> It's awesome that after 3 years of this nonsense we're just happily escalating the conflict and imagining new ways to destroy urban areas and the civilian populations that live in them.
So the ethical answer is to what, roll over and let the Russians win? Wars are awful things. But to paraphrase Trotsky, you get to choose whether or not you're interested in war. But you don't get to choose whether or not war is interested in you.
Or negotiate for peace. It is known there was a solid negotiation process in place and the Ukrainians were interested in it. NATO was not and worked to destroy it.
> Wars are awful things.
...and _Forbes_ acting as a cheerleader of them is disgusting.
> But to paraphrase Trotsky
Trotsky was spreading propaganda. In the actual study of war, they rarely break out as described, and they often have months if not years of time where they could have been avoided entirely.
It usually turns out there is someone with vested financial interests in war and they always find themselves near the people who generate the conflict. Go figure.
I can't tell if this is Russian propaganda or just terminal naïveté. This war is going on because Russia, without justifiable provocation, invaded another sovereign nation. There is nothing for the Ukrainians to "negotiate" about other than Russia leaving their land.
If I hypothetically put a gun to your head and told you to give me your wallet and the credentials to your bank accounts, no amount of "negotiation" would make your property legally mine or what I did any less than armed robbery. Same here.
I think the propagandist was trying to make an analogy with the distinguishable outcomes of "dead with no wallet" and "unharmed with no wallet".
In the case of Ukraine, Russian state media have often claimed their goal is to exterminate Ukrainians and their culture so that distinction would not exist.
>There is nothing for the Ukrainians to "negotiate" about other than Russia leaving their land.
Are the Ukrainians aware of this? Because massive forced conscription and closed borders for leaving are strongly pointing out against it.
>no amount of "negotiation" would make your property legally mine
Negotiations are needed not for legality, but for example, to stop mass forced conscription of people who doesn't want to die for political ambitions of Zelensky, corrupt Ukranian government or for something else, that they think doesn't worth dying for.
The Ukrainians will decide for themselves if and when to negotiate, and on what terms.
They will also decide -- for themselves -- whether the losses they are taking are sustainable, or "worth" the just end to this war that they seek.
Your idea of what they "need", what is worth dying for or otherwise valuable to them, or your general view of their government -- just doesn't factor into it.
Does not seem like it. They are not asked. They are banned from leaving the country. They are captured right on the streets and forcefully, under threat of death, sent to fight in war.
> They will also decide -- for themselves -- whether the losses they are taking are sustainable, or "worth" the just end to this war that they seek.
No, it's already decided for them - and decided otherwise. That's the reason borders are closed and Ukrainians are sent to frontlines against their will
> Your idea of what they "need", what is worth dying for
That's not my idea, that's their idea - otherwise there would be no need for closed borders and forced conscription.
Let me rephrase that more accurately . . . the democratically-elected government of Ukraine is exercising its legitimate authority to draft people into its military during a severe war that it did not start.
So presumably their view would be that the Allied cause during WW 2 was wholly illegitimate, because after all, those nations had conscription policies as well.
All the data (status of human rights organizations in this area, statements of officials, law enforcement agencies, the reaction of "democratic" institutions to such cases when they leaked to public) shows, that after civilian are captured on the street - civillian will be tortured until he goes to the frontlines or until he dies. Just two option: go to war or die via torture.
The "the Ukrainians wanted to negotiate, but NATO wouldn't let them" line is definitely standard tankie propaganda.
And lo and behold, within literal seconds of putting forth this perfectly straightforward observation -- which granted might sound slightly, vaguely controversial, but really isn't to anyone following the basic event chronology of this conflict (and the various false narratives that people keep mindlessly repeating about it) -- someone had to flag it.
The quoted parts have nothing to with how the events really unfolded. US military aid to Ukraine remained at stable 300-400m USD per year in the six years preceding the full-scale invasion - without a "counter-escalation". The opposite happened: by 2021, the fighting in Ukraine had died down to sniping and sporadic shelling on the frontline. Ukrainian losses for the entire year were 79 soldiers.
If anything, the greatest single US-related factor for the full-scale invasion was the humiliating retreat from Kabul, which signaled that the US would not stand by its commitments. Russian planning for the invasion began around the time of the retreat.
>>>Russian planning for the invasion began around the time of the retreat.
Do you have a source for that? I'd love to read any insight into that process.
My personal, totally unsubstantiated, opinion is that Russia began planning an invasion in 2019 after Poroshenko signed a Constitutional Amendment pledging Ukraine to seek NATO membership, which was followed up by Zelensky promising a NATO referendum the same year.[1][2]
I suspect Putin initiated planning but was unprepared for anything prior to mid-2020....and then invasion planning was derailed by COVID. Forces couldn't be postured until they got that mess under control, and then you also need a big annual exercise as pretext for moving that much combat power into their assembly areas. Hmmmm....I need to go back and take a hard look at the early force flows, as well as Russian rhetoric in response to the 2019 political decisions by Ukraine.
So the ethical answer is to what, roll over and let the Russians win? Wars are awful things. But to paraphrase Trotsky, you get to choose whether or not you're interested in war. But you don't get to choose whether or not war is interested in you.