>it was only ever a theory, and one that’s becoming increasingly outdated with each passing day that Russia remains in Ukraine.
This seems like a bit of a silly point, given that the war in Ukraine is, at least so far, nothing compared to the conflicts of the past. Do we wanna rush head first back into something that reliably produced worse conflicts than we see today simply because what we have going now isn't perfect?
>Germany’s dependence on Russian gas is now limiting its ability to respond to a crisis. They’ve handicapped themselves and can no longer promote peace and in fact are funding a war.
A bunch of western companies are pulling out of Russia over this and it looks like the whole thing is going worse for the aggressors here than they expected. I'll take this over Germany and Russia engaging directly in armed conflict.
> One could argue that giving one side enough support to keep fighting, but not enough to win, causes long term damage to them.
I don't agree. Russia's invasion of Ukraine has been ongoing for around a decade, but only recently has support ramped up to adequate levels.
I recall that Germany's initial response to Russia's 2022 invasion was to pledge handing over helmets.
The goal of a conflict is to win, and what represents winning really depends on your situation. In Ukraine's position, winning might mean more than forcing out Russia from it's territory. For Ukraine, winning might mean breaking Russia's willingness to continue perpetrating a genocide that's ongoing for around a decade.
I think it shows us instead that Germany worked hard to put itself into position where it is strategically aligned with Russia, and is willing to sacrifice life and freedom of everyone around to keep it that way.
> Ukraine under western control is a national security issue for Russia
It is. But this is a straw man. It’s always been. Ukraine hasn’t been seriously considered for NATO membership since 2008. Even its path to the EU was muddled at best.
Some effects of the war, e.g. Ukraine being flooded with Western weapons where it wasn’t before or Germany pivoting away from Russia, were unpredictable. But some, like the response in Finland and Sweden, or the Baltics’ remilitarisation, were.
Ukraine was and is falling under the control of the Ukrainians, and that remains the problem for Putin—not Russia.
> Honestly I have no idea how's the fighting going there...it seems like we've reached peak interest a few months ago unfortunately. Russia can just keep Ukraine in this weak state, maybe fire a few rockets now and then.
This is not an option, due to the amount of lives and equipment lost I don't think Russia has the option to pull out. It's a bit hard to have 50k casualties and lose thousands of pieces armoured equipment, hundreds of planes and just be like 'actually that was for nothing'.
> Ukraine would still be a very dysfunctional country with the threat of Russian invasion always on the background
I think Russia has more of a problem the longer the war goes on Ukraine is already going to receive NASAMS and IRIS-T anti air equipment from the US and Germany, which would significantly change the balance in the ability for Ukraine to control the sky.
The weapons aren't going to stop until Ukraine wins, pulling out also means losing Crimea and all the other gains they had made from 2014 until prior to the full on invasion.
Ukraine is more than capable of hitting installations in Russia even in their current degraded state, I don't think anyones gonna let Russia go back over the line and wash their hands of it.
> What does Russia gain out of all this shit I have no idea but my point remains is that Russia can keep this up if it wants to
Can it though? Russia is quickly running out of pretty much everything, they aren't using T-62s (tanks that don't even have a autoloader, a staple of Russian and even USSR tanks) because they want to its because they have to. I think the systemic corruption in Russia means they cannot fight this war for that long, for more then now? sure, but for years? im not so sure.
> The average Russian citizen is either fine with what's happening (surprisingly many) or too afraid to do anything. It's very hard to predict but the chance of Russia making it like this cannot be ignored imo. If you want to this how a country can make it like this look at Iran.
The longer this goes on the more the average Russian will be affected, the more assets that will be seized, the more people that will be sanctioned and the more companies that will pull out.
> I fear that this conversation will take a drastic turn. But my view is that Russia invaded because Ukraine wouldn't backdown from joining NATO. After Russia invaded, Ukraine said it won't join NATO if Russia stopped the war. So isn't all this pain simply because Ukraine's leader (maybe backed by US?) didn't budge until too late?
Your view is entirely incorrect, we could argue all day about the different thing that Russia has used to justify its genocide of the Ukrainian people but we will never know if any of it's true because Russia will have another brand new reason tomorrow.
I do find it interesting that the initial invasion happened very soon after substantial energy deposits where found in the Donbas, which had a chance to knock out some of Russias dominance of the European energy market.
> You suggested very literally that the separatist movement in east Ukraine was a Russian ploy from the start to justify war.
It is. This was a response to Russia's puppet being ousted. I'll forgive you if you haven't been following Ukraine since 2010 or so. But then stop making out like you have some special knowledge about what has been happening there for the last 12 years because it is a bit silly.
> Somehow to you that’s more reasonable that just assuming it came about organically.
No, I know that it did not came about organically, as do most people that are informed about Ukraine. This is not subject to discussion, nor is it subject to your fantasy story suddenly becoming true, in fact this is exactly the propaganda line coming out of the Kremlin.
> Objectively, the lines hadn’t moved and people stopped dying. We had peace and the conditions for a peaceful resolution and new borders.
There was at best an unresolved situation, and this is what is happening today: the furthering of the same goal that was in view when this whole thing escalated the first time. Consolidate, move forward. Consolidate, move forward. Putin is not making the same stupid mistake that Hitler made, he is taking his time to consolidate, which makes him far more dangerous.
> Then all of a sudden, things escalated. A big important gas pipeline blew up. Then Russia came in and got involved.
What a coincidence.
I'm going to stop responding to you, if you want to take that as a victory of sorts be my guest but I don't have the energy to continue to debate this, it makes no sense, but if you want to persist in it be my guest.
Russia formally annexed ~15% of Ukraine today. How is that winning?
I follow the conflict almost daily, and Ukraine appears to be in its "late WW2 Germany" phase where it throws everything it has at Russia all at once and then after…has nothing left to resist.
It didn't work for the Germans in WW2, and I have no expectation it will work for Ukraine in 2022. Germany did so in the hopes that Russia would just give up. They didn't, Germany rapidly lost the war afterwards. I expect the same to happen to Ukraine.
Ukraine needs NATO to fight if they want to defeat Russia.
> 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.
> Western armies, apart from Ukraine, hadn’t even entered the conflict.
..on paper. In reality Ukraine is infested with paramilitary organisations funded and trained by the west, fighting with western technology.
Also calling Ukraine "western", is a bit of a stretch. This conflict and the subsequent propaganda has made us forget how backwards and corrupt Ukraine was, just to rally behind their support and not complain for freezing our assess to death this winter in Europe.
Of course Putin is a deranged lunatic that should let go already. But the idea of a powerless Russia, or even worse, a Russia that is a puppet of China, is terrifying.
> 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.
>This only makes the current war that started in 2014 even dumber
Not sure about this.
US had been meddling with Russia using Ukraine as base, and the 2014 ousting of the Ukraine Prez at the time was only made worse by the US and EU flaming the issue.
Not saying the war was necessary, but given the large number of times US has been involved in regime changes of various countries (using this Modus Operandi of supporting protesters), taking back control of a region they used to govern (as USSR) is not something absurd to consider.
> You don’t seem to get my point though - it only has turned into a quagmire for Russia because other countries have feared the thing of which you are sceptical. It is like complaining the medicine is useless because you don’t have symptoms, when it is only because of the medicine that you don’t have them.
What did I write that made you think that I think that the West's backing of Ukraine has not been essential for Ukraine's defense/Russia's failure? My claim is that Ukraine is an example of why it is absurd to expect Russia to invade NATO countries. If Russia cannot even overtake NATO-backed non-NATO countries, no one should reasonably expect it to invade NATO-proper countries.
> immediately invaded Ukraine as soon as they again didn’t have a Russia-compliant leader.
The fact that the Russia-compliant leader was democratically elected, and was removed from power not by democratic means, but by a revolution in which one side was directly supported by Russia, and the other by the USA [1] shows that the situation is much more complex than that.
> And the same people seem to forget that the ultimatum in 2021 was during the war of aggression launched in 2014,
That's true and the fact Russia was prepared to do that after Ukraine started going directly against its interests should have shown that they were absolutely not afraid to start a war over the issue, and Ukraine knew all too well it was playing with fire by continuing on the exact same path. Are we going to just pretend that when your country has just lost a huge are to a larger neighbour who doesn't like the direction you're moving towards, that the right thing to do is to double down on that direction and hope that you'll have the support of your neighbour's enemies when conflict eventually comes is a sustainable way to govern?
> Nobody forced Russia to invade a sovereign country (or to consider itself the rightful owner of those lands for that matter), that's entirely their fault.
Alas, the world doesn't operate based on the moral principles you imply, but cold hard realpolitik. Actions have consequences in the great power game between nation states.
> And it was mind bogglingly stupid, as we can see a few months in, with the massive losses to their army and economy.
The Russian economy is doing fine, business with India and China is thriving. "Massive losses to their army" I believe is far from accurate. I'll be greatly surprised if at the end of this, Ukraine isn't economically destroyed, geographically devastated. Territories lost will remain lost, and the deaths of so many people will have been for nothing more than furthering the geopolitical and industrial interests of the main instigators.
This is backwards, its not possible for Russia to win since Russia is having much more trouble with getting recruits and training them then Ukraine is and can't easily manufacture replacements for lost hardware while equivalents are being provided to Ukraine. The longer the war goes the worse it goes for Russia. Yes Ukraine faces death and destruction but the mood in Ukraine is a determination to keep fighting and Russia is incapable of inflicting enough damage to change that.
Russia was the one meddling in Ukraine, not the US, to Russia's detriment. They are the ones who have set Ukraine against them with their actions. Their actions have led to Finland and Sweden
to apply to join NATO.
Based on Russia's actions its clear that Nord Stream 2 should never have been built
>But at the end of the day if your neighbor wants to have good trade relations with you, you shouldn't throw that away in service to your "ally" across the ocean.
Russia is not willing to have good trade relations with Germany. Decades of German politicians have bet on buying Russia's good or at least tolerable behavior through economic interdependence.
Russia made all of them into fools and proved their critics right.
This isn't about America. This is about the EU, about Poland and Czech Republic and Lithuania and Finland. And most of all this is about Germany. Russia is the one who threw it away and proved that Germany's interest was not to buy from Russia
> In recent weeks even Frank-Walter Steinmeier, the German president, a totemic figure of the Social Democrats and greatest German advocate of the trade “bridge” between east and west, has recanted. He admits he misread Russia’s intentions as he pursued the construction of a new undersea gas pipeline. “My adherence to Nord Stream 2 was clearly a mistake,” he told German media in April. “We held on to bridges that Russia no longer believed in, and that our partners warned us about.” This is an extraordinary admission for a man who acted as chief of staff to Gerhard Schröder, the Social Democratic chancellor from 1998 to 2005 and thereafter a lavishly rewarded, and much reviled, lobbyist for Vladimir Putin. Steinmeier was also foreign minister under Chancellor Merkel, and a great evangelist for Wandel durch Handel, the concept that trade and dialogue can bring about social and political change.
> Because most analysis on this since Russia took Crimea in 2014 have predicated that Russia would make further attempts at capturing Ukrainian territory.
That’s very much untrue.
It was hard for experts to form a solid opinion after the Crimean invasion. It had some characteristics which the current one doesn’t have which made it rational from a realpolitik point of view.
The invasion had a clear strategic benefit: keeping access to Sevastopol, came at a time when the relationship between Russia and Ukraine was quickly shifting and was made easier by the complicated relationship between Crimea and Ukraine.
> Ukraine is a nation, parts that might prefer not to be are no nation.
Might is pretty thin ice, here, they didn't and they don't.
> Everybody is pulling strings in Ukraine, the Maidan revolution was supported by the West, the separatists are supported by Russia, organized crime is supporting corruption. And now?
The separatists are a small fraction (best estimates around 23%) in the East and without Russian support they would have been overrun long ago.
> The problem is that NATO and the West lost so much credibility in the last decades that we stand on shaky ground when we oppose moves such as Putin's.
No, the problem is that NATO is a very blunt weapon that doesn't really work well against nuclear armed dictators.
> The West invaded Afghanistan and Iraq, especially the latter one was totally unjustified.
Agreed.
> We happily deal with Saudi Arabia and support their war in Yemen.
Again, agreed.
> Spain can crack down on their Catalonian independence movement as much as they want, including blocking voting access with police.
Agreed again.
> The EU lets, literally, drown poor people in the Mediterranean. I could go on.
And again. But: even if you could go on, you shouldn't because none of these have anything to do with Russia invading Ukraine.
> The question is, what is the world going to do about it?
Apparently, not a whole lot and it bothers me quite a bit.
> The longer it takes for Russia to conquer Ukraine, the more likely it will end up being the start of World War III.
A very naive and fatal flow of judgement.
Numerous times, Russia state media expressed Russian desire to attack Baltic States and Poland. Putin said similar things many times: i.e. that he wants USSR to be restored in previous borders.
If Ukraine is conquered by Russia, you will not get a world peace as an output.
Half of Ukrainians will be exterminated in the process (think Holodomor), but I know you don't care too much: "As horrible as this would be for the Ukrainians". I get it, it's not the point of this comment.
As an output, you will get a much stronger Russia with added power of Ukrainian people and military resources.
The problem is also not in Putin. If he dies, the situation won't be better much. The Russian regime is fascist-like and embraces Russian imperialism.
The only sane action is to help Russia to disintegrate into smaller nations and to show the world that aggression at such scale does not work.
This seems like a bit of a silly point, given that the war in Ukraine is, at least so far, nothing compared to the conflicts of the past. Do we wanna rush head first back into something that reliably produced worse conflicts than we see today simply because what we have going now isn't perfect?
>Germany’s dependence on Russian gas is now limiting its ability to respond to a crisis. They’ve handicapped themselves and can no longer promote peace and in fact are funding a war.
A bunch of western companies are pulling out of Russia over this and it looks like the whole thing is going worse for the aggressors here than they expected. I'll take this over Germany and Russia engaging directly in armed conflict.
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