Quote (Black XistenZ @ Sep 23 2022 08:00pm)
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/That actually makes it much worse. You're essentially arguing (correctly) that Yanukovych wasn't a Russian pawn who was subservient to Moscow, and that his replacement by the NATO powers was even more egregious therefore.
Quote (Black XistenZ @ Sep 23 2022 08:00pm)
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".
The managers of US empire aren't entirely ridiculous. Canada, for example, was somewhat fresh off the heels of an independence referendum in Quebec. Having Quebecois deployed to Iraq for a clearly bullshit war of aggression would have aggravated that situation, destabilizing a stalwart US satrapy. Montreal had much, much bigger protests than Toronto or Vancouver.
Ditto France and Germany. Both of these countries aren't anglo and were (and still are, somewhat) engaged in an internal political struggle for self-determination from the American empire.
Quote (Black XistenZ @ Sep 23 2022 08:00pm)
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".
It's reasonable. I say this as someone living in Canada, all my direct family lives here.
If Canada decided to align itself with a hostile foreign power (none actually exists, but lets pretend China or Russia was), then the US would
rightfully be able to claim that this foreign powers encroachment into US-bordering states was a strategic threat. Because it would be!
This fiction you're weaving depends on the assumption that the US isn't actually the most violent and evil empire to ever exist. That's wrong.