Undoubtedly many crimes have been committed over the years, but we cannot rewrite the history of what might have, perhaps should have been done. Do we return to WWII and compare what atrocities the Russian and German armies took part in when we try to make sense of the attack on Ukraine? Putin appears to have total power and has taken on the role of commander in chief, so when civilian targets are deliberately fired on and hit, a war crime, he is responsible. Ukraine wishes to be part of a modern western community, and Putin is trying to thwart their desire, and bring them under his dictatorship. This is far more relevent than trying to make comparisons with the past.
People defending Putin can **** right off. The Iraq war was justified in a way because people like Saddam should not be in charge of a country. Assad is the same. It was not our right to bomb them though. Putin has attacked Georgia, Chechnya and now Ukraine. Apparently that's fine because Bush invaded Iraq. The Russian atrocities are way worse than anything NATO or the Western world have inflicted on any nation. US or UK soliders never raped women or babies in front of their families, mass executed people, castrated live POWs whilst filming it, murdered their own returned POWs, murdered enemy POWs, flattened entire cities like Mariupol, threatened nuclear wars ever other week, deported civilians and orphaned children to remote areas, targeted civilian shopping centres in peak hours, etc... Hating the US is not a reason to excuse Putin.
It was Shrubya finishing off daddy's business that was the real crime. Blair not doing his due diligence, having a thatcher moment, and going in for it was distraction enough for the Americans. I'll not tar Blair with the same brush as bush jnr. Not quite. I still take Blair to be a decent man who got this catastrophically wrong. Others don't. Whatever. America now set their sights on Iran. Iran is a bit like America: a religious nut job in charge of a notional democracy where women are demonstrably 2nd class citizens. Only Iran offers single pay healthcare and free higher education into the bargain.
What the Iraq war did was to turn the rule book on its head in as much as it established pre emptive defence as a valid reason for attacking another country - all you needed to do was to invent a reason why another country could be seen as a threat to your security and that became sufficient reason to attack it. Putin has applied this logic. You say the Russian atrocities are far worse forgetting that 200,000 civilians died in the Iraq war - this was largely as a result of the so called shock and awe tactics of carpet bombing - POWs were murdered and tortured and transported to places like Guantanamo - but apparently the Americans have declared that their soldiers are excempt from prosecution in international courts. The main difference is that Iraq did not have the extensive media coverage of these crimes that the Ukraine has had - also the victims did not ''look like us''.
The US didn't annex large swathes of land and attempt ethnic cleansing. The crimes committed were prosecuted, unlike in Russia where they got medals and the US army didn't kidnap children and civilians and deport them to desolated places miles away from Iraq. Ukraine had also never attacked another country. Saddam had. Ukraine were no threat to Russia.
War crimes committed by the USA in iraq were hardly even acknowledged let alone prosecuted Toby, which I think you know very well. It is essentially the UN security Council which mostly determines what may, or may not, be classified as a war crime and there the USA has a veto and can block such proceedings. Of course Saddam had attacked another country - namely Iran it was with the blessings of the USA and it was the latter who supplied weapons for this purpose (including chemical ones). Iraq was never a threat for the USA - all the lies about them having connections to terrorist organizations, and having WMDs were just that - lies. Of course the Ukraine is not a threat to Russia - but Nato is perceived in that way and it is the Ukraine's relationship to Nato which is the problem here as well as the lack of any political representation for its large Russian minority. The major difference between the two wars is that the US government where never clear about their goals when engaging in Iraq whereas Putin has been clear about his goals from the start. Selenskiy is happily playing on his almost hero like status in the West whereas he could end all of this immediately and save countless lives in the process by going back to the negotiating table. Russia wants a guarantee that Ukraine will never join Nato and a guarantee of its future neutrality - in other words no more loss of sovereignty than that experienced by Austria, Switzerland, Sweden and Finland in the past. Also on the table is some kind of self determination for those areas of the Ukraine which have predominantly ethnic Russian populations (there should be referendums in those areas which can be supervised by the UN and all other parties). Until we have these then we are in the dark - how long are we prepared to pump weapons into the Ukraine to recover areas which may want to be Russian ? Ultimately there can be no really stable peace in the area until some kind of partition of the country takes place. The predominant idea in the West is a faulty one because even if the Russian army was driven out of the Ukraine completely it would remain a bitterly divided country and a heavily weaponized one.
That's just more pro-Putin excuses. The areas that had more Russians are now war zones thanks to Russia's invasion. Putin will never stop. Believing he's doing it to 'protect Russian speakers' is just riduculous, he even said himself that it was a land grab. The weapons are being used by the Ukrainian military to defend their families and loved ones against a vile destructive invading force. Why do you always see the negatives around Ukraine but never around Russia's actions? There is no chance of Ukraine ceding any land. If the Russians there were not happy they could just move back to Russia, it's far from being overpopulated. Should Yorkie and OFH expect the UK army to invade France? There's a huge % of the population there that's English, we apparently have every right to. There are no UK MPs in French parliament. The territories he annexed had no desire to become part of Russia. Look at the celebrations in Kherson. Why are the rights of Russian speakers more important than those of Ukrainians? The Russian army is suffering unsustainable losses. Ukraine will defeat them and send the leftovers back to Russia.
https://www.theweek.co.uk/world-news/57569/why-partitioning-ukraine-may-keep-peace This is from 2014 and maybe it would have made sense to think more along these lines at the time !
Daniel Hannan is a right wing nutcase who would quite naturally support Putin. Partitian is not a good idea. Look at the problems with Ireland.
For goodness sake Toby don't give the ERG ideas. Hearing some of the retoric from them, I am sure they would like to.
So larger countries can annex smaller countries' land by force? Seems completely fair. Horseshoe theory is proving to be right, once again. The GOP and the extreme right agree with your views.
I am not interested ''who'' agrees with my views Toby. You appear to think that this problem only arose this year, as opposed to being a culmination of civil war conditions which have existed since 2014. I am not a Putin supporter - but rather trying to see possible roads to peace, a stance which has no political orientation, either left or right (and there are plenty of them on all sides of this debate). Russia today is not Germany in 1945 - you can't just move in and replace the government, neither is the occupation of Russia possible, so we have to live with them after this, with or without Putin. Long term stability in the area can only be secured with them as partners not as a humiliated and beaten foe surrounded on all sides by forces which they see as the enemy.
Peace will happen once Russia is defeated and removed from Ukrainian territory. I doubt they'll ever get reparations from them, but the West can donate the seized oligarch money to put towards it. Ukraine will join the EU and NATO, finally becoming safe from future Russian attacks. Giving anything to Putin is just encouraging him to do whatever he wants in the future. PS: I'm fully aware of what's happened in Ukraine in the past decade or so, and I don't get my news from RT or right wing fruitloops.
The source of my news on what is going on in the Ukraine is the standard media Toby - if I have doubts about what they are telling me then I will possibly look elsewhere but not from either left or right wing sources - I've actually found Al Jazeera and also the Indian times relatively unbiased - does that make me an Arab or an Indian in your eyes ?!!!
We know russia invaded a sovereign nation without justification. We know that high ranking GOP members surreptitiously visited russia and met with officers. We know that putin supported brevity. We know that London and the tories are awash with russian money. We know that putin has ordered the murder of russian and other dissenters in this country. We know that the Ukrainian people voted in a patriot not a moscow stooge. We know that de piffle has visited lebedev unchaperoned. We know that the annexation of Crimea is unlawful. We also know that putin doesn't give a ****. We know that the Ukrainians themselves are doing a great job against a supposedly superior force. We know that it is demonstrably necessary to continue the supply of arms and humanitarian aid to Ukraine. Everything is intrinsically linked. We know that Ukraine must prevail.
Just one observation here Fez (to begin with - there may be more) the 'Ukrainian people' referred to here is a bit unclear. The Ukraine is a multi ethnic country which is largely Ukrainian (about 60% i think) the second largest group being ethnic Russian (but mostly born in the Ukraine) then Polish and Hungarian speaking communities - and the most disadvantaged of all (as always) the Romani population. What happened at your election was that the ethnic Ukrainian people imposed a judgement on the others (this is why Orban in Hungary is divided on the issue) and also imposed their language as the only official one - a bit similar to how the Hindu nationalists have done in India. The end result of this election was a strongly divided country in which the West voted for a western orientated candidate and the East for a Russian orientated one. In other words one side of the country imposed a judgement on the other (ok. it could have been the other way around). But the end result was that the ethnic Russian population was threatened with the real probability of having to live within the Nato alliance where missiles would be permanently pointed at Moscow. Bearing in mind that the Americans have been sending weapons to Ukraine since 2000 (all bar a couple of years under Obama) and the CIA have also been active there in a training role for quite some time. The Russians are right to feel alarmed at the prospect of American missiles on their doorstep but wrong in the way they have tried to solve this issue. I think we agree that Putin is guilty - but where we differ is in our assessment of the motives of Nato which I see as a stooge for the USA, and, as several countries will attest, not just a defensive force.
If I remember correctly Fez Blair actually produced evidence of Weapons of Mass Destruction for Bush to present to Congress to justify the invasion The professor who supplied said information was then found dead on some remote heathland which despite much evidence to the contrary was officially recorded as suicide Blair was equally as guilty as Bush and even worse he sent our troops in without all the latest weapons and protective equipment In more enlightened times Blair would have been hung upside down on a lampost and left to a baying crowd to finish him off EDIT The US of A knew Saddam had the weapons because America sold them to Iraq during the war with Iran It must have been a double shock when none of those weapons were found
Just a piece of sound reasoning here - not from Russia Today or anywhere similar but from that well known subversive Henry Kissinger in the Washington Post 2014 - ''Far too often the Ukrainian issue is posed as a showdown: whether Ukraine joins the East or the West. But if Ukraine is to survive and thrive, it must not be either sides outpost against the other - it should function as a bridge between them''.
