Ask yourself if the neighbors of that adversary could possibly want to avoid being invaded and if constant invasions would maybe be the cause of NATO expansion.

Ask yourself if Russia and Ukraine had normal relations before Western interference (coup d'état) and if Russia leased their naval base from Ukraine without issues.

normal relations is an interesting way to describe and entire govt that would do literally anything putin asked on a phonecall.

don't get me wrong the current govt is just a proxy for biden and the west, but the former was a proxy for russia. this war has never been about russian citizens getting shelled or even the creep of NATO on their borders, it's been about the fact that Russia lost an entire nation they had under their thumb.

Maybe if this loss would of happened organically we can sit here and be moralists and paint this conflict black and white but that's not the way it happened. We backed and funded a coup, just like we did so during the cold war across continents, upsetting the status quo, they responded in the way they could with this armed escalation. Subsequently we legitimized the government and backed the cleansing pro-Russian factions or even any middle of the isle politicians.

Thing is they never had the soft power reach we do with state department/CIA funded NGO's and a bottomless pit of cash to grease hundreds of levers of power. They have some soft power in their ex-soviet satellite states but can never match us. So they responded with the only card they had left, which is the military one.

This post was edited by ofthevoid on Mar 31 2023 11:17am

correct, and our tool is a small calibre sniper round, theirs is a barrage of shells.

what we did was wrong, and it cost a small number of lives by comparison. ive said all along US = bad, russia = worse. we're somehow to blame for their aggression because we should have known the only thing they can do is invade and destabilize and entire nation because they're mad they lost a puppet that we gained? that's a lot of people's argument. you dont capitulate a toddler because it has only the power of temper tantrums, cookies aren't for dinner.

The two blocks are adversaries and have been for a long time, there's no other way to put it. Ukraine is situated between the two.

I don't get why so many people think it's okay for NATO to reel in Ukraine, considering the previous rounds of NATO expansion that Russia condemned (citing it's security concerns) and the fact that Crimea is so important for Russia.

We all know the US would lose it's mind if this was Mexico being reeled in by the Warsaw Pact if it still existed (and the US has no issues finding good locations for naval base unlike Russia).

if you're referring to me, as ive stated countless times, i dont.

I mean to say what we did only cost a few lives and was relatively insignificant is not honest, and it completely ignores causal relationships of how things work. Toppling a pro-Russian leader in a state that has always been a Russian satellite state, which has cultural/ethnic ties going back many hundreds of years is not small potatoes. We set off the chain of events with that move and the thing in life, you can't control the 'find out' when you decide to 'fuck around'.

If I go to the bar and being a drunk dumbass push some hothead and he ends up bouncing my skull off concrete with a knock out killing me, we can all say what he did is worse because we know the outcome but an outside observer can honestly say that you can't always predict outcomes in life, nor should you expect proportionality in outcome to the offense, that's just not the way the world works.

Fact of the matter is the coup set off the civil war, which then escalated into a full blown war. You can dance all around how we're less culpable or whatever but it's dishonest. There's no good or bad guys, there's only geopolitics and fable-esque reasons like that we do the things we do because we care about freedom and democracy when in reality it's all about diminishing our geopolitical enemies whether its Russia with Ukraine or Georgia or China with Tibet or Taiwan or fill in the blank.

This post was edited by ofthevoid on Mar 31 2023 11:46am

i didnt say it cost a few lives, at all. i said small number by comparison, which is true.

Timeline:
-holodomor (i start here)
-russian backed president wins and kills EU/NATO initiatives that spawned in the liberal eastern half of Ukraine
-protests arise
-US backs coup underway as a result of killing EU/NATO attempts (you start here)
-Putin backs separatists in the west only to cry when they get shelled
-Putin invades
-Today

Putin killed the chances Ukraine could escape his grasp without US backing, then funded thousands to die in "ethnic russian" regions, then invaded using their deaths as pretense.

do i think the US has any real admirable goals in Ukraine? not even close. it was a big dirty mistake to ever get involved there, and we should have been the ones to kill the EU/NATO talks. but in hindsight we didnt invade another nation with a fullscale conventional army. no matter how bad we are they're inarguably worse. that's my only point. any attempts to say im arguing the US is good in any way are just strawmans and always have been. we bad, they worse, inarguably. they just simple are worse, its not equivalent, they're worse. we played spy games they played war games.

This post was edited by thesnipa on Mar 31 2023 11:57am

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You mean like in the 1930s, when Stalin deliberately starved millions of Ukrainians to death?