Quote (ofthevoid @ 9 Mar 2022 20:37)
Bribed is possibly the wrong word but what happened is a lot of economic investment/loans/inclusion into various things are tied together. In the 1990s and later on in the early 2000's many of those eastern and central European countries were thirsty as fuck for any sort of investment and job creation and most of that money would be coming from the west, not the crumbled soviet east. Joining the EU and NATO as well, provided the economic carrot that tbh no one really wanted to turn down. If I'm an average Estonian, it's not necessarily that I feared Russia in 2004 but if NATO is looking to spend 5 billion dollars to build bases, house their soldiers here, spend more money here in my community I'd be all for it because ultimately it stimulates my economy, raises my standard of living, allows me to spend a week in Greece on holiday, etc. That's why all those ex-soviet states rushed at that opportunity meanwhile the much richer Finns and Swedes to this day are kind of on the fence about joining.
I don't know what happened in the smoky back room discussions that led to many of these countries to join NATO but as a sidebar look at the pressure that is being applied right now to countries like Hungary & Poland that are not on the same page when it comes to issues like immigration and social issues like lgbtqbbq+ rights. It's hard for me to believe that the enticement of economic investment wasn't used as some bargaining chip.
The economic carrot is mostly coming from EU membership, not NATO. Now, look at Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary, who all joined NATO long before the EU (99 vs 04). These countries happen to have a strong national indentity and suffered particularly under Soviet/Russian rule.
Regarding Finland and Sweden: they have geography on their side. If Russia were to divert military resources to these two countries, they couldn't possibly apply pressure toward Central and Western Europe at the same time, which is just a much bigger prize. Also, the Baltics, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Romania experienced first-hand what it's like to live under Russian rule. Apparently, they all agreed that it suuuucks and that they would rather lick American and German boots than to risk going back to Russia.
Quote (bogie160 @ 9 Mar 2022 21:09)
Crimea in 2014 had a very easy pretext. Ukraine was in the midst of a low grade civil war, Crimea was majority Russian, and Russians wanted to be ruled by Russia.
The pretext here was that the Donbass required autonomy, but Putin clearly didn't want to stop at just the Donbass, so the pretense quickly fell apart.
The pretext for the annexation of Crimea was easy, sure. But the pretext for inciting a civil war in Eastern Ukraine was far less trivial, yet the Russian propaganda was able to convince most people in the West that there was good reason for their actions and that both sides share some degree of blame. This is a big part of the reason why the Western reaction was so tepid back then. This time around, they didn't even try to lay out some rationale for their invasion. They could have been telling the world for months that "dangerous fascists" are in power in Kyiv who are planning to acquire WMDs or preparing genocide in Eastern Ukraine. Instead, they only started disseminating these narratives while their own tanks were already rolling...
This post was edited by Black XistenZ on Mar 9 2022 05:42pm