"Leave Ukraine and pay for the war crimes committed there" is an obvious choice that comes to my mind.
I don’t think the US would leave Iraq because they couldn’t buy IP licensing. They’d probably say that the IP licensing is invalid and do it anyway.
Anyway. Obviously I want this invasion to end, but obviously they don’t. So, this move makes sense given that context.
Also, remember that while China and India can choose to continue receiving exports they didn't pay as much as Europe did _before_ the war. If Russia has reduced itself to one or two potential buyers, those buyers have the power to dictate pricing well under market and the financing options are going to be very much not in Russia's long-term interests. China has a strategy they've used on smaller countries where they offer aggressive loans for projects and then take control of infrastructure / resources if the borrower defaults, and I'd be exceedingly unsurprised if some Chinese companies end up doing something similar here.
In some sense they could survive on a war footing (i.e. people won’t starve) but their economy will take decades to recover even if sanctions are lifted soon. They lost 25% of their wealth in a few days (rubble) and don’t even have a functioning stock market.
This is already a catastrophe for Russia.
It is only necessarily for regional flights.
In the worst case, the airlines will have to transport the parts to Russia themselves, which is not much more costly than getting Boeing to do it.
All Russia has the domestic capability for is going back to long range four engine planes, which will increase maintenance and fuel consumption.
Explainer-Importance of Russian Titanium to Global Industry
https://money.usnews.com/investing/news/articles/2022-03-01/...
oec.com has lots of info per country on what makes up their economy.
Russian oil is already going unsold, without formal sanctions.
In the long term, Russia can survive by selling gas to Europe, and buying goods from China. In the short term, there's an absolute madhouse in the domestic markets.
Unlike in the Soviet days, when most of its domestic products were locally produced, Russia has de-industrialized, and all of its supply chains have become incredibly dependant on the West. It can't turn back the clock 40 years overnight.
They will use Linux, build their own alternatives for Google/Youtube or use Chinese sites. It will all be fine. In fact their data will be safe from Google and Meta.
I've used a lot of them personally, especially games. Some of those translations were pretty good, and some were so bad they were actually hilarious, and have become a meme (like "wasted → потрачено" in GTA San Andreas)
I know one indie game whose Russian localization was done and distributed with the pirated version first, before being adopted by the dev and added to the official distribution. (of course since the guy is only doing gamedev as a hobby, his stance regarding piracy of his own games is quite relaxed)
Decades ago I patched binary Commodore 64 applications to have messages in Spanish, getting as far as patching programming environments like Logo and BASIC to have not just error messages but also the keywords translated.
Even without source code it is somewhat doable, and modern applications often have localization mechanisms that remain in the compiled executable.
Since you didn't specify bad for who (but really, even if you did) still this:
> "Leave Ukraine and pay for the war crimes committed there"
No war is right. That's it. No situation is black and white.. One could argue that Russia's invasion could've been avoided by simply talking while other places didnt even have a choice. Wars are politicians incompetence or simply not seeing others interests and points of view but their own. Remove yourself from countries try to look from a 3rd point of view and you will see. The only way to break this cycle... All these poor innocent lives in all these wars all of a sudden came to me as a result of what I see in my current age and I will be honest, I am more mad at humanity than ever... what we think we are vs what we actually are is so different and that should be opened up and taught in schools.
Yes, both countries are evil, but US is "number one".
edit:
" A war of permanent occupation, and oppression, under absolute rule, is not the same."
The US set up a puppet government, Putin will likely do the same.
The inference, in this context, is that the US directly slaughtered 200k civilians. This is pure deceit.
Or are you suggesting the US lined up civilians and shot them?
What you mean is, the US destabilized the region and then locals slaughtered each other, causing 200k deaths.
A massive difference.
The Middle East is a hotbed of conflicting religions, and tribalism runs rampant. Any "destabilization" caused deaths are impossible to separate from whatever next local conflict would have caused, regardless.
Great false optics though.
The middle east being a hotbed of conflicting religions is not an excuse. It just means that the US should have treated the region with a lot more care, you don't go around bombing nuclear reactors and then claim that it is their fault for exploding.
According to UN, Russian actions costed 1207 civilians their life, not 300.
Wrong logic.
First, one report claims this as a theory, where as the US believes 1300.
Second, this was over 5 years, half a decade!
Third, great care was taken to not harm civilians.
Fourth, this was the US and her allies, not the US alone. Some of her allies are locals.
Further, this was a campaign against a violent group, Islamic State, invading, and slaughteting people relentlessly. Had the US and allies not stepped in, it is not hard to imagine IS killing even more, had their progress not been halted.
This is just an absurd comparison. You are working so hard, and diligently, to present the US in the worst light possible. It is just silly.
"Second, this was over 5 years, half a decade!"
And? The US has not really changed. Look at Yemen, Libya, etc.
"Third, great care was taken to not harm civilians."
You certainly can't see that great care in the "collateral murder" video. I am sure Russia will also talk about the great care that it took to not hurt civilians.
"Fourth, this was the US and her allies, not the US alone. Some of her allies are locals."
I don't think that this really changes anything. In addition Russia could claim the same about solders from Chechnya, Belarus, Crimea, etc.
"You are working so hard, and diligently, to present the US in the worst light possible"
You are working so hard, and diligently, to justify the atrocities that the US committed.
Am I wrong here? It looks like nobody really cared about Syrian people and that's what's similar in US and Russia foreign policy. Wars are usually waged for land or for power, not to protect someone's liberties.
You are right though that America recently didn't annex land; but they did so earlier, see history of Panama Canal Zone for example [1]:
> In March 1902 Colombia set its terms for such a treaty: Colombia was to be sovereign over the canal, which would be policed by Colombians paid for by the United States. The host nation would receive a larger percentage of the tolls than provided for in earlier draft treaties.
> The draft terms were quickly rejected by American officials.
> A Frenchman who had worked on his nation's canal efforts, Philippe Bunau-Varilla, represented Panamanian insurgents; he met with Roosevelt and with Secretary of State John Hay, who saw to it that his principals received covert support. When the revolution came in November 1903, the United States intervened to protect the rebels, who succeeded in taking over the province, declaring it independent as the Republic of Panama.
> negotiated a treaty, giving the United States a zone 20 miles (32 km) wide and full authority to pass laws to govern that zone.
The same trick that US, USSR and Russia have repeated multiple times since: support the opposition against the government; get something valuable (like land or permission to build military bases) in return. Repeat if the opposition you have helped stops being grateful.
It's a bit more complicated than just “nobody really cared” — the U.S. was already bogged down in two wars of choice with no end in sight so a third one was going to be a very hard sell. The U.S. did provide aid to some groups and actively attacked ISIL but the latter was the primary combat goal because there was no interest in occupying Syria and accepting the massive requirements in personnel and casualties that would require.
That's one of the key differences with the current situation in the Ukraine: Russia has made it clear that their goal is to rebuild the historic empire and are willing to accept large death counts to do so.
How can we know what Russia is going to do in Ukraine? Did Putin tell you? For now, we can say they're the same. Not to mention all those countries supported financially, militarily... by the US, who apply an absolute rule of oppression to their citizens.
So the comparison is false to begin with.
Similarity would be if Iraq attacked Israel (a dictator attacks democracy).
Also, both Chile or Guatemala were democracies when the US financed and organized the coups that deposed their elected presidents, just to put some friend dictator.
Yes, and any "definition of democracy" is questionable, either you have it or you don't. Do you think that Saddam was in any "definition" a democratic president?
How about Hitler, Mussolini, Mao, Stalin, Putin?
> Also, both Chile or Guatemala were democracies when the US financed and organized the coups that deposed their elected presidents, just to put some friend dictator.
That was wrong, what can I say? I don't pretend US is a good guy, it is more gray. But in that color definition Russia is black, or at least very dark gray.
And no, I'm not US citizen.
Actually, Putin has given a few speeches on the topic. In the most recent one, I believe, he said that he wanted to annex Ukraine. After a previous speech in which he said that he doesn't believe Ukraine has any existence as an ethnic state, since Ukrainians are (to him) just Russians.
https://www.trtworld.com/europe/lavrov-russia-s-goal-is-to-d...
That's why the current invadion is moreso akin to the Iraq war. The invadion in 2014 can be analogised to other conflicts, if you want.
The topic of discussion is that it is not:
- Russia has clear intent to annex territory
- US never had such intent from early 20 century: they left Iraq when they were asked to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Withdrawal_of_United_States_tr...
Russia has already annexed territory.
By the way, the US is still occupying territory to this day in Cuba, so clearly the intent remains.
"All" means 100k of initial invasion forces? Or few hundreds who provide security to commercial objects in Iraq?
> Russia has already annexed territory.
They occupied territory, it is not recognized by many countries as annexed. Now they want it to be recognized.
It
The troops I'm talking about weren't for commercial security. They were in US "embassy" complexes and were used as an occupying military.
Russia annexed Crimea. They aren't occupying it. It is a done fact. Annexation has nothing to do with international recognition. Annexation is when a sovereign state takes over territory and annexes it to it's own. Which Russia did to Crimea in 2014.
Russia is asking Ukraine to recognize the facts on the ground and give up it's claim, after which both countries may exist in a state of peace.
Could you provide any reference on this?
> Russia annexed Crimea. They aren't occupying it.
Looks like rest of the world is in disagreement with this statement.
The Iranian affinity comes in no small part organically or from pro-Iranian militias.
They couldn't do anything about US actions, yes, because lacking military power.
I don't think it is an occupation as this word is defined.
I would take issue with the word justify.
That country A did something bad to country B doesn't justify country C doing the same bad thing to country D. But what it does do is puts the actions of country C in historical perspective (i.e. is it uniquely evil), and calls into question the moral argument advanced by country A (if it claims that what country C does to country D is wrong, then how come it did the same to country B? where was the moral argument then?).
When we see someone say one thing and do another, we call such person a hypocrite. This person might object that by calling him so, we engage in a whataboutism, because his actions have no bearing on whether what he says is the right thing to do. But such objection typically doesn't work. I wonder why.
If Russia is or is not justified in its invasion of Ukraine, what is it? What word would you use here when someone is attempting to draw a comparison in order to make one thing "ok" because of another thing?
I've no idea. I don't know if there is such a thing as a justified invasion; and if there is, then what are its criteria; and whether all countries have agreed to recognize the same set of criteria; and what specific criteria Russia would claim that it met in this case.
I know that there were several ill-defined reasons that the Russian government offered to its citizens. Obviously, after the invasion had already started. Obviously, insisting that they are in the right. I have not heard an in-depth analysis of their reasons against the criteria of a justified invasion. All I heard are fragments.
> What word would you use here when someone is attempting to draw a comparison in order to make one thing "ok" because of another thing?
"similar"? "dissimilar"? "understandable"? "incomprehensible"?
"ok" is a moral judgement; and applying a moral yardstick to instigators of a war is ... hard.
Any suggestion that Ukraine is not making its own choice to be a liberal democracy, even despite the Orange Revolution, even despite 2014, even despite the fierce defensive fighting going on as we speak, is an effort to deny an entire people agency. It is racist.
Not 8 years ago, but for the last 8 years. You know, being unaware of some pretty basic circumstances around an issue and then claiming undeniability is pretty rich of you.
> constructive comments that add to the conversation
How did your comment add to the conversation? You just repeated a common black/white sentiment and showed that you weren't fully informed about the topic. Please, be mindful next time.
The Russian narrative of "we're helping the newly recognized DNR/LNR" doesn't make much sense - why are they invading all of Ukraine to make those two regions safe?
This is sort of like if the US "helped" Taiwan by taking Beijing. Or South Korea by capturing Pyongyang.
Also, the Russian news keep saying "DNR/LNR forces aided by Russian forces". When it's clear it's just the Russian military.
This is what eventually will happen, but over Putin's dead body most likely. "Live by the sword, die by the sword", that kinda thing, etc. Everybody agrees that by starting this pointless war Putin has painted himself into a corner.
ie. there are still diplomatic ways out of this open to Putin. If he is not open to considering them and feels cornered, it is his own shortsightedness and failing.
It has been said that you should never draw your pistol unless you are going to shoot. I don't know if that's true; but I do think it's unwise to threaten violence unless you are quite sure you are prepared to carry through.
I think Putin is prepared to carry through (he's made the threat more than once). Russia seems to be losing in Ukraine; but they can't be seen to be slinking away with their tail between their legs. So I think there's a good chance Russia will pop a tactical nuke in Ukraine.
For the same reasons, NATO can't be seen to tolerate the popping of tactical nukes in a regional conflict; they would have to retaliate, for fear that their nuclear deterrent be treated as a joke. I haven't any idea how NATO might select their target, though; striking a city would be gross over-reaction, and striking Russians in Ukraine would be rather counterproductive.
NATO should definitely not respond to nukes with nukes unless Putin drops one on a NATO country. Ukraine is not in NATO. That makes it a first strike, not a retaliatory strike. Putin's propaganda has been that NATO is an aggressor threatening Russia. If NATO strikes Russia in retaliation for a strike on a non-member country that only vindicates him, and you know, leads directly to WWIII
Hey, I didn't mean to sound like a cheerleader for global thermonuclear war! I'm just observing that the logic of nuclear deterrence calls for a response whoever Russia attacks. If it becomes clear that Russia can nuke anyone it likes as long as they're not in NATO, then it can march into e.g. Georgia or Armenia with a company of conscripts, and take over, declaring that any resistance will be met with nukes.
Suppose Russia pops a small nuke in Ukraine? Really, that's not going to achieve any major military victory. They'd need a few to end the war in Russia's favour. That would result in clouds of fallout afflicting NATO countries. At some point you'd have to say "that's enough". But at what point? After two? A dozen? Only after the first megaton city-flattener?
I was a member of CND for a year, back in the 80's. I still favour unilateral disarmament. I quit not because I didn't support the goals, but because I was shocked at the political infighting I observed at the Annual General Meeting.
Not everybody. The "NATO pushed Putin into corner by inviting Ukraine" theorem is still alive. In any way, cornered Putin is angry Putin and angry Putin is dangerous and may be unpredictable.
Putin has said that Ukraine is a historical mistake, and laments the dissolution of the Soviet union. This war is because he want's to create a larger Russian empire, not a preemptive strike for self defense.
Do you of a good source that covers the topic?
You can use Realism to predict that Russia would eventually try to regain the power it lost over Eastern Europe and the Baltics with the dissolution of the USSR. In fact that very understanding and fear is precisely why countries in Eastern Europe and the Baltics pushed so hard to join NATO and the EU, because they predicted that would happen.
But that doesn't make Russia's actions the right move, either legally or morally. They have agency too and could always have made the choice to not to try to act like an empire with violent hegemony over their neighbours.
2. "NATO pushed..." does not imply Russia is right. Russia is wrong, legally and morally, but it can be simultaneously true that NATO pushed Russia.
2. "NATO pushed" is deceptive framing. The countries that joined NATO after 1991 had to lobby hard over many years to get NATO members to agree to expand. Even then the process took forever with MAPs and other interim steps each designed to slow the process down.
No wonder China is gleefully standing by. They're just biding their time. When 2 dogs fight over a bone...
an unrealistic choice is not a choice.
Putin's approval rating is at 70% [0]. From [1] (referring to the invasion of Crimea):
> President Putin's approval rating among the Russian public increased by nearly 10% since the crisis began, up to 71.6%, the highest in three years, according to a poll conducted by the All-Russian Center for Public Opinion Research, released on 19 March.[346] Additionally, the same poll showed that more than 90% of Russians supported unification with the Crimean Republic
So it looks to me that most Russians supported the Crimea invasion. Why would it be different now? I find it hard to believe that if Russia hadn't found such a stubborn resistance and would've been able to annex Ucrania quickly, which was what the Russian government thought would happen, in five years all the polls wouldn't show Russians supporting the invasion.
[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/896181/putin-approval-ra...
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annexation_of_Crimea_by_the_...
Do you remember "garbage in - garbage out"?
If people fed nothing but bravado on how the glorious leader shines the path to the wonderful future, how in the world they would see him in a negative light?
The last two years showed everyone what even the professionals are happy to spew an utter nonsense, directly contradicting their profession and education, just because they want to feel that way.
And remember - population polling gives you information on how people feel about something, not why do they feel that way.
PS:
"Let us ask your opinion on these matters:
1. How do you feel about our President?
#a I'm delighted to live in this glorious days and I'm fully supported our glorious leader!
#b I'm a shithead and prefer to spend the rest of my days in gulag."
Hyperbole, sure, but how the poll is constructed, where it was performed also matters.
On the other hand, I have a limited amount of empathy and at the moment it is being consumed by people who are actually being bombed by not their own government.
Hmm, no.
I would say believing that garbage is on them. [1]
But when you have nothing other than garbage?
Don't forget what this is the country where you can be detained for holding an invisible placard [0] - so saying something out of the party line is a quick way for the unemployment at least, hence the people who could had provided some other info (primarily on TV) have big incentives not to do so.
[0] https://www.rferl.org/a/russia-protest-arrests/25324619.html
[1] which is another joke because half of those people lived or at least were born when "government never tells the truth" was the default MO even for the government itself.
Or from a different perspective: if the opinion of the citizens doesn't matter, then why is Putin shutting down independent journalism and turning up the propaganda in his own country? That only makes sense if he cares what the public thinks.
Shutting down the media limits the average person’s reason to know there is even a thing to protest against.
It’s not absolute power over the people, but it does diminish the power of the people.
Then they can all take to the streets and protest against the regime to make their PoV heard. Sure, the protesters will clash with the police/military who will use force against them, but if it's indeed the vast majority of people as you claim, against the regime, then the police/military cannot overwhelm over ~80 million people on the streets.
If the vast majority refuse to take to the streets in protest, then it means they silently or otherwise approve the government's actions. It's up to the Russian people to sort out their politics, by violent force if need be, if they're truly unhappy with the past 30 years of fake democracy and corruption among their leadership.
Same how in 1989 people and students in Romania took to the streets, en masse, to oust the dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, who refused to step down and had the military shoot the protestors. Spoiler alert: he still got ousted, so the excuse that "we can't protest in Russia against Putin" does not fly.
For a man who is said to have thought the people deeply loved him, he sure was paranoid. Or maybe he actually knew how much people hated him and he was just fooling himself?
But Putin is nowhere as unpopular as Ceausescu was. His approval ratings that I've seen are no different from those of Western leaders. A lot of people there seem to believe Ukraine is full of Nazis. Nobody is going to storm his palace any time soon and I don't think the sanctions will help. They'll just reinforce his "the West is out to get us" narrative. Don't forget they don't have anything reminiscent of a free press anymore.
The problem is - as long as the economy is fine they don't care.
Personal anecdote:
In April 2010 I was protesting ratification of the so called "Kharkiv Pact" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kharkiv_Pact) in Kyiv. I remember a moment, when I was single-handedly pushing three rows of soldiers (national guard; they didn't really try) and almost no one else joined, one of the members of our group said to another: "There won't be a revolution today. Let's wait till they start losing money, then we'll try again".
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email [email protected] and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
Where you go wrong is that the comment you were replying to was not talking about their ability but their options. The grand parent comment said: (paraphrasing) “Hey, what can Russia do, if no one licences them software?” To which the comment you responded said (again paraphrasing) “They have the option to stop the war”.
You are not disputing that Russia has the option to retreat, you are just talking about how they are strong and nobody can force them. Which might be true, might be false but certainly is a complete non sequitur in the context of this conversation.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email [email protected] and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
Edit: this is what I mean:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30586644
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30586240
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30553214
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30552714
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30455525
It's pretty shocking to see an account posting that abusively on a regular basis. Seriously not cool, and we'd already asked you to stop.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29213678 (Nov 2021)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26905306 (April 2021)
The right choice is to stop murdering civilians in Ukraine and invading their free nation. It's pretty simple.
Basically pirated software is not a solution for mission critical businesses.
Also who do you think is cracking the software? The same people who would find it very easy to put in malware into the software.
If Russia is running on pirated software, it will be a nightmare.
They need to get off Western software and push open source alternatives. they are massively inferior, especially in the B2B software side of things, but so be it. This is what Russia needs to do now.
Wasn’t this already the case for pretty much every entity outside the government and the largest corporations?
Apparently the Russian government are talking about creating their own GitHub replacement, as China did with gitee.com.
https://writing.kemitchell.com/2022/03/07/You-And-Whose-GitH...
So the Russian government are probably already in the process of transitioning to FLOSS.
That might seem ironical in multiple ways: a dictatorship where freedom of expression is suppressed that promotes FLOSS because they don't trust closed software. Maybe the western world can learn a lesson or two from that.
That would be the only free thing in Russia then.
There is something absurd with that sentence, Software licenses are completely irrelevant if piracy is legal.
If some product is impossible to buy legally in some region there is little harm in pirating it.
"All digital content must be made available in country X at the lowest price available in any other jurisdiction. If this condition is not met, said digital content can be freely accessed by any other means."
Unfortunately, most EU & other countries signed up to the draconian "life+130years" copyright agreements...
I know this one! They should have chosen not to fucking invade Ukraine.
I’m sure the Russian government are using Microsoft Office, if they can’t legally buy it anymore then they must make the piracy of it legal: or they’re breaking their own laws.
Or they retrain on open/libreoffice. But that unfortunately has a poor track record of working.
As staunch of a FOSS advocate as I am, this is probably the sensible move for now. :/