather well-behaved and soft spoken during the cold war in Europe while the USSR was prone to sending tanks to Prague. Turns out that people have long memories and really don't like being invaded.
There is no birthright for a country to having a large sphere of influence. The threat NATO poses to Russia is to its sphere of influence. The moves the US made to align most of Eastern Europe against Russia seem mostly non-evil to me, as far as these things go. Even if one would assume that the Euromaidan was 100% an evil CIA coup to wrest control of Ukraine from a legitimate pro-Russian president, the total number of deaths was below 200 (most of them on the pro-Europe side). It would be rather bloodless as CIA sponsored coups go. Most of the alignment was simply people voting for parties which were pro-NATO or pro-Europe instead of pro-Russia in places like Poland.
More options
Context Copy link
But compared to the USA, Russia hasn’t been a globe-trotting military power imposing its will on other countries. This is the first large scale military invasion of a sovereign nation by Russia since the end of the Cold War. Compare that to America who has invaded Iraq twice, bombed Libya, invaded Afghanistan, and expanded NATO to include almost all of Eastern Europe. Whether or not you agree with either the geopolitical position (not wanting a NATO member along a difficult to defend border) or the stated aims (removing Nazis from Ukraine) or not, it’s not exactly the military adventures of the USA.
I don't consider NATO an alliance of puppet regimes, I just consider it an alliance. So as far as I'm concerned there's nothing to feel guilty about there.
More options
Context Copy link
For context, the Cold War kind of ended with the collapse of the USSR.
Post Cold War Russia was not in a very good position to project force globally. They did have their small scale adventures, though, but Chechnya was not a recognized country, and Georgia was not fully occupied by Russia. Still, Putin was hardly a dove.
I think NATO adventurism in the Islamic World was a horrible move, but the expansion of NATO was a good thing. Do you recall how Clinton gave Poland an ultimatum to join NATO or face his tanks before they joined in 1999? Neither do I because that did not happen. Eastern European states were eager to join NATO because they know how the USSR had behaved in their countries in the Cold War, contrasted that with how the US had behaved in Western Europe during that period and decided that they would rather be under the protection of the US than Russia.
The raison d'etre of NATO is to prevent a war with Russia. It is certainly not to conquer a nuclear armed Russia. Having a NATO ally on his flank would be mildly inconvenient to Russia because it would place them in a worse strategic situation in a war with NATO. But realistically, a NATO-Russian war would result in large scale nuclear war, which is why both NATO and the USSR/Russia have taken great pains to avoid shooting at each other directly in any conflicts.
Also Transnistria! Break-away state from Moldova supported by Russia! I don't know the full story so I don't know if the details are similar to what happened in Georgia. I gotta look into that.
More options
Context Copy link
True, but then again, we expanded NATO eastward to a difficult to defend border after it told Russia it had no intention of doing so. Even if Poland wanted in, it’s hard to ignore that having NATO troops and military equipment on the border of Russia is at least somewhat provocative. And given that it’s all of Eastern Europe and soon Ukraine as well, Russia is going to be basically surrounded. It’s about equivalent to Russia forming an alliance with Mexico and Canada. I can’t imagine a universe in which the USA would not view that as a threat.
And in this hypothetical the positioning of troops in Mexico and Canada was in direct response to USA's seizure of Nova Scotia.
The Baltics joined NATO in 2004, and didn't host any permanent NATO troops until the EFP was created in response to Russia's seizure of Crimea. The current force is ~10,000 in the Baltics, 11,600 in Poland. It doesn't take much historical acumen to understand that this is not a credible threat to Russia's continuity.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
If Russia didn't invade and ethnically cleanse their neighbours every chance they got, their smaller neighbours would be way less eager to join NATO.
That Russia's last hundred years of foreign policy is such a spectacular failure, having accomplished roughly zero of their aims, can hardly be said to be the fault of the US.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I wouldn't say the West is minding it's own business - there seems to be a tit for tat in terms of proxies, espionage, fraud, hacking, etc. I would say that I've seen no evidence of attempts on Putin's life nor anything that could remotely be construed as NATO showing any interest in invading Russia or violating Russian territorial integrity. Would you disagree with that?
You are right that the US is very careful not to directly call for Putin's removal or a partition of Russia and it's destruction as an independent power. But I think that is what they seek, and it's what they work towards, and if Putin was to show any weakness, it's what they would work towards openly.
But that only started once it became clear that Russia was belligerent. The US didn't want to destroy Russia just for the sake of it, they wanted to do that because Russia was a threat to the system of the world.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
And yet, far less so than ignoring nuclear weapons as a deterrent for invasion.
The argument that Russia was not under threat from the US axis is not made on the basis that the US wouldn't if it could beat Russia in a conventional war- not least because nothing about the Ukraine war changed the underlying reality of Russia's conventional deficit vis-a-vis the US and has only made it worse- but rather that beating Russia in a nuclear war wouldn't be worthwhile when the cost is measured not in divisions, but cities.
The Russian national security argument for invading Ukraine has always fallen to the point that it does not change the actual nuclear balance of power against the US in any conflict, and that it has been nuclear deterrence that Russia had, and all those others have not.
The US was not exactly thrilled by hostile forces extending their influence into its hemisphere during the Cold War (or any other time really), especially the forward basing of missiles. It's expected that great powers will try to avoid this.
Sensors and missiles based in Ukraine are relevant to nuclear warfare, as are Ukraine's claims to Donbass and Crimea.
It's also expected that Russia can read a map and is aware that it is already in the position regardless of Ukraine- so invading Ukraine to keep it out of NATO doesn't change the missile threat, and thus does not serve as a sensible rational. If NATO wanted to place missiles in range of Moscow, they don't need Ukraine to do so.
Likewise, it's also well known that the US is in range of Russian missile bases in... Russia. Russia gets no nuclear posture advantage by advancing nuclear bases into Ukraine.
The Cuban Missile Crisis logic stopped making any sort of strategic sense within two decades of it happening. The US did not need to maintain nuclear missiles in Turkey for the sake of ranging Russia, and the Russians did not need missiles based in Cuba to range the US. ICBMs and SLBMs largely rendered the role of IRBMs irrelevant, which is why they were an easy-to-negotiate away weapon in the nuclear arms control treaties as a trust-building measure.
Not really. The sensors and missiles that can nuke Russia can do so from the continental united states and orbit. The nuclear deterrence argument continues to fail because the technology levels involved are not the 1950s or 60s or even 70s.
If you want to argue that Ukraine is the key to a potential NATO nuclear decapitation strike of Russia, you need to establish what Ukraine brings to the table that the Baltic countries don't... and why Russia's second-strike deterrent capability only works in the invade-Ukraine scenario but not in the other.
Nuclear decapitation does not work. Say you manage to nuke Moscow in a sneak attack. Do you really believe that the commanding officer of a ICBM silo in Siberia will say "too bad, without orders from Putin, I can not retaliate"? I assume that there are nuclear-tipped submarines in the Atlantic and Pacific which provide more second strike capabilities.
The gains from wiping Russia -- a regional power of limited threat to US interests -- would be limited, while the risks are enormous, especially on the tail side.
It is also not in the US long term interests. Even if they manage to wipe out all Russian nukes (and most of the Russians) without a single nuke exploding over NATO soil, this would normalize preventive nuclear warfare.
There is this other big country called China. Also a big nuclear power not particularly friendly with the US. Wiping out Russia would set the clock ticking on US-China relations, because once you have established that this is your strategy, this is where the next showdown would happen. So the US would have to get extraordinary lucky twice.
Global nuclear war does not poll very well. A sneak attack would completely undermine the role of the US as a soft-spoken hegemonic power whose clients thrive. (At least that is the image in Europe and SE Asia, less in Latin America or the Middle East.)
Between political ramifications, radioactive fallout, possible climate impacts and economic aspects (a large part of the chip industry is in China) wiping out China and Russia would be disastrous for the west.
We are not living in 1960 more, where some people believed that of course the Cold War would escalate and that it might thus be better to escalate on your own terms. Living in the shadow of nuclear annihilation turns out to be quite comfortable if you make it to the correct timelines, actually. No need to risk the good thing we have going.
More options
Context Copy link
The distance from Northern Ukraine to Moscow is significantly less than from the Baltics to Moscow, 460 km to 600 km which is relevant to a decapitation strike. Missile defence based in Ukraine would also complicate Russian nuclear strikes. They would have to defend thousands of kilometres of extra airspace in addition to the Belarus-St Petersburg area.
The Russian Black Sea Fleet is not known for its excellence, they aren't in a position to to lose bases to NATO warships. Given the interest British and US warships seem to have in the Black Sea, it's likely there'd be many AEGIS-equipped ships in Crimea or the Sea of Azov. This obviously limits Russian power-projection abilities, their ability to support Syria or other allies.
And what happens once Ukraine joins NATO? Everyone and their dog has been saying this will happen for years now.
You're not supposed to be able to join NATO with territorial disputes - yet NATO training and integration has continued through 2014, through 2022 and continues to this day despite this. Suppose they amend the 'no territorial disputes' clause or strategically ignore it like Blinken does to bring in Ukraine and Ukraine moved on Donbass in a counter-factual where Russia didn't invade. Then Russia would be forced to choose between losing Donbass or war with NATO.
Furthermore, it's a basic strategic principle that great powers don't want their neighbours to be members of hostile alliance groups. Everyone knows that Russia was extremely unhappy with the idea of Ukraine being in NATO, Burns's 'nyet means nyet' cable shows this. We can identify efforts to prevent this in Russian strategy - debt relief and energy subsidies pre-2014 and increasingly intense economic and military pressure since the Special Diplomatic Operation you don't want to call a coup.
And note what the actual distinction is here, as there no significant range limiting factor at the 460-to-600km range in the modern era. Rather, it's time.
A nuclear decapitation in the modern age would be reliant on hypersonic weapons which- if not simply branding for old ballistic weapons- are traveling at a minimum of about mach 5, or 6, 173 km/hr. As the additionally 140 km is the distance to be traveled, this this simply adds time to the transit time, not a range limitation in itself.
An extra 140km at 6170 km/hr equates to an extra 80 seconds- again, at a slow hypersonic rate. Which, while not nothing- and I'm sure you will insist is very relevant- doesn't actually change the acceptableness of a nuclear first strike. If the goal of the decapitation strike is to kill a leader then the 80 second differential won't realistically make a difference in the target escaping the nuclear blast radius, and if the goal is to do a nuclear armegeddon first strike, this doesn't change that the success factor is being primarily driven by the ability to mitigate second strike capability, not the 80-extra seconds to alert / get release authorities for non-second strike.
Which returns to the question of who is unleashing nuclear holocaust on Russia in the first place in light of second strike capabilities. Which isn't the US, both because (a) the US has been deterred by much less capable nuclear risks for decades, and (b) the idea that the US is looking to nuclear genocide the russians is based in fever fantasy rather than any realistic understanding of American politics or its military-strategic community.
Which returns to the point that nuclear deterrence is still being waived away, because the argument premise is silly when Russia's own nuclear capabilities are brought into the picture.
Missile defenses based in Ukraine would complicate Russian nuclear strikes on Ukraine or over the Black Sea. The nature of the curvature of the earth is such that the Russians don't need to fire over Ukraine to hit any other NATO nuclear member for the purposes of maintaining deterrence, and that they'd have to actively go out of their way to do so.
Now, if your argument will shift to that Russia really needs to be able to nuke non-nuclear members like Turkey, I will grant you that Ukraine would help defend Turkey... but now we are conceding that the Russians need to act based on threats not actually in Ukraine, and not nuclear-driven in the first place. And while Russia certain had war plans to nuke most non-nuclear states it could come into conflict with in NATO, that mentality was rather a significant part as to why they wanted to be in NATO under a nuclear umbrella.
Whether the Russian Black Sea fleet is known for excellence, they were the original impetus for the strategic value of the Crimean peninsula as a naval base, and this was considered a major key to support Russian power projection despite the Black Sea being cut off from Syria or other allies regardless of how many AEGIS-equipped systems are in the Black Sea by virtue that the Black Sea is controlled by the Turkish straight.
Ukraine provides no advantage for the Russians to expand power-projection abilities into the Middle East, unless you hand-waive Turkey out of the way. Crimea is a prestige port, not an enabling port for out-of-blacksea activities.
Based on history to date, Putin publicly claims it doesn't change anything and Russia doesn't care anyway and continues not to attack a NATO power and the NATO powers continue not to attack Russia because no one involved- least of all the US- wants the expense or hassle of attacking Russia.
Peace, in other words.
NATO training and integration leadup are not joining NATO, and there is no position that NATO cannot work with willing candidates in preparation for the time that they resolve the territorial disputes- the resolution of which was the official Russian of 2014 through 2022 and even now.
And, of course, this goes back to why this matters, which amounts to pretending that Russian nuclear deterrence doesn't exist and that 80 seconds of travel time is somehow what is preventing the US from unleashing a nuclear genocide opening against the Russians.
This would unironically be a net gain for the average Russian, and would have been a major strategic gain for the Russian defense interest had it been done years ago. The average Russian would no longer be on the hook for subsidizing a broke mafia statelet that has been responsible for tens of thousands of Russian deaths to date with more to come, and had it been abandoned years ago the Russians wouldn't have crippled their northern flank's very viable option for a significant military victory against the NATO alliance, it wouldn't have reinvigorated NATO at a time where the Americans and Europeans were openly discussing strategic divorce over the lack of a perceived shared security interests, and not only would tens of thousands of Russian military-aged men by alive and 10% of the Russian IT workforce still in the country, but hundreds of thousands of pieces of equipment wouldn't have been lost in the sunk cost fallacy over a failed popular uprising that primarily had the effect of taking the pro-Russian demographic out of the Ukrainian electorate and accelerating Ukraine's political reorientation from wanting to to be a part of the European Union but militarily neutral to the most anti-Russian demographic this side of Poland.
NovaRussia was a Russian strategic blunder in the great power competition year before the Ukraine War turned the Russian military into a mid-cold war army and made the Russians synonymous with cope cages for years to come.
Furthermore furthermore, it's a basic known fact of history that great powers who repeatedly attack their neighbors drive their neighbors into alliance groups by their own hostility, and that if the goal is to not drive neighbors into hostile alliance groups, a great power should not result to repeated armed interventions. Russia was indeed extremely unhappy that its former subjects feared it like a battered wife might fear a drunken Husband, and yet Russia continued to attempt to coerce and threaten and hit its former subjects into compliance.
This is, in strategic lexicon, an 'own goal.'
Furthermore furthermore furthermore, it's an even more basic strategic principle that great powers who pick stupid wars get stupid prizes. The eras of empires of conquest ended years ago not merely because most of the Europeans realized it was morally abhorrent, but also because it was economically and militarily ruinous due to the technologies (that russian enabled and widely spread) for cost-effective resistance. The ability of minor powers to disproportionately hit back against an invader so long as they were willing to fight and had foreign support was the hallmark of many of the wars of the Cold War, and Russia's belief that they would be greeted as liberators was as stupid for them as it was for the Americans in Iraq.
Or perhaps even more stupid. The Americans were initially welcomed by the Shia, but then stuck around and tried to stop the follow-on civil war that was initially ignorring them. The Russians planned to have torture facilities and kill lists from the start.
Regardless, I return to a long-stood by claim that appeals to strategic principles are misaimed when it comes to Russia, because Putin has demonstrated his strategic incompetence for over a decade at this point.
Which I do not for the same reason that you don't want to admit the rather inconvenient but uncontested context of Yanukovych's departure: that he was not escorted out of the country by the military or security forces, but rather fled before he could be arrested and tried for crimes against the nation after the military and broader security forces refused orders to follow along in shooting civilians in the streets after he granted himself the power and began to do so without legislative consent while his government executed a sniper campaign to justify the crackdown.
No one in the 'it was a coup!' camp ever really addresses what the level of impeachable conduct is that might warrant a legislature moving against an executive without being a coup, but in other contexts they generally concede that the executive granting themselves the right to shoot their political opponents at foreign behest typically qualifies as a legitimate rather than illegal basis for removing a president.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The right of self-determination of Ukrainians is first and foremost not to be sent into a meatgrinder by conscription officers. The women of Ukraine have this right, and like a lot of modern people in that situation, they simply choose to live somewhere else.
To the most liberal, Western-minded young Ukrainians the 'special military operation' has been a great bounty. They finally were able to obtain a visa to Miami, NYC, Los Angeles or any European capital. They'll probably pay lip-service to the 'cause' to assure their status in their local circle of liberals, but they might not be thinking of ever going back.
Perhaps the middle-aged Ukrainians who have not grown up with Western propaganda online and feel unable to learn a foreign language go either way, they are attached to their country and see Russians either as enemies or former brothers in the Soviet Union.
Then there are the retirees who are (probably?) exempt from conscription, and may still feel nostalgic for the glory days of Bandera and think perhaps the wrong guys won the 'Great Patriotic War'. I'm not sure how they reconcile that with a desire to join NATO/EU or even voting for Zelensky.
Either way I think the most important development in all of this is that post-internet, nationalism cannot really be a thing. It's hard to convince the youth to die for your government after years of telling them that the people who just arrived have as much of a claim to the country as they do.
What's the difference if Russia takes Ukraine? That's like a change in government. Before it was Trump, now it's Biden.
Would an American zoomer care if China bombed the local strip mall, apartment complex full of Somalis and Venezuelians, the Indian-owned gas station, the gender-correction clinic etc? Perhaps they want to die for 'transkids'? Maybe if China bombed Instagram's or Netflix' servers and made it go dark they'd care? If the situation is too dire they can always move somewhere else (if somewhere else is at peace, that is), after all they were told they would own nothing and they'd be happy, so why here specifically?
Who on this website would go die in a trench for their government and under what circumstances? This is the first step to clear before allowing yourself to symbolically vote for somebody who wants to 'ear-mark' money for these foreign wars.
What's the difference if Biden stole the election? It's a change of government either way.
Except in this case, the guy in charge of the new government first shelled the fuck out of the previous government, including many cities, and his campaign is "your party isn't legitimate, your country isn't real and we will literally dismantle all of that". Not really the kind of behavior that promises benevolent governing.
More options
Context Copy link
Are you being sarcastic? If not, this feels like the worst comparison I have read on the internet in a long time.
The power of the US president is subject to checks and balances. If the people don't like him, they can vote them out next time. Also, compared to the worst case governments, Biden and Trump are basically the same thing with minor nitpicks. A worst case government would be someone trying to forcibly trying to turn the US into some ethnostate or into a Stalinist dystopia. If you think having to travel to another state to get an abortion or a federal ban on scary looking guns is the worst thing a government can do, look at the Holodomor instead.
What is the worst thing that stupid evil tyrant can do if he conquers us is a question to which we have reasonable lower bounds from history. Government decisions are the difference between North Korea and South Korea.
More options
Context Copy link
That seems more like an argument that nationalism is incompatible with a modern, liberal, cosmopolitan society. Which, honestly, I don't think anyone on either side would argue with you on that.
That doesn't mean it can't necessarily be a thing in modern times, it just means that nationalists have to be willing to jettison at least one or more of of [modern|liberal|cosmopolitan]. And in the circles where nationalism flourishes online even jettisoning all three of them is quite popular.
More options
Context Copy link
why you think so?
Why you think it is universal situation? Or applicable to Ukraine at all? Are you aware that Ukraine is really poor and has basically no incoming economical migrants?
For my government? No realistic scenario. Willing to die in a trench? If alternative would be that I will likely die shot by invaders or my friends/family will be harmed. Or out of pure annoyance at Russia invading again.
Though I would strongly prefer to kill Russian soldiers in their trench via remotely operated drone. Rather than dying in trench myself.
And even more I would prefer this situation to be inapplicable at all.
(yes, I am aware that Russia invading Poland within next 50 years is say 1% - still uncomfortably high, and currently main military risk for my country)
More options
Context Copy link
Someone has never run into a bunch of people from different Balkan countries online.
Are they at war or just LARPing online?
Yes.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Pic unrelated?
Pic of soldiers holding civilians at gunpoint from the incident that made Biden reflect that he doesn't want his children to live in "a racial jungle with tensions having built so high that it is going to explode at some point." A race war meatgrinder so to speak.
Hmm, remind me how many people died during the School Integration Wars? And who the conscription officers were?
I don't have an exact number, probably between 10,000 and 100,000, maybe more, it's still ongoing. Here's one recent injured that made the news.
The conscription officers are the media agents, the Civil Rights judges, the CPS workers, the National Guard as in the picture, the cops...
So in the Ukraine war, you're minding your own business, get conscripted at gunpoint, then sent to the front where a Russian drops a shell on your head with high probability.
In the School Integration War, you try to intimidate a child, then the cops tell you to fuck off, then with 99.9..% probability your life goes on unaffected.
It really is the same!
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
It not only can, but is. Splinternets have been a thing for quite awhile now and all countries (including the US) engage in this sort of cyber balkanization. Russia does it quite successfully in service of their domestic, nationalistic goals.
At this point I'd die for the Russian government before I would the US, as a home grown American.
Yes, so Ukraine does not qualify as a country (therefore Ukrainian nationalism is an oxymoron) by that definition, as its citizens are either living in the Western memeplex of the EU/US or of Russia's.
That's quite the jump. But the latter is how it's always happened. Most nations live in the sphere of influence of their region's biggest power.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
This is a really bad cliche by now. Putin represents a moderate faction within Russia compared to the hardliners who wanted to invade 10 years ago after Maidan. Putin did not single-handedly launch the war (if one single man is reaponsible, it would probably be Strelkov). And Putin is not irrational for feeling threatened by NATO and the US.
The idea that Putin represents a moderate faction and that Putin is indeed single-handedly resposible for the current phase of war (ie. events after 2022) in no way contradict each other. When the drumbeat for war started in 2021, there were no indications that the situation in Ukraine was about to change in an essential way (ie. Ukraine was about to make a major assault to take back the territories lost after 2014 - if anything the Ukrainians had gone to great lengths to seem nonaggressive up until a few weeks before the invasion) and also no indications that Putin's strict grip on power in Russia was about to be challenged, by the more radical nationalist forces or anyone else. Putin simply saw that the idea that he'd get what he wants peacefully would not happen - the least anti-Russian politician that could get elected in Ukraine at this point, ie. Zelensky, would not budge or be able to do so - and took a gamble.
More options
Context Copy link
Its worse than a bad cliche, and I've been stunned as an observer on this site, how many of the more intellectually minded people seem to fall victim to thinking in the same platitudes a standard ignoramus who doesn't even watch the news does. The problem with the above style of comments is that it fails to take geopolitics seriously and fails to understand alternative viewpoints. If it wasn't Putin, any other Russian leader would be beset with the same scenario and conditions.
Eh, my sense is that we have maybe one-digit number of hardline American jingoist posters who overwhelm any remotely Ukraine-related thread by participation and effort, and many more people who just generally lower the sanity waterline by seeing it as yet another metaphorical battleground for the US culture war where the only thing that matters is Hunter Biden and which side is more (fake and) gay. This seems to be about what to expect for a topic that attracts agenda posters but lies outside of the specialisation of anyone producing the sort of deep dives that tend to cause productive discussion around here.
Frankly this is one reason I actually prefer Reddit to this forum regarding certain hot topics (Ukraine, Holocaust, probably a few more). Either the specific subject matter experts demurr, or the topic has a pendantically obstinate position advanced eternally by emotionally invested posters. No slight against emotionally invested defenses of untenable positions, the consequence free wasteland of an anonymous forum means I will unironically simp for the XiMa TenAliAI Godhead, but it does mean that this tick isnt coming unburrowed.
More options
Context Copy link
As the person who made the initial post, I'd like to push back on this. I guess I might have an "agenda". You'll have to take my word for it that my agenda is peace and the preservation of human life.
I think Ukraine is an important topic and one in which mainstream opinion is wrong. The intersection of these two makes it a great topic to discuss here. That's why I've posted about it twice now.
And, yeah, it seems to generate some heat, but I'd argue the amount of light is greater. How many people are even talking about conscription, either on the Motte, X, or on (shudder) mainstream media?
On the other hand, what I don't love about this forum is 5000 word "deep-dives" on some random game developer no one has ever heard of or cares about. I don't view those as productive in the slightest. The stakes couldn't be lower.
Since I think what gets said in places like this matters, I think it's important to discuss real issues.
This forum has a refreshing readiness to highlight bad take faiths, one of which is that Ukrainians actually really want to be Russians are are only being forced to fight by the cruel machinations of the West. That the pro-ru position overlaps between antiprogressives (tolerated here) and antiwest socialists (disrespected for good reason) is why bad takes are entertained even briefly, so long as the decorum of the forum is maintained. Calling '5000 word deep dives on videogames' cringe while your own takes are superior is, to my view, straining the boundaries of decorum.
Honestly, I think your comment is in bad faith. You are strawmanning a nuanced anti-war position in order to police an opinion you don't like and reducing it to a "bad take" and "pro RU". If you have an argument in favor of the Ukraine War make one.
Your words, not mine. Calling this a 'nuanced anti war position' is frankly laughable, a pathetic attempt at pretending to be impartial by labelling this position as such to head off the pass and preemptively tie all previous arguments to this end state.
An argument in favour of 'the Ukraine' (real subtle there): they don't want to be Russian. They made that calculus, and they can choose to effect that outcome however they can. State power, public sympathy, whatever. We (the nebulous we) are not obligated to listen to their requests, as you clearly have stated, but we are also free to suggest or deny as we see fit. If the Ukrainians see maybe dying in a ditch to be less preferable than being Worse Belarus, thats their calculus. Should the calculus flip (higher chance of dying, Worse Belarus isnt so stupid), the Ukrainian soldiers can make the decision themselves too, ala October Revolution.
Till that time, Ukrainians (as a currently united polity) can ask, we can respond, and the Russians can respond as well.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
If it wasn't Zelensky, any other Ukrainian leader would be beset with the same scenario and conditions.
If it wasn't Biden, any other American leader would be beset by the same scenario and conditions.
Are we pretending Yanukovych wasn't overthrown?
"Presidents come and go but the policies remain the same." - Vladimir Putin
Are we pretending Yanukovych wasn't fleeing the country rather than being procedurally removed from office for granting himself the authority to shoot not only the supporters of his political opponents but also the supporters of his unity government partners that he brought into his own government, at the direct pressure of the foreign government that he fled to after his own party loyalists didn't want to conduct a bloodbath?
And are we going to pretend that giving yourself authority to shoot political opponents in the streets without legislative support wouldn't drive legislature retaliation against an Executive clearly bowing to foreign government pressure and incentives?
I am as familiar with the Yanukovych coup narratives as you, and probably a bit more familiar with various political events during Euromaidan, including the ever-handy reference to the conspiracy theory that the US Ambassador discussing candidates for Yanukovych's invitation for a unity government and considering people who could work with Yanukovych and others was actually plotting a coup against the person who she was going to discuss the candidate list with in the coming days.
Perhaps you'd like to raise the protestor-sniper theories that justified the claim to shoot-to-kill authorities, which I might counter with the state sniper evidence and various security service suspect defections to Russia in the investigations after? Or perhaps you want to make the position that the protestors had no right to protest against the sovereign right of the government to join the Eurasian Union economic association, after Yanukovych made a rather abrupt about face on the already-sovereign-agreed to European Union association agreement that was followed by Russian pressure and incentive campaigns? Maybe you'd like to retreat to the defense of Eastern Russo-phile suppression of the Russian speakers, who were so uninterested in joining in the Russian novarussia campaign that the Russian millitary had to directly intervene to keep the separatist republics from collapsing?
Come now, there's so much history we can banter on!
I don't know how well read you are on the history of what happened...
Seems we both agree at the outset that he was democratically elected, do we not? His overthrow was explicitly supported by the US and it's allies. Are you not aware that there was even leaked audio of Victoria Nuland and the Ukraine's Ambassador that revealed deliberate planning of his overthrow? NATO was never a European alliance of 'peace', it's an alliance that's aimed at destabilizing Eastern Europe, with the intention to weaken Russia. Do forgive a homie for challenging American
imperialismunipolarity. This whole quagmire has absolutely zero to do with high minded moral idealism against the Next Hitler, who at the same time the media tells us is losing, running out of gas, is out of ammunition, is incompetent beyond belief; and simultaneously is preparing for world domination and his next target is going to be Poland or Scandinavia. It has everything to do with continued projecting of American and western geopolitical dominance across the planet.Ah, I see we are going to play the pretend we don't know game, such as--
-that US support for Yanukovych stepping down followed Yanukovych starting to process of shooting protestors in the streets with government snipers.
Oh, hey, called it-
Come now, we can go over the transcripts if you'd like. We can even go over Yanukovych's invitation for the opposition to join the government, which was the basis of Nuland's discussions of who would actually work well within Yanukovych's government which- again- was invited and being discussed in the context of Yanukovych running it.
While this certainly nails your flag high, it doesn't really establish your awareness with Euromaiden-
-or that, as far as challening American imperialism unipolarity, Ukraine was such an own-goal by Russia.
Yawn. Like I said, I'd rather you build a competent historical metaphor, not your naval gazing. If your media is telling us Putin is Next Hitler, or running out of gas, or out of ammunition, pick better media, not other trash.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Indeed; the automaton peasants (who lack agency) of Ukraine were told by their CIA handlers (who have agency) to riot and oust the hapless Yanukovych (who lacks agency) and was replaced by American puppet Zelensky (who has agency and should use it to sue for peace). This led noble leader Putin (who lacks agency; anyone in his shoes would do the same) to regretfully declare war.
Makes sense. As you say, they're beset by the same scenario and conditions. Anyone in their shoes would do the same.
Don't know why you're trying make a mess of history on the matter. Even the regime change wing of the State Department admits of their activities in Russia's backyard and the very thing I'm calling it out for.
And as such, Russia's response is reasonable in turn to US' operations in their sphere of influence.
That the Russians suck at playing the international soft power game is their own fault. If the Russians couldn't even get a literal clown who performed for Putin to be their puppet, thats on them. Russians are hardly moral innocents reacting against a big mean west, they have continually acted (often incompetently) in their own interests against the west, and to give Russians the benefit of he doubt is an invitation to have your exposed back stabbed.
More options
Context Copy link
I'm not sure why you believe Global Research .ca, an anti-globalization conspiracy website, represents the regime change wing of the State Department, but this would be both an incorrect citation and not a rebuttal to the post on hyper and hypo agency.
Similarly, you seem to have missed that point that he was making fun of the argument structure, and not actually making a position that your argeement with would advance your position.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I freely profess my ignorance of Russian politics. To clarify, do you think if Putin had not wanted to invade Ukraine in 2022, it would have happened regardless? Or if Putin had wanted to invade and his advisors had not, it would not have happened? Or is your position some bailey that Strelkov's actions set in motion a series of events that made Putin's decision to invade inevitable?
Because option 3 still sounds like Putin had plenty of agency to me.
And he tried exercising it to find more amicable solutions to the problem. That's what the Minsk Accords were.
Why was the west encouraging Ukraine behind the scenes to give Russia a run around, while the west poured arms into the country to bolster its strength so the government could betray the terms of their agreement?
The Minsk Accords were many things- including the functional erosion of national sovereignty by legislating an external power's veto by proxy- but an amicable solution they were not.
Why wouldn't the west encourage Ukraine not to submit to unreasonable Russian demands that the Russians knew were unreasonable and would not be accepted, while bolstering the ability to resist the military coercion that pushed the demands in the first place?
The demands were unreasonable, and were made at the end of a military intervention. Europeans, as with many other cultures, tend not to support those things against their neighbors lest it be applied to them.
Doesn't make for strange bedfellows when you understand the Minsk Accords mandated a similar relationship to Ukraine that the US imposed on Japan in the postwar period, which remains today.
Which was not an amicable solution to negotiations, but a compulsory surrender punctuated by more than one nuclear weapon after years of unrestricted submarine warfare against an island that needed to import resources and firebombing of cities made of wood and paper... after the receiving country had launched a series of unprovoked invasions and a litany of warcrimes across the region.
The Minsk Accords were, again, many things, but the Pacific Campaign of WW2 they were not.
Alas, the Japanese-American alliance today does not remain an unconditional military occupation with overt censorship by the occupying authority.
Also, the Russians aren't interested in dismantling a warmongering oligarchy as much as installing one.
Seems like you're engaging in some pretty strenuous intellectual acrobatics to preserve a conclusion you wouldn't accept if another actor adopted a similar justification. Judged by the standards of moral idealism, maybe both Russia and the US fall short. Judged by the standards of the world's only superpower, Russia isn't doing anything the US wouldn't approve of in it's own defense. You want me to be more introspective, check your own actions at the door first.
Which wasn't the point I was making. If you think history is important, I encourage you to read it. If not, then that tells me everything I need to understand your position.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Strelkov was important in 2014, but pretty marginal in 2022. Putin alone was indeed the main instigator of the war. Nothing had changed in 2022 in terms of Ukraine's ability to join NATO, as the US refused to let them in as it had for the previous 8 years. Putin just woke up one morning and decided he wanted an invasion, and the rest is history.
Strelkov started the chain of events that bubbled up to the war. It's a much bigger point: Putin didn't "just woke up" and create a war, there was already a war. It was started by other individuals, and Putin actually refused several earlier opportunities to escalate the war the way he did in 2022. The situation changed in 2022, which precipitated Russia's direct invasion. You can actually admit all of this without wanting Russia to win, or having to change any of your other opinions.
This is blatantly not true: The US refused to make a guarantee to Russia that Ukraine would not join NATO.
You're talking about 2014 here, right? If so, then sure, that checks out.
There was the frozen conflict that had been bubbling since 2014, but 2015-2021 was massively different from the invasion in 2022. There was little reason that status quo couldn't continue for another decade at least from the West's perspective, but then Putin decided he was unsatisfied with the state of affairs and that's how the invasion came to be.
I'm not saying there was no conflict prior to 2022. I'm saying the massive invasion itself that happened in 2022 was Putin's doing.
I don't think we're disagreeing on this point.
This was not a change, at least on the US's part! The US didn't let Ukraine join NATO, but they didn't rule it out either, same as 2015-2021. The US wanted to kick the can down the road some more (or indefinitely) by keeping Ukraine in limbo, and it was Putin who said that wasn't good enough now.
More options
Context Copy link
This is untrue. Offers that Ukraine would not join NATO were made and duly ignored, on grounds that the US would not make unamendable changes to the US Constitution that were beyond the US Executive's ability to offer in order to meet the level of Russian demands for what a legal guarantee would consist of, which entailed requirements that no future legislature or executive could change their position on.
As the ability to prevent future administrations for reconsidering a policy, a legislature proposing a law, or constitutional amendment from reversing an amendment would require a level of legalistic restriction that the US has never negotiated in its history, and which the Russians have never negotiated upon themselves, it was a notably new and novel proposal for Russia's concerns on how an already vetoed state would not enter NATO. (It was also a unilateral demand as Russia reserves the sovereign right to walk away from treaties they sign, and had done so repeatedly in contemporary history at the time.)
Of course, these demands were also made when Russia had already was in the midst of the final operational preparations for the invasion, and was in the process of generating casus belli justifications and justification narratives, so the sincerity of the Russian interest in the specific demand is highly suspect given their familiarity with US government structure, and the concurrent demands for NATO withdrawals from former warsaw pact states as equally unrealistic demands that served little role other than to say that it was the Americans who refused to negotiate in good faith.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I watched people predict this war at roughly this time well over a decade ago, so no, I'm pretty sure Putin didn't just wake up one morning and decide he wanted an invasion.
I'm talking about proximate causes. The long term reasons for competition between Russia and the West exist, and anyone can trot out Mearsheimer if they want the Russian view, but for the immediate causes of the war there wasn't really anything other than Putin. There was no reason he couldn't have kept it a frozen conflict for another decade.
More options
Context Copy link
These unfortunately are the kind of replies you get from people who haven't been paying attention.
Antagonistic. You have been warned 3 times before:
5 day ban.
More options
Context Copy link
If you're implying I haven't been paying attention to the Ukraine war, you're very mistaken.
I think he's implying you paid no attention to the Ukraine and Russia in the years leading up to the war.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
People saying the west told Ukraine not to take peace are doing a giant motte-and-Bailey. Personally think it is bad argumentative form to do that without including a lot of asterisks. To use a known motte-bailey without adding disclaimers. No doubt Putin did offer peace but I see no evidence it was anything less than the end of Ukranian nation/ethnicity (heavy Russian culturalization).
I feel like this should be a proper way to cite a motte-and-Bailey when using one to indicate you are only meaning the motte.
The terms as discussed to that point said no such thing.
Without proof. I am going to guess you don’t have intercepted directives from Putin to the negotiators telling them the terms to accept?
Which means you don’t have evidence that any of the negotiations were anything more than a charade to make the Kremlin look better (we asked for peace) before invading. And my side which is basically side the saying you are a wrong thinking it was real has hundreds of thousands of troops ready for invasion at great costs, executed battle plans, Putin speech’s, 2+ years of war saying your are wrong.
Well, last post you were supposing Putin's peace terms were the end of the Ukrainian ethnicity, now you're falling back on asserting that we don't really know what was in them. Which isn't entirely true: according to all reports the deal included total Ukrainian neutrality. And we have some of Russia's most recent peace terms, which are stronger now that they've conquered territory: they aren't as you've feared.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
It beat's not existing at all. Which is where Ukraine's demographics are heading after sending most of their men off to die in trenches and their women are finding new lives abroad. But I guess Zelensky can pat himself on the back, king of the ashes, when the TFR of native Ukrainians is 0.21 ten years after his "victory". Or when their political future is now determined by the flood of migrants which repopulates the region, as opposed to their coethnics in Moscow.
But sure, "Ukraine" would still be an independent nation, even if no Ukrainians are left in it. Not sure why a Ukrainian today should fight for that future though, being cut out of it completely.
While I share some of your concerns around TFR, it isn't the sole measure of worth of a nation. Somalia has a TFR of 6.3, mid-19th century Ireland had a TFR of 4 while illiterate peasants slaved on increasingly small plots of land and starved. Continuity is important, but so is the right to self-determination. If the Ukrainians had rolled over and collapsed, I expect there would have been a lot of finger wagging and recriminations but we wouldn't be having this conversation. If they choose to fight and are willing to die for their country, if they choose to risk their country being reduced to rubble and their TFR being reduced to some arbitrarily low number you pulled out of your ass, I don't think it's your place to lecture them.
Somehow I suspect Ukrainian affection for their 'coethnics' in Moscow is experiencing a bit of a dip at the moment.
Again, that's not really your or my determination to make, is it? I'm not supporting pressuring them into fighting a war, I'm strongly against NATO troops ever fighting in Ukraine, but revitalizing our defense manufacturing infrastructure while arming Ukrainians to fight for independence strikes me as the best action we could take at the moment.
More options
Context Copy link
This is not congruent with reality. Russia itself claims UA has lost 444k soldiers killed and wounded up to 2/27/24. Assuming a roughly 50/50 split of males:females, this means they have lost (KIA or WIA) around 2% of their prewar male population. And of course that number is coming from Russia, so that's massively inflated for obvious reasons, as well as for reasons unique to Russian reporting statistics. That's obviously a huge tragedy in human terms, and there's also the ~5M mostly women and children that have fled as refugees, but it's nowhere near "most of their men dying in trenches".
On the other hand, Russia's aims have always been transparently genocidal. The "misguided mini Russians" need to be put in their place according to the Russian government, and that's how stuff like Bucha happens, or that video of Russians decapitating a screaming Ukrainian POW, or the various castrations of POWs. Real ethnic solidarity there.
More options
Context Copy link
I imagine that this is one of the wedges that drives different intuitions on this conflict - are you looking at it through a racial lens or a civic nationalist lens? Do you see Russians and Ukrainians, two peoples about as genetically and linguistically similar as you can get while still remaining distinct, or do you see Russia and Ukraine, two independent legal entities that are bound by the same ahistorical Rawlsian veil of ignorance as all other international actors?
In general I'm going to be a lot less concerned about an invading force that is ethnically and linguistically closer to me than one that is more distant. China invades the US, it's go time, Germany or the UK invades the US, eh I can probably live with that. Contra some of the other replies, "the continued existence of Ukraine" is in fact an abstract geopolitical goal of NATO, because the nation-state itself is an abstraction of relatively recent historical origin. Prosperity for oneself, for one's family and tribe, for the continued endurance of one's way of life - these desires are universal, but they are not equivalent to "the territorial integrity of one's nation-state". The latter is not a natural and universal human desire.
Of course race is certainly not the only thing that matters. I don't want to be ruled by white wokeists. But how many Ukrainians currently fighting are deeply opposed to Russia on ideological grounds because of their commitment to free speech/representative democracy/gay rights/whatever, and how many of them are just going with the flow because "Putin bad and this is what we're doing now"? How many of them are actually ideologically closer to the average Russian than the average American liberal? This is where the accusations of puppetry come from.
More options
Context Copy link
Bold of you to assume that the plan isn't to repopulate both Ukraine and Russia once their mutual destruction is complete. Imagine the glory of taking over both the ancient Slavic "center of the world" Kiev as well as the modern one, Moscow. And the best part of it all will be how bloodless and peaceful our conquest will be, nay it will be even better, it will be done with the full consent of the conquered. Much like Rurik's original arrival into Novgorod back in 862, they are going to invite us to come over and rule over them. Could you ask for anything better?
Sometimes I ask myself: "Are we Gog and Magog?"; but nah, that's too farfetched and fantastical...
I'd say you're both being overly dramatic because the intensity of this war and the number of casualties on either side is nowhere close to the last big conflict fought in these lands
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
It was always the case that Ukraine was losing this conflict. The vibe shifting now isn't anyone having their minds changed, it's the raw reality of the situation overwhelming jingoism, propaganda, and russophobia. The only aspect that opponents of western support in the conflict had missed was how brutal and slow and generally ineffective contemporary war looks like today.
The neocon hype cycle:
A new Hitler is launched. Saddam, Osama, Gadaffi, Putin, Ho Chi Minh is this evil person motivated by evil who wants to destroy the world because it is evil! We have to act now before the new cartoon villain kills us all! Nobody wants to talk about the lead up to the conflicts and the very real grievances the next Hitler has. His motivations are by default nothing but his cartoonish evil and his arguments don't have to be discussed.
Freedom fries and hype. We will take Berlin next week! Mission accomplished! People are waving their flags and hyping up the military operation that is quickly and surgically remove the new Hitler thanks to the new wunderwaffen. This war isn't like all the previous disasters, we are going to win cheap and fast!
A plan designed by politicians rather than generals is launched. We aren't actually going to have a war time economy and do what it takes to win the war in Ukraine. We weren't actually going to build a military base in every valley in Afghanistan, we weren't actually going to nation build Libya. We want the cheap discount option that is easy to swallow. Ukrainian soldiers can be trained in six weeks. Not because they can learn a year's worth of material in six weeks but because it is a nicer option than the alternative.
People start acting for the sake of acting. There is no goal in Afghanistan, nobody knows what winning looks like. But we have some spare stuff lying around so we can donate that to the Afghan national army. Do they need it? Do theyhave a plan for how it is going to be used? What will eventually replace it? Who cares, people who ask those questions are terrorist lovers listening to the Dixie Chicks.
The misadventure goes way over budget, hundreds of thousands of people die and we get flooded with migrants. Now people don't want to talk about it anymore.
Years pass and people start denying that they ever supported that war. However, have you heard of the next Hitler! They may have lied about every previous war, but this new Hitler they are being completely honest about. We have to kill him, the media that told us Iraq has WMDs and the Afghan army has 300 000 soldiers says this guy eats babies!
You left out the part where once the obvious disaster becomes visible, we clearly recognize that shit is fucked up, but we need to keep sinking resources into the problem because otherwise The Bad Guys Win. Sure, all our efforts up to this point have been squandered when they weren't actively counterproductive, but you don't want to lose, do you? That's quitter talk!
...I appreciate that this, and the post it's replying to, sounds uncharitable, but at some point on the intersection of human failure, incompetence, and hubris, the charity simply runs out. I watched corpses flap in the slipstream of evacuating US aircraft when Afghanistan collapsed, after TWENTY FUCKING YEARS of this bullshit. We've got the documents now that lay out how there never was a plan, how no one involved who mattered in any way was even attempting to win in any meaningful sense, at any point, ever. At some point, you need some basic level of confidence that the people you're talking to are capable of basic pattern recognition.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
It's continually baffling to me how the majority of this forum thinks that defending your own lands from a hostile foreign invader somehow makes you a puppet. At least this thread isn't as bad as the one yesterday that explicitly called them an American puppet, and when pressed for evidence they produced several articles relating to Boris Johnson, apparently entirely unaware that he was the leader of the UK and not the US
Further, the idea that Ukraine is doomed and should just surrender now to prevent more bloodshed is only ever really advanced in bad faith. It's clear a lot of people on the right hate the woke left so much that they end up hating the entire West for having given birth to wokeness. Instead of specifically targeting the excesses of wokeness, they do the oikophobic thing and say the West itself must be destroyed. Since the invasion made the West seem more unified and righteous, they've been earnestly hoping for a Ukrainian defeat. They post as concern trolls similar to this, claiming they just want to stop the bloodshed of the Ukrainians, who after all are really just misguided mini-Russians.
The eventual resolution of this war is still very much in flux. It's looking more negative than it was post-Kherson, when there had been 3 big pushes liberating land. Now, Ukrainian leadership seems unable or unwilling to resolve the conscription issues, and House Republicans have sabotaged the compromise bill that would have provided aid (and limited immigration) at Trump's behest. That said, more aid could arrive through a different aid package or through Europeans boosting their own efforts. Ukraine could very well be forced to give up land in an eventual peace agreement, but how much and whether they have real security guarantees afterwards is still an open question. I'd go into it more, but this forum isn't particularly great for that so I'd just point anyone interested to the daily threads on /r/credibledefense.
Generally my group, i.e. oppositional Russians are for an immediate peace specifically on the humanist reasoning. Peace deal that was proposed in April(from what we know about anyway) wasn't bad enough to justify a couple of hundreds more dead and maimed. Starting the war was incredibly dumb and evil thing to do, but so(of course less so) is continuing it in the hopes of gaining some land back.
It is easy to misunderstand this but maloros ethnonym isn't some kind of slur but is coming from Byzantine chronists naming Principality of Galicia–Volhynia Small Rossia(Greek for Rus' and modern Russian for Russia), in the naming convention of naming ethnic heartlands small and land in which these people expanded to(like Principality of Vladimir) great(Like Magna Graecia). People in Ukraine did name themselves malorosy(not all of them, but many) up to the XX century, but this term was forbidden and fell out of use as part of soviet korenizatsiya policy.
it was effectively unconditional surrender - Ukraine would dismantle army (far below levels present then or now) - and after that Russia would invade on easy mode.
There were security guarantees from European countries included. And if you think that they would not be followed through in reality, why do you think that the army would be actually dismantled and not hidden in bureaucratic loopholes. Also, I hate when people use word to mean "thing that I don't like" instead of the definition of the word. No, any peace treaty that favors some side isn't unconditional surrender and terms weren't even close to one.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Ukraine has a conscription problem. El Salvador has 100,000 gang members in prison that they don't know what to do with.
I see a solution to both problems.
More options
Context Copy link
That bill would have enshrined minimal allowable amounts of illegal immigration into law before the proposed countermeasures kicked in, and would have transferred great authority over such enforcement to the discretion of DHS. It was a bad bill that deserved to die.
Ukraine is not getting Crimea back, and probably not much of anything else they've lost. The only question is how long it will take for everyone to accept this reality.
It did no such thing. It had trigger clauses that would allow the USFG to take measures above and beyond what they're currently capable of doing. The DHS authority is to get around the court clog of the DoJ, which is currently responsible for one of the main loopholes via missing court dates. Here's a good primer. It was the most conservative immigration bill in a generation, and Trump ensured its death for purely self-serving reasons. It makes sense, given he was basically no better than Obama when it comes to actual illegal detainment numbers.
Crimea would have been an easier target than the original breakaway republics in Donetsk and Luhansk. Had the UA offensive succeeded in pushing to Azov, they could have plausibly disabled the Kerch bridge, and then the entire southern front would have been a redo of Kherson. If UA retakes the imitative then that's still plausible, although the modern situation so heavily favors the defense that it is indeed pretty unlikely even if the UA does fix its medium term issues.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
and it seems like bad faith to me when globalists are suddenly completely certain that nationalism is universally supported and good. Even the more right wing people I chat with aren't purely line on a map nationalists that ignore cultural differences. Ukraine is an especially poorly partitioned country where you have entire regions that are mostly Russian speaking, then others that are Ukrainian speaking, and still more that are heavily Hungarian. The place is a complete mess. It doesn't matter if they fix the "conscription issues" (which is a very clinical way to say that 10k+ a month are dying and their older male population is so exhausted the only way to keep the front from collapsing is to lower the conscription age and get rid of any opportunity for long term conscripts to demobilize)
credibledefense bans all opposing views... it's an echochamber like most of reddit.
This sounds like a "Comrade Stalin threw a dart on a map and put the border where it landed" problem. And I agree it causes tremendous issues of national identity and integrity post-breakup. For the Bolskeviks, obviously that was the point: divide the minority ethnicities, put them in SSRs with people they hate, destroy nationalist ambitions,
profitcollectively owned return on collective investment.And then there's Moldova, which just is North Romania, but was divided from the motherland because of dumb Soviet border disputes.
Who wore it better: UK or USSR?
I think it's more because of it's conquest by Russian Empire in the 19th century.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Some Hungarians are there but they're only a tiny fringe along the Carpathians. Ukraine is indeed split with some supporting Ukraine (and the West) and some supporting Russia. But having a Russian contingent isn't unusual, as the Baltics and Moldova also have that. I doubt most Estonians would want a chunk cleaved out of their territory to appease the ethnic Russians.
It has a UA tilt, but they definitely don't autoban pro-RU people. Glideer for instance is pretty prolific and often gets downvoted, but the threads are sorted by new so his posts aren't hard to find. There are also plenty of rather eloquent pro-UA but pessimistic people, like Duncan-M.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
To be clear, I’m pro-western and (mildly)anti-Russia and think Ukraine should have opened negotiations months ago, starting by recognizing Crimea as part of Russia, in the hopes of preserving some semblance of Ukraine in the future. This is not an isolated position; lots of red tribe boomers who don’t fully grasp the end of the Cold War have a ‘they lost, negotiate for the best possible deal’ mentality about the issue.
This is predicated on Russia being willing to negotiate in ways that aren't essentially just a surrender of Ukraine. They've shown very little willingness to do this so far.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
There are a few users who really jump on any news from Ukraine to defend Russia. Jeroboam has been consistent, but I wouldn’t say he’s framed it as anti-woke. I don’t know the prevalence, nor do I know how much pushback they receive on average. But this forum really attracts contrarians, and there’s not much alpha in saying Russia Bad.
More options
Context Copy link
Yeah, that's clearly the most obvious read there. That I'm completely retarded and can't tell the US from the UK. Not an assumption that Boris was acting on US policy goals despite being a UK politician, with the key quote being that he insisted "The West isn't ready for the war to be over yet". When the US is funding 90% of the war, it's a safe assumption to make that Boris was writing a check the US was going to cash, with their tacit approval.
I didn't bother responding to you then because you taking such obvious liberties with my actual claims, but if you are going to sit back and crow about it like it's some sort of victory, fine, you've gotten my attention.
Boris was grandstanding because he had a Churchill complex, it had nothing to do with the US at all.
More options
Context Copy link
I mean, you also didn't respond to Dean either, who wrote more eloquently than I did about the faults of the position. I'll also note the bolding here wasn't present on the original post.
It's just bad logic that Europe has no agency, that they're all US puppets, and that the US is for some reason sending Boris instead of Blinken or Biden. Was Macron's recent remark about sending troops also a threat that the US was about to intervene with troops of its own?
This isn't true today, and was never true before. If you look at total commitments, the combined EU outweighs the US by quite a lot. You probably would be frustrated with me for making a point like this and say you clearly implied it was for lethal aid, but even that wasn't true either. Poland + the Baltics sent pretty much everything that wasn't nailed down in the first few days, and other European powers like Germany have slowly ramped up their commitments to pick up the slack thereafter. The US remains the largest single source of military aid, but its handily beat by the combined EU today.
More options
Context Copy link
You were responding to "the US for not letting Ukraine negotiate a peace"
Yes, that was the most obvious read of your comment.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
It's only oikophobic if the West feels like home. A lot of people in the US see the pride flag being treated more reverently than the stars and stripes and feel like strangers in a strange land. If the morale of the people is flagging the ruling party may have to look to their own sins to understand why.
Looks like a circular argument to me. If you're hating your own country, of course it's not going to feel like home.
More options
Context Copy link
Oikophobia in the traditional clinical context usually arises from the patient's home not feeling like a home.
I think I got tripped up on the wording because "phobia" denotes irrationality to me and I don't believe the right's non-support of a war waged in the name of an unfamiliar flag to be irrational.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Do you give me, a man who has never lived in the West, a permission to wish death to the whole West for giving birth to wokeness? It's not your dreaded oikophobia, after all.
You specifically are not oikophobic since you don't live here, but it'd still be bad to say the West is indistinguishable from wokeness, and thus to wish death upon it. Wish for the rejection of the ideology, not the death of the collective nations or peoples.
My metaphor for that is from one sci-fi horror fiction. Kill everybody who could have even heard the word woke, that's the only way to rid of it. I'd gladly finish with myself if I had the means to ensure every other death.
I feel like this is the memetics equivalent of great-man historical theories, this idea that ideas just pop into the zeitgeist via random recombination, and if we could just prevent the bad ones we'd all be doing great. I think it's more likely that ideas like wokeness are inevitable outgrowths of previous conditions like any other historical force or event; you might kill every wokie, but if society and its infosphere are primed for wokeness, it'll just pop right back out.
This is almost certainly at least partially correct, imho. Not suggesting that ideas don't have potency (they clearly do, you can trace the intellectual origins of almost any thing back for hundreds of years) but I think that "material conditions" matter a lot more than just some guy having an idea.
One of the interesting things you'll note historically is that most powerful ideas (e.g. Darwinism) aren't (entirely, anyway) original, they keep popping up time and time again until something happens that seems to make them stick. It seems pretty plausible that it's circumstances more than personality (at least in many cases) that causes the "sticking" to occur.
More options
Context Copy link
I imagine the servicemen in that world raised similar arguments to their more strong-willed comrades. In any event, genetical and cultural changes after such a purge would make the conditions not at all similar to the present world.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Trumps not going to lose this war. He will escalate to deescalate. It’s either going to end up frozen on current lines or American AirPower shreds the Russians.
Bidens been doing his typical Biden shit and screwing things up. He has had approval to send more weapons and has not. His people are afraid of escalation when the only thing Russians know is power.
Russian apologists will say Trump can’t do this. He’s not going to start his next administration losing a war. Winning a war gets all the neocons back on team Trump and kills all the lefts mythology of Trump being a Russian agent. Ukranians can fight the Russians to a standstill which is nothing compared to modern American military hardware and training. Send in some Polish ground forces backed by US air and the wars over in a month.
Trump escalating isn't entirely out of the question given how prone to escalation he was with Iran, but thus far Trump has only indicated that he'd strong-arm Ukraine into essentially surrendering.
He also indicated he would strong arm Russia into peace.
Source on this part? So far I've only seen articles saying he'd force UA to give up land, or else risk getting cut off from all US aid, and maybe other punishments on top. I haven't heard his idea of strong-arming Russia.
He didn’t say he was going full send in the Air Force. But he did promise more arms than they’ve gotten.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/donald-trump-russia-ukraine-war-b2377077.html
Thanks for the link. So he basically said he would... keep doing what Biden was doing, but "bigger" in an unspecified way.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I’ll say We, as in NATO would be stupid to do it. Putin has nukes and has said repeatedly that NATO in Ukraine is his red line. If Putin is backed into a corner where either option is “lose and die”, the restraining force of gentility just isn’t going to stop him.
When has Putin said he’s going to nuke over Ukraine? Official doctrine is an attack on proper Russia. Tanks rolling to Moscow.
Putin isn’t ending Russian history by starting a nuclear war over some shithole border town in Ukraine.
He annexed Donbas and considers them a part of Russia, which makes any attempt to retake them an attack on Russia proper.
The other thing that I think is dismissed too lightly is that him losing the war is likely to be fatal to him. Russia has a history of killing or deposing rulers who lose wars. If the only way to win in Ukraine is to use nukes then he’s likely to at least think about it.
The he annexed these places thing has already been violated without nuclear war. I believe Kherson was after annexation plus Ukraine has been attacking annexed land for over a year. So no line their for Russian nuclear options.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Russia officially annexed parts of Ukraine, so under Russian doctrine a US/NATO intervention that aimed to retake Crimea or the other oblasts would be (under Russian thinking) an attack on Russia proper, wouldn't it?
Russian "escalate to deescalate" doctrine would likely involve using tactical, low-yield nuclear weapons on a military target set and then daring NATO to end history by starting a real nuclear war. Or at least that's the theory – who knows what would happen in real life.
I think Trump would try to do what he did when he was in office last time (choke Ukrainian military aid, threaten Putin with insane military escalation) and force a frozen conflict, but that's just a guess.
Given that (as per Western/NATO-aligned sources) the Russians have been shooting down US anti-radiation (IOW, anti-air-defense) and surface-to-surface missiles in Ukraine on the regular, I'm not convinced that an air campaign (which would use munitions we probably have earmarked for a Pacific war) would be an easy and quick fix, even if it was ultimately effective. Similarly the Poles certainly have a very significant military, but (based on a quick glance) they've already donated about a third of their tank inventory (300+) to Ukraine. I can see a world where throwing their remaining 600ish at the Russian army (which IIRC is now about 15% larger than it was at the beginning of the invasion, as per the DoD) results in them getting ground down over the course of several months or years the same way the much larger Ukrainian army has been attrited.
If the annexed territories are ‘officially’ part of Russia, why hasn’t Russia nuked Kiev for invading its sovereign territory?
It’s a bluff, it always was. If NATO tanks roll in from Poland, Russia will choose retreat over nuclear Armageddon.
Because it thinks it can win a conventional war with Kiev (and anyway even if it couldn't Kiev doesn't pose quite the threat NATO does.) War with NATO would be (understatement of the week) a much dicier proposition. It's quite possible that you're right and that they would retreat.
But understand that the idea everyone has from the Cold War about how nuclear war consists of hundreds of ICBM launches isn't necessarily accurate. NATO and the Soviet Union both planned on using tactical nuclear weapons in the event of any large-scale confrontation during the Cold War, and they didn't necessarily think this meant Armageddon, although they were cognizant of the risks. Ships routinely deployed with nuclear weapons meant to be used against individual submarines (probably our only means of catching some of the faster Russian submarines for a time.) These weapons weren't weapons of mass destruction in the city-destroying sense; they were used because their explosive yield (by weight) was needed for certain tactical applications (e.g. ensuring an aircraft carrier was sunk, or that a submarine was caught in the kill zone of a depth charge.)
If NATO tanks roll in from Poland, and Russia decides its conventional forces won't cut it but it wants to stick it out, it most likely will fire a low-yield weapon from tube artillery or a cruise/theatre ballistic missile at NATO troops on the ground or at another military target, e.g. a Polish airbase. These weapons are tremendously destructive, but only in a very localized area (think of it as deleting one bunker, or putting a single airbase out of commission. They wouldn't be especially effective against troops on the ground unless they were in a tight formation.) In the past during US exercises, the US response to this has been to launch their own tactical nuclear weapon in response, not to open the ICBM tubes.
The US is skittish about using nuclear weapons on Russian soil (in one past exercise they retaliated with a nuclear weapon launched on a target inside neutral Belarus) so one possible outcome to all of this is that all nuclear weapons are targeted at conventional Russian/NATO forces inside Ukraine in a "non-escalatory" fashion until one side cries uncle.
TLDR; we could all plausibly live through a nuclear war with hundreds of nuclear detonation without any nuclear Armageddon, or even mass civilian casualties. Life in most of the world would continue on as it had, but there would be thousands and thousands of dead Poles (and thousands more dead Russians.)
Honestly as much as Russia waving the nuclear saber is a visible prospect in light of current stated and anticipated hostilities, we all seem to forget the most likely course of nuclear apocalypse: nuclear armed retards. India and Pakistan could have absolutely nuked the shit out of each other back in 2022 when India accidentally launched a Brahmos at Pakistan and the Pakistanis were too asleep at the wheel to respond. If the Pakistanis were more on the ball, we really would have seen the first nuclear incident since Hiroshima/Nagasaki, all thanks to fucktards inheriting toys from their forebears
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Why should Trump fight at all for a country he knows best as a source of graft for the Bidens?
To turn it into a source of graft for the Trumps? Use the war to indebt the Ukrainians to his family personally.
He would only be spending American money, not his own, and he'd gain a source of graft as well as regain prestige. Furthermore, money would primarily flow from blue constituents to red ones.
Sounds perfect for Trump.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The “Ukraine will turn into a frozen conflict lasting years” thing is the new media cope. Ukraine is losing multiple towns every week in the east, and their army is getting progressively more run down. The situation is going to be seriously dicey for them by June or July.
Only if more materiel from the west doesn't materielize...
The aid doesn’t matter anymore. Ukraine is calling up 400,000 new draftees and they still won’t be able to afford to rotate out front line combat troops that have been fighting for two years. Unless NATO actually sacks up and sends multiple divisions of troops, there’s going to be a major collapse of the front in at least one area.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
"Ukraine will turn into a frozen conflict", no matter whether correct or not, is not a "new cope", it's been a popular prediction for the duration of the war.
The media/NAFO Twitter/Reddit party line was “total Ukrainian victory, including Crimea” until about fall 2023 and “comprehensive Ukrainian victory, Donbas and Luhansk reclaimed” until about two months ago.
The opinion of NAFOids and Redditors can be discounted on sight, but at least here, where the one thing the media or the public opinion beyond the most extreme loser circles is solidly pro-Ukrainian , the media has been bouncing the question of what the actual goals are or should be for quite a bit longer than that.
I'll just add that the media bouncing has also shifted over time. In the first six months of the war, the pro-peace-via-concession element was decisively in the European court, particularly Germany before the Nord Stream pipeline explosion scuttled attempts to keep the Russian gas flowing. In the last six months of the war, as the US aid holdup began, the more US-based conession voices have increased, but more belicose support from the European powers has increased due to evolving government perspectives on what Russia would do with its Cold War over-build if a peace were to emerge. At this point, the re-activated Russian stockpiles have themselves become a national security threat, as the current attrition rate has made them a use-them-or-lose-them asset for the Russians who can't credibly modernize them after a war, but could continue to use them for a near-term war if Ukraine were to capitulate shortly.
I'd go as far as to wager that even if Trump were to try and pressure Ukraine to make a deal, the Europeans would continue to back the Ukrainians and maintain the conflict, if only to give their own arms industries more time to mobilize and attrit more of the Russian stockpile. The US isn't the only party with an interest in depleting the Russian armored corps, and the strategic logic takes a life of its own with other EU-sovereignist interests are considered.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I don't think this is surprising. A lot of Ukraine's ability to resist was predicated on US assistance, which has become increasingly rare due to resistance from House Republican leadership.
This is so bizarre to me. Ukrainian women are... people? They are not the property of Ukrainian men. They are not obliged to restrain from forming relationships or otherwise trying to live their lives because they happen to be refugees.
I do not think "maintaining the territorial integrity of Ukraine" is an "abstract geopolitical goal of NATO."
Ukraine has received oodles of money from the US, and oodles more from Europe. There has been no shortage of aid.
Over the duration of the entire war, sure but (1) the US has provided almost as much as all EU institutions and (2) there has not been aid from the US for several months due to opposition from Republican leadership.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
As has been pointed out downthread, the sexual freedom of ukrainian women is not more dear on a cosmic level than the not-getting-shot-at freedom of ukrainian men.
Now personally I find it hard to blame ukrainian women for trying to find relationships with German men(although someone should tell them tinder is a bad way to do that). I doubt the ‘Ukrainians on the cock carousel’ narrative in any case. But protesting for the freedom of ukrainian women, but not men, is incoherent.
I mean, I agree. That is why I am in the replies to every comment protesting for the freedom of ukrainian men.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The right to vote yourself into a war means the responsibility to pay and support the soldiers fighting it.
Ukrainian women did the former, but not the latter (they skipped town).
Human beings pay their debts. Criminals skip town. Ukrainian women running from the war have thus committed a crime and should be deprived of their liberty as a consequence until they have paid their debt to Ukrainian society. The penalty for murder is generally a complete forfeit of that for the rest of one's life.
That is what we would do to men, anyway.
In an environment of equality this is what we would do to women.
Obviously, we are not in an environment of equality.
This problem does solve itself over time (eugenics through enemy action?), but that doesn't mean it's not going to suck for those who have to deal with it.
More options
Context Copy link
It was never realistic to support Ukraine.
The defence industrial base has been slaughtered for 33 years. Most of the industrial base isn't doing magic military stuff but is tied into the overall industrial base which was shipped to China. There aren't that many welders, factory workers and machinists left. The idea that we have an advantage because our GDP is so high since we have socialmedia companies worth a fortune ignores that technically minded people in the west are working at a fin tech startup instead of a factory. When it comes to mass manufacturing pieces of steel financial hubs won't do well. The US sees itself as economically superior because smart americans work with insurance, investment banking and Netflix while Russians work in a tractor factory. The tractor factory will produce far more mortars than Netflix.
The US military isn't very army heavy. The US military is to a large extent a medical and pension scheme with military appended to it. Most of that military is navy and airforce with the army only being a minor part. The army is geared toward low intensity policing missions in the middle east, not fighting on the eastern front. NATO wasted trillions on fighting in the Middle East. That money had to come from somewhere and the industrial base took a big hit. The industrial base turned into manufacturing prototypes and small series of extremely expensive gear for special forces.
NATO equipment is maintenance heavy, expensive, incredibly hard to use and not designed for the mission at hand.
Just fixing the sorry state of NATO militaries would be a Herculean effort. The industrial base is barely able to replace the equipment from the cold war that needs to be retired. Now it is tasked with the additional tasks of feeding Israel and Ukraine fighting wars in a scale much larger than any European military was scoped for. Meanwhile China can pump out artillery shells, SAMs, ships and hand grenades at a rate that we simply can't.
The US produces more steel than Russia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_steel_production
And "smart americans" can buy steel from the Chinese, who massively outproduce Russia (or the US).
The US is also a major tractor manufacturer and exporter, Russia is not: https://blog.howdeninsurance.co.uk/tractors-where-are-they-manufactured/ -------- though Russia does import a lot of tractors from countries with better tractor manufacturing industries: https://www.trade.gov/country-commercial-guides/russia-agribusiness
Just because the US outperforms Russia in service industries, it doesn't mean that the US doesn't ALSO outperform Russia in manufacturing.
The fact that China outcompetes Russia and US is bad for US prospects against Russia when China is currently supplying Russia.
Are we talking about steel? Because the US also imports from China. And, if there wasn't the current glut in steel production, the US could outbid Russia easily.
More options
Context Copy link
I don't think China is going to stop selling to the US just because they might integrate the materials into weapons that will be sent to Ukraine. China is pro Russian, but not that pro Russian.
Definitely. But in this case, China is exporting arms to Russia, which it does not really export to the West. I wouldn't put it past them to sell to both sides if they wanted to, but it moots any simple analysis about the US arms industry being larger than Russia's.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The Russian steel industry is more or less at American levels. Meanwhile the US has to fight a bunch of wars in the middle east and compete with China. It isn't that Russia is an insurmountable problem, it is that the combined weight of all problems is greater than the capacity to deal with them.
So that's your update after finding out that your image of "Netflix producing Americans vs. steel producing Russians" was wrong?
"Well, actually US steel production is not enough, because of this qualitative analysis I just developed. The US is entangled in the Middle East (unlike Russia?!)"?
The US spends 3.5% of GDP on defence, around the lowest in its history. For illustration, Russia had been spending 4.1%, but it is now increasing defence spending to 6%. The US is very far from exhausting its capacity to deal with military problems.
More options
Context Copy link
And Russia doesn't have the same issue? They are in the Syrian conflict and countless brushfire conflicts in africa on the GDP of Italy.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Hate to tell you this but smart Russians also work in insurance, investment banking and tech companies, whether at home or (increasingly, as the brain drain accelerates) abroad.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
They may not be property of Ukranian men but they very much are property of the Ukrainian state (to the same extent as Ukranian men are right now). In moden armies the tooth to tail ratio is about 1:6, meaning that for every frontline solider there are 6 support/logistics staff keeping him well fed and healthy. Many of these jobs don't require more physical strength than any office job and there is no reason why women can't do them. If the men are going to be conscripted into the military, the women can also be conscripted and made to work these jobs and thereby forbidden from leaving the country. This is not some cosmic injustice inflicted on the fairer sex.
I think conscription is bad, also.
But in a scenario where conscription is already occurring, do you think it is proper to only require males to stay in the country?
I think the proper thing is to stop conscription.
Even if that would mean a Russian victory?
More options
Context Copy link
But if conscription isn't being stopped, do you think women should be blocked from leaving the country like the men?
No. We must keep our eye on the ball. The problematic injustice is conscription. I do not think the situation is made better by perpetrating some further injustice even if it is, in some sense, "fair."
If you're just going to dodge the same question repeatedly then why are you even imon this forum?
More options
Context Copy link
That's shoddy reasoning IMO and sidestepping the core question or "the ball". Yeah morally speaking conscripting someone to fight for their life is an injustice, but even bigger injustice is limiting the injustice of conscription to a certain demographic. Practically speaking it does make sense for conscription to be limited to Men. The percentage of men being able to clear the minimum physical level that is required for combat is higher than that of women. The women are especially more vulnerable to being targeted for sexual violence than men. Yeah Ukraine can conscript women and make them take a more non-combat role, but why take the political risk when you can make do with just conscripting Men(which I think they fucked up seeing that they need more meat for the "meat-grinder" and has since changed).
Being raised on the idea that Men and Women are equal and witnessing the Women evacuating to well-to-do economies resuming life as usual while you are being thrown in the meat grinder to fend for yourself is bound to cause some bitterness in Men.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
If you're male, I find it very hard to believe you don't see his point. You can discard it as a primitive, outdated consideration if you so choose, but don't call it bizarre - it decidedly is not.
Myself, I can't overstate just how much this scenario makes me recoil. If such mercenary behavior is straightforwardly permissible, then the idea of fighting for a nation falls apart, and you're just meat to be sacrificed to further elite interests. You don't exactly get to loot your way into leaving a war better off these days. War in Ukraine is utter hell, demanding solidarity on homefront is perfectly normal.
More options
Context Copy link
Ukraine is already taking away its male citizens right to life. Taking away its female citizens right to date German men is a small step in comparison.
If the government is going to conscript men and send them to the front to die, then all citizens should chip in and help. Women should be working in arms plants, farms, and in support roles in the military. And, yes, they should be there to form families with the returning soldiers when the war is over.
And if these women would prefer not to, shouldn't Ukrainian men get to opt out as well?
What's bizarre is the Western world asking Ukrainian men to bear nearly the entire brunt of this conflict as if their lives have no value.
Men are the expendable sex; nothing bizarre about that. Women's lives have value — they are valued by society just by being born. Men have to earn their personhood, earn the care of society. Men's lives — Ukrainian or otherwise — have no value but the value they provide to women and children.
More options
Context Copy link
I think conscription is bad, also.
More options
Context Copy link
The 'Western world' isn't asking anything of them. The Ukrainian people and government want to fight, and want the west to support them. If the Ukrainian government wanted to surrender, they could do so tomorrow without asking for anyone's permission.
Other countries have agency too.
Maybe the government wants this war. Maybe even the people do too. But not enough to go fight and die. That's why Ukraine is rounding up men and forcing them to fight against their will.
The people who seem to want this war the most are those for whom it costs nothing.
More options
Context Copy link
Agency doesn't mean free choice. When they tried mere negotiations, Boris Johnson flew over to scream at them until they stopped.
...?
When the Ukrainians tried mere negotiations, the Russians were demanding a dismantling of the Ukrainian military and veto over any external security guarantors actually providing assistance in case of another continuation war.
Further, the timing of those Russian demands broadly coincided with the Ukrainians discovery of the Bucha massacre and forcing the Russian retreat from Kyiv, both of which changed the Ukrainian political appetite- governmental and popular- for negotiations.
By contrast, the power of Borris Johnson to coerce, compel, bewitch, or otherwise overturn the true desires of the Ukrainian political establishment was...?
You frame this as if it were absurd to think US had any way of influencing Ukrainians. I do find the focus on Johnson silly. The idea that at that pivotal moment US helped Ukrainians decide to commit themselves to the meatgrinder, not so much. Obviously Johnson himself would be little more than a mouthpiece.
My impression is that you never give an inch.
I frame it as absurd to think the US was responsible for the Ukrainian point of view when there is no indication the Ukrainians changed positions at all, other than claims generally fronted by Russian-originated sources which had every incentive to claim that the onus of the war continuing was on the Americans / Brits.
Characterizing negotiations breakdown as a result of the UK 'screaming at them until they stopped,' as opposed to the Russians demanding terms that would have prevented the Ukrainians from pulling a similar defense of the country in the future even as Russian atrocities were being recognized, is a silly when put in the context of what the state of negotiations were when they ended, and thus also silly when said terms and contexts aren't being acknowledged.
That the US had any way of influencing Ukrainians is truism: that's a bar so low you have to dig to not walk over it. That the US influence (by proxy, no less) was the determining factor is an appeal to the hyperagency/hypoagency framework that's a consistent flaw in understanding international affairs and especially the Ukraine conflict, which for nearly a decade has been a consistent series of Putin's Russia not recognizing Ukrainian agency and trying to attribute responsibility for resistance on others.
Just to clarify, the most recent source of the claim, that I'm familiar with, was some high-ranking Ukrainian official. There were also some German politicians saying things to this effect, but I think they were from the terminally pro-Russian faction, so I was taking that with a grain of salt until more recently.
OTOH, I probably oversold how confident I am in the claim, this is in the "something that popped up on my feed, and I never followed up" category.
But on this I have to push back. Framing it as a "the hyperagency/hypoagency framework" is a strawman, or a weakman at best. The point being made here isn't that Russians literally couldn't make another choice, it's that an American / Western move put them in a position where war seems like the best of all possible options. Normally this isn't a controversial framework, the US was justifying it's own invasion of Iraq in exactly the same way, not long ago.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Okay, so how, exactly, did Boris Johnson stop them? What's the specific mechanism? Screaming? THat's not really enough to force anyone to do anything in geopolitics.
How am I supposed to know? It's not like I was in those behind-closed-doors meetings, but that those meetings took place in response to the Russian peace offer is not in question, as far as I understand. I would imagine he did it the way countries usually do - the threat of withholding some carrot, or applying some stick, or both.
What could Boris Johnson have possibly threatened Ukraine with that's worse than what the Russians are already doing? Is he going to nuke Kiev if they surrender?
Two can play this game - why did he go there if he had nothing to say, offer, or threaten with?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
What carrot would he have had? Weapons shipment? Little need for those if Ukrainians were hell-bent for peace. NATO membership? Explicit Russian demand was for Ukraine to not be in NATO, at this point. EU membership? There was a certain event some years ago that means Boris Johnson did not exactly have leverage on this point.
I'm not sure what other stick there would have been apart from UK actually invading Ukraine itself, which, uh, would have certainly caused a lot of questions, home and abroad.
I never said they were "hell bent".
"Either you go balls to the wall with this now, with Europe's and USA's full support, and potential rewards if you manage to win, or you're out on your own" is a pretty compelling carrot/stick combination. I don't see how Brexit enters into the picture if the Western establishment was of more or less of one mind on this.
More options
Context Copy link
Why do you assume they threatened Ukraine, as opposed to Zelenksy directly? The position Boris allegedly expressed was clear. The West was not ready for the war to be over. You think if Zelensky declined their generous offer for "help", they wouldn't have found someone who would accept it? Or would have even threatened to?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Are the men the property of the Ukrainian government? Dase recently got in trouble for lashing out against this kind of "innocent" "shucks! I don't know what you could possibly mean" debate tactics, and while I don't want to be as aggressive as he was, I do share his frustration. This kind of clap-on / clap-off - we're just individuals pursuing happiness / we're part of a larger whole and you have to fulfill your duty to society, is somewhat maddening.
I think conscription is bad, also.
It's not a question of it being good or bad, it's a question of not being able to understand the outrage at being forced to fight and die as others are out having fun.
Ok. I think it is bad that the Ukrainian government is forcing men to fight. The solution is to not do that, not force women to remain in the country or otherwise restrict them.
You can understand, though, why this would be nuclear-tier propaganda as opposed to something bizarre? If a male is being forced at gunpoint to go to the front while his female counterpart is out partying on Tinder in Germany, is it surprising that the male would find it unfair and be resentful?
Would it? Do you think Ukrainian soldiers aren't aware that the women left behind aren't exactly bound to nunneries? It would be propaganda, sure. In fact there is at least one well-directed propaganda video made by Russia where an AFU soldier dies in the field in parallel with a corrupt upper-class Ukrainian fucking some woman. But nuclear would have to be a bit more illuminating than that, I think.
Besides, the Russians that are shelling them are close and real, while some abstract Ukrainian sluts are far away and hypothetical.
Nuclear may be an overstatement; effective is probably a better word. Although Ukrainian soldiers likely know what's going on, the propaganda's goal is not to inform but to increase the salience of that fact.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Sure, I agree. I think my reaction was more to the implicit "the government should be doing to women what it's doing to men" solution.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I'm not sure why you're reiterating your point about it being bad, when I explicitly said that it's not about that.
I think I misunderstood your reply. I understand how people can be outraged such a situation but I think they implicitly identify the wrong solution.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Nothing exposes the limits of this worldview like conscription.
Women are the primary victims of war, etc.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Men have duties. Women have rights.
It is as it ever will be, and no matter the rational arguments you muster for equal treatment, you will never convince anyone who's bought into this mindset. At best, you'll get a rhetorical concession, before the principle is promptly forgotten when the next discussion comes up.
Women used to have duties as well: to bear children and to raise them.
Without those duties, deference to the fairer sex may live on in our lizard brains but it serves no useful purpose.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Maybe don't promise things you can't deliver? I never supported Ukraine, I have no interest in supporting Ukraine, and I'm not interested in voting for people who support Ukraine. If more people thought like me, it's entirely possible that this war would not have happened. Given that this war has happened, I'm not going to change my mind because "you broke it, you bought it". I didn't buy shit, and I think anyone who's still on-board with writing blank checks to the American foreign policy apparatus is too stupid to be allowed to vote. If the last twenty-four years of disasters wasn't enough to drive the lesson home, they're simply incapable of learning.
This would be a better argument if those Ukrainian men weren't faced with forced conscription into indefinite service in a meatgrinder war of attrition. They are also people, no? But naturally, when it's the men, it's honor and duty, and when it's the women, it's human rights and individualism. Women have, after all, always been the greatest victims of war.
Then I submit that you are not very good at assessing what is and is not an abstract geopolitical goal of NATO.
How do you mean? I expect Russia would have more incentive to invade, not less, if they foresaw no Western opposition.
If we were talking about Patriot Acts and boots on the ground, maybe. But spending money on munitions is like…our comparative advantage. It’s making a slightly larger fraction of GDP go towards geopolitical goals. I think we’re still getting a decent return on investment.
Yes, more people are dying than would if we washed our hands of it, and I wish they weren’t. But how much of the culpability falls on us rather than on the conscriptors, let alone the invaders?
I would take your “Mistakes were Made” bet, because I don’t expect this to escalate in the ways you’re thinking. Russia is probably going to win out as Ukraine collapses. I will admit that I was wrong—and lobby my Congressman against it, etc.—if America considers more direct intervention.
What is that return, exactly? I will grant you that in terms of direct costs to America, this scenario allows us to purchase dead Russians and destroyed Russian value at an astonishingly cheap price. Why are dead Russians and destroyed Russian value something you want? What is the end-result you believe we are investing in?
Is it regime change? And then what? Do you think a Russian liberal democracy is a likely outcome if only Putin would go away? If so, I think you should explain why this particular democracy-export project is going to end different than the last several. And if not liberal democracy, then what? A different strong-man? A friendlier strongman? When has that worked before? If you were fine with a strongman, why not just accept Putin?
Is it a failed Russian state? And then what? Who gets the nukes? Who gets the arms? Who cleans up the mess? How confident are you that such a mess can be cleaned up?
Is it a Russian state that remains barely functional, but with minimal capacity for power projection? Why would this be a more desirable end-state than a functional Russia that we left alone to dominate Ukraine? Is it the better outcome for Ukraine? Why is gutting a large country preferable to allowing a small country to be stunted?
What is the actual logic? What is the long-term benefit to treating Russia as an enemy, rather than simply leaving them alone?
This war was the predicted outcome of our explicit foreign policy choices. The standard rejoinder is that this assessment assumes that only America has agency, but that appears to me to be a thought-terminating cliche. "Provocation" is a coherent concept within international politics, and it doesn't magically lose its coherence when it becomes inconvenient for supporters of American foreign policy. It was predictable, and was in fact predicted, that meddling on Russia's borders would lead to this war in particular. That meddling had no upside that I've ever been able to see. What was the point, and why was it worth it when this was the predictable outcome?
My expectation is that Ukraine loses at some point in the next couple years, leaving Russia with a pyrrhic victory, a poorer and less-stable country, and cemented as an explicit enemy of the US for the next few decades at least. Why is this a desirable outcome? What value was secured by doing things this way?
Russia emboldened to invade Baltics seems to be worse outcome than that.
More options
Context Copy link
Russia chose this, thinking that Ukrainians would pay most of the human and financial cost. By supporting Ukraine, we are moving more of that cost onto Russia, the aggressor. I believe this is more moral than caving to threats.
This is mainly true insofar as Ukraine is willing to resist. If, as increased conscription suggests, they are losing their willingness to fight and die, we should defer. But for now, we have no moral duty to make the Ukrainian people surrender.
What explicit U.S. policy choices are you thinking about? Do any of them outweigh Russia’s explicit choice to invade? From where I’m standing, their right to respond to provocation is strictly weaker than Ukraine’s right to self-determination.
I think this is the most likely outcome, and it is a tragic one. I also don’t think it will be remembered as an Iraq-style Mistake. We’re not committing ourselves to nation-building or occupation; the check isn’t blank.
More importantly, I find this tragedy preferable to the one where Russia rolls in and shoots a few thousand Ukrainian troops before declaring “mission accomplished!” All the better options were taken off the table, and not by us.
More options
Context Copy link
My impression, from living in Russia, was that Russia cemented the US and "the West" as a 99% explicit enemy a decade, if not more, ago. A pole of power that has opposite interests and values, and will never be trusted.
Not merely objecting to the US's role of the world police and reserving the right to police itself, however, Russia decided that it wants a slice of the world police pie. I wouldn't expect the US to like it any more than Russia likes what the US has been doing.
More options
Context Copy link
I don't see in the thread the result I have found most convincing, so here goes: the end-result is a world where military force is not used to change state borders, and is not sent across state borders in any way that could be ambiguous. Countries can go to hell in their own handbaskets, and descend into civil war and massacre civilians and bleed out endless streams of refugees, but as long as the chaos stays within the lines on the map, the rest of the world can get on with their lives.
Yes, this is hypocritical coming from America (I'm American), but I don't think anyone serious thought that we were going to annex Iraq or Afghanistan or anywhere else. If Russia sent troops to (say) Mali as "peacekeepers" or to put down "insurrections" that were causing "human rights violations", whatever. No one serious thinks that the Wagner Group is going to annex the Central African Republic. But if Russia does the same to Ukraine or Georgia or any other neighboring country, that's much more dangerous.
What Russia did in Ukraine - sending tanks and infantry across border in what is objectively an invasion - that seems like the bad old days starting up again. By doing that, Russia made themselves into an enemy, and I am happy to see them bleed. Especially if it has a side-effect of causing NATO to improve its military-industrial capacity. The more damage we can do to Russia, the less likely any other country will be to try something like this in the future. Like China.
Probably the Russians felt the same way about America during Vietnam, and, you know, I'm fine with that. Ditto for anyone who was funding resistance in Afghanistan and Iraq. And yeah, America's messed with a lot of other countries, including Ukraine, in ways that I with my limited knowledge think of as a stupid waste of power. I still think this is different from all of those cases.
And maybe America is too dysfunctional to pull this off. Maybe we can't stop Russia from peeling off its Sudetenland. It's still worth trying. I'm glad we're not going gently into that night.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Calling people who support Ukraine aid "too stupid to vote" is just "boo outgroup", and if the valence was flipped it would probably be considered banworthy.
I don’t believe we’ve modded anyone for the reverse sentiment, though it’s possible I missed something.
It wasn't with the opposite valence but rather in a goofy thread about bats vs knives about a month ago. The use of the word "retard" probably didn't help, but the part about not being able to vote was also quoted by the mod giving the person a warning.
And I'd say that probably should be a warnable or banable thing to say. Saying a group of people is so stupid that their right to vote should be taken away is a textbook case of "boo outgroup".
More options
Context Copy link
I'm going to add "too stupid to be allowed to vote" to my list of mod-approved ways to characterize people I disagree with.
More options
Context Copy link
I'm sure there's no post on the site where someone was modded for the literal string "people who don't support Ukraine are too stupid to be allowed to vote", but I think the appropriate comparison is to look at other posts where people were modded for "boo outgroup" and compare the aggressiveness of the boos. Like, if "Canada seems to be doing its damnedest to ski down that slope right off that cliff" is worthy of getting modded, then I would think that "too stupid to be allowed to vote" is also in mod territory.
(I'm aware that FarNearEverywhere's post history was an aggravating factor here, but presumably if the linked comment itself didn't cross some absolute threshold then it wouldn't have attracted mod attention in the first place regardless of her post history.)
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
That is a bad comment. You are replying to a comment that claims there have been twenty-four years of disasters and laments that people are not learning. Have there been twenty-four years of disaster? Does past performance predict future performance? Is this time different? There is plenty to engage with. But your comment is negative, low effort, and unresponsive.
Huh? Nobody's obligated to either respond to an entire post or nothing at all. I called out a bit I found particularly objectionable.
I could easily turn it back on you: why did you respond to MY comment without addressing the issue of whether a statement like "is too stupid to be allowed to vote" should be disallowed or not?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I would like to argue that "supporting Ukraine" and "writing blank checks to the American foreign policy apparatus" are not equivalent. For an example, the people who argue that we are and should be supplying just enough material to Ukraine to prolong the conflict indefinitely, as this will maximize the death and destruction inflicted upon Russia, with the maximization of death and destruction inflicted upon the Ukrainians being a price they're willing to pay, are not writing a blank check, but rather making a straightforward, coherent cost-benefit analysis. My objection to this latter group is not that they're stupid, but rather that they're straightforwardly, appallingly evil.
There's also the people who aim for total victory through unrestrained escalation with a rival nuclear power, and think we should roll American tanks and aircraft into direct combat with Russia. These people are not stupid like the first group, and not evil like the second group, but rather crazy. I object to these people the least, as their craziness seems likely to be self-punishing in a way the stupidity and evil of the first two groups lack.
Presumably, there's in theory a group that can argue coherently the reasons why our current engagement is going to secure our Sacred Values where the previous several did not, while threading the needle between pointlessly-destructive large-scale attrition as an end unto itself or the threat of a disastrous escalation spiral. I haven't actually seen these people, but I'm ready believe they exist. I think such people would be wrong, given the available evidence, but am open to their arguments should anyone wish to present them.
I disagree that this is "boo outgroup". We are talking about a set of geopolitical actors that have burned down four countries, are currently directly involved in burning down a fifth, and bear considerable responsibility for millions of deaths. At some point, some degree of moral responsibility for all that destruction, death and misery must intrude. Maybe I'm wrong in my assessments, but I don't think so, and at some point people must make their bets and take their chances. This is mine: this shit will not end well, and ten to twenty years from now it will be generally accepted that Mistakes Were Made. I am going to hammer the point because I am confident I am correct. If I'm wrong, I want to learn from it. If I'm right, I don't want the people I'm arguing against to be able to forget it. I think many of the people who discuss this issue are being unbelievably, unacceptably casual about the lives of millions of other humans. I hate them for it, and I find that this hatred cannot be suppressed or masked to any great degree.
If that earns me a ban, so be it, and I'll attempt to modify my behavior in the future.
I wish we had RemindMeBot? And is your prediction that general sentiment is "Mistakes Were Made"? Or is it the general sentiment that some particular group of people are too stupid to vote? They are not the same claim. The latter seems to be generally shared sentiment about the political outgroup in the US politics since I can remember, so I am uncertain how it can be verified. Perhaps you intend a more specific claim about responses about stupidity that is more strong than more than stable trend of everyday political animus?
Nevertheless, I don't think observable presence of either kind of sentiment would tell much about the objective facts of the war. Watching MAS*H, made 20 years after the Korean war, the generally accepted sentiment of the producers of the show is that the Korean war was a mistake (naturally the show was for a large part about Vietnam, also thought a mistake). I don't think the evidence proves that either war was a mistake. South Korea is clearly a victory for all of mankind, only complicated by their later problems with their birth rate. Vietnam is more difficult to assess. There were faults in execution of the war, both strategically and on home front, but containing the Communism probably was not one of the mistakes. The domino theory worked, sort-of. Who knows what would have happened in SE Asia if North Vietnam would have had a shorter, more victorious war. What if Second Malaysian Emergency would have started earlier and turned out differently? Would Singapore had been the success story it has been?
In general, if the overall American mood during "Freedom Fries" moments are not the most rational, it is mostly information about the state of American mood than anything objective. The consistent prediction is, the American mood ten years before or after "Freedom Fries" is equal in its rationality, no matter its current polarity or valence.
Concerning casual discussion: The amount of death during the course of human history is of such magnitude, any discussion about it will appear nothing but casual or callous in comparison. Also an isolated demand.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I think conscription is bad, also.
Do you support sending billions of dollars to help prop up a regime that conscripts people then?
Yes. I would prefer Ukraine not engage in conscription, but I do not think it is a deal breaker in helping them defend themselves against Russia.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
And then in the very next breath Westerners complain about how the vast majority of refugee migrants initially coming to the west from the middle east etc. tend to be men. They fail to realise that it's not just a way to allow the women to take the easier route via plane once their family members have settled down but also a very good method of ensuring their chastity and honor stay intact and no suspicion can be laid upon their feet.
Everything we say and do makes complete rational sense. We're just starting from a different (and I would argue, better) set of axioms than you.
Where are you from?
Pakistan
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
You people are so great and superior. Aren't you worried that by reading and posting on this website you are contaminating yourself with the filthy Westerner mindset and that your customs and traditions will be lost?
If not you, your sons and daughters.
This is nothing but personal antagonism.
Which since you have a long record of this, gets you a ban for another week.
Maybe stop dancing to @BurdensomeCount's tune, since he clearly knows exactly how to make you lose it.
More options
Context Copy link
Nah, I believe I have a duty to let people know there are better alternatives than the current social system state they are stuck in and pointing out situations in which our system would have outperformed your system is a particularly good way to do so. Islam is a proselytising religion after all you know...
Oh boy, It's way too late for me on that front, I'm already 80%+ western at this moment in time and I'd expect my future trajectory won't shift me much from here. Plus it's not like the West doesn't have a lot of good things going for it, it's just that Westerners don't need to be told about them because they already follow them to some extent. They need to be told about the good things they don't yet subscribe to.
My preferred system is not the one we have back home, it's a syncretic mix of that and the western system, biased if anything more towards the western way.
I don't see how your system would have outperformed. I don't really get the end-goal of the muslim emigrants. They're just leaving a poor shithole (muslim-majority country) to a wealthier country (formerly white-majority country), and their descendants are gradually becoming Westernized. Then they acquire a quite Jewish ideological flexibility: oppressed minority in the streets, islamic conqueror in the sheets... That can't be good psychologically.
So what's the point? Coloring the map?
Westernized insofar as 'getting western money and defiling their women' counts as getting westernized. You can repeat the cycle indefinitely with a slave imported from the home country to churn out ideological clones who have no qualms taking from a west too scared of being racist to plug obvious loopholes.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The idea that Ukrainians are only fighting out because mean old NATO made them do it is absurd. In the months leading up to the February invasion, it was widely assumed in Western capitals that Ukraine would fold like a house of cards, and that would be that. The only reason the West got sucked into the conflict in its current capacity is because Ukraine put up an impressive resistance, stopping the Russian offensive in its tracks and pushing them back rapidly. Relatively recent polling data from Ukraine (a few months old, but after the failed summer offensive) shows continued strong support for the war and confidence in the UAF. Now, I'll happily grant that Ukraine's 2023 summer offensive was a disaster, not so much because of casualties but because it significantly depleted Ukrainian munitions and led to the current "shell hunger" being experienced across the line, and all for very little return. But despite this setback, Russia has not been to shift the lines significantly either, suffering lopsided casualties for minimal territorial gains at Bakhmut and Avdiivka, and the largest successful advances of the war after the initial invasion still remains the Ukrainian Kharkiv counteroffensive of Q3 2022.
The bitter lesson of the last year, I would suggest, is that the operational environment in Ukraine now strongly favours defensive operations, and large breakthroughs are unlikely. On the one hand, this is bad news for Ukraine: any dreams of sweeping advances into Crimea or liberation of Donetsk City have been thoroughly quashed. However, it's also bad news for Russia, insofar as it makes an outright military resolution of the conflict unlikely. Instead, it will be a battle of stamina and will between Ukraine (and its backers) and Russia (and its backers). It may be that the Ukrainian people decide it's not worth fighting on, and will sue for peace, and that's ultimately up to them, but we're a long way from that point. Moreover, it's not clear that the fundamentals of the battle of stamina really do favour Russia: we're witnessing dramatic scaling-up of munitions production in Europe and the US, the continuing depletion of Russian armoured vehicle stocks, and increasingly bold attacks on Russian oil and gas infrastructure hundreds of miles behind the border. It seems to me that the resolution of the conflict remains wide open.
Was it that, or more that Russia is much more pathetic (and apathetic - just look at their public's reaction or the level of mobilisation/defence spending that Putin can muster) than anyone expected?
From what I have seen, it's not so much that Ukrainians have been fighting well, and more that Russia's ability to project power beyond its borders is almost completely gone. Once they could dominate Eastern Europe, now they take months of grinding to gain worthless plains within a country that they once lorded over directly.
More options
Context Copy link
The resolution, yes; the outcome, no. Appalling amounts of lives and infrastructure have been destroyed, and whatever lines end up being drawn up on the map, the people of those countries deciding the lines will be dead or impoverished. It's only a question at this point of how many dead and how impoverished.
It may be up to the Ukrainian people to decide whether it's worth fighting on, but I'd point out that in that poll, 42% favor negotiations to end the war. I'd be curious to see crosstabs: are the young men being
forced at gunpointasked to sacrifice most well-represented in the small majority who favor continuing the war without negotiations?More options
Context Copy link
The west would have benefited from Russia taking Ukraine in a week. Ukraine's pensionsystem is a complete mess, their infrastructure is worse than Russia's and they would have gotten 20 million new citizens that hate them. Combine this with sanctions on Russia and it could easily have toppled Russia. The plan was probably to give Ukrainians light weapons, training and let Ukraine become a Soviet-Afghan war 2.0. Three billion dollars of aid to the taliban played an important role in sinking the Soviet union. The architects behind the war had experience from Iraq and saw poorly funded militias cost the US tax payer the equivalent of the GDP of a medium sized country.
Instead they have gotten a nightmare in which Russian mass produced drones are being shot down by 250 000 dollar missiles in limited supply.
The neocon plan was to pull out of Afghanistan, have a quick collapse of Russia and then focus on China. Now they are the supply line for a Ukrainian military the size of the American force in Vietnam at the height of the war that is fighting a far more intense war while Russia is turning into a large arms factory. The aid won't stop when the fighting ends. After this war a force 4-5 times the size of the US marine corps including its reserves has to be completely rebuild and then sustained. They now have a military the size of the French, British and Germany military combined that is consuming supplies at WWIII levels and will need a complete restoration after the war. The pivot out of the middle east ended with a 7+ month war over a tiny strip of resourceless desert.
Meanwhile China builds more tonnage of military ships than all of NATO combined.
More options
Context Copy link
It's one thing to support a war in the abstract. It's another to volunteer to actually fight the war. There is not sufficient volunteer manpower, so Ukraine is forced to round up men at gunpoint and force them to serve.
I do not believe that the continued prosecution of the war (for what aims?) can justify the human rights tragedy that is unfolding.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Recently Ukraine changed their subscription doctrine that deployment to the front is one way ticket. You only come back dead or disabled. That both reeks of desperation and will probably hurt Ukraine in the one area they had clear advantage over the Russians - their morale. So I guess the tonal shift is just regressing a bit to the reality on the ground.
Isn't "service for the duration" the default assumption mostly everywhere? Only powers fighting far-off wars of little importance can afford to send soldiers on limited combat tours.
More options
Context Copy link
That's an odd perception, given how it's not only an incredibly common practice in any armed conflict of scale, but one the Russians adopted in the first year of the war.
The concept of stop-loss policies is a very basic policy common to volunteer and conscription militaries alike as manning demands increase. It's as much a sign of desperation as putting a water stop into a sink to soak dishes: militaries build up forces by increasing retention, not simply increase inflow, when numbers need to raise.
Setting aside that you and I remember the tenor of summer 2022 Russian offensive and spring 2023 rather differently, when the moral attrition of Ukrainian defenders outnumbered and outgunned was supposedly crashing moral, you don't consider the Western intelligence support for Ukraine a clear advantage?
Tone shifts in the war have been constant. Remember the swings that occurred during the Kharkiv offensive, which was a terrible disaster at least three or four times over the several months it occured?
For this year, as noted last year, the Russians are going to enjoy a relative period of maximum material advantage due to faster war industry mobilization, and they are demonstrating a higher casualty tolerance in the pursuit of territorial gains. This is also not surprising, and was predicted, as were the assessments that Russia's best chance to reduce foreign aid to Ukraine for the years to come is to shape perceptions this year in the leadup to the US election in hopes that presenting a strong showing would help the non-Biden (now Trump) candidate come to a conclusion to cut material support before the Ukrainians lost the willingness to fight.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
At this point, I don't even think that there is a geopolitical goal in supporting Ukraine, but a reflexive conservatism regarding the liberal project. Putin violated the post-Cold War consensus, eroded the Liberal International Order, and he Must Be Punished (even if it would be against the national interest.) The Europeans had 25 years to keep peace on the continent and failed. They failed in the Yugoslav wars and they're failing in Ukraine now.
Even if you accept the claim that respecting the sovereignity and territorial integrity of states is an end in of itself, the time to do that was in 2008, with Georgia, and 2014, with Crimea. Or heck, 1998, with Kosovo. The Russians have never forgiven NATO for supporting a seperatist state within their sphereling, and is happy to pay them the wages of hypocrisy.
But even with all this, I am still pro-West, because Putin is not a realist actor, but a map-painter, who justifies atrocities with dusty history books. He's not pushing back against NATO's expansion in his sphere, but reclaiming historical clays. Motivations are important in geopolitics, and irrational actors shouldn't be tolerated.
I'm also pro-West. Putin and Russia don't provide a convincing alternative to a better future. But just because Putin is evil and wrong doesn't mean we can't make peace for pragmatic reasons.
This is not Munich in 1938. Russia is a wounded animal, encircled by NATO. People saying "if we don't stop him now, he'll take Poland" are fabulists. This is not a realistic scenario.
On the other hand, I think the lives of Ukrainian conscripts (and yes, even Russian conscripts) have non-zero value.
The very credibility of the LIO and the West in general is at stake. If Ukraine loses, then it's a green light to all with revanchist ambitions. Too much national honor has been put on the line by feckless politicians, who have entangled their political fates to this insignificant front. There's no room for pragmatism.
More options
Context Copy link
Why you think that it is not plausible at all? If Russia invades Baltics and NATO effectively does nothing - why you think that Russia invading Poland is not a viable scenario?
I think that it is not very likely (fortunately) but it seems likely enough for me to justify supporting Ukraine.
The Baltics are part of NATO.
And NATO has real (though small) chance to collapse, especially if Trump would be president.
CSTO already did.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
NATO wouldn't do nothing in that scenario - given that the Baltics are members, an abrogation by the US of their mutual defense obligation to fellow members pretty catastrophically undermines their credibility with allies and vassals the world over. This doesn't even take into account that the rest of the EU would absolutely respond to an attack on a fellow member. At the very least Sweden, Finland, Denmark would become directly involved. Once you've got a hot war involving wealthy member states on their own territory I don't see France, Germany, the UK etc. just sitting that one out either.
That's certainly the theory. But there are some cracks in that theory.
First: Nato isn't a country, and has no unified military. It would take time, at least a few days, for the various European nations to coordinate a response and for the US to send troops over there. Diplomacy in Brussels is famously slow.
Meanwhile, the Baltics are small. The Suwalki gap from Belarus to Kaliningrad is just 100km long, and most of the baltics are not much wider than that. Russia would barely have to advance at all to be within artillery range of their capitals. A strong, quick offensive could cross the gap and occupy their capital in a matter of days, and then present NATO with a fait accompli. Do they really want to go to the mat to liberate these small, useless countries that have already been occupied?
Suppose they do. NATO commanders and politicians agree that, dammit, they've made a commitment, so they fully mobilize their militaries for an all-out war with Russia. At that point, Russia activates its nuclear ICBMs and points them at Europe in a menacing way. Attack us, it says, and we will nuke you, because this is an existential war of survival for us, and we have a lot more nukes than you do.
Europe asks its big bro the USA to help. The USA, after all, has just as many nukes as Russia, and much more advanced ones. At that point Russia points its nukes at the US and says: "do you really want to get involved in this? Are you really going to sacrifice millions of your people to save some tiny little insignificant country in Europe that most Americans couldn't point out on a map? Isn't that insane?" And then the US backs down, and then Europe backs down, and Russia gets a win.
Of course this isn't a new concern, it's been at the heart of NATO strategy ever since it was founded. The solution to this sort of salami-slicing has been the absolute inviolability of article 5, plus a bit of strategic ambiguity and the US's refusal to sign a no-first-use treaty against nukes. Essentially, to make Russia fear us more than we fear them. But I don't know how much that will hold in this modern world where the Republican party (traditionally the more hawkish) has become isolationist, our main rival is now China, and NATO has been unable to manufacture enough basic artillery for Ukraine. I'm not saying that Russia can definitely take the Baltics, and certainly not Poland. But... it's not a complete fantasy, either, it's a real fear.
Nato doesn't have a unified military, but member states frequently train together. I'd be surprised if the Scandinavian and Baltic nations haven't jointly planned for this sort of scenario. While a complete military response would almost certainly be co-ordinated at the European level*, individual nations could spring into action much more quickly. The UK would very likely also respond quickly to a situation like this.
*This is assuming that Trump pulls the US out of NATO (over the objections of almost the entire US political/military establishment).
More options
Context Copy link
That's precisely why the Baltics have insisted on having tripwire troops there. If the Russians overran NATO troops from the major member countries while doing this blitzkrieg, it would be considerably more difficult for those countries to go "whatever, we don't care".
True, that adds to the political calculus and would certainly provoke a big public outrage. But still... when you're comparing against a potential nuclear war, I don't know if the loss of a few thousand troops would be enough.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The CIA had good advance intelligence of the Ukraine War. In the event similar intelligence emerged indicating an invasion of the Baltics, NATO would station 50-100,000 troops there and be capable of repelling the invasion. It’s not a realistic scenario.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Okay, but this doesn't actually say it's not plausible. There is a non-trivial number of Americans who don't want the US to have mutual defense obligations or vassals the world over, and their preferred candidate is one precisely lothed, and reciprocates the feeling, with the Europeans. That candidate- arguably the leading candidate- took a position that he would 'encourage' Russia to attack countries not meeting defense spending cutlines- a line that applied to a majority of NATO countries.
While I would be the first to note that Trump's criteria specifically would not ignore an attack on the Baltic states, and I doubt reading his characteristic hyperbole is worth that much, this is not a man who would particularly care about the credibility he has with allies he has characterized as parasites.
This is without noting that multiple NATO governments are variously politically aligned with Russia as-is (Hungary), or are a very plausible election scenario from coming into governments significantly less interested in EU or NATO as a strategic policy.
The issue isn't whether they'd sit out, the issue is that most of them are militarily irrelevant to a war in continental Europe, because decades of mismanagement and capability cuts have rendered them unable to mobilize units at scale or supply them with ammunition to sustain fires at the scale Russia has and is.
Further, one of the significant factors of the Balkan scenarios is that the wealthy member states would not be fighting a war on their own territory: rather, they would be presented a fait accompli in a rapid Russian occupation of the much smaller (and poorer) Balkan fringe, and then faced with the question of whether they really want to pay the high cost in blood and treasure to try and fight their way through the Russian forces there.
This returns to the question of credibility, where while the Americans face the doubt if they would show up, most of the Europeans face doubts of if they can show up in enough scale to matter.
If an actual war would break out and Finland conducted a full mobilizatio, we would mobilize 280 000 troops, and at least an implicit common understanding is that a large portion of these would fight in the Baltics. With one of the largest artilleries in Europe and supported by Sweden's considerable air force and naval capabilities, these wouldn't be able to win by themselves, but are nothing to sneeze at.
Finland and Sweden are both two of the biggest exceptions in Europe, and is part of why their decision to join NATO was such a strategic disaster for Russia's NATO-rationalizations for the war.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
With Trump as president I would not assume that it is impossible (and yes, Trump may also do sensible thing or order nuking Kaliningrad). And Trump has quite decent chances to be a president.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
What about, "If we don't stop him now, he'll attack Ukraine again"?
Just because Russia can't beat Ukraine militarily now, doesn't mean that Putin can't try for a second bite in the future, with the same rationales.
He's already attacking Ukraine, so I don't know how this would be worse.
Salami tactics. That was apparently what Putin was trying prior to 2022, but changed his mind for some reason, possibly because of Ukraine's arms buildup.
More options
Context Copy link
Without the urgency of the current war encouraging the West to transfer arms to Ukraine, and especially if the West loosen economic sanctions on Russia following peace, Russia will replenish its arms stocks for the sequel war way faster than Ukraine can.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Name any stupid war, and people will always ask why did the countries keep on fighting even though it was obviously to everyone's detriment. Who cares about Alsace-Lorraine or Kashmir, when it would be better for everyone involved if they just quit fighting and focused on the pragmatics of making money and living life in a stable environment?
Then you have Ukraine, and all of a sudden the most important thing in the world is maps from centuries ago or maintaining a precedent for the liberal world order, and everyone rallies around the idea that we must make massive sacrifices for a bit of soil. ("We," in this context, is the kind of we that is mostly composed of young Russian and Ukrainian men, not the person making the statement.)
Yeah, there has been a massive effort to manufacture consensus for the Ukraine War, framing it in apocalyptic terms and launching ad-hominem attacks against anyone who spoke up.
But I believe the tone has changed. People like David Sacks are openly speaking up against the war and not being canceled. Accusations of being a "Russian bot" are no longer sticking. The narrative is collapsing.
I mean, I kind of get it: if I were in Ukraine, I'd rather be in the Western sphere than the Russian sphere, Putin is an asshole who launched this whole war, and the US is getting to screw with a rival for comparative pennies. But at some point you've got to consider the humanitarian cost: I might prefer being in one sphere or another, but I'd always prefer being in either sphere peacefully than being blown apart by a shell in a war zone.
Yeah, it's weird. To me there doesn't seem to be that much difference between Ukraine and Russia. They're both poor, corrupt, Slavic-speaking countries that share a lot of culture. Sure, a European-leaning Ukraine is probably better than a Russia-leaning one, but it's not a huge difference.
But nationalism fucks with people's brains. No one wants to be ruled by a foreign race, even if that foreign race is only superficially different.
I'm reminded of how Bosnians, Serbians, and Croats all speak the exact same language but insist that they speak different languages. I've heard of courtroom trials where the defendant insists on getting a translator because, as a Bosnian, he can't understand Serbian. And then the translator just recites the exact same sentence back.
The differences between Ukraine and Russia are much smaller than the differences between Ukraine and Germany. And that's perhaps why nubile Ukrainian women vastly prefer to stay in Germany.
From my understanding it is popular to compare not Ukraine-as-it-is-now and Russia-as-it-is-now but comparing say Ukraine and Poland.
Or comparing Belarus with Estonia.
It is less "it is much better than in Russia" but about preferring to get to European standards, not Russian standards.
Yeah, that's the fantasy. But it won't be the reality. Ukraine is a Slavic country that is culturally similar to Russia. Whether they are politically part of Russia that won't change.
Estonia, on the other hand, is demographically most similar to Finland. That's why they got rich and Ukraine didn't.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I really don’t believe the ‘Ukrainian women are hoeing it up’ narrative. Liberated American and Western European women don’t like casual sex much in practice, as much as they’ll defend their freedom to engage in it, and Ukraine has arguably the most conservative social norms of any Christian majority country outside of Africa.
What I will believe is that Ukrainian refugee women seek local husbands and get taken advantage of at high rates. This is, uh, not their preferred scenario, and I doubt they’re very happy about it. I’m also perfectly prepared to not believe in this scenario, either.
Ukrainian women are doing nothing wrong. If I were one, my immediate response would be to GTFO of Ukraine as quickly as possible. As it became clear that the war will last a long time and even once resolved will leave Ukraine a ruined place, I'd then look to settle down in whatever safe country I could find, ideally a relatively well-off one, which would likely involve finding a partner from that country. Maybe I'd use Tinder, if I were foolish. Regardless, in general it's not something I'd begrudge them, and given the option, I'd expect most would rather have stayed in a peaceful Ukraine and married a Ukrainian man. Unfortunately that option's not on the table, so they make do with the options that they're actually presented with.
The central issue is that men are being prevented from doing the exact same thing.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
My reading of this was not that Macron wants to send troops to Ukraine to fight the Russians but rather that it would be, essentially, a part of an effort to formalize a division into Ukraine and Russian-occupied/annexed territory - sort of like the Korean division, in other words. Of course that would quite a risky move, any way one would do it.
This has been a part of the Western message for the entire war - Ukraine will join NATO after the war. Allowing Ukraine to join the NATO now does not still seem to be in the cards, since this would inevitably lead to direct Western war with Russia, something Blinken eschewed in the same statement.
Well, why do you think they fight?
The entire war, the... well, not solely the pro-Russian side, but shall we say the Ukraine-skeptical side has talked about how it's the West that's forcing Ukraine to fight, how Ukrainians are dying for gay marriage, how the whole thing is just a proxy war with Ukrainians dying... and yet, the Ukrainians keep fighting. Not all of them, sure, some will avoid the draft, some will help Russia, so on. And still, there still seems to be a remarkable consensus on the Ukrainian side that fight they must and - even if this has been fraying a bit - the goal is still pre-2014 borders Ukraine in NATO and EU. One can always claim this is all just a lie and the Ukrainians are forced to fight, but you don't get troops staying in the kill zone so consistently just with a gun in back.
Gun meet back.
More options
Context Copy link
Increasingly, they fight because they are conscripted and forced to. Ukrainian men are being treated as if their lives have no value.
"The Ukrainians only fight because they are conscripted and forced" is also something that I've seen for the entire war. The whole idea seems to have originated as cope by Russians and pro-Russians who claimed that since Ukrainians are just Russians who speak funny they'd run directly into the arms of Mother Russia once given an opportunity and who have then flailed to find explanations for why that didn't happen. You don't fight for two years with this intensity with forced and conscripted troops. It's possible that this might change at some point, but even then I'd need far more evidence to actually believe it to be true this time.
What do you make of the videos of screaming Ukrainian men being dragged into the backs of vans by "recruiters"?
The claim isn't that every single Ukrainian wants to fight, just that most do. If a country has conscription, there's bound to be stragglers even when most conscripts would not complain about going.
Making analysis of anything on the basis of online videos circulated with partisan debators with an obvious intent of altering the information landscape is generally not a good way to make sense of events in any case.
If a plantation has 60% free workers and 40% slaves, that hardly excuses the plantation owner does it?
Is your position that Ukraine conscripts are 60% free and 40% slaves?
If not, what percent do you think are the slave-analogs here? 30%? 15%
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Isn't conscription itself evidence that there is a fairly significant portion of people who don't want to fight?
Conscription, like all laws restricting individual liberty, can be societal equivalent of Ulysses tying himself to mast.
Very few people really want to go fight in a war. Yet the consensus may be that all men are needed to fight or the war is lost and the war ought not to be lost.
More options
Context Copy link
I'd expect a lot of people don't want to fight regardless of conscription.
If you're asking if conscription as a policy indicates a lack of public support for a war, not really. No major war as a share of national population has been fought on a volunteer-only recruitment basis. At the same time, there have been many wars where support for continuing the war has remained high even as conscription numbers ran high.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Suppose military service were entirely voluntary. Do you expect there would be a substantial drop in the number of military recruits? If conscription doesn't conscript many people who don't want to fight on the front, why is Ukraine strengthening penalties for evasion and expanding conscription operations?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link