Charles Bukowski posted:

So NATO wants to back Ukranian Nazis vs Russia? ...Why?

Sex Farm posted:

Crimea river lol

Pennywise the Frown posted:

I just learned a new word today.

Also I'm gonna say it. Permaban me if you want....... war is bad. There. I had to speak my peace.

STABASS posted:

I want to do my duty as a patriot and invest in some defense contractors, but unfortunately none of them sell nfts...

Betty Wight posted:

I’d prefer no war, a united earth under a single hegemony. However sometimes it’s okay to fight against people doing bad things to ensure it isn’t normalized.

QuoProQuid posted:

russia has presented demands that no country can actually fulfill and just this morning appears to be sending the national guard to the border. neither of those things really suggest a peaceful outcome

https://twitter.com/girkingirkin/status/1485930045860458496?s=21

if people don’t want to gently caress with russia because it’s big and ukraine doesn’t matter to them, comp to that position without pretending that ukraine stole russia’s lunch money or whatever

Big Beef City posted:

Are the 'Nazis' in Ukraine interested in keeping Ukraine independent?
Are they pro-NATO?

If so, it would seem better to keep Ukraine independent and become a NATO ally and then deal with their internal social issues rather than stop supporting the country and allow Russia to annex them and gain territory, etc.
If not, and the 'Nazis' and majority of people within Ukraine want to reintegrate with Russia and denounce NATO alliance, then they should be free to do that.

Both are lovely prospects, and the first is definitely a Devil's bargain. But, perhaps if we're able to dangle the carrot of support while holding the stick of 'if you don't make social reforms we stop protecting you at any time and you're on your own', we can make progress in that area. Perhaps I'm being far too hopeful. I don't know.

Klyith posted:

Russia has a pipeline under the Black Sea to send gas to Turkey, and is just finishing up the Nord Stream to send gas to Germany. Both are direct from Russia to avoid anyone else taking a cut for transit, like Ukraine has been doing for the past while.

One of the reasons why Putin wants a pro-Russian leader in the Urkraine is so they'll charge less.

Taking over Crimea wasn't directly about gas, it was about punishing the Ukrainians + old soviet navy yards and assets (more control over the Black Sea) + internal propaganda value by scoring a win

pipelines are vastly better than boats, in both how much they cost to build & operate and how much gas they can send

AFancyQuestionMark posted:

if merking some spook guy most americans havent even heard of is the most retaliation they could do for the assassination of their most famous military hero and commander of their armed forces, then that's pretty pathetic imo

dk2m posted:

Ukraine is now just some nameless eastern flank country lmao. We’re gonna Kurd the gently caress out of Ukraine once we get tired of lionizing them

https://twitter.com/cspan/status/1485692720496664585?s=21

Business Gorillas posted:

one of the benefits of being a fuckin dumbass like myself is i can just say "Nazis are bad and we shouldn't be giving them military aid & money to advance our geopolitical agendas" without having to twist myself into knots trying to justify it

i know taking a bunch of words to say "we should keep giving them money but tell them if they do a pogrom, we'll get REALLY MAD about it" might sound like you're a complicated adult making Hard Decisions, but you're just lying to yourself

Klyith posted:

no, major planners and architects of the CIA don't go into conflict zones

but moving on from that since neither of us can prove it, what about this plane. he wasn't flying it himself was he? who was the pilot, crew, what happened to them? were all their families black-helicopter'ed away?

Kosmo Gallion posted:

Serious question, why is Ukraine so valuable to Russia they'd risk starting a war over it. And why is the West so determined to defend Ukraine they'd risk starting a war over it?

Regarde Aduck posted:

How much of a simpleton do you have to be to think Ukraine has anything Russia wants? The gently caress is wrong with you people. This is posturing between two powers, Nato vs Russia, and neither wants to back down and neither is entirely to blame for this shitshow. Grow the gently caress up.

Play posted:

There are other reasons but primarily Ukraine was a part of the former soviet union and putin has ALWAYS believed that every country which used to be part of the ussr belongs to Russia. We have seen them try to make this a reality in many different countries in the last couple of decades.

The west believes that countries should have self-determination and make their own political decisions. Ukraine, for obvious and good reasons, would rather be a part of the west and nato than Russia.

People equivocating the two sides are doing Russia a major favor. This is a clear aggression on their part. Nothing has fundamentally changed recently regarding Ukraine and nato, Russia has just had this in the works a long time. Their argument of having an 'enemy' nation on their borders makes little sense since if they conquer Ukraine nato will only be closer to Russia.

I heard someone say that if it gets hot it won't get hot until after the winter Olympics so Russia doesn't embarrass it interfere with China over that. If that's true it's pretty lol

Skyscraper Raccoon posted:

Biden's gonna kill so many people that he'll be a lock for the next Nobel Peace Prize

Big Beef City posted:

Funny.

QuoProQuid posted:

perhaps my memory of 2008 is hazy but, as i recall, NATO explicitly refused to put ukraine and georgia on a track to membership after they expressed interest, in part as a concession to russia (who felt its security concerns weren't being appreciated) and to reduce regional tensions

and then it went "ok cool" and launched an invasion of georgia that killed a bunch of people and displaced almost 200,000 people

SRQ posted:

lol @ the idea of nato being imperialist when people have just wanted to join it, desperately and willingly, so Russia doesn't pull a Georgia on them.
There's nothing imperialist about saying "Okay you can join the club."

QuoProQuid posted:

yes, im p familiar with ukraine and georgia's situation. yanukovych''s removal (because he was poo poo) is also the trigger that led russia to have its freakout and annex crimea and start propping up a whole war in donbass

(also RIP kyiv post, which got bought by a kleptocrat and gutted its staff)

Play posted:

As wrongheaded, evil, pointless and stupid as the US invasions in the middle east were, they never permanently occupied those countries and the goal was always to create democracies there. Democracies which would be aligned with the United States of course, but there was never any thought of permanently occupying or making those countries part of the us' holdings.

Also, you realize that 2008 was 14 years ago right.

Yep, pretty much. Ukraine is 100% opposed to Russian intervention and occupation and yet desperately wants to be a part of nato so they can be protected against Russian intervention. Calling the two sides the same is loving bullshit and indicates that either someone is fully in the tank for Russia or has internalized so much anti-US / anti-nato rhetoric that the result is the same.

Ukraine WANTS the US and nato to help them. They WANT Russia to stay the gently caress out because they understand the two sides want very different things. Saying this is justified is saying you don't give a gently caress about what Ukrainians want and don't care about their very lives and right to self-determination.

Betty Wight posted:

Balkans

Xenocides posted:

This. The last US intervention that went well was Desert Storm when Iraq invaded Kuwait, a nation what explicitly didn’t want to be conquered. The US had a simple military objective of removing the invaders. No endless fighting of insurgents. The people we were liberating genuinely wanted to be liberated. It was quick and effective and then done and actually helped some people.

I know in the background there were a lot of other ulterior motives like expanding the US military presence and profits for the military industrial complex and all that but there weren’t hordes of insurgents and the US wasn’t trying to destroy and replace a government. At least not overtly. President GHWB did hope the defeat would lead to some kind of coup in Iraq but that didn’t end up happening.

Ukraine is in a similar situation except the US has to work with the Russians and the US both having the option to blow things up to a much bigger degree. I suspect that the tough guy rhetoric will probably get Putin to back off. Russia would suffer a lot under sanctions if the US can get enough nations on board.

pro starcraft loser posted:

I like how the entire argument of Russia is that they dont want NATO on their doorstep...so they will invade more countries until NATO is literally on their doorstep due to the countries they conquer.

Taerkar posted:

No you don't understand, NATO forced Putin to invade Georgia. It's only by invading Georgia could Putin show all those former Soviet states that they'd be better off without NATO promising to help them remain independent.

Betty Wight posted:

This is just being willfully ignorant of the geopolitical situation. Stop doing the FSB’s job unless you are getting a paycheck.

Funky See Funky Do posted:

Xenocides posted:

It was horribly lovely (both literally and figuratively) to hit the water treatment infrastructure and then petty to put the parts needed to fix them on the embargo list.

Saddam did believe that but it was his own stupidity or a translation mistake. The ambassador told Saddam that the US wasn’t taking sides in the border dispute Iraq had with Kuwait. Pretty sure that neutrality on where a border should be doesn’t mean you are okay with one nation deciding the issue by invading and conquering the entirety of the other nation. Even if it was a mistake it became clear way before the shooting started that the US was going to intervene and Iraq had time to withdraw.

Wasn’t perfect or nice but the conflict wasn’t as nasty and protracted and interminable and unwanted as Afghanistan and Iraq 2.0.

Betty Wight posted:

You seem to be pretty mad. Like someone who got called out. Am I bothering you at work? Are you currently posting from St. Petersburg?

ChunTheUnavoidable posted:

ukraine is being jumped into nato this is a hazing thing

Weka posted:

They need to hurry up and invade Russia. Pretty much every major NATO country has, I think it's basically a requirement for membership. Spain, you're on shakey ground.

SRQ posted:

The USSR was totally a friend to the global lower class, largely because I think they realized it was a great way to fight the capitalist status quo. Any time said global lower class decided they didn't like the soviets they had a pretty fair chance of having their own form of 'police actions' done on them. They also backed a ton of awful regimes.

It is an interesting perspective though. There's nobody around anymore that backs the sort of groups that the USSR did. Nobody cares to, or for that matter has anything to gain, by backing communist rebels anywhere.

So yeah like that rad cool guy said, seeing it as black and white for either side without nuance is dumb. I honestly, legitimately, think we'd be better off of the USSR hadn't collapsed though. I'll take a bipolar world with kinda-sorta criminal superpowers over a nasty clusterfuck. God the way things are going to, we're going to go from one democratic superpower and one communist one to everyone just being fascist through and through.

StoryTime posted:

I think they should shoot the gay bomb at the soldiers to either lower or improve their morale, I dunno.

pro starcraft loser posted:

I thought I saw that Germany is willing to use the pipeline in sanctions against Russia if they invade. If so, this is pretty much over as that'd be crushing for Putin.

Betty Wight posted:

The scare stories are so that people support us going into Ukraine. Russia is already the belligerent. These articles are entirely for the US home audience so that if we do need to play world police there is popular support for the action.

Which is exactly what any good state department does. It builds the domestic case to support why for an action.

Russia still isn’t going to invade. While Russia is comfortable going to war in the winter, taking Crimea is different than all of Ukraine. They also telegraphed their actions way in advance so it’s obviously about negotiating leverage. Russia invading is Putin ensuring the west meets every strategic objective in Eastern Europe.

Play posted:

I like how the one party not mentioned by this brain genius is the country full of people about to get invaded and murdered

This is probably what people in Georgia and the Crimean Peninsula were saying before they.... you know.

Yeah Ukraine is a much different, bigger and more well-supported target. And the modus operandi is much different this time. But even if it doesn't end up happening, it should be treated as imminent until proven otherwise.

Sekenr posted:

Lol how did Crimea vote "repeatedly" to be part of Russia when there was exactly 1 quik n dirty referendum 2 weeks after military occupation

Earwicker posted:

in the late 1930's most citizens of the Free City of Danzig, who were mostly German speaking, wanted to leave Poland and be annexed by Germany. does this mean one shouldn't criticize the German invasion of Poland?

if you look hard enough you can find breakaway regions and cities all over the world. these are often manipulated by the opponents of the country in which they exist, especially when there is a cultural or ethnic tie between the breakaway region and the opposing country. this doesn't automatically make military action more justified or moral.

steinrokkan posted:

Lmao, the Ossetians did a brutal ethnic cleansing of all the Georgians, and the crimeans did the same to the indigenous Tartars. I guess genocide is self determination.

Uncle Enzo posted:

I completely agree with the point you're trying to make: if the people in a country have done bad things, they deserve to get invaded by Russia, who will surely be more humane.

eSports Chaebol posted:

the Russians saw NATO wanted Free Kosovo and they thought the fine print said “free Kosovo with another breakaway republic of equal or lesser value” but the deal is void where prohibited!

Flavahbeast posted:

are you talking about the war with Georgia or the war with Ukraine? Georgia was was under 1000 by most estimates Ive seen but the Ukraine war is at like 15000 and counting