Friends of friends are hosting (or were as of mid 2022 when I talked to him) a Russian-speaking Ukrainian refugee. To say that he is not sympathetic to the Russian side of this conflict would be a truly gargantuan understatement. To the extent that he has adopted an anglicized name and doesn't want his hosts to tell anyone his birth name.
A good friend of mine is hosting a Ukrainian woman. She hates the Russians and all their lies. The fact they have been fighting a covert war against Ukraine for over a decade seems to be acceptable to people in this thread…
This is a ridiculously over-simplistic take. Everyone here is horrified and sympathetic to the Ukranian people. But the point is, I would do anything it takes to stop that pain and suffering happening to English people. And our “leaders” seem to be doing everything they can to get us involved in a conflict physically. Personally, I am not in any way pro-Putin. I am anti-war. And that includes the previous illegal wars and bombing campaigns in our name which we were all told forget and ignore. I am so desensitised to this utter bullshit because of decades of lies, corruption and deceit that I don’t believe a single thing that western governments is being done for anything other than their own individual greed & power. Vin, I have previously answered your question. If Russia had attacked England we should be defending ourselves. But Russia hasn’t attacked England. It has attacked a nation which isn’t even in NATO. I refuse to accept that we have to get so heavily involved in this conflict for anything other than money and power for those at the top table.
It's pretty jarring. We were driving to the restaurant to meet up with them, and my friends told me that his name is ____, which is usually a shortened version of a common English name (for which the Russian version is quite a bit different, now that I think about it). I just assumed it was the usual situation where someone will adopt a localized name for ease of pronunciation, so I asked what his given name was out of curiosity, but no: he doesn't want to use that name anymore, full stop, because it's Russian. He only goes by ____. Felt like a complete idiot, because the idea of hating Russia enough that you no longer even want your name to share the same language as them never even occurred to me. It's a level of deep-seated (and completely justified) animus that is completely outside my experience, and it's horrifying that there are millions who have unwillingly had to face that experience.
Of course it doesn't change the past. As I've tried to imply, I'm not brain-dead. But, what it changes is that simply hand-wringing about "peace at all costs", "we must find better ways", shouting the evils of arms manufacturers and firing off conspiracy theories about the CIA become a tad futile at the moment the artillery fires across the border. I say it again, there are people on here who would have left Hitler to crack on with it because peace is always better than war. Vin *Putin didn't want to negotiate. How do we know this? The invasions of Chechnya, Georgia and Crimea give you a clue. Look at the pretext for Chechnya II and tell me about the opportunities for negotiation.
The hitler comparison is apples to oranges. If Hitler had only considered retaking a tiny portion of France which he already deemed as German land, which had decades of civil wars and political strife, we would never have got involved. Not only that Putin has given clear warnings for YEARS that he would do this. It took hitler involving multiple countries for us to get involved, and even then sentiment was very against it. To compare the situations is mad. Obviously everyone would agree that if Putin continues invading other nations and goes down the path of trying to conquer Europe then we should do everything to stop him. But he definitely isn’t doing that. (Yet). You can be strong and defensive without aggressively making the situation worse. The west currently seems to be trying to make things worse IMO.
Who is going to be the first to tell Os that Hitler didn't start WWII by invading France? And that France declared war on Germany, not the other way around? Just in case anyone is in a similar boat: - Hitler remilitarized the Rhineland, in contravention of Versailles. Nothing happened. - Hitler threatened to invade Austria unless it unified with Germany. The day before Austria was to have a referendum on the matter, the Wehrmacht rolled (unopposed) into Austria. - Hitler then demanded the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia. And received it in the Munich Agreement. - Hitler then invaded the rest of Czechoslovakia a few months later because he could. - Hitler then demanded the Free City of Danzig in Poland (and a land corridor to join it to Germany proper) and Memel in Lithuania. He also demanded that Poland align itself with Germany by joining the Anti-Comintern Pact. Poland refused, Germany invaded, France and Britain declared war two days later. There are very clear parallels here. Hitler kept making demands, and those demands kept having the desired effect, so he kept making more. By all historical accounts, he was shocked that i) Poland refused to become their client state, and ii) France/UK, previously anxious to appease Germany, actually honoured their treaties with Poland. Though if they honoured them just a bit better, it might have been a far shorter war...France in particular faced a skeleton German force in the Rhineland in the early part of the war, because Hitler simply had assumed that Western Europe would keep caving to his demands. Similarly, Putin kept up these provocations, invading neighbours and threatening others, and there were few consequences for doing so. He didn't anticipate Ukrainian resistance, nor the zeal with which the West armed Ukraine. But had he succeeded, it's extraordinarily likely he would have continued, just as Hitler wasn't going to stop at Danzig and Memel if the Poles acquiesced, or stopped at Poland if the UK/France failed to honour their treaties.
I was going to post something similar re WWll and point out Putin's denial of the existence of Ukraine and other former soviet union countries now enjoying their independence albeit with great concern with Putin's expansionist program.
Who is saying peace at all costs?! Most people in the west are still completely unaware of the Euro Maidan protests and subsequent revolution which was unquestionably supported by the west, the 2014 invasion of Crimea and long standing wars in Luhansk and Donetsk. It isn't a conspiracy theory to point out that mar companies make money from war for goodness sakes. They are making billions from this conflict. The US is "donating" more to this conflict than Ukraine has spent. But these companies arent giving anything away in any capacity whatsoever. Obviously Putin has bad intentions, he was left unchecked for years which was a colossal geopolitical mistake that gave him confidence that this war would be a gamble worth taking. But it would be incredibly disingenuous to suggest that everyone who is against Putin has good intentions.
I have no idea what the outcomes could have been, I am in no way able to comprehend the complexities involved in brokering peace between massive nations. I arrange servicing contracts for a very modest living and that is often complex enough! What is obvious is that ignoring the building tensions over a substantial period of time has resulted in brutal war showing no signs of let up. I'm sure many of the civilians killed in this would rather be alive than dead for taking and taking a strong moral stance. It is maybe too late for Russia Vs it's former "lands" it wants to reclaim as Putin is clearly a complete psychopath and needs to be removed from power for this to get better, but maybe that wasn't always the case at every point in the last 32 years. Attention perhaps required on Xi who like Putin has openly spoken of his intentions. They will invade Taiwan and if no one in international politics was able to take on Putin, they sure as **** won't be able to take on Xi. These guys build generational dynasty's, meanwhile we've had 5 leaders in a 6 year period.
I actually don't think China will invade Taiwan, at least in the medium term. Could be wrong about that, but the cost/benefit there really sucks for them...they'd win, sure, but a massive-scale amphibious landing against a small country that is going to be heavily geared toward anti-air and anti-sea weaponry is pretty scary stuff. You lose a couple aircraft carriers to little ol' Taiwan, or your troops that have never actually fought a war in living memory do poorly and get thrown back into the sea on the first attempt, and your veneer of invincibility and peer status falls. They're probably better off treading lightly over the next few years and focusing on what is likely to be a pretty fractious internal situation, because they no longer have double-digit growth to keep the populace from chafing too much against their repression. We got a quick glimpse of that a couple months ago. And that makes the economic consequences of war even more significant, both because of the loss of markets, and because they would no longer have the foreign currency to use in their soft power projects in Africa and South America. Using external conflict to take the focus away from internal problems is certainly an age-old trick, but Xi isn't the same kind of autocrat, at least to my eye, and China hasn't staked so much of its national identity on empire-building. The post-Xi power struggle might result in a weak leader taking over and feeling the need to do something big to rally the population (much as Putin almost definitely bombed his own civilians as a justification to invade Chechnya), but XI himself has an awful lot to lose and very little to gain by so doing.
Source: https://www.statista.com/chart/27331/countries-committing-the-most-of-their-gdp-to-ukraine-aid/ The keenest supporters of Ukraine aren't the USA or UK. No, it's the Baltic States, Scandinavian states, Poland, Slovakia and the Czech Republic who are giving up the biggest share of their GDP. Why? Because they all know what happens next if Ukraine falls. Vin
And in those days, when Hitler blamed Britain for forcing him into war, people saw through the lie and laughed through gritted teeth. Nowadays when Putin says he was forced by NATO into invading Ukraine, people retweet the lie and post it on forums. Vin
Brilliant thread guys, really is. Reading with real interest & the thrust & riposte is great. Learnt a lot & still learning. Brilliant insight. Sincere thanks.
I realize it's not going to sway anyone, but an actually informative timeline of the buildup to the war, as conveyed by US/UK decision-makers at the time (with a Liz Truss cameo!): https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/02/24/russia-ukraine-war-oral-history-00083757
It might be helpful if that graph distinguished between military and humanitarian aid. Click on the link, and we can see that the US provided $27.6 billion in military aid, compared to $15.2 billion in financial aid, and $9.5 billion dollars in humanitarian aid. Which shows you where the senior partner of NATO's priorities lie. I would be interested to see how that breaks down for Baltic and Scandinavian countries. As for the UK, of the 6.4 million people fleeing the region, we've taken around 80,000. Germany, the European country least keen to send military aid, took in just shy of a million. Over a third have gone to, er, Russia. Not sure how that fits the narrative. https://migrationobservatory.ox.ac..../qa-the-uk-and-the-ukraine-refugee-situation/ Doubtless we've extended to those Ukrainian refugees arriving in the UK, the same hospitality we've shown the desperate tide of humanity fleeing Syria and Iraq. Meanwhile, our politicians queue up to be photographed visiting Kiev.
That's a rather spurious suggestion. The US has given more military aid as a percentage because they have more military hardware to give; they have also given more humanitarian aid than anyone else. I'd also add that they have frequently done after arm-twisting by the Baltic and Scandinavian countries...the Finns played a large role in pushing Germany to allow Leopard 2s to be given to Ukraine, which in turn spurred the US to commit Abrams tanks. You keep acting as if the warmongers in the US and UK are dragging the rest of Europe into this but, with the exception of Germany (which, to be fair, has very good reason not to be in the vanguard here) it's the historically peace-loving countries most vocally calling for increased military aid.
I can fully understand why the countries closest to Russia want to see her constrained by any means necessary, but I certainly don’t think that’s because they are “historically peace loving”. Very few countries anywhere in the world can claim to be that; peace loving political leaders are an especially rare breed, and should be cherished. Peace in Europe between 1945 and the present appears anomalous in the broader historical context, and sadly hasn’t survived much beyond the Cold War. The Finns, incidentally, played a large role in pushing Germany to besiege Leningrad, so I’m not sure the optics of them persuading Germany to send tanks to Ukraine are looking too great.
