Quote (Goomshill @ 24 Sep 2022 02:28)
When the will of the people of Ukraine was to elect a Russian aligned politician and reject NATO's overtures
How many times do I have to point out that there was no clearly stated "will of the people" at the time? Yes, the Ukrainian people had elected pro-Russia president Yanukovych who rejected the EU-UKR association agreement - but they had also elected a pro-EU parliament which voted to ratify it. So it's flat out wrong to claim that rejecting the overtures of the West had a clear, unambiguous mandate from the Ukrainian people.
Furthermore, it should be noted that Yanukovych had been ambivalent about his stance on the EU-vs-RU question during his years as opposition leader and during his 2010 campaign, and had at times signalled outright openness to closer ties with the West:
https://foreignpolicy.com/2013/12/06/the-ukrainian-presidents-big-broken-promise/Quote (JohnnyMcCoy @ 24 Sep 2022 01:23)
they still got some guys + support and since iraq-afghanistan interventions ran at the same time for a long while, supplying troops for afghanistan was indirect support
every soldier we sent for afghanistan freed american troops to do something else
The way France, Germany, Canada and others bucked the US on the Iraq war still proves that they enjoy a pretty far-reaching degree of sovereignty and are not the United States' vassals/satellites. This is a sharp contrast to the way the states of the Warsaw Pact were openly subordinate to the USSR. (Hungarian Revolution, Prague Spring, Breshnew doctrine and all that). It's also very different from the post-Soviet era during which Russia tried time and time again to enforce what I would call the "Putin doctrine" about the "limited sovereignty of Russia's neighbors".
This post was edited by Black XistenZ on Sep 23 2022 09:05pm