Quote (Black XistenZ @ Mar 23 2022 05:16pm)
The post-Maidan government was no dictatorship - there was still a functional and democratically elected parliament and a new presidential election was scheduled and carried out asap. This new president that you're labelling as a dictator was then defeated in the very next election in 2019.
The last democratically elected government in Ukraine is the Zelensky government. The fact that Russia annexed Crimea and that the two oblasts in Donbass seceded, so that there is a clear pro-Western majority in the rest of Ukraine, cannot possibly be held against Zelensky.
The fact that the plurality party didn't participate in the election and the most populous oblasts boycotted it undermines any pretense of democracy. An election by only half a country isn't democratic. And that can absolutely be held against those that overthrew the democratically elected government. You don't get a mulligan when a democratic vote goes against you. When the result of an election is thrown out by force and the insurrectionists hold sham elections after that, they don't carry any legitimacy. I've given the example of Trump being reinstalled by a coup on January 6th, then all the blue states seceding and Republicans winning a landslide "election" in 2024 in fragments of a country.
There's really no way to pretend that this is democratic, free and fair or legitimate. The country was broken apart by a revolution that overthrew a democracy. Anything that followed that, while the country was still torn apart, clearly does not hold any valid claim to being a democratic state of Ukraine and representative of its people. And what followed was Zelensky tearing up even the pretense of democracy within the west and installing a one-party rule despotism.
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The strategic interest is quite simple: take a stand for the concept of national sovereignty and a rule-based international order, put a stop to an increasingly expansionst and aggressive Russia, uphold Western credibility as a reliable ally on the world stage. And of course to prevent instability and human rights abuse on the doorstep of Europe/NATO.
It's not much different from the interest the U.S. had in the Balkan wars of the 90s.
A humanitarian crisis only exists as long as the war continues. Our involvement is not aimed at ending the war, its aimed at enflaming it and making it worse. We're not willing to take a stand for national sovereignty and protect Ukraine, we're only willing to turn Ukraine into a new Syria with hundreds of thousands dead and millions displaced before the inevitable outcome. And it completely undermines the US geopolitically by dividing the loyalties of the unaligned world and even some of our allies, as they fall on the wrong side of the new iron curtain. We sure aren't advancing American geopolitical interests when we put Russia in bed with China, then align Israel, Mexico, India, the UAE and KSA all with them against us. And striking right at the heart of the petrodollar no less.
I think a good comparison is the Syrian War. We were not willing to intervene directly enough to overthrow Assad, only to flood the country with weapons and prop up a resistance. We at least had learned the lesson in Iraq that any power vacuum would instantly be filled by ISIS. We enflamed the war after Russia annexed Crimea as a way to needle Putin on multiple fronts. We were giving weapons and aid to Al Qaeda war criminals and lying about it in the western media. We had the white helmets running around doing staged photo ops, we had false flag claims of chemical weapons. And what was the result, in the end? Hundreds of thousands died. Millions were displaced. Cities bombed into rubble. An unstable shithole filled with weapons leaking out into the rest of the world. A tidal wave of refugees broke upon the shores of Europe, and Putin gleefully let Assad off his leash enough to drive more Syrians to the EU and watch as the union cracked under its own misguided humanitarian impulses, eventually causing Brexit. Eventually Obama did a complete 180 flip and wound up fighting our former allies to help our former enemies, handing the country back to Assad and Russia on a silver platter. In the end, Putin profited and the US/EU were greatly harmed by our own missteps.
So here we are, unwilling to stop Russia in Ukraine, but willing to flood the country with weapons and prop up a resistance. We want to needle Russia on both a military and economic front. We've got PBS full throated gobbling nazi cock in shameless propaganda. We already preemptively declared that any use of chemical weapons is a Russian false flag, before anything happened, and after lying about the existence of US-funded biolabs with bioweapons in Ukraine. Tens of thousands are dead, millions are being displaced. Cities bombed into rubble. The inevitable outcome is Russia taking over at least the east, the most likely outcome is all the way to past Lviv and to the Polish border. And this time, we're turning our own allies against us, undermining our economic stranglehold on the global economy and risking nuclear war.