Its weird how my version of geopolitics doesn't require contradicting everything I've said recently
I don't have to say "Sending heavy weapons could escalate the war to a nuclear conflict" on tuesday and say "Russia won't react, they're bluffing" on thursday.
I'm not scrambling to arm """pro-democracy""" Sunni militias and a few months turning around and arming Kurds to fight the same Sunnis.
No need to invent fictions about Trump colluding with Russia to explain why Putin is retaliating tit-for-tat against Hillary

you have to be incredibly naive to pretend that the conflict has not been brewing for a while

check the last election results, the regions that "joined" russia voted like 90% for pro russian candidates in the past

no, the regions do not legally belong to russia and i doubt putins fake referendums, but dont try to tell anyone that there is not an overwhelming pro russia majority there

complete and utter failure by the international community to just ignore the interests of eastern ukrainians after the maidan coup

there was a chance for a legit referendum, but unfortunately the west and ukranian nationalists never gave it a chance (because the result is obvious)

what was the expected result here with the fighting in the donbas since 2014? accept this shit or get killed by ukranian artillery? millions of people leaving?

thats called ethnic cleansing.....its so sad how the country got torn apart on the behalf of washington/brussels and moscow

i remember reading something about the right to self determination for all people in the UN charta, but i guess thats just a piece of paper

Quoting Obama in a snappy 1 liner during a primary debate is a bar so low and ant couldnt play limbo with it.

as i already explained Russia's loss is China's loss. Russia's destruction is China's destruction. The only reason China hasn't been put in a stranglehold is the eventuality that a Russo-Chinese alliance could withstand a western blockade, whereas neither Russia nor China could alone. so do we go after the rapidly industrializing deepstate authoritarian tech giant of China to break that alliance? or do we go after the fuel rich and just about everything else poor vodka addicted oligarchs who are aligned with but separate from the govt and therefore more willing to make concessions to save money? china's big business is the state, russias big business runs the state, a small but important distinction.

Well you could quote Obama's explicitly codified Obama Doctrine circa 2012 which laid out the "Pivot to Asia" as its top line. Lets not forget that prior to Obama bungling the Syrian Intervention and sticking his nose in Ukraine, and before the buttery males / nothingburger of 2016, Obama was still fully committed to resetting relations with Russia to make friends with Putin and oppose China. That was our stated policy objective. And somehow our suspicious circumstances keep dividing America and Russia and helping China's interests- if there are any Fang Fangs running around pulling the strings, they're doing a mighty good job of covering their tracks.

Russia's loss isn't China's loss. Russia is building closer ties with China and being put in more of a dependency on Bejing, that's wildly in China's favor. When we're talking about Russia using China's financial systems instead of the Wests, abandoning the petrodollar to form a new anti-US coalition that could even include the KSA, well I really shouldn't have to explain how that's not in the interests of our hegemony. And frankly, China's been eating our lunch so long that they could easily survive a western blockade at this point. We need them, they don't need us. We're no longer talking about China's ascendency, just our own downfall. A few decades of serving their interests instead of our own has accomplished that.



This post was edited by Goomshill on Jan 27 2023 12:35pm

"russian candidates", huh? gave the game away there, ampoo. you accidentally acknowledged that previous ukrainian presidents (like yanukovych) were hand-picked by the kremlin, making the whole "the evil americans installed a pro-western government - how dare they?" line at the very least highly hypocritical. let us not forget that the euromaidan started after he simply rejected to sign an agreed upon EU association agreement, and just went rogue with a hard pro-russian turn, without any legitimisation.


also, you're conflating two different things there: voting for a pro-russian candidate (which i have no reason to doubt a majority of the people of donbas and crimea for example did back then) is NOT the same as a referendum to actually JOIN said country. that was NOT his platform, and he probably would never even have gotten close to being elected had it been. to be clear, i am absolutely in favour of any region's right to self-determination. if catalonia, scotland, crimea, donbas, bavaria... want to be independent or join another country, their people should have the right to hold a referendum - and if a majority is in favour, ways of making that happen should definitely be explored and pursued.

that's not what happened though, and a fake referendum after an invasion / occupation / annexation / resettlement / ethnic cleansing (like the one conducted by russia in recent years in order to make crimea seem more russian and give its claim to it some form of retroactive "justification") certainly is not a legitimate way to go about it.

also, your favourite kremlin fairy tale of ukraine just randomly shelling donbas for having voted against a pro western government is just that - a story made up by russian propaganda. the little green men there weren't ukrainians, who simply wanted to be closer to russia. they were demonstrably russian troops operating on ukrainian soil, instigating a conflict to portray a subsequent invasion as "liberation". that's a common russian tactic by now. no one is actually fooled by that, except people unlucky enough to live in a state where the media is controlled / owned by the government, and highly censored (like in russia, north korea, china, hungary, iran...).

i'm not sure what relevancy Obama has to me or this discussion. i dont agree with what he did and think russia can never be our friend in anything resembling it's current form.

as to the russian dependency on china, so what. if we can push them into decline we're not sending china a life raft we're sending them a debt ridden anchor.

as to the last the idea we need china is dated and rapidly changing due to automation. their dominance in the manufacturing space is coming to an end, and they know it. thus attempts at diversifying.

This post was edited by thesnipa on Jan 27 2023 02:01pm

The Kremlin didn't handpick Yanukovych. He was governor of Donetsk, you know, which became the DPR which became Russia, and was the most populous and important oblast of Ukraine while it was still a democracy. He had been in politics since 1996. The OSCE declared his 2010 election "an impressive display of democracy" and said there were no indications of fraud. Of course, democracy is just one of those terms you think can be used liberally when you want to describe something you like, perhaps you say "That was really democratic shit I just took".

Obama was the president who laid out explicitly how we should improve relations with Russia and pivot our foreign policy towards opposing China, ending the cold war mentality. Its kind of relevant when the whole geopolitical situation we're in right now is a product of violating the Obama doctrine.
You still don't see how aligning the world against us, breaking up our financial and resource hegemony and giving the Chinese a supply line with some of the largest natural resource producers is absolutely against our interests? The only debt ridden anchor in this scenario is the worthless western half of Ukraine we're fighting to retain. China is gobbling up Russia's cheap gas, coal and grain. We're the ones putting up the Iron Curtain 2.0 and now the rest of the world is working together to spite us, building their own financial networks, even looking to the yuan as a reserve currency. What could be more direct a challenge to our geopolitical dominance?

nice job leaving out the PRO in pro russian candidate

i wonder why everything is a russian conspiracy or propaganda in your eyes, just reading for 5 minutes about the conflict since 2014 makes it clear

russia stepping in with the "these are our people" argument should be a suprise.....to absolutely nobody as they did it before

even german mainstream media addressed it back in the day how the government in kiev attacked civilians and killed journalists and that it needs to stop

why do you support nationalists all of a sudden?

and (ignoring your little trick) how is a washington dc picked candidate (poroshenko) better than a kremlin one?

the victoria nuland leaks literally confirm this and after him we get selensky, who is the lap dog of kolomoisky

that guy stole billions from the ukranian people and tried to seize assets with his private army, after fleeing he supported selensky

i will never understand how people can even take sides here, arent you supposed to be one of the anti globalist interest guys?

ukraine is literally getting rekt over cash and future business opportunity

after the taxpayer has funded the support for ukraine and the rebuild, big corp can cash in big with their oligarch buddies, you should hate this right?

who do you think gave him the order to reject signing the already agreed upon EU association agreement last minute? his priest? any other fairy tales you like to share? xD