That is an interesting argument. How would you suppose that works? Are say French people to blame for wars waged by the US?
Ukraine Today
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Pandora Papers, you mean. He was name-dropped in the report because right before the 2019 election he transferred his stake in an offshore company to one of his aides. But his business before that time was not connected to public finances or administrative power so that's not some kind of state-level corruption. Good enough as far as Eastern European presidents go. When he's caught in corruption while in the office, he's out that's for sure.
I don't know if that's good. This works with authoritarian regimes. You remove the tyrant and that does it.
But have Russia taken the totalitarian turn? Is the majority of the population now beaten into a frenzy and asking for total war? It's actually a possibility, we don't know for sure.
This is what a lot of Russians think. And that is where it might be too late to make any appeasements.
Doesn't it rhyme loud enough for western people to finally get it?
We have a very large European country that was shunned and humiliated by western leaders for a few decades (due to its own previous actions, but still). Resentment is brewing, dreams are dreamt of bringing back the golden age and replaying the recently lost war but winning this time. The established world order, where they are losers, is reviled and they need to bring it down.
They break all the international laws that kept the West at peace. On the pretense of consolidating lands where people who speak the same language live they engulf several European countries before the war is even declared. All the way as they do it they claim that they are actually resisting British and French evil imperialism. Finally, they attack Poland and the big war starts.
It will play out the exact same way this time with Russia. Why does it always have to be Poland?
When someone tells you he's waging war against you, you need to take it seriously or you're caught with your pants down. We've learned it the hard way, but in the West they seem to think they'll be able to sit this one out. Well, guess again. Unless of course, we manage to beat Russia back on our own. But that would be a decade-long slaughter. And if we lose, Russia gets a new foothold and millions of soldiers to bolster its army.
And don't you hope for Russia to be too exhausted to continue. Russians are used to poverty and they will have their rockets and tanks built alright. Look at Iran and they don't even have half the Russia's potential
So there's a simple conclusion: you can't just replace Putin and pretend nothing happened. Many events will have to transpire and many things will have to change yet.
operation Noble Anvil.
well, it's not Poland now, because it is Ukraine now... or for now.
I brought dates with military conflicts of the US, i can bring the same with Soviet Union or Russia. And frankly number of conflicts would be the same. To put it simple,if a country does not have a nuclear arsenal, that country may or probably will be used a battleground for countries that have a nuclear arsenal.
I see little difference between current war in Ukraine and past wars like in Afghanistan, Vietnam and Korea. It's exactly the same scenario. I think the difference is, that it happens not somewhere overseas, but at your/mine backdoor.
I just find it funny. Are people that naive? Correct me if i'm wrong, but not a single country that suffered color revolution become a better place after this revolution. Georgia? Free Trade Agreement. That's just as example. By the way, Erdogan signed Free Trade Agreement with Ukraine not long before Russian invansion. I really doubt it would end well for Ukraine anyway, despite of any outcome of this conflict.
That's actually what Peterson belives is happening. So if a Canadian intellectual belives that Ukraine is just a battlegorund and a testground between Russia and the West, i believe it is so.
But yes i agree, a lot of Russian people think that way, and that's a correct assumption. It's a proxy war.
And we had it coming since 2000. It was just a matter of what country will be chosen. In 2014 it was obvious that it will be Ukraine.
Here is the deal. We can demonize Putin to oblivion. But even if he would be replaced it will change nothing. Medvedev will be next in line and policy will be the same. And the list can go on. In order to change the situation, entire political regime of modern Russia should be removed, and that will not happen. Because we still remember attrocities on the 90s, and how 30% of population of the country almost died because of liberal goverment. So for russian people, the police state is better than the alternative.
the answer to your question is no, however, France is a part of NATO, and this organisation is responsible for many deaths. Organs harversing with NATO blessing? sure, why not?
So no, don't pull bad and good guys on me. There is blood, and hands of every major powers on this planet is covered in blood elbows deep. Wanna talk about how exactly France acquired uraniun?
What I mean is that an attack on Poland will be once again a precursor to a large-scale war. War in Ukraine can be likened to annexation of Czech territories. An Anschluss of Belarus was likely also planned. If we have another Munich betrayal, then we're on track to the big war.
I bet Putin knows how it will end for him, but it seems it's a ride he can not stop now.
This is a very valid point and it bodes a disaster for global security. Now everyone will have to start their own nuclear programs. The genie is out of the bottle. War in Ukraine does not really destabilize the status quo so much, but global nuclearization... This is some challenge the leaders of the civilized world are not prepared to answer.
The elephant in the room is that those are past wars. It's a different century. Wake up, stop living in the past.
The lesser but still major point is that the US wasn't trying to annex territories.
Well, Russia tried really hard to make life worse in those countries. By different means. But mostly by invading them and stealing territory.
But actually, even despite Russia's worst attempts to put us down, life in Ukraine was way better after the removal of Yanukovich. Still worth it. Don't know how you get to your conclusions. TV?
Why?
No, it's not a proxy war per se. Who's Russia's proxy? You can't be your own proxy, dude.
It's a good old war of conquest.
So much wrong in that passage.
Russia never had a liberal government. Come on. Who are you calling liberal? Yeltsyn's government? Well, then Putin was even more liberal than that during his first two cadences. He was also in Yeltsyn's government...
And there's no way Medvedev ever gets anywhere. He's a political corpse.
And you have a really demeaning view on Russians if you think they are only capable of not going extinct unless they live in a police state. Do they have extra chromosomes or something? Anyone can do it, modern Germans are not actually genetically superior to slavs.
Responding to the first bolded italicized part: no opposition media; no opposition political parties; no organized dissent against the ruling regime; copious examples of dissidents who were either murdered, or forced to flee abroad, or forced to flee abroad and then murdered, or just turned up dead in weird circumstances; a ruler who very likely bombed his own people to create a war drum context to assist with getting (probably, mostly) legitimately elected for his first run at President, and then has progressively used every possible trick to insure his progressive victories as well as recurrent adjustments to laws that would prevent him from holding office recurrently; the same guy has been effectively supreme leader of the Russian Federation for ~20 something years (honestly not that many tinpot African dictators ever managed to last that long, Robert Mugabe aside . . .); a State Media which makes Goebbels Ministry of Truth seem tame--constant ranting and raving about nuking anyone and everyone who opposes them, etc.; 15 years in prison for calling the war a war; homosexuality illegal . . . a system which is corrupt at seemingly every level (a blessing in disguise now that the effects of all that corruption that depleted Russian military capacity is coming into pay) . . . those are just the most basic things which come to mind immediately. I reckon that an actual unbiased Russian scholar would be able to write an entire book about all the ways in which the Putin regime is actually much WORSE than the Soviet Union (Khrushchev was replace by the party because he was deemed to be a loose cannon, but I don't see any "committee" or parliamentary body or ANY force other than a bullet being placed between his eyes by one of his trusted bodyguards holding Putin accountable). Putin has only just got started, as Althix was all to eager to point out: You Ukrainians are not the actual "enemy," it is effectively "the world" or at least that portion of it which eschews Russian supremacy and dominance . . . this is your standard ethno-supremacist, irredentism common to many totalitarian or authoritarian worldviews down through the centuries, with the Nazis being just one of the most egregious examples.Pandora Papers, you mean. He was name-dropped in the report because right before the 2019 election he transferred his stake in an offshore company to one of his aides. But his business before that time was not connected to public finances or administrative power so that's not some kind of state-level corruption. Good enough as far as Eastern European presidents go. When he's caught in corruption while in the office, he's out that's for sure.
I don't know if that's good. This works with authoritarian regimes. You remove the tyrant and that does it.
But have Russia taken the totalitarian turn? Is the majority of the population now beaten into a frenzy and asking for total war? It's actually a possibility, we don't know for sure.
This is what a lot of Russians think. And that is where it might be too late to make any appeasements.
Doesn't it rhyme loud enough for western people to finally get it?
We have a very large European country that was shunned and humiliated by western leaders for a few decades (due to its own previous actions, but still). Resentment is brewing, dreams are dreamt of bringing back the golden age and replaying the recently lost war but winning this time. The established world order, where they are losers, is reviled and they need to bring it down.
They break all the international laws that kept the West at peace. On the pretense of consolidating lands where people who speak the same language live they engulf several European countries before the war is even declared. All the way as they do it they claim that they are actually resisting British and French evil imperialism. Finally, they attack Poland and the big war starts.
It will play out the exact same way this time with Russia. Why does it always have to be Poland?
When someone tells you he's waging war against you, you need to take it seriously or you're caught with your pants down. We've learned it the hard way, but in the West they seem to think they'll be able to sit this one out. Well, guess again. Unless of course, we manage to beat Russia back on our own. But that would be a decade-long slaughter. And if we lose, Russia gets a new foothold and millions of soldiers to bolster its army.
And don't you hope for Russia to be too exhausted to continue. Russians are used to poverty and they will have their rockets and tanks built alright. Look at Iran and they don't even have half the Russia's potential
So there's a simple conclusion: you can't just replace Putin and pretend nothing happened. Many events will have to transpire and many things will have to change yet.
It seems to me that Putin is about where Hitler was on the scale of "threat to humanity" by about 1937 or 1938. Arguably, because Russian Federation has a gigantic nuclear arsenal, Putin is many orders of magnitude worse than Hitler ever managed to be, at least in terms of potential threat to humanity.
I have serious doubts that, even if Putin decided to deploy a nuke, the order would follow through to the NCO or low lever officer(s) who actually flip the switch . . . If he were to attempt such a thing, I suspect there is already a pact among individuals close to him that they WILL take him out, because sane people understand that nuclear weapons are useless for anything except committing suicide, or perhaps at best "playing Russian roulette." This is precisely why the damn things have only been used TWICE in combat since they were first developed in 1945.
Responding to the second bolded-italicized part. The USSR fell apart with very little actual fighting. I realize it was all very complicated, and when the time comes that the Putin regime falls apart it is likely to also be very complicated, probably more messy, and possibly more protracted. Or it may not happen at all. Maybe Putin outlives all of us, and manages to live out his dream: to bring the Russian Empire back to its glory and even beyond that.
There are very few visible Russian leaders who dissent against Putin, but I think there are plenty of Russians who oppose Putin, so the question is: how can we assist them?
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I appreciate you using a modicum of nuance in this answer. You probably realize that that is not quite what you were saying in your original post, which came across as your blaming every individual citizen of any Western country for any bad thing that NATO has done. That is as nonsensical as blaming every Russian for what Putin is doing.
By the way, whataboutism is a classic Soviet propaganda tool that Putin has kept using to great effect (in fact it is also used by his dear friends in the US political scene). You say that the west is victim of propaganda, and you are not wrong on that. However I feel that you are not being very objective about the propaganda that is coming from your own country. Which is understandable, we all have our confirmation bias, but on the other hand I think it would do you good to look at your side with a bit of critical thinking.
I like this thread, I disagree with everyone. Have forums gone too far?
Maybe more sanctions and greater isolation would help.
I'm not sure what are you hoping for here. There's a Russian who is caught by the mass hysteria of war nationalism, amplified in a dictatorship by controlled media, where people go to jail for opposing the war. All he can do is say "but what about" for every point of criticism of his precious dictatorship, instead of addressing it. You can't persuade him into anything because he's driven by emotional nationalism.
Maybe more sanctions and greater isolation would help.
Define sane. Your definition will likely not be good even for your next-door neighbours.
The Earth is mostly not populated by sane people as you define them. You need to meditate on that thought.
The age of empires is gone. It's a stillborn project. And that's why Putin's Russia can never live up to Nazi Germany.
Those guys had everything figured out with German precision, they had a project. Russians, they have a mish-mash of memes for ideology. Communist flags along with orthodox crucifixes along with imperial eagles along with Nazi symbolism along with "special mission" of the Russian people which no one understands and which is not even properly put together.
The only reason it is not crumbling is that the West currently has no compelling project at all. Both sides are too weak to win.
The old war was a clash between mature nations with strong convictions. This war comes from the place of fruitless searching for one's identity in a post-modernist world and both sides are looking in the wrong places. At least we have some proper nation-building here in Ukraine.
Yeah. We have so many historic examples of that MO being effective.
a reminder
Hope. I'm hoping for hope.
This bull**** again? What a small, disorganized group of Albanian guerillas did in the 90s is not a good indicator of collective NATO ethics & morality, especially because Albania wasn't a NATO member until 2009. None of the countries of that region which were directly involved in the Kosovo war were, and the closest NATO member geographically (at the time) was Hungary.
If you want to target some group for not seeking justice in these cases, look at the courts of Kosovo. They're the ones refusing to pursue them, and they're the local authority. Or should NATO now launch a conventional invasion of Kosovo to oust their corrupt courts and install judges that aren't beholden to ages-old Balkan factionalism? What--in your view--can NATO do to redeem itself for crimes it didn't even perpetrate?
It's not about redemption. It's more about denying NATO countries moral superiority while Russian military is acting like unhinged animals.
Thousands of Ukrainian 'battle casualty replacements' are being trained in England
Ukraine is losing up to 200 soldiers each day and it is important replacements can be trained in safety, away from the war.
news.sky.com
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Redeeming itself for what?
Let me put it this way. Soviet Union defeated Nazi Germany and liberated a lot of countries along the way. But, It the US who won the WW2 and this allowed them to be a super power we know it to be today. If Soviet Union made a different choices back in the day, perhaps it is SU would dictate its will across the globe, not the US. And in that case SU would behave just like US does today.
As for crimes it didn't even perpetrate, oh please. I already mentioned Noble Anvil. Countries of NATO block participating in Iraq war. Libya? How many people died during this operation and after?
It hardly matters though how many people died, local, personal tradegies are local, personal tradegies after all. But don't pull forces of good vs. forces of evil trick on me, i'm old enough to understand that there is no such thing as forces of good on this planet... or forces of evil for that matter. All regimes, no matter how they organized, are guilty in something.
But the thing is, there have to be "an enemy" otherwise war is losing its justification. And this is where public relation comes to play.
I will give you an example. There was a rethoric on russian media about captured neo nazis. You know, entire package included with swastikas and stuff. And one of the "reasons" why Russia invaded is to implement denazification of the country right? So Russia captured these neo nazis, and exchanged them as PoW... As a tax payer i wanna know why did this happen, and i mind you i run a business with 20 working people, i pay taxes from my business and personal ones. So as a taxpayer i want to know why these nazi has not been shot on a spot, why they were exchanged? During WW2 SS dudes were hanged or shot without a trial.
Yet, i can't even ask that question. I "don't have a right" to ask this question according to actual propaganda line. I don't have a right to ask a question why nazis are still breathing when russian soldiers commit suicides upon returning because they were castrated by these very same nazis. And this is not what you may find on russian media, i'm a former senior sergeant, deputy squad leader and BMP commander, i served during last stages of second Chechnya war so i have my connections.
A rhetoric that i "don't have right" to ask questions, is a rather common these days in russian media. Message has changed. And i'm pretty sure than any media source anywhere on earth translates a message that fits best in the current circumstances. Putin is bad? Bad. NATO is bad? Bad. America is satan? For sure.
But at the end of the day,nobody, and i mean nobody cares about Ukraine. I don't. Nobody does. Either that or hypocrisy.
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Do you know who Gaidar is? Market economy in Russia is his doing. Along with many other things.
Because it will destroy Ukranian production, as it did destroyed Georgian. The flood of cheap goods will destroy any kind of local production in Ukraine, because it will be impossible to compete against it. It did happened in Georgia already, i fail to see how Ukraine can be different.
and we live by the book that thousand years old, the book that serve as corner stone of our society. Century maybe a different one, but humans are still humans.
And for sure, US are not trying to annex territories, because US are smarter than that and act differently.
Crimea? Mind you it is only an annexation if there was a coup in Kiev. No coup in Kiev, than it's not anannexation but referendum. You can't have one or another. But it's obviously an anannexation simply because of how it had been executed.
DNR and LNR are proxies. Just like Ukraine is a proxy for the West. Make no mistake and assume it is something different.
I mean since 2014 there was a conflict between Ukranian regime and DPR and LPR. 8 years. It was happening for 8 years and only now Russia decided to protect these republics and acknowledge them?.. yeah right. Good timing though.
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I don't blame people. What i'm saying is any regime of any major country on this earth is responsible for something very nasty. And it is important to understand that. As ultimate redeemer and scape goat said "he who is without a sin cast the first stone".
the US is just a very convenient example.
Not really liberated though. More like enslaved for half a century.
And now we're the target of liberation once again.
Which choices though? Like not making a pact with Nazi Germany to partition Poland and allying with Britain and France to fight Hitler from the very start? Yes, maybe should have done that.
Certainly, there is good and evil as perceived concepts. What are you some kind of a post-modernist edgelord?
Why aren't you as a taxpayer curious why Russian neo-nazis, like Rusich and Imperial Legion, with swastikas and other pagan trinkets, are allowed to join the army? Why weren't you curious back then why Chechnya had to be razed to the ground and subdued and not just let go?
Maybe you're just not a curious guy? Maybe you know the answer and you don't like it?
But surely more people care about Ukraine than about Russia right now. That's something you need to understand.
So all the bad things in the 90s happened because of the few liberal politicians like Gaydar and Chubays.
That's a really poor level of analysis.
Gaydar's reforms were sort of what was known as "shock therapy" reforms in post-soviet Poland. It was rough. But mostly rough because the soviet economy model collapsed spectacularly and could not be revived. It worked for Poland eventually. Maybe because it wasn't overrun by a corrupt clique of oligarchs and secret servicemen/gangsters who stole everything that could be stolen and still hold the entire country in stranglehold to preserve their riches.
This is just gibberish. Flood of cheap goods?
If both Ukraine and Russia can live with massive Chinese imports how are Turkish goods so bad. They're not even cheap by local standards.
Get your info right, stop listening to whatever you're listening to because it's ignorant. Georgia is not dying because of Turkish imports either, that's just silly.
No, we don't live by that book. You don't live by that book. Get real.
You're not your grandfather, you're living today. And what was okay back then is not okay any more. Wars of conquest are no longer the norm.
Political turmoil in a country is not a reason for landgrabs by its neighbours. If anything, it makes it worse.
Also, if the previous Nazis held a referendum in occupied Crimea would it count?
Yeah, no. You could call L/DNR a Russian proxy, sure. But that's over now.
We're now fighting a proper Russian army here and they're no longer hiding their badges.
And Ukraine is not fighting to please Biden. We're fighting to actually preserve our existence.
I perfectly understand that given how Russian army underperforms against a weaker, smaller army, it's tempting to pretend it actually fights against the whole civilized world. Makes you feel slightly better about your military. But that's not the case, obviously.
Boy, I wish we had NATO's boots on the ground. I wish.
That's just a non sequitur. When you're doing something horrible and are called out on it, pointing fingers at history books is not a reaction that makes you look any better.
Yeah, you did, and you specifically mentioned the organ trafficking that happened concurrently while claiming it had the blessing of NATO. Since you neglected to mention any other specifics I can only assume that's the strongest example you had to make, and as I already explained, it's bull**** from the bottom up. You don't get to just say the same thing again and be like "I told you so," that's not how this works.
The first or second Libyan civil war? Both had involvement of Russians or Russian-backed entities (Belarus and Wagner for first and second, respectively), in both cases US involvement was precipitated by crimes against humanity (first by Gaddafi's government and second by ISIL), and in both cases the list of external actors is long.
I didn't, but you're trying to make an argument of relative privation on behalf of the Soviet Union & Russian Federation which isn't acceptable. The hands of the US--and by extension, NATO--are not clean, and I will never say they are, but they're nearly incomparable to the atrocities committed by the Soviet Union and covered up or down-played by the Russian Federation. NATO and US doctrine has evolved with the times to become more precise, with a focus on reducing collateral damage, but the Russians seem intent on doing things like it's 1922, not 2022, leveling entire cities in the Donbas with artillery so they can claim they're making territorial gains.
Put two and two together. They don't want you to ask questions because the answer is most people captured in Ukraine aren't Nazis, aren't even combatants in the war, and are released because they are of no value to Russia except as bargaining chips for getting their own soldiers back in exchange.
Maybe Russian soldiers are committing suicide upon returning from Ukraine because they've been indiscriminately leveling whole cities once their commanders realized a one-week coup d'etat wasn't actually in the cards.
You can tell yourself that if you want. I can give you dozens of phone numbers of people I linked to rescuers so they could escape Rubizhne in the days before it was fully controlled by Russia. The number of intact buildings left in that city now can be counted on one hand. Your own jaded cynicism is not representative of the rest of us.
Tying USA being a super power only to the variable of who won WW2 is very narrow view of seeing things. I am not historian or anything but I bet there are a lot of other things made USA a super power today and I also bet the results of WW2 have very small role in this fact.
I mean Germany most certainly lost WW2 and yet they are fourth at economy ranking.
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