> This entire conflict could of been avoided if we didn't keep trying to expand NATO.
This is really not a good take. Ukrainians didn't overthrow their government because of NATO expansion. They overthrew their government because it was a corrupt pile of shit that didn't credibly represent their interests. And make no mistake, Putin has always seen Ukraine as in integral and inseparable part of Russian culture. He was never going to allow them to govern themselves, NATO expansion or not.
> it's clear that the Ukraine invasion was motivated, in part, by NATO expansion.
Unless you mean, the only way to have prevented the Russian invasion of Ukraine would have been to accept Ukraine into NATO, I strongly disagree with you here.
Russia invaded Ukraine not because Russia is fearful of NATO but because Russia wished to recreate the Soviet empire. It's just plain old imperialism.
> Please stop with this. Ukraine is an independent nation that can do what it wants. They may have wanted to provoke this war as Russia threatened it.
Ukraine can do whatever it wants. It was up to NATO to flat out reject any prospects of Ukraine’s membership and prevent the war, but they egged it on.
Ukraine can do whatever it wants, but the simply truth is that Ukraine is now just ground zero in Washington’s proxy war with Russia. They could have remained neutral and avoided this disaster.
> he thinks the west precipitated the crisis by pushing to have Ukraine join NATO
NATO doesn't want Ukraine to join NATO (at least, not for the foreseeable future). That's why, even now, when Ukraine is more or less begging to join NATO, NATO has done diddly squat to do so.
A lot of the pressure to join NATO within Ukraine has increased since Russia invaded Georgia and then Crimea. Russia only has itself to blame for the fact that its neighbors are terrified of Russia violating their territorial integrity and want to run as fast as possible from its sphere of influence.
> In this case a simple "Ukraine wont be joining NATO" would have prevented this war.
Given the myriad of non-NATO excuses, including outright restoration of Russian imperial territory, that have been cited by Putin since day one, if you pay attention to anything besides the message crafted by the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs for Western audiences (and faithfully relayed by Russia’s useful idiots in the West), and Russia pattern of aggression against it's neighbors, that doesn't really seem likely.
(It's more likely that simply letting Ukraine skip ahead straight to joining NATO would have stopped the war.)
Cut the Russian propaganda, NATO didn't expand to Ukraine. Ukraine, a sovereign country, wanted to join NATO, as is their every right. Denying Ukraine that right and excusing Russia's war crimes is pretty bad.
> So as sketchy as the whole annexation was, was it wrong?
As a Russian who generally thinks that both Russia and NATO need to back down from the pissing contests they engage in...
Yes, it was wrong. Ukraine was done wrong by it. It was not done legally. Even if it was done with respect to the doctrine of self-determinism (I generally approve of secessionist movements), it was not done correctly. There are correct means of going about secession, and the War in Donbass was not one of them. It was a thin pretense for other geopolitical ambitions.
> I always figured that Russia wanted to own/control Ukraine, since it's a fertile, resource-rich part of the former USSR (it's a huge grain exporter; consider all the famine warnings since the war began?)
This isn’t the motivation. Putin has been saying since 2007 that NATO expansion is an existential threat to Russia. Now whether we agree with that or not is besides point. They view it that way.
They warned in 2007 Ukraine entering NATO would lead to war, but we basically told Russia that there a has been and they don’t matter. This led to what happened in 2014. Then in 2021, we basically come out in full support of pulling Ukraine into NATO.
What’s happening now is extremely dangerous. Russia can’t win in Ukraine because of west helping Ukraine and their economy is ruined after sanctions. They see this as an end of Russia.
You’re backing them in the corner. This is when rational state actors act irrational. The chance of thermonuclear war is increasing because Russia cannot take on the west in a conventional war.
We had a significant role in how we got to this war, but we won’t ever take responsibility. We pulled out of Afghanistan and now the military industrial complex is making billions through Ukraine.
>Then it seems like Russia has made all the wrong decisions here. Even after Yanukovych was kicked out of power, the successor government had no interest in NATO until Russia invaded eastern Ukraine in 2014.
> … so I am convinced the war could have been stopped, but the West made absolutely no effort to do so.
Conspiracy theories aside, avoiding war at all costs by capitulating to the aggressor's demands without a fight is not a sustainable approach.
Sure, Russia was strongly and publicly opposed to Ukraine joining NATO, to the point of threatening war over it… but that isn't their decision to make. Russia is still the unjustified invader here and the only one at fault—not Ukraine for seeking NATO membership or the other NATO members for considering the application.
> So those who say they agree with Putin or agree that NATO forced his hand, are signing up to the same view of the status of Ukraine and therefore the Ukrainian people.
I don't have to agree with Putin to say that I can understand Russia's issues with Ukraine. Saying that Putin's/Russia's attitude makes sense, does not mean I agree with it. It's in Russia's interests that Ukraine should be under Russia's influence, and in USA's interests that Ukraine be away from this influence and under their own, NATO serving as a tool for this.
Now would the Ukrainian people's lives be better if under the EU's/NATO's influence, instead of Russia's? Maybe. Right now though, there's a war. Would a pro-Russia regime in Ukraine (& not trying to join NATO) have resulted in no war? Is the war worth it? Time will tell.
> In my view the USA has been wanting to escalate this whole situation for a while. The USA has known for years that expanding NATO into Eastern Europe, especially Ukraine, would be a war declaration towards Russia [0]. Many influential people and people in powerful positions in the USA have warned of this for many, many years.
In my view this is complete rubbish and is just attempting to excuse Russias actions and tries to remove Russias agency. The only one responsible for this war and its countless warcrimes is Russia.
This also ignores the fact that NATO was not going to expand into Ukraine any time soon. We already knew it wasn't going to happen, and Ukraine even explicitly put it on the table when talking to Russia.
The real reason for the war is the natural resources in the Donbas, Luhansk and Crimea region which Russias sees as a threat to its place a gas station in the world. If the EU didn't have to deal with Russia but could still get cheap oil and gas there is no doubt they would move providers.
> Yet, through Victoria Nuland the USA staged a coup in Ukraine [1]. Installed a puppet regime that bombarded the people in Crimea, Donbass. Prohibited teaching Russian in schools, etc...
It was a revolution not a coup, the people of Ukraine weren't happy that the Russian installed puppet was deciding to move away from the EU despite promising the opposite. This Russian puppet later fled to Russia.
> The people that live in these areas are generally pro-Russia (often from Russian descent) and the Ukraine government made live hard for them. There's been referendums in Donbass in 2014 and the Ukraine government and many others didn't recognise it [2].
Why should anyone accept a referendum at gun point, which is what all Russian referendums are. If you have someone come around and give you a piece of paper whilst holding a machine gun there is one way you are going to vote.
> After years of bombardments the peoples living in this area feel safer under Russian governance than under Ukraine governance.
I'm not sore sure about this considering Russia is literally pulling people off the street to go fight on the front lines in the LPR and DPR. Put then again it cannot be working that well cause Russia mobilised last week.
> If Western governments were sensible and would really want to avoid war, they would respect the results of the referendums last week and allow Crimea, eastern Ukraine to merge with Russia. Or at the very least split from Ukraine.
If Western governments where sensible they would given Ukraine any weapons it needs to push Russia out of Ukraine. This war is showing just how much of a paper tiger the Russian army really is.
I mean you cannot just let a country literally rape and pillage its way through another and then annex a bunch of territory can you?.
Put if Russia wants to put hundreds of thousands of its own citizens through the meat grinder its up to them. I guess thats why so many people are literally fleeing Russia now.
> However Western governments, for one reason or another, are hellbent on inciting a possible World War 3. I am not sure why, but I am just glad I don't live in The Netherlands anymore - emigrated to Thailand 5 years ago.
Western governments are hell bent on supporting Ukraines democracy.
> Hopefully SEA will be mostly safe from whatever will happen in the near future. I do worry for my family in The Netherlands though.
I dont know if you really wanna live in SEA if WW3 breaks, the west clearly has superior technology given the poor showing of the Russian forces, good chance Russia just collapses instead of inciting WW3 like you suggest.
> I personally think that a Ukrainian NATO membership is not worth hundred thousands of dead and wounded, millions of refuges and a destroyed country, but others obviously disagree.
Well, it has been for the Ukrainians to decide. They have fought like hell to avoid being conquered by a foreign dictator that would destroy their country, their culture and the rape, torture and murder their own people.
> Which threats? Putin already decided that Ukrainian NATO membership is so important that he is willing to go to war over the issue if there is no political solution, he certainly expected sanctions and support from the West.
Which threats? I assure you that in the run-up to February 2022, there were some very serious phone calls and meetings between the USA State Department and the Russian Foreign Ministry. Just because that wasn't reported on the news doesn't mean it didn't happen. Often we try to find solutions to problems without it being a public announcement.
> hence my point that Ukraine behaved irresponsibly with regards to avoid Russian agression
Or in fewer words, your blaming of the victim. Don't act as if it wasn't entirely Russia's choice to invade, without any comparable provocation. It's not Ukraine's job to placate Russia. Avoiding Russian aggression is Russia's job. There is no guarantee that Russia wouldn't have invaded anyway even if Ukraine didn't pursue NATO membership. (The threat of this is why they wanted to join NATO in the first place.)
> Am I missing something, you are low-key justifying Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Yes, you are missing something.
> Kremlin always was messing with Ukrainian democracy in the first place.
That is simply not true. Messing with Ukrainian democracy has started on April 3, 2008, after the Bucharest Summit, with the NATO's Declaration that it welcomes Ukraine's and Georgia's Europe Atlantic aspirations for membership in NATO. That was a direct threat to Russia and they made it perfectly clear, same as the Monroe's Doctrine makes it perfectly clear that nobody, not a single country, is allowed to move military forces to the western hemisphere (say in Cuba), because it becomes a threat to the US. The decision at the Bucharest Summit led to a war in Georgia and Maidan in Ukraine. Prior to that, there was zero threat from Russia whatsoever.
Since the west keeps pushing on the NATO's expansion (which is part of their strategy, along with promoting democracy and expanding the EU), Putin gives the US two choices: either Ukraine goes back to a pre-2014 state of being a neutral player OR Russia will wreck the country. So the root cause is not Putin being out of his mind, but the aggressive US's strategy to expand NATO. Once again, despite me being a Ukrainian, Putin's strategy is perfectly clear to me.
> If Ukraine had agreed to be neutral (non-NATO) the war and all this bloodshed would have been avoided.
This was already offered by Germany, turns out it's not really what Russia wants.
> I'm sad so many people had to die. This would have been greatly advantageous for some of those dead people not to have died in vain because we want Russia to have a quagmire.
Be great if Russia just decided not to invade instead.
> Won't happen. The Russians are likely going for all the ethnically Russian Oblasts in Ukraine.
Yes because Russia has an infinite number of soldiers, vehicles and weapons and isn't running out of all three of those things.
> I hope Ukraine maintains its independence, but it's just the first battle in a war Putin accidentally created, and will surely lose.
Putin did NOT accidentally create this war. It's clear that this was intentional and that there are real people suffering because of that intention. He tried opening more doors to see what benefits he could gain. That isn't an accident.
> Finally, Ukraine has the right to join any alliance it wants and for Russia to invade over that is bullshit.
In geopolitics, nobody has any particular rights. Whoever has the bigger stick and better propaganda gets their way.
One could argue that there’s no reason to have sanctions on Cuba, that Palestinians should also have the right to self determination, that America doesn’t have the right to interfere in the developing world.
That’s not how the world works, regardless of right or wrong.
IMO - the west could have prevented this war. Regardless of what Ukraine wants, an agreement that NATO will not expand eastwards for 60 years in exchange for Russia not invading. That was all we needed.
This is really not a good take. Ukrainians didn't overthrow their government because of NATO expansion. They overthrew their government because it was a corrupt pile of shit that didn't credibly represent their interests. And make no mistake, Putin has always seen Ukraine as in integral and inseparable part of Russian culture. He was never going to allow them to govern themselves, NATO expansion or not.
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