I'd prefer sanctions where it hurts them more than it hurts us. Especially, since the current ukranian conflict is no different than eg the war in afghanistan, syria, libya, and as putin says it, also kosovo/yugoslavia. Those were all the wars for US power, control and mass murder of all those people, and we silently supported all those wars, even sent our own soldiers to fight there.
This is ridiculous. The wars are incredibly different in literally every way.
Every war has horrible tragedies and innocent lives lost or harmed, but to suggest invading a stable democracy to annex it is even remotely the same as supporting a locally led uprising against a murderous dictator like in Syria is absurd and offensive.
Is the west’s [silent] support of Yemen’s slaughter any different? That’s a travesty just as much as Ukraine.
To be clear, I don’t agree we shouldn’t sanction Russia. EU should remove its dependence on Russia since Putin doesn’t seem to be going any where and if he does, we don’t know what that means
But our politicians are fucking up that too... just look at the german fight against nuclear power, while being happy to buy coal-generated power from poland.
We have a nuclear powerplant in slovenia, and we're talking about expanding it for literally 30 years now, and all the arguments against it are "this will take 10years, that is too long, we need power now". ...well, and austrians protesting against it.
I always feel bad my Slovene friend and I only talk about world or US stuff. Now I have something to talk about for her country! Sucks that the topic is not a completely positive one though. Hopefully some progress will be made
Some one posted that Yemen is complicated. It really isn’t. If the exact same Yemenese conflict was happening to a white country or a country involving China or Russia no matter what, the world would be all over it.
If you think the US actually acted in Syria to increase human rights and reduce bloodshed I have a few bridges to sell you.
From the very beginning the "locally led uprising" was 50% Islamists.
And by the way, Turkey is essentially annexing Syria right now. Unlike Ukrainians, the Syrians can't meaningfully fight back because Turkey is in NATO, so their forces have absolute safe harbor.
Beyond this, there is no reasonable moral argument that an annexation is any worse than installing a puppet dictator.
Completely false. If tomorrow Russia defended Syria against Turkey by attacking mainland Turkey, Article 5 would certainly apply. Similarly if a Libyan faction fired a ballistic missile onto Paris tomorrow I guarantee Article 5 would be considered. Or if Iran sunk a Turkish ship off the coast of Syria in retaliation for a strike on the SAA, etc...
NATO means that Turkey doesn't have to worry about any retaliation from Syria's allies. That is to say, impunity. On the other hand if Israel invaded Syria and IRGC troops fired a missile onto a base in Israeli territory, the US wouldn't invade Iran, but they would if it was into Turkey. That's a significant chilling effect.
For a certain person, it is. Easier to have someone who makes right wing claims and then cites a Marxist to deal with the cognitive dissonance and introspect on how their worldview has gone wrong, than to spend twenty minutes on a thorough rebuttal.
You can always tell when someone is polluting HN with Russian propaganda from these small details other than their obviously toxic pro-Putin narrative…
Ukraine was attacking russian minorities in donbas and lugansk.
I'm not pro putin, i'm just saying that we're not any better than him, while acting so, and that we're destroying our own countries with sanctions, that don't hurt putin but hurt as. Maybe we deserve them though, but i'd prefer better economy for us.
“Donbas and lugansk” is not a thing. You are incorrect about very basic details in these issues, that I’d advise actually listening to people that know “Donbas” refers to both Donetsk and Luhansk Republics, for starters, unlike yourself.
Azoic is a tiny group relative to the whole population that barely registers as a factor in Ukrainian politics. Using them as a reason to invade the nation of Ukraine is a ridiculous excuse. How can a government be nazis if their leader is Jewish? It’s contrived conspiracy theory nonsense.
I think it’s worth pointing out inaccuracies like this when they are shared by someone who is clearly engaging in whataboutery and the spread of misinformation across several comments in this thread.
Is it really whataboutery if we're not any better than the russians.... and meanwhile destroying our own economies while not really hurting russia that much?
The Russians have been shown to have slaughtered civilians, indiscriminately bombed and shelled residential areas, looted, raped and abducted people on massive scale.
What do you mean by ‘not any better than the Russians’? What has Azov or anyone else in Ukraine been doing that rises the the same level?
Russia has been promoting and funding racist and white supremacist groups just as bad all over Europe. The only thing about Azov that’s different is they are anti Russian.
I know Azov are an unpleasant lot and have distributed hate propaganda and harassed people, but as part of the national guard they are under military command and discipline. Furthermore politically speaking they were utterly insignificant and got absolutely nowhere in elections. The whole ‘fighting nazis’ line is utter garbage.
They were. Most of the right-wing elements (there weren't that many of them as Kremlin propaganda would like you to believe) were purged as part of this process, or left the battalion themselves.
There's a decent article on this (from a strongly pro-Ukraine publication) that expounds on this theme in a relatively neutral way (IMHO). The sad thing it's in Russian, but should be readable through the magic of google translate if you're interested enough.
This [1] is an article from Time in 2018. You can find other countless similar articles elsewhere. You'll find that the narrative before and after the Ukraine war took an extremely hard 180 to the point of absurdity. Just one segment from the article:
"After the worst such [anti-Islam terror] attack in recent years—the massacre of 51 people in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2019—an arm of the Azov movement helped distribute the terrorist’s raving manifesto, in print and online, seeking to glorify his crimes and inspire others to follow. .... It might seem ironic for this hub of white nationalists to be situated in Ukraine. At one point in 2019, it was the only nation in the world, apart from Israel, to have a Jewish President and a Jewish Prime Minister. Far-right politicians failed to win a single seat in parliament in the most recent elections. But in the context of the white-supremacist movement globally, Azov has no rivals on two important fronts: its access to weapons and its recruiting power."
There's also stuff like [2] which is a freedom-of-information act report from the Department of Homeland Security. They're concerned about the fact that "Ukrainian nationalist groups including the Azo[v] Movement are actively recruiting racially or ethnically motivated violent extremist-white supremacists (RMVE-WS) to join various neo-Nazi volunteer battalions in the war against Russia".
This whole thing is becoming increasingly absurd where the information warfare is gradually moving from propaganda to 1984.
Azov isnt unique because it has extremists. It's unique because:
* It was founded by a nazi and most of its members appear to be nazis.
* It committed atrocities in a civil war against ethnic russians.
* It was instrumental in keeping ethnically russian majority areas of Ukraine under Ukraines control.
* It was made an official part of the army and lavished with praise by poroshenko despite being largely nazi and having committed atrocities because territory.
* When Zelensky came to them asking them to lay down their arms and help end the civil war they told him no and denounced him as a traitor.
Officially they have little power or democratic mandate but they told the president that the war shall continue until its bitter end and he capitulated. In the west nazis dont have that kind of power.
I don't think these sort of things are very comparable. Of course you'll always find extremists in militaries. But in this case the military itself integrated a real Nazi militia as an independent state force. It would be like if the US marines officially recognized the Aryan Brotherhood and gave them their own unit, including with integrating overt Nazi symbols as part of their uniform.
Sure, I would definitely agree they are worse in a lot of ways. I don’t really agree their existence is proof that all of Ukraine is a new Nazi Germany and therefore the invasion by Russia is justified. Maybe that’s not what you’re saying either, but that’s where this conversation started.
No, that's definitely not what I'm saying. And I also didn't read the original post that way. There are a lot of problems in Ukraine (outside of this war) and they have also done some pretty awful things. Many of the things that go unstated in our media can go some way towards explaining the war, but there's a difference between explaining and justifying. And I increasingly feel that that nuance is being lost in society, which divides us all even further.
The original is flagged now, but if we read it differently it makes sense we are coming away with different interpretations. In my opinion the person doesn’t seem particularly well informed about basic facts - getting the names of places and regions wrong - and their main argument seems to be that the US has done bad things, so there’s no point inconveniencing ourselves to try to stop Russia and I’m not really sure that follows. I didn’t (personally) find a lot of nuance in the discussion. I do agree that in general nuance and understanding are missing a lot of the times these days.
They seem to mainly be celebrated by people today (at least by the types who celebrate that sort of thing) for their white supremacism rather than their leftist policies.
The authoritarian far left and far right are very close together, with a tiny bit different politics, but the same end results. It's not a coincidence that the commies and the nazis started the WW2 together... somehow the modern left forgets the soviets/communist involvement.
Of course, these Russian minority casualties died as collateral from Russia and Russian backed separatists as well as from Ukraine. And more saliently, Russia is the aggressor so none of those people would have died if they hadn’t put Ukraine into an existential position.
Nonsense. Assad deliberately used chemical and kinetic weapons on civilians, moreover neither the US nor other western countries are using this as a pretext for annexing Syria. There is no analogue.
I am sorry, people in Syria. We can't condemn the use of heavy weapons against civilians, because... checking notes... NATO members used heavy weapons against civilians in 1999.
Ukraine deliberately shelled civians for 8 years, so what?
Their routine tactics of dealing with rebels is to bomb civians dear to those rebels. When they don't hope to make territorial gains, they wish to inflict some damage and civian targets are way easier to hit.
This week, they're using freshly supplied M777 to bomb areas of Donetsk they could not reach previously. Such as by hitting four schools in a single day.
Well, the USA has used an awful lot of depleted uranium shells, which burned down and now deposited in Iraqi children lungs. Not to mention all of the bombed weddings.
Assuming you’re talking about Poland and Romania, the consensus was that Russia’s initial plan would have been installing a puppet government.
So they wouldn’t have had Russia as neighbor, but a Russia-friendly country, just like they did for most of the rather brief time Ukraine existed as an independent country. Or another Belarus, which Poland at least is already neighboring.
I get why these countries are nervous but Ukraine’s very very different from Romania or Poland or any other EU country.
Honest question , how are they "very different from Romania or Poland"? Do you mean bigger? Also hypothetically if Belarus wanted to join the EU (after a regime change ofc) what would your objections be?
Stop your bullshit please, this is not Facebook or Reddit.
Anyone that doesn’t drink Russian propaganda every day can see what you are trying to do here..
I live in the balkans, I had american planes flying above my house, bombing a country (that we were once a part of a same country) ~400km away, for mostly the same reasons that putin is attacking ukraine now for.
Nah, they just set their own dictators, and if they stopped obeying the americans, they violently replaced them. Just look at latin america, Iran, etc. Just scrolling through the wiki article takes a long time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r...
Perhaps I'm biased, because I'm from a country (Poland) that's actually actively protected by the US from a murderous dictator (Putin). Even when Poland was on her knees in the early ninetiess, the US never tried to install their dicator here, but instead actively promoted democracy and protected us from Russians. The only benefit that US takes from that is that Poland became a part of the global trade network, we pay for US companies for their intellectual property (i.e. piracy is no longer legal) etc.
Amoral countries can still in some cases be a lesser evil. I agree in the case of Poland the US is a force for good, but on the scale of the world the US definitely gives Russian destruction a run for it's money.
The benefit the US gets from protecting Poland is that in doing so it helps keep Russia boxed in, it keeps great influence over the EU (Poland is a pivot of US influence on the EU), thereby greatly helping curtail 2 out of 3 threats to the US's position as the most powerful country on Earth. It's not done out of benevolence but it's quite great for Polish people.
Same can be said for Japan, Germany, Taiwan, Singapore, South Korea. That's hundreds of millions of people enjoying great lives thanks to being or having been protected by US from the beasts across their borders. At the same time, is there any nation on Earth that's actually grateful for what Putin's Russia did for (to) them?
Yes. Syria and Iran would likely be wastelands if it wasn't for Russian intervention and assistance allowing them to hold their own against Saudi Arabia, Israel and Turkey, which would have undoubtedly implemented much greater invasion or intervention plans in Syria than they already have. There is also Armenia that isn't Azerbaijan only because of Russian defence guarantees (that don't apply to Nagorno Karabakh), and the Stans would be greatly vulnerable to China if it wasn't for Russia as a counterbalance.
That's, by the way, a result of a 12 year period, compared to the list you gave that's over 80 years.
Those aren't great lives by any means, but avoiding Iran-Iraq V2, or Turkish invasion of most of Syria, a complete Azerbaijani victory, or complete subservience to China, is genuinely a positive. On the greater balance, simply existing as a counterbalance to the US is something that's useful for most of the world, which explains indifférence over Ukraine.
I suppose the issue is that there is precedent for the USA to support democracies until they decide to side against American insterests. Then the US supports a local dictator instead.
Making them US citizens would be too problematic. It's better to make them subject of an easily controllable puppet. And yes, that means killing everyone who resists. A million people if that's what it takes.
I mean, Russian propaganda claims that the reason is the same: intervening in a genocide. But obviously this isn’t the case—Russia started a war in a region of Ukraine that has a lot of ethnic Russians and attributed all casualties (including the Kremlin-backed Russian separatist combatants) as “victims of a genocide campaign” including those who were killed by Russian and Russian-backed forces.
So no, it’s not the same at all as NATO intervening in an actual ethnic cleansing campaign.
US (and a few other countries) attacked Iraq, because propaganda claimed that they had weapons of mass destruction. Let's not forget the time before that, where iraqis supposedly killed babies in a hospital.
Somehow we treat those wars and those agressors differently.
> Somehow we treat those wars and those agressors differently
We really don't. There's been much acknowledgement that the Iraq war was a mistake and wasn't justified, since no weapons of mass destruction were found.
I think it would have been great for countries to sanction the US over it, but at the time, part of Europe also thought that if Iraq had nuclear weapons they'd be a threat to them. But Russia should have sanctioned US and Europe, they should have cut their supply of oil for example. I'd have been for it.
Just as the US should have been sanctioned then, and the war in Iraq should have not happened or been prevented, so is the war in Ukraine.
Normally we should learn from past mistakes, Iraq was a mistake, the world should have acted different back then and didn't. Now Ukraine is a chance to do better and act as we should have in Iraq.
Note: The other distinction is that Iraq was a clear and obvious dictatorship, so there was hope that it could improve the lives of the people of Iraq and lift them into more individual rights and prosperity.
Ukraine is not as clear, in appearance it seems they are on a good path to have more individual rights and prosperity, and it looks like Russia's trying to stop them from doing so. Is that completely accurate, hard to say, but probability wise it is a possibility.
So from the angle of picking a side as well, it's easier to side with Ukraine, which appear to support individual rights and democracy, and against Russia, which appears to oppose individual freedoms and seems to be moving towards full on dictatorship.
> We really don't. There's been much acknowledgement that the Iraq war was a mistake and wasn't justified, since no weapons of mass destruction were found.
But we didn't sanction them. We're still friends with them. We even helped them.
> but at the time, part of Europe also thought that if Iraq had nuclear weapons they'd be a threat to them.
I'm pretty sure 'we' (our leaders, who sent our armies there) knew that iraq had no such weapons... Tony Blair even half admited it.
> Normally we should learn from past mistakes, Iraq was a mistake, the world should have acted different back then and didn't. Now Ukraine is a chance to do better and act as we should have in Iraq.
So, we knew iraq was a mistake, and we stopped? After the first time? Or after the second time? What about syria? Libya? What about somalia? Didn't biden just send more troops there? I won't even mention afghanistan... US basically armed the terrorists for the next few decades with their pull-out.
> Ukraine is not as clear, in appearance it seems they are on a good path to have more individual rights and prosperity, and it looks like Russia's trying to stop them from doing so. Is that completely accurate, hard to say, but probability wise it is a possibility.
Let's be fair... ukraine has areas where a lot of russians live, and they weren't very nice to those russians (and i mean "nice" in the same way as israelis are not "nice" to palestinians...). Somehow many people have forgot about those things (ukraine) or don't care about the others (isreal).
I'm not sure what you're saying, that we should make the same mistakes we did in Iraq with Ukraine as well? Why repeat the same mistakes?
Yes, we didn't sanction them, and you seem to argue we should have, and I agree. That's why I think with Ukraine this time we're doing the right thing, same thing we should have done with Iraq. Do you disagree?
But for americans (and a lot of EU nato members) it's not a "mistake" but just a daily part of their war-fueling politics. If US had to wait until ukraine to realize that all of their wars were "mistakes", why did they send soldiers to somalia after the start of ukraine war? If they sent soldiers there, is it really by mistake? And if they sent soldiers there, shouldn't they be sanctioned? Shouldn't a bunch of other countries be sanctioned for invading afghanistan? Or syria, lybia etc (and still having soldiers there)? Are we really doing the same thing by sanctioning russia, while we (nato members) have our soldiers occpying quite a few countries around the world? If it's a mistake, why not atleast bring them home and stop the occupation, befure we point the finger at putin?
No, I'm saying that we're all the "baddies", and that we should either sanction every country that is occupying any other sovereing country (and that includes most of the nato countries, including mine), or, (preferably by me), we should pull our armies out of those countries, stop being the agressors, and then point the finger at putin. Why the hell does slovenia (my country) have soldiers in fucking Syria? Who asked us to go there? We even have to pay a lot of money to have them there.. for what? What effort have we, the EU, the americans, the "friendly west countries" invested into stopping ourselves from occupying all those countries?
This whataboutism is just more Russian propaganda (it’s a boilerplate argument that gets copy/pasted into every single debate about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine). It has absolutely nothing to do with the war in Ukraine, and the Iraq War doesn’t justify Russia’s conquest of Ukraine.
Nah, I'm not going to accept deflection to unrelated wars. If you want to discuss the Iraq War in an appropriate thread, I'm happy to do so, but it doesn't justify Russia's ongoing conquest of Ukraine.
Nah, iraq war is over... maybe we can discuss syria, since my countries army is currently invading them as a part of nato forces. Maybe even lebanon. We're not in somalia (yet?), but americans are there now too. We luckily pulled our solders out of afghanistan in the last moment, but we were a part of occupying forces there too, just like the belarus army is in ukraine.
It theoretically could, but… why would they do that?
And before you say “Ukraine”, consider that Ukraine and Russia have a common history going back hundreds of years and together with Russia were part of the USSR. The attack on Ukraine is illegitimate, but at least it makes some logical sense.
Russia going after Romania or Poland which are part of EU and NATO and were never part of the USSR, but instead individual countries in the Warsaw Pact makes no sense at all.
The Baltics are more complicated, but once again - NATO and EU.
I care what I pay for gas, power and food, no matter what putin says. If the sanctions hurt me more than putin, I canot stay quiet about the sanctions.
