most men mock what they can never aspire to.

if the ice melts but is not wet - we will never know how it feels.

westward movement means more danger from russia, means they need NATO protection, means they apply.

there is no world where they move west and dont apply.

i dont completely agree with this position. but regardless, they should have waited until putin was gone before testing the waters, is my view. to be safe.

This post was edited by ferdia on Feb 28 2023 11:21am

I've said before that its the kind of distinction that lost its relevance when the US decided to interfere. Its a what-if scenario. Yes, the US could have tried to wait on an organic pro-western movement to surge in Ukraine, which would have necessitated Russia to act first and intervene more directly in Ukrainian politics to keep their sphere of influence. But we didn't. When it comes to the legitimacy of democracy and the aggressors who change the status quo by force- we're the ones who acted first, we're the proximate cause. And that's not to quibble over how much of a role the CIA played- clearly micromanaging the government and pulling all the strings after the fact- or to point out that the existence of Nazi death squads really should indeed be a red line that overshadows any moral, legal, political complexity beneath it. I think even stripping that away and getting to the meat of what caused the Ukraine war, it pegs right into the form of the US color revolution.

and I think the complexity you're talking about is inherent to all US color revolutions and the threat that Russia and China have perceived from them. We were never talking about the CIA going in with 25,000 troops (editor's note- I mean, like, post bay of pigs), we were talking about deep ethnic/religious/political divisions that pre-exist our interventions, but that we can exploit to rile up a populace to overthrow their government. There are huge populations of dissidents in Iran, in Egypt, in Bolivia and Kazakhstan and China. The threat isn't a bunch of CIA goons in black trucks pulling up, its the organization and support that could reach the tipping point of revolution. Ukraine was one such society. That doesn't diminish American culpability for intervening or Russian culpability for invading, what it does is just describe the mechanics of the system, what it took for us to reach this point.

A larger part comes down to what sort of lens you want to use to analyze it. If its a moralizing lens, you need to look at who started it. You need to look at the value of democracy, its continuity and legitimacy and the right of people to their self-determination free from foreign masters. If its the lens of a geopolitical chessmatch, then who dealt the fart is irrelevant, all that matters is who has manuevered themselves to gain or lose from the Ukraine war, what effect its having on our international relations, oil markets, supply chains, whether NATO expansion is being pushed back.

This post was edited by Goomshill on Feb 28 2023 11:23am

russian troll farms creating fake US accounts to organize protests and counter protests during the 2016 election to rile up the deeply divided populace. "no big deal, just a bit of tickling here and there, changed nothing" goomshill

CIA poking at an already angry minority voting block in the capital who just lost an election by a few percent "yup, the US did this, so the context doesnt matter much and we can NEVER know if they'd have coup'd without us" also you.

yet no one asks the question beyond this war. why cant putin simply let Ukraine fall to the west? because of some fantasy where we encircle a nation with thousands of nuclear warheads and say "put down the big red button and come out with your hands up"? decade after decade Putin refused to modernize his nation and relegated himself to a fuel supplier who also makes 2nd tier weapons for 3rd world despots. the responsibility to change is not on the victor, but rather the defeated whilst on their knees.

instead he sped up his own country's demise, they're being removed from fuel supplier more and more every day and they have nothing left to offer. they'll be left with selling coal to africa, begging china to buy oil/coal/gas at reduced prices, and hawking shit weapons to anyone willing to pay 3/4 of what they're worth. over Ukraine and the silly premise that it's movement westward spelled their doom. like we're going to have a cuban missile crisis over a corrupt wheat basket that likely would have been denied NATO membership for decades.

This was actually thoroughly debunked by the revealed twitter files. Elon Musk who actually now has access to all this has been tweeting about this like a madman. There is no validity to it, like at all.

What nuance have you brought into this? You highlight how it wasn't a binding agreement while simultaneously discarding actual multiple causations that led to this friction as lazy. You think just because Ukraine was tilting slowly pro-west it's okay to support a coup. If how heavy we're invested now with this war is any representation of how invested we were in 2014, its obvious that what we did was anything but minimal.

@bolded

That "deal" is not otherwise war would've broke out a long time ago. But ongoing NATO expansion clearly is a big issue here.

Let me remind you how the West reacts when tiny Solomon Islands negotiate a deal with China. There you go







This post was edited by Djunior on Feb 28 2023 12:25pm

you still can't read. i dont support the coup, i said it was dumb, and said we shouldnt have done it.

we're on page 908 on my client of this. you think im scrambling to have an in depth conversation with dj the russian shill on the topic ive brokered 20 times in hte past just to get NPC putin regurgitation?

ive tried to expound a bit more in my replies to you, when you jumped on my reply to him, but if you cant even get the basics right i'll not bother even to shit post bored at work.

You're dumb.

what percentage of the Ukraine war is the fault of the USA? and what percent is the fault of Russia?