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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.
I accept your concession of your limited perception with good cheer.
Sure, you made a silly historical metaphor while trying to ignore the inconvenient parts that ruin it as a simile. History's hard. Fortunately, this is the motte, and asinine positions are for being flanked, spanked, and penetrated as a result.
Modern Russia is certainly doing things the modern US wouldn't approve of in its own defense, not least of which is invading adjacent countries in territorial expansionism on irredentalist grounds based in the past. American warmongers of the current generation, as everyone has familair examples of, invade far-away countries on ideological grounds driven far more by humanitarian considerations/rationals in the present.
Even if you wanted to appeal to the 1800s Americas, back when it was run by racist imperialist most Americans would be appalled by and oppose today if a mirror-US magically appeared, the expansionist era American imperialists didn't rely on claims historical conquest to justify their conquests. They just resorted to the sort of lovably mockable jingoism and manifest destiny that's parodied, and no one believes or particularly claims that the Mexican-American war was a defensive war.
The fact that you tried appeal to a war the better of a century ago- to a war that was declared against rather than by the US by the perpetrators rather than defendent of territorial aggression- to force some kind of equivalence between the modern US-Japan relationship and the ongoing attempt to subjugate Ukraine kind of shows you missed the mark on historical metaphors. The US-Japan relationship of 2020 isn't the relationship of 1950, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine is not aiming to establish a relationship of 2020 US-Japan.
Now, if you argument is instead that Japan is analogous to Russia, and that Russia should be nuked and forced into unconditional surrender in order to be occupied and forcibly reconstructed as Japan was, that might be an interesting historical parallel to make...
I'd rather you devise a competent metaphor than be introspective. Naval gazing and whataboutism is easy, but not particularly impressive. Competence is hard.
I will submit that you likely think you are far more informed than you are, but that you also don't care when you make a bad historical claim with more relevant differences than similarities.
If you care to disagree with my position on historical differences mattering... let's hear it!
You completely missed the point I was making.
The Minsk II agreement was initially adopted by France, Germany, Russia and Ukraine in 2015, and endorsed unanimously by the UN Security Council. It presupposed withdrawal of George W. Bush’s invitation to Ukraine to join NATO and was reaffirmed by Obama, then vetoed by France and Germany. It called for disarmament of the separatist Russia-oriented region (Donbass) and withdrawal of Russian forces and spelled out 3 mutually dependent parts: demilitarization; a restoration of Ukrainian sovereignty that included control of the border with Russia and complete autonomy for the Donbass in the context of the decentralization of power in Ukraine as a whole. Which wasn't at all unlike the conditions the US imposed on Japan in the postwar period, by banning Japan from having an army, called for disarmament and economic integration with the western powers.
It seems you don't even understand my position enough to coherently disagree with it, sadly.
No, I got the point you were making, it was just historically illiterate.
Setting aside that the Minsk agreement did not actually propose to restore Ukrainian's sovereignty due Russian-demanded poison pill provisions that would give its proxies vetoes over Ukrainian national institutions, which would lose the ability to govern the country as a whole even as the Russian-separatist regions could engage in diplomatic agreement with Russia (thus giving the Russian-supported proxy groups more foreign power sovereignty than the government) while proposing elective systems that did not require Russia give up proxy control (which they did not relinquish)-
-this was not only significantly different from the US government design for Japan, which not only did not enshrine foreign proxy sub-states at a constitutional level, but the post-war Japanese occupation also was in no way a respectful recognition of Japanese sovereignty to negotiate, but a result of unconditional surrender. The American occupation system was imposed, not a result of amicable negotiation, and there was no pretense of Japanese sovereignty until a good deal after the US occupation forces left and Japanese elections were able to be held without American occupation shaping permissable conduct.
Nor, and this is also relevant, does the comparison acknowledge the context of the imposition: that Japan was denied sovereign rights and agency due to having just lost a war of regional conquest in which Japan was an imperialist aggressor against most of its neighbors including the US itself. Whereas the Russian justification is that Ukraine warrants a Japanese-style submission because... America bad, or the Ukrainians were killing fewer Russian-speaking civilians over a decade than the Russians did in a few months, or something equally heinious.
Again, as for reasons why the positions emerge, Russia in a future defeat and occupation to the US would be far more analogous to Japan occupation than Ukraine is to Russia.
Understanding your position doesn't mean it's a good position, sadly.
And yet you didn't articulate it directly.
In 2019 Zelensky got elected on a peace platform to resolve the conflict between Eastern Ukraine and Russia. He began to move forward on it and tried to go to the Donbass. What it would have meant was a kind of federalization of Ukraine that gave a degree of autonomy for the Donbass, which is exactly what they wanted. Something like Switzerland or Belgium, but he was blocked by right-wing militias which threatened to murder him if he persisted with his effort. If you're essentially telling me that the inhabitants of that part of Eastern Ukraine don't have a right to their own freedom and self-determination because it would mean their interests would play into the hands and service the objectives of Russia, that exposes the prejudice of your personal political views on the matter; but does little to address what the source of the conflict was actually about.
You're actually thinking Japan has this much autonomy and independence in its foreign policy establishment? It's widely accepted in most foreign policy circles that its own foreign policy conduct is ultimately subordinated and dependent upon continued American economic and military support.
The ultimate Russian justification against Ukraine is NATO's military expansion up to the borders of Russia. You can appeal to undetectable, subliminal and nefarious ulterior motives all day, but short of having direct access to his mind, all you're left with in the end are Putin's own statements on the matter. And that fundamentally hasn't changed since he began talking about it.
Because it was historically illiterate for missing key relevant context that contradicts the desired framing. For example, this was additional historical context that you neglected-
-and this was your evasion of that context.
Note, audience, that he does not actually challenge the existence of the sovereignty-sabotaging clauses, or that it would give the autonomous region more autonomy than the central government as a whole. It does try to claim a new equivalence instead with other countries- but does not acknowledge that neither government has the sort of diplomatic veto and autonomy to enter into its own agreements that the Russian interpretation of Minsk insisted. Nor has he addressed the role of Russian military proxies as the in place, and to be still in place in the system due to the autonomy protections preventing the central government to allow free and fair elections that would empose on the 'self-determination' of the Russian supplied, and Russian-manned, proxies.
You also widely deride the foreign policy establishment as inaccurate and untrue, yet now you appeal to them even as you'd be wiser not to. People who are unable to understand the difference between a choice of alignment and an inability to choose otherwise are poor foreign policy experts, and believing that the current warm US-Japanese relationship is a direct continuation of the American occupation-state is negligent of several decades of intervening history that saw the US and Japan reconsider their relationship multiple times.
This is not a justification against Ukraine, as Ukraine is not a part of NATO, was not close to becoming a part of NATO, and multiple NATO members had for nearly a decade been actively blocking Ukraine's ability to formally become a part of NATO. A successful conquest of Ukraine doesn't even reduce the NATO borders to Russia- it expands the NATO - de-facto-Russian border.
It is also completely unrelated to the reason for Japan's subjugation to American reconstruction, which was not planned to deny or destroy Japanese national identity.
Sure they have. Putin's Russia's position on NATO and Ukraine has evolved numerous times over the years, including when he wanted to be a part of NATO and when he explicitly avowed that he had no territorial designs on Ukraine.
Putin's posture on NATO shifts with the narrative wind. There's a reason that there was a multi-month pre-invasion buildup focusing on non-immeninet prospects of Ukraine in NATO, and virtually no significant reaction to the largest expansion of Russia-NATO borders as a third of Russia's naval forces found themselves in a NATO lake. In one context Russia was building a pretext for war that was already determined over a notional threat that wasn't a threat, and in the other it was also not a threat.
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