1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budapest_Memorandum_on_Secur...
The first is a violation of the agreement, which is what Russia is doing currently.
The second is the lack of enforcement of the agreement against the above violator. If the other signatories enforced the agreement, then it would signal that the agreement is worthwhile, and other countries would be willing to enter into it.
Yes, of course Russia is the aggressor here and was the first to break the agreement. But the moment when these agreements become worthless, is when violations are not enforced, not when violations occur.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budapest_Memorandum_on_Secur...
Thus such agreements have become worthless.
Had the US said five days ago, "we will use our military to ensure the Budapest Memorandum is followed", and defended Ukraine when invaded, then in the future if a similar agreement was proposed the country would trust that it would be followed. They did not, and this means that no one will again enter into a similar agreement.
I'm not claiming that a US military intervention would be the "correct" thing to do, merely that it would be necessary to preserve worldwide trust in treaties similar to the Budapest Memorandum.
If you have neither of those things, you have no agreement at all.
Just because someone agrees to something in a contract doesn’t make it enforceable, and it’s even worse if the contract doesn’t specify what the consequences are for breaking it.
It is a bit unfair to blame it on US, France and UK only, when russia signed the document, too - and was the actual party to violate it by attacking ukraine already in 2014.
(russia's position is, that since Maidan 2014 the state with which they signed the treaty, does not exist anymore)
Well, I agree that this attitude "all bad things are the fault of 'the west'" is quite stupid.
But the US is the hegemonial power and wants to maintain it. So it is natural that those in charge get the flak for things going wrong.
And about things going wrong: how about the whole war on terror?
Was it really a surprise, that you can't make the world a safer place, if you attack countries(against international law in one case), to punish some individuals?
And Guantanamo is still open.
So yes, the west has some democratic and liberal values worth defending against dictators and co. And some only understand the language of raw power. But maybe that would still work better, if we would stick to those principles all the time and not just, when it suits us.
Putin just invaded a sovereign country, maybe you should mention some of the bad things he and the oligarchs who fund him have been up to? Chechnya, Georgia, Ukraine, polonium poisonings, journalists falling from windows or being killed on the streets, Alexei Navalny, there's plenty to choose from. Come on, let's hear it. We know "we" are sinners, enough of that - save it for a sunday sermon or something like that.
We Know. Now, it is time to pick up "The Western Burden" - or accept the defeat of what we call liberal democracy. And yes, we know that there are many flaws in what we call liberal democracy. It is still preferable, warts and all, over the alternatives, whether that be some harebrained plan from the World Economic Forum, a kleptocratic oligarchy like Putin's Russia, a dystopic surveillance state like Xi's China or some combination of these.
So, what's it going to be? More self-flagellation or, finally, some clear words on where we stand?
But Guantanamao is still open.
Assange is waiting for extradiction and a secret trial, under conditions the UN official called torture.
Snowden hiding from exposing illegal surveillance.
And Saudi Arabia still a formidable ally. Despite what they do in their own country or in places like Yemen (or in some embassies).
And the list goes on. (heard something about Turkey lately? I did, because I choosed to follow it a bit, but mainstream does not really care)
And russia is clearly not a real democracy, but despite all abuse and KGB shit, it is still way more democratic than saudi arabia (they have no voting at all, nor human rights)
"So, what's it going to be? More self-flagellation or, finally, some clear words on where we stand? "
So I can say in clear words, that I stand by any democratic country and any population fighting against occupying forces.
But I deeply distrust the motives of the western powers to actually care about democracy, but rather their stupid games of geopolitics.
So yes, I say we start cleaning our shit up. And then we can maybe start lecture other states and play world police.
Because the way I see it: western forces would love to help get russia their new afghanistan, with lots of losses, guerilla warfare and dragging it on for years. But this is not helping the people on the ground.
Putin is not cemented in power. He can get actually kicked out by elections.
So can Xi. It is just that there are elections, and then there are elections.
You're still doing it, detailing bad things about "the west". We know all those things already, yet still you insist on harping on the sins of "the west".
May I ask, what do you hope to achieve with this? You know everybody already knows all those things you mention yet still you use far more words describing "our" sins - over, and over, and over again - than you use to describe what brought us to this thread: the fact that Putin just ordered the invasion of a sovereign country on a fake pretence because he wants to re-create the Russian Empire. Yet, still, you bring up Saudi Arabia, Guantanamo, Snowden... who we all know about already.
Why? Are you afraid you'd commit an unforgivable sin if you forgot to do penance for "our" sins - and I put "our" in quotes since I do not know where you're from, nor do you know where I'm from but the chance of both of us being part of "the west" is rather high - before you wag a small finger at an opponent? Realise that it is exactly one of the achievements of "the west" that you can criticise "the west" to your heart's content without fear of repercussions. The same is not true in Putin's Russia (where peace protesters have been arrested in the last few hours), Xi's China (no explanation needed, I hope?) or many of "our" other opponents. That does not mean you need to base these discussions around a political version of the lord's prayer - forgive us our sins for we know we are a fallen people. We know we are fallen, but we also know we did not fall as deep as others did, others like Vladimir Putin who waited for a weak American presidency and a divided Europe to launch an invasion.
When Xi decides to invade Taiwan Guantanamo will probably still be open. Does that mean we should not do our best to keep that invasion from happening, or to make the PRC pay as high a price as feasible for their actions?
´Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye.´ is how the King James translation of the Bible translates Matthew 7:5. This is true if your sins outweigh those of your opponent's. It is decidedly untrue when the opponent just launched an unprovoked invasion of a sovereign nation to satisfy his dreams of empire.
"When Xi decides to invade Taiwan Guantanamo will probably still be open. Does that mean we should not do our best to keep that invasion from happening, or to make the PRC pay as high a price as feasible for their actions?"
So why not stop our hypocrisy now and close guantanamo. End our alliances with murderous psychopaths. Etc.
Then we will have more credibility, when we deal with all those other murderous psychopaths. (there are plenty of them, I know)
But when we fight one evil overloard, while supporting another one, because he side with us - how can anyone in the world really believe, we care and fight for democracy and not rather our own selfish strategic goals?
This is what I am hoping to achieve, but don't get me wrong, I have no illusions about that. Self-rightousness is as strong as it ever was.
But yes. I am fully aware that it is a privilege and it is a difference, that I can say all of this here and not over there. And I do not want to loose that right, but rather want the whole world to have that right as well. I just want to go a different path, than the usual one, which has not really worked out so far in the past.
Indeed, we can, for now. There are some chinks in this armour - Trudeau in Canada activating the Emergencies Act to quell a protest which came a bit too close to the target, increasing censorship through an unholy alliance between industry and government, an unhealthy fawning over the endless possibilities offered by the social credit score system as implemented in China - but for now the bastion still holds.
> And I do not want to loose that right,
Nor do most of us, bar those who long for the chance to muzzle their ideological opponents - viz. Trudeau in Canada and his ilk, everywhere.
> but rather want the whole world to have that right as well.
Ah, but there you make a mistake. The whole world does not want to have this right - or at least they have been raised in societies which see "our way of life" in a wholly different way. What "we" gained in freedom to express ourselves any way we want, we gradually lost in things which bound us together - clan/tribal/national pride, religious affiliation, sense of purpose. Our freedom has its price in that it is up to the individual to find acceptable replacements for these factors with differing degrees of success - some find it in financial success, some look for it in political/ideological fervour, lately many people are looking for it in some aspect of identity and the related politics. Why, ever, would you want to leave your known position in the clan, with the elders to tell you what is good, the imam or preacher or priest to tell you what is holy and your future as predictable as that of your ancestors?
> I just want to go a different path, than the usual one, which has not really worked out so far in the past.
What will you do on that "different path" when an opponent comes up to you and holds a gun to your head?
To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven. When the man with the gun in his hand comes to threaten you you either fight him, or you submit [1].
[1] and no, this is not a call for open war against Putin, for those who wondered. That time may come but we're not there yet.
Knock him down, if the situation allows it, otherwise give in, as long as the gun is pointed to my head. I never said flowers are the only option.
As high a price as Russia is now paying for invading Ukraine?
Victory must be magnanimous or it's just temporary.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_program_of_Saudi_Arabi....
Saudi has just called back a huge multi-billion dollar loan to Pakistan.
Why? Modi is leaving Russian military hardware for US one, or so he threatens.
Second, Pakistan is broke, and is on the road to becoming Argentina 2.0. Even with the sorry state of Russian exchequer, Russia can probably spare a billion or so.
If it is not just Modi, then Putin wants a platz-de-arme in the region.
The leaders just signed a piece of paper which was never ratified by legislators and doesn't even guarantee what you claim:
> The United States of America, the Russian Federation, and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, reaffirm their commitment to seek immediate United Nations Security Council action to provide assistance to Ukraine, as a non-nuclear-weapon State Party to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, if Ukraine should become a victim of an act of aggression or an object of a threat of aggression in which nuclear weapons are used.
It was just a promise to have a meeting at the UNSC if something happens.
The premise of this agreement was that US, UK, etc... wouldn't invade the Ukraine to seize/secure the nuclear assets, if they gave them up willingly?
Not that the US, UK, etc... would protect the Ukraine if they gave it up?
Russia wasn't forced to do anything. They could've merely quietly dropped two of their delusions:
a) NATO was never going to attack them, unless it literally went crazy, or someone framed Russia so badly that a nuclear response was preferable to any other option. The West doesn't want to trigger a MAD scenario, and are keen to keep the post-WW2 peace and (in the case of the US) bomb less defended countries for their natural resources. Any claims or beliefs to the contrary are a projected reflection of their own priorities.
b) buffer zones outside of the neighborhood is getting more crowded. Big deal, if you are really so keen on a buffer zone, then maybe sacrifice a few square km out of the ABSOLUTELY MASSIVE part of the continent that they already control. Does that mean risking important areas? Oh noes. Security has a cost, so if you're not willing to pay for it, quit whining.
It's the same thing with Russia: Putin has struck a deal with Xi that allows him to move his military assets from the east to this theater, because he feels that it's a strategic imperative to 'clear the neighborhood'.
Russia has given up land and trapped foreign invaders, including Napoleon and Hitler, but it has done so at a huge cost in blood and treasure. From Russia's perspective, it's far more cost-effective to have weak client states that do their bidding on their hard-to-defend flanks, than to have strong, democratic, independent states that can ally themselves with their archenemies.
Might as well start preparing for the Mexican invasion of the United States.
Since my nation was literally behind the Iron Curtain, I can assure you that Russia _has no right_ to invade neighbouring sovereign nations, no matter how "unsafe" they are feeling. Invading Ukraine is an attempt to externalise the cost of having a land buffer, by stealing said land from a nearby nation.
No matter how "cost effective" it is, it has a real price in human blood and suffering. Only a sociopath would agree it's a reasonable solution, if one were to be (or pretend to be) a good-faith geopolitical player. Which is the current perception of the Western stance on the NATO-Russia tensions from the perspective of ~everyone who cares about human rights and the right to national and personal self-determination.
That's not terribly different from what Russia is doing with Ukraine - they will overwhelm a weaker country for their own strategic reasons, enjoying the impunity granted by a nuclear arsenal (and not just your average one: the largest!).
Ukraine not being in NATO means we aren’t obligated to intervene. We regularly intervene in various things without a treaty requiring it.
The US is not obligated to intervene in Ukraine, plain and simple. The US has a strategic partnership with Ukraine, I think, but it's not an ally. https://www.defense.gov/News/Feature-Stories/Story/Article/1... https://www.state.gov/u-s-ukraine-charter-on-strategic-partn...
Currently, as NATO members, they are not likely to be attacked, but if NATO declares war then that deterrent is gone.
Hopefully not a likely scenario, but who knows.. There's been a lot of tension lately, especially with the likes of Belarus bussing migrants across the border into Lithuania etc, but no idea where this will end.
"Article 5 provides that if a NATO Ally is the victim of an armed attack, each and every other member of the Alliance will consider this act of violence as an armed attack against all members and will take the actions it deems necessary to assist the Ally attacked."
So, the 9/11 attacks were considered an armed attack on the United States, and the alliance deemed it necessary to overthrow the Taliban in order to prevent Al-Qaeda from perpetrating similar attacks again.
One can disagree with the rationale behind the decision, or the cost-benefit ratio. But it did follow the protocols of the alliance.
... is a very different thing than ...
> occupying a foreign country for 20 years
When NATO invaded the towers were still smoking, the war-on-terror intelligence apparatus had yet to be built, and we (I) had no idea whether another attack was forthcoming. It felt pretty damn reasonable at the time.
This is the deterrent—and it also rhymes with the Triple Entente v. Triple Alliance tensions that set off the Great War.
Are they really?
> So while the use of armed force is one way to respond to aggression, the NATO has several options, for example:
> Nothing. They might decide that the best way to "restore and maintain security" is to just let the attacker have that country.
Germany aid to Ukraine was to send them 5k helmets.
Those helmets didn't do anything against Russia's missiles.
---
That is, attacking a member of NATO just means that all other members must help it, but how they help, is up to them, and that help can be just a pat in the back.
In the end, there is no supranational tribunal for military allegiances - in matters of conflict, Hobbes' jungle is still very much there.
(I'm unclear on how true the silent implication is, but seems reasonable).
Better to hit an enemy when they're not expecting it.
Every major power has had 50 years to prepare for it, and it won't work.
You want to respond proportionally, and make it hurt. But you also want to leave room for more pain, to give incentive for the behaviour to stop. And you need to make sure that your adversary believes that you'll keep hurting them. This is why we use some, but not all of the economic sanctions available:
1. If things get worse, we can make the sanctions worse. 2. We're much more likely to be able to maintain sanctions than soldiers in foreign wars.
I'm not talking about a nuclear strike. All out nuclear war is clearly in nobody's interest (what's the point in ruling over a nuclear wasteland). Putin is relying on the fact that we are all so scared about that scenario that we will be weak in our support of Ukraine (and Latvia, Lithuania, Poland....).
China talks a good game now but how long do you think China will tolerate Russia bombing their most valuable customers?
More flippantly, I think there are some serious questions to ask yourself if you find yourself staking out a more pro-war position than architects of the Iraq War, none of whom think NATO should send in troops here.
> and then talking afterwards about how Hitler's a peace loving guy who'll never invade anyone again.
We've had that stage already. It started in 2016. And instead of Chamberlain it was Trump.
Look at what he is saying. The parallels with "lebensraum" are there for all to see. What makes anyone think he will stop at Ukraine? If he is successful here, Poland will be next, mark my words.
That we don't actually have their back will be noted by despots the world over.
There is no way Putin will say after this war "Thank you sir, may I have another?" He'll be hard pressed to keep financing his military...
That might fade when/if the sanctions become serious, but thus far I have the impression that he's generally popular (if not as popular as rigged polls would suggest) for his hard-line stance against the US, NATO, and Europe.
Am I wrong about that?
There are already anti-war protests in Russia, and the war has barely started!
(if they do, I'm also curious for any analysis of their psyche that you have, because that seems to me like borderline insanity)
[1] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2022/02/23/reac...
We are not in the same civilizational project, I guess you just don't realize it
Ukraine is being handed to Putin. He gets to flex his strongman ego and the world gets to not be ended (today).
Russia invading a NATO country would be akin to walking on a landmine. Putin's not a fool, so it is very unlikely to happen.
On the one hand, I feel bad for Ukrainians. On the other hand, the whole world saw it coming, just like we can see China invading Taiwan at some point in the future, and the calculus will be the exact same: Taiwan means more to China than it does to America, and the Ukraine means more to Russia than it does to the West.
It is perilous to fight somebody, whether it's Putin or Xi, with vested emotional interests in the subject matter of the fight when all you've got is ideology.
And so nothing will come of this except 'strong condemnations'. As if any strongman ever gave a fuck.
And that's the perspective this should be viewed from.
The US may not have a firm interest in Ukraine. The US has a fairly firm interest in Taiwan. The US has a serious interest in Korea, Japan, and the countries bordering the South China Sea.
You have to strongly and unconditionally support international order re: Ukraine, so that Xi takes away the right message.
Why only "fairly firm"? I've heard arguments that if Taiwan is invaded and TSMC falls under PRC control, then the US faces massive chip shortages for years (possibly leading to riots and a destabilized government), and those seem plausible to me.
People don't want a 'world police' anymore.
I suppose somebody might ask what I would prefer the US State Department say, and I guess I'd personally want more realpolitik: "Putin's a megalomaniacal piece of shit with nationalist historical aspirations that stretch back to Peter the Great; NATO's contributed to all this to the extent that it's been dick swinging in Eastern Europe for the past 20 years; the Ukrainians should probably just surrender since they're all basically (and historically were) Russian anyway, and they stand no chance of actually resisting, and no other country on Earth is going to risk nuclear war over them."
Not exactly feel good material for a bolded NYT headline, but at least it's honest.
Also the US has delivered weapons to Ukraine.
They don't want to engage in a war with Russia, and that decision I think is the right one for now. A couple years down the road, if the sanctions don't succeed in containing Putin's aggression, we might have a different discussion.
Yeah well we tried that back in 2014 when it was the Crimean Penensula. I think its time we have that discussion NOW.
In my opinion, Russia will not have a lot of appetite for further aggression after all those sanctions. Invading NATO members and setting off a huge, unwinnable conflict should be pretty far down the list of priorities in the next few years.
See this report for a brief example: https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/SN07...
The US and UK governments have been formally and repeatedly asked for help.
This information is also constantly in the news. The US has provided almost $3 Billion in military aid to Ukraine in the past several years alone. The UK has also provided significant amounts of aid. Ditto for NATO. All of these are not 'forced' on Ukraine!
I also hope that the US will share intelligence information; US's abilities here are far greater than Ukraine's.
If you let that genie out of the bottle, it better be a prelude to a winnable war, or you had better be happy to have all your government officials, diplomats, and their families on permanent lockdown.
Assassinating or targeting political leaders is a war crime. The CIA might have done that - quite a while in the past, mind you - but never against an adversary like Russia. At the very least you would expect a few US politicians to drop dead if there ever were such an attempt.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_attempts_on_Fide...
I totally forgot the "Communist Stooges" category that America had a special loathing for. I'm sure they were a no-holds-barred category!
But that kind of calculation "oh, the US won't have the stomach to fight a useless war if you hit them hard enough first" was exactly what doomed the Japanese Empire.
I don't think NK has currently credible launch systems to make it to the east coast (of the US)?
Also, the past century shows the US had the stomach to fight useless wars, so I'd hope NK has noticed that.
In any case, the state and capability of their missile arsenal isn't widely known. The issue here is that it's not so much the will to fight an expensive war but rather to risk nuclear strikes at home just for the benefit of revenge on North Korea.
Your explanation isn't bad but this choice of words is strange. No one "forced" Russia to do anything. NATO has never overtly threatened Russia. Neither NATO or any European country was going to roll tanks through Ukraine and attack Russia. Even if every Eastern European country decided to get back at Russia for a half century of abuse from the USSR, the existence of Russia's nuclear arsenal secured their borders.
The Putin propaganda about tanks rolling through Ukraine is simply absurd. It's just some recycled Stalinist propaganda trying to equate NATO/Europe with Hitler and the Nazis.
I don't think any description of Putin's actions using the word "forced" or anything like it make actual sense.
I think this debacle will jolt the the EU members' leadership out of its complacency, and there will be a renewed focus on European Security, now that Macron's deal-brokering has clearly failed.
Which country is going nuclear free? I hope it's not France, because I thought they are the leaders in nuclear energy.
Germany is intending to, once their current plants are decommissioned.
Did you hear evidence of that anywhere or is that just wild speculation?
This is Russian disinformation. Aegis Ashore (which is the system being installed in Poland) is designed to launched SM3 missiles that are designed to intercept ballistic missiles. They aren't nuclear armed at all. The Russians have been claiming that the silos could also launch Tomahawk missiles, some variants of which are nuclear armed. There have been no plans for this to happen, and the US has even offered to allow inspections.
according to Putin that treading is a major motivation for his current actions.
yes, as i already wrote during the last year, Ukraine got Turkish drones and with them the window of opportunity to win the Donbass war (like Azerbaijan/Turkey did against Armenia/Russia). The fall of Donbass would have been a large failure for Putin which his regime would have hard time to survive. Without bringing aviation though Russian forces couldn't operate successfully there (especially given the tank swallowing deep Spring mud what is going to happen in few weeks), and this is what happened yesterday across Ukraine - attacks on airfields and air-defenses, command and control centers, etc.
Fuck up Ukraine and go home. Belarus has already been turned into a puppet state, and if they manage to turn Ukraine into a similar puppet or at least a failed state, there will remain no prosperous alternative in Russian-speaking world to Putin's Russia.
Russians have massive inferiority complex since at least the 1960s when Soviet Union began to significantly fall behind the West and this is their way of dealing with it.
This guy nailed it 7 years ago!
It's believed by many that the US ran a coup that installed a US puppet. That alleged puppet ended the long-standing arrangement that granted Russia access to its only warm water port. Losing access to this port made it almost a certainty that Russia would annex Crimea, which it did.
With no strong opposition to that, drunk on success, ~~Hitler~~ Putin can go further.
In taking Ukraine, Putin just put Nato on Russia’s border.
did this affect Russia negatively ? from my seat it was no biggie, and nothing came out of the baltic states joining.. no threats, accident, economic problems in the news.. but maybe i'm just blind
If it’s an old fashioned land/riches grab then their current behavior makes perfect sense.
People seem to make the mistake of thinking about this in some kind of game theoretic way where Russia would have something to gain or lose but that's the wrong perspective, Putin couldn't care less about Russia or the Russians, what he cares about is to cling to power until he's dying, if he can't do that then his lot could well be worse.
You're not loving it, you want to make some sharp moves to prevent more states from considering it, and you'd like to get those states back somehow in the long run.
This is a wildly imperfect analogy, but...
Can you imagine resettling the whole Mormon population of Idaho to the furthest corners of Alaska? A knock on the door awakens you. You're given half an hour to pack a single suitcase, and then your whole family is pushed into a cattle wagon going to Alaska. No food beyond a slice of bread per day, no other supplies while traveling there over three weeks. If babies die, their bodies are just thrown overboard by soldiers. When you arrive, you're assigned a mine to work in for free as slave labor and a dirt mound to sleep in.
That's what took in Eastern Europe to seek isolation from Russia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_transfer_in_the_Sov...
If the Pacific Northwest broke off tomorrow and tried to join Canada, I may still be opposed to war simply out of pacifism, but I wouldn't be terribly shocked if we had a Civil War II over the issue.
If the Pacific Northwest broke off tomorrow, the largest remaining Federal-ish government in the formerly United States recognized it as an independent country, and then thirty years from now it was contemplating an alliance with Canada...
However, in this admittedly flawed analogy, I thought it was pretty clear that Washington, Oregon, and Idaho were meant to be analogous to the multiple NATO countries already sharing borders with Russia.
Putin's invasion of Ukraine is a dastardly war crime, but it didn't happen in a vacuum either. Was attempting to explain the (shitty) reasoning behind Putin's actions.
Those neighbors are allowed to join defensive agreements. Also Gorbatshov denied being "duped" about NATO expansion. Also Putin has no reason to be bothered by NATO troops in neighbor countries. They aren't anywhere close to invasion strength (even if you are prepared to consider they would want to despite all the treaties).
It's just that the NATO troops would be in the way when Putin decides to reintegrate those neighbors too his historic empire.
I'm just trying to understand.
If not for this he would have to face the fact that Russia is on its last legs. They won't be able to sustain this war for very long either hence all the bluster about repercussions if other countries decide to help Ukraine prolong the conflict.
Russia had a buffer state that was content to do its bidding in Yanukovich et. al. but after the Ukrainians overthrew their corrupt government and made moves to establish a genuine western-style democracy with rule of law, Russia were forced to shore up their vulnerable flank. This is part of that process. But they now face bad consequences, including neutral Finland and Sweden deciding to join NATO, perhaps Georgia also, and Germany (and Europe in general) starting to look for alternate energy sources in earnest (Russia supplies a huge percentage of Europe's energy needs, and is also a huge supplier of many rare earths and raw materials that are critical to the Semiconductor Industry).
EDIT: Belarus is also a client state of Russia's, and there has been unrest there, so perhaps Russia is sensing that they might slip as well. Putin is desperate to do whatever it takes to stay in power in Russia, and these things play into that as well.