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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?
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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You were responding to "the US for not letting Ukraine negotiate a peace"
Yes, that was the most obvious read of your comment.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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