Quote (ofthevoid @ May 16 2023 08:33pm)
When you're linking official NATO lines, safe to say I'm going to fail to convince you of anything, which is fine. Nothing has been debunked, that's an open question with billions of people and many governments not having it settled.
I look at history and how we operated in similar cases in the last 70 years and use that as my baseline as the lens to view this conflict, while you want to view this from a perspective of moralism (of course that's the same one being spammed on TV 24/7 in west by the MSM, which always seems to find itself aligned with what the alphabet agencies and military wants)
There is no moralism in my reasoning, stop strawmanning.
The realpolitik as I see it is that the main threat to Russian regime was Ukrainian democracy, combined with Russias own shitshow strategy of its black sea navy/naval base; That essentially involved bribing Ukraine's government to allow the Russian fleet in Sevastopol and hoping that Ukrainians would be fine pivoting away from closer ties to Europe and becoming the next Belarus.
The USSR and RF mismanagement of the administration of Crimea and its own terrible strategy for its Black Sea fleet led to this war becoming existential and inevitable for Russia.
If you think the US caused this primarily, there is no convincing you otherwise. But it blatantly is fallacious logic.
As I said before the US only takes notice of Russia when it has to. The Russian regime requires an adversarial relationship with the US for domestic leverage, and to validate its own ambition to be anything more than a nuclear equipped gas station masquerading as a global superpower.
This post was edited by Prox1m1ty on May 16 2023 01:43pm