> We have tape recordings of US state department officials deciding who will be in the Ukrainian cabinet and who wont. of what their policies can and can't be.
If you could provide a source for this, that’d great.
> One phone call from Washington and there is a third coup in Ukraine with Zelensky out the door and another US puppet installed.
Zelensky was elected in an election, I know you likely don’t know this so I just thought you should know.
> So Ukraine has zero sovereignty, and that's true regardless of what happens in this war.
It’s actually not true and patently false.
> The only question is whether it will continue to be ruled from Washington or whether it will be ruled from Moscow.
Even if these were the options (and they aren’t cause Americas not looking to rule Ukraine). The choice is clear, being ruled by Moscow which leads to the rape and torture of your civilians(including children), or being ruled by America which leads to not that.
> That is why this is a US-Russia proxy war, with Ukraine stuck in the middle.
Russia keeps changing the reasons they invaded the current reasons have nothing to with America but I’m sure they will change next week.
> I can tell you the U.S. certainly didn't want outside intervention during our own civil war.
So, you say that US has the right to support one side, including an anti-constitutional coup against democratically elected president, and Russia has no right to support the other side? I beg to disagree.
In fact, Kiev has been Washington’s military proxy against Russia and its “compatriots” in eastern Ukraine for months. Since the political crisis began, Secretary of State John Kerry, CIA Director John Brennan and Vice President Joseph Biden (twice) have been in Kiev, followed by “senior US defense officials,” American military equipment and financial aid. Still more, a top US Defense Department official informed a Senate committee that the department’s “advisers” are now “embedded” in the Ukrainian defense ministry. [1]
> This isn't two states playing covert war games in a third state, this is Ukraine fighting for its sovereignty against a separatist movement.
This is one way to see it. Hopefully, I gave you enough information to explain how it is possible to view the issue from completely different point of view.
> Ukraine is not "NATO controlled", and has been refused entry into NATO. Nobody has suggested putting NATO missiles in Ukraine; that's all Putin's propaganda.
Ukraine is actually controlled by the US State Department, and has been since the Maidan Coup overthrew a democratically elected leader.
It was Washington & Brussels that issued an Ultimatum to Yanokovych in https://youtu.be/ROTwyP5no08?t=381 that preceded the protests and led to the coup.
It was the Oligarch Kolomoisky that bankrolled Zelensky's campaign, providing him protection, a bodyguard, vehicles, and other resources
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MXgli7TpINw
> They are attempting to weaken Russian through a proxy war (Think Afghanistan or Vietnam). They are not defending Ukraine.
Wow, if only Russia had a way to stop the wests devious plan of forcing them to fight in Ukraine and decimate their military. I guess they could leave right?.
> If the US administrations truly wanted peace they would have signed up for permanent no-NATO agreements as Dr. Mearsheimer has pointed out.
Dr Mearsheimer has gotten nearly everything about this war incorrect, no one should be listening to him.
> But having Ukraine become Switzerland would not benefit the US' current warlike ambitions, nor would it assist the plundering of the incredibly valuable resources of Ukraine. Zelensky's platform for peace, when he was elected, was destroyed by the Banderistas in Western Ukraine who have been prepping for war, or executingi
Damn those Banderistas and there control of the Russian government, if only Putin had the power to not do what the west and the Banderists wanted he would of been able to stay out of this mess and to invaded Ukraine, but those mind control geniuses forced him to do it.
> The Russian army is really designed for this type of combat, and they won't have a better chance. Now, they might have misjudged the level of Ukrainian resistance, and the Western support, but now they are just rubbling cities and targeting everything. The worst of WW1 & WW2 is back.
The Russian army is already resorting to using T62's and are mad maxing vehicles, I don't think they are designed for this, unless 'this' is being slaughtered by western weaponry.
> Each time we give the Ukrainians weapons we stall the inevitable, and we ensure that more Ukrainians will die.
Conversely, each time we give Ukrainians weapons, we stop another Bucha massacre, we stop more women, children and men being tortured and raped, we stop more teenagers being summarily executed.
Why do you think letting the Russian army that has already ground cities to dust, implemented there 'filtration' (read torture) camps and committed war crime after war crime, do more of that is going to help?.
If you wanna really complain about weapons deliveries to Ukraine complain to Russia, they still are likely the biggest supplier of weapons to Ukraine, and if they aren't they are a close second.
This does not claim at all what you think it does.
> In an environment in which rival political parties were banned, torture centers were established, death squads were roaming the streets arresting dissidents, etc, and there was strict control of media.
What?, Zelensky was elected in 2019, 5 years after the Maiden revolution you know that right?. Do you have _any_ proof at all, that isn't thinly veiled Russian propaganda?.
> So in a place like Ukraine, it doesn't matter who is elected as long as the US controls the country. Zelensky was elected on a peace platform and pro-Minsk 2 platform, and immediately changed his position after the election. This is something you should also research if you want to be informed.
Theres literally zero proof the US controls the country, the Ukrainian government didn't even believe the Russians were going to invade. Probably because the Russians themselves continued to say they wouldn't and the Ukrainians put misplaced trust or maybe misguided hope in the words of the Russians.
> No, it is the Maidan regime that set up SBU torture centers, burned people alive, buried people alive, funded various Neo-Nazi groups like Aidar, Right Sektor, Azov, banned the use of Russian language, disappeared pro-Russian citizens, banned pro-Russian parties, banned pro-Hungarian parties, etc, and they were committing and continue to commit mass atrocities. There were many articles by Amnesty International and other human rights groups about this.
We literally have videos of the Russians committing war crimes against Ukrainian civilians, including execution and castration and we have many many many independent reports of torture and sex crimes including against children.
It would be nice if you source any of what you say, your stream of conscientious is not really a source.
> preventing Ukraine from hosting NATO troops/bases
aka, preventing Ukraine from protecting itself from future Russian attacks.
> much to the anger of the Russian population which wants a far more hardline position on Ukraine, particularly in light of all the ethnic cleansing and atrocities committed by this US client regime.
This is literally fake news, there is no proof at all that isn't just straight Russian propaganda of any 'genocide' in Ukraine outside of the one that Russia is committing.
> I would say, however, that as the war drags on, there is a real chance that Ukraine will end up partitioned into nothing, which is an object lesson to other regimes that wish to be U.S. clients.
I dunno, Russia is currently sending out under equipped mobilised citizens with T-62s and keeps recruiting from prisons whilst Ukraine is still fielding T-64s and better equipped and trained soldiers. Russia keeps getting more and more desperate every week, their army has been largely reduced to a pathetic bunch of barely trained cannon fodder lately.
I see the Russian army collapsing before Ukraine gets 'partitioned' by some mythical boogey man that doesn't exist.
> But I take it that now we agree on the larger point that this proxy war has nothing to do with "sovereignty".
This war has everything to do with Ukrainian natural resources and sovereignty, the Russians don't see the Ukrainians as a seperate people or as a real country and feel their position as the worlds gas station is threatened by the natural resources in Ukraine.
on Minsk-2 why would anyone believe what Russia says in any international agreement they already promised to not invade Ukraine or even threaten there sovereignty under the Budapest Memorandum?.
> The situation in Russia right now in regards of Ukraine war is very simple -- everybody has rallied around Putin and against the West, everybody knows that this war is a proxy war against USA ands Ukraine is just an unlucky puppet. If you see some media telling you otherwise, you should know outright that it lies.
This isn’t a war against the west, it’s a war of aggression waged by Russia that is killing, torturing and raping civilians. This is a war of survival for Ukraine, if they lose they cease to exist.
The Russians have repeatedly said that Ukraine isn’t a real country.
The only way that this is a war against the west is that the west is supplying Ukraine against the genocidal Russian army.
> 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.
> Are you aware that the USA and its "allies" have orchestrated a Coup d'etat in Ukraine?
You mean that thing in 2014 where a few Ukrainians protested a thing the president did that they didn't like, and in response the president of Ukraine promptly fled the country never to return?
Meanwhile the current president has the entire Russian Army bearing down on him and hasn't left.
Some "coup".
The truth is, all "Evil West" whataboutism aside, Russia is weak and corrupt and cannot bend Ukraine to its will. Too bad.
> It is only by weighing of the lives of the people in the conflict at zero that the U.S. justifies prolonging this proxy war and continuing to arm and subsidize Ukraine.
Ukraine is literally fighting for their sovereignty, America is helping them push the Russians, who are raping and torturing citizens out of the occupied territories.
Every weapon to Ukraine is time less under Russian occupation, which is a good thing.
> It is NOT America's job to tell Ukraine what to do and what terms to accept. Get that through your conspiracy-addled head
I agree with your statement that it is not the US’ place to tell Ukraine what to do. It is also not the US’ place to send Billions of Dollars in “Aid” to Ukraine. It’s a Ukrainian issue, and the US should have left it at that, but it didn’t because the US saw an opportunity, just like they did in 2014. Did we forget how the US upended the regime and placed Zelensky as leader? Why does the US meddle so much in Ukraine?
> It is also not the US’ place to send Billions of Dollars in “Aid” to Ukraine. It’s a Ukrainian issue, and the US should have left it at that, but it didn’t because the US saw an opportunity.
An opportunity to help prevent a genocide by a brutal authoritarian regime, and weaken one of their largest enemies all in one?.
This opportunity America took was clearly beneficial to the world, Ukraine and America.
They'd be stupid not to take it.
> Did we forget how the US upended the regime and placed Zelensky as leader?
Zelensky, was elected in an election in 2019. What are you talking about?.
> It wasn't a revolution - it was a coup funded and organized by the EU and USA.
I don’t doubt that there was western involvement, just as there was certainly Russian involvement supporting prior administrations. While it can be difficult to discern the true desires of Ukrainians given outside involvement, its very easy to say that the current government in Ukraine is much more democratic than plenty of US Allies in other parts of the world, eg the Middle East.
> Also, your media probably do not say that Ukrainian politicians repeatedly announced plans to exterminate Russian population of Ukraine. Physically kill all the Russians just as Hitler (he's considered a hero in Ukraine) wanted. You'd probably never find this in English or any other language spoken on the West, but there is plenty of evidence in Russian/Ukrainian even though a lot of it being scrubbed in the last 200 days. Still you can find a lot of those on YouTube for example, if you can understand Russian/Ukrainian.
If this is so easy to find, why not provide actual sources?
Edit: the irony here is the extremely close parallels between this war and hitter’s annexation of the sudentenland.
> How do you know this? Did Putin said this personally to you? Announced this in the media?
I can tell from his actions. Russia has been invading its neighbors the entire time he’s been in power.
Did I go a bit overboard when I said “complete fealty”? Sure. But it’s quite obvious that Putin won’t accept those states as anything less than Russian client states within its sphere of influence.
> Has US ever suffered sanctions for that? I don't remember any.
US does bad things so other countries should do bad things too.
> 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.
> Zelensky was elected in an election, I know you likely don’t know this so I just thought you should know.
In an environment in which rival political parties were banned, torture centers were established, death squads were roaming the streets arresting dissidents, etc, and there was strict control of media.
But in some sense elections in client states don't matter. Zelensky was elected on a peace platform and immediately was forced to abandon his stance on implementing Minsk 2 when he got into power - 70% of the population wanted it implemented. Minsk 2 was the agreement Ukraine signed with Russia to avoid war. Minsk 2, which was brokered by the EU after the violent anti-Russian Maidan coup. It called on Ukraine to grant autonomy to Donbas and to respect the rights of the Russians living there. It also called on Ukraine to recognize Russian control over Crimea. In return, the Donbas provinces would return to Ukraine and Russia would recognize the coup government, and there would be no war. Poroshenko stated he had no intention of ever implementing Minsk 2, but signed it to buy time for Ukraine to arm itself to fight a war with Russia. US Senators McCain and Lindsey Graham visited Ukraine and urged them to defeat Russia in the war. This was 2015. The US was clear that Minsk 2 would never be implemented by Ukraine and that it was just a lie to buy time as they geared up for war.
So in a place like Ukraine, it doesn't matter who is elected as long as the US controls the country. Zelensky was elected on a peace platform and pro-Minsk 2 platform, and immediately changed his position after the election. This is something you should also research if you want to be informed.
> The choice is clear, being ruled by Moscow which leads to the rape and torture of your civilians(including children), or being ruled by America which leads to not that.
No, it is the Maidan regime that set up SBU torture centers, burned people alive, buried people alive, funded various Neo-Nazi groups like Aidar, Right Sektor, Azov, banned the use of Russian language, disappeared pro-Russian citizens, banned pro-Russian parties, banned pro-Hungarian parties, etc, and they were committing and continue to commit mass atrocities. There were many articles by Amnesty International and other human rights groups about this.
> Russia keeps changing the reasons they invaded the current reasons have nothing to with America but I’m sure they will change next week.
This is just made up nonsense. Putin gave a speech explaining the reasons for the invasion - the liberation of pro-Russian Donbas region, preventing Ukraine from hosting NATO troops/bases, and the denazification of the country. These were the three reasons. You can try listening to this speech rather than making up your own reasons, and then listening to his other speeches across time (he gives many speeches about Ukraine), and seeing if there is a change. He has been fairly consistent -- much to the anger of the Russian population which wants a far more hardline position on Ukraine, particularly in light of all the ethnic cleansing and atrocities committed by this US client regime. I would say, however, that as the war drags on, there is a real chance that Ukraine will end up partitioned into nothing, which is an object lesson to other regimes that wish to be U.S. clients. This is probably why Taiwan kicked out the pro-US party in the recent elections -- they don't want to be a battering ram the US uses against China and then discards when their powerful neighbor attacks them. Again, in all of this, it is Ukrainian people that suffer, whether they be of Russian, Hungarian, Polish, or Ukrainian ethnicity. The US doesn't treat its client states very humanely.
But I take it that now we agree on the larger point that this proxy war has nothing to do with "sovereignty".
>>>It would be a very sad state of affairs if NATO basically used the Ukrainians to soak up as much damage as the Russians can inflict in order to weaken it
No one will openly state it but I'm confident this is the perspective in the US's halls of power. It's possibly the only thing the CIA and State Department have done right in the past ~25 years, and I think it's more a stroke of luck that the Russian military is surprisingly-incompetent than anything deliberate on our part. If Russia had performed as expected, this war would have been over in 72hrs and we'd be making excuses just like we did when our Afghan house of cards folded.
>>>Ukraine is currently well led by a capable democratic leader
>>>Don't know that they have the man power for that
Manpower isn't the problem. They don't have the munitions or the logistics to pull off such grand operational maneuvers. And moving large conventional forces into Russia itself would be a hugely destabilizing escalation. It would give Putin an excuse to actually mobilize his reserves, and give stronger justification for employment of tactical nuclear weapons (which people are already concerned he might use).
Crimea was part of Russia longer than the US has existed. While its previous host, Ukraine, has only existed as a country for 20-some odd years.
Once the government of Ukraine was overthrown, the people of Crimea had every right to decide to stay or leave. And you will not find a single poll before-or-after not showing an overwhelming support for the latter.
> it was Ukraine snuggling up to the EU that provoked Russia into intervening...
A foreign-lead coup of a twice elected democratic government that put in a puppet regime for the sole purpose of creating problems for Russia is what lead things to the way they went.
Right now, what is happening in the eastern parts of Ukraine is a civil war - resulting from ethnic cleansing, neocon agenda, etc. And what is happening in the west of Ukraine is a total economic collapse from the so called free-trade deals with the EU.
If you could provide a source for this, that’d great.
> One phone call from Washington and there is a third coup in Ukraine with Zelensky out the door and another US puppet installed.
Zelensky was elected in an election, I know you likely don’t know this so I just thought you should know.
> So Ukraine has zero sovereignty, and that's true regardless of what happens in this war.
It’s actually not true and patently false.
> The only question is whether it will continue to be ruled from Washington or whether it will be ruled from Moscow.
Even if these were the options (and they aren’t cause Americas not looking to rule Ukraine). The choice is clear, being ruled by Moscow which leads to the rape and torture of your civilians(including children), or being ruled by America which leads to not that.
> That is why this is a US-Russia proxy war, with Ukraine stuck in the middle.
Russia keeps changing the reasons they invaded the current reasons have nothing to with America but I’m sure they will change next week.
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