Yes, those Russians in jail right now for protesting against putin should be ashamed /s
Edit: the statement is about “should be,” but the replies talk about whether they do/did feel ashamed. But *should* they? Those people who ended up in jail were acting heroically by jeopardizing their careers and freedom. I think those specific Russians deserve to feel good about themselves
If you ever wondered what you would have done to stop Hitler, you're doing it now.
In that scenario, "I have nukes" becomes a joker you can pull out to achieve anything less bad than a global nuclear war. Peel off a bit of a neighbour? OK, less bad than nuclear war. What about a "minor" NATO country? What about, "pay me money or else"? And so on.
So either you accept that (no thank you from me) or you accept that sometimes you must set limits, even if the other side threatens nuclear war.
In that respect it's the same, just different scale. Allies could have said "no" to Hitler earlier, at risk of a devastating war, but chose to say "ah, go ahead" for fear of it. And got that war served up to them anyway.
The irony is that WWII could possibly be over in a few weeks, if Hitler's ambitions were stemmed earlier. In September 1939, it is unlikely he could fight on two fronts, and against the British and the French - the actual superpowers of the day.
The stasis, at least for now, is one of mutual defense pacts backed up by nuclear weapons leads to very hard boundaries given MAD. Ironically, the pitfall that led to WWI turned out to be a stabilizing force (at least for now) under MAD. Everything outside of those hard deterrence boundaries, if we're being honest, is fair game for proxy wars. Ukraine isn't in the boundaries. People who are arguing that we should start shifting those boundaries (ie, changing the 'rules' by directly engaging despite them being non-NATO) are playing with fire. As soon as the rules are broken, the fundamental premise of deterrence goes out the window, and all bets are off as to where it takes us. This is also why it's incredibly dangerous to admit countries into NATO with disputed, actively fought over territory like Ukraine, since we'd be exposing a new level of risk whereby there's a conflict between conventional rules of escalation running up against nuclear alliance deterrence.
That's not a rule, and has never been suggested to be a rule until invoked as an excuse for inaction in this particular crisis, and is, in fact, contrary to the public claims and past actions of NATO as a regional security organization with a mutual defense commitment and not a pure mutual defense organization.
They spoke in Korean sometimes (but especially under stress, spoke Russian), and flew Soviet jets based in China and nominally assigned to Air Defense, not Frontal Aviation.
They weren't maintaining plausible deniability, but a transparent fig leaf. We knew they were Soviet pilots, and they knew we knew they were Soviet pilots.
And the Soviet anti-aircraft crews shooting down American jets in Vietnam didn't even have a transparent fig-leaf of not being Soviet troops.
I’m not sure. Rationally, Putin shouldn’t have started the war; he was told Russia will get sanctioned to oblivion, which it did and is genuinely hurting Russia, and he should have known his forces aren’t up to scratch. Due to some kind of delusion he pressed ahead. Hitler may have done so too. For example, hoping that the western powers won’t risk MAD over a bit of Central Europe, much as they didn’t care much for Western Czechoslovakia.
Of course sanctions aren’t MAD; but then nothing is, and no analogy is very close.
Sure, the potential cost of getting it wrong is even higher, but the same answer is wrong for the same reasons.
“Letting Ukraine do all the (overt, at least) fighting but flooding them with arms and intel will be sufficient to check Russia” is, OTOH, somewhere between Sudetenland and Poland as a response, and it's a very high stakes gamble.
If Russia has really been cremating remains in Mariupol, people may remain missing forever.
If we were to take his nuclear threats to Ukraine seriously, he has all the potential to be one.
At this same moment USA, Turkey and Saudi Arabia are involved directly in illegal aggression against multiple sovereign states, fully supported by many other NATO members. They were responsible for much more death yearly than Russia in this war, yet nobody seems to care.
Is it because USA do it to spread democracy? Then what about Turkey? They used word for word exactly the same justification to invade Kurds in Syria.
Where’s the outrage about other wars.
Either condemn all wars, or stop pretending you care about people affected by wars.
What a weird thing to say. Humans are hypocrites.
We can absolutely not care one whit about the Kurds (or only in the abstract anyway), and then get extremely upset when people that look like us, in a society that mostly functions like ours, get attacked by a country that really should know better
And frankly, until they started this shit, I didn’t feel particularly bad about Russia any more. They shot themselves in the foot so hard…
Can we do better as a humanity? Should we just accept that we are all racist assholes and stop pretending we are better than that, or try to become better than that?
You would prefer Ukrainian border to be locked so that they can't escape at all anywhere. And you don't seem to want to care countries next to Syria to treat refugees better, it is just about sticking it to countries next to Ukraine which you know nothing about.
How come Arabs are more likely to fight ISIS and help Arabs over going over to Ukraine or help Arab refugees. Better no one helps anyone ever, not even when threatened by same aggressor again and not even if they are literally the next country over the border.
ad hominem ad nauseum.
Nice example of moral and discipline of US troops. Just Google if you need more.
Murderers are murderers, regardless if they wear Russian, US or Taliban uniform.
But yeah, Russian army killing anyone suddenly makes US army winning humanitarian contest.
This is not a realistic stance. We are all humans, and it's obvious that some global tragedies affect us more than others (for whatever reason). Just because somebody is vocal about the Russo-Ukrainian war but less so about other wars doesn't mean they don't care. It just means that they are personally and emotionally more impacted by this.
Furthermore, people do what they can. Should I either donate all my money to all causes or not donate at all? Should I either not do any action that has a negative effect on the environment or live in a forest alone without electricity?
We complaining about Russia and Russians and Iraqians complaining about USA will not stop any war. We need a strong international peace movement. It kinda worked in the case of Vietnam.
That polls sound for me like an Internet survey showed that 100% use the Internet.
Putin didn't sprung up from nothing. He was nurtured and cared for by all western leaders. He's that disease you did nothing for for so long. And now you're complaining? That is like a cop blaming the victim for what a criminal did to them.
“I looked the man in the eye. I found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy,” Bush said in remarks he later regretted. “. . . I was able to get a sense of his soul.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/bush-saw-put...
The limit of shame is entwined with the information we consume.
If you were presented the War through the lens of "denazification", you might think the war was ethically justifiable.
What's different is that it is widely publicised pretty much live and that it hasn't happened in some time (although in the Syrian civil war Aleppo was similarly flattened). The invasion of Iraq is a bit different in that the gap between Iraqi and US capabilities was so great that the US did not really need to go all the way on that occasion (and of course they didn't want to show you, anyway).
On the other other hand, I think the West has not really been involved in this type of warfare since WWII/Korea, so we don't really have a point of comparison with Western tactics.
I should know better than trying to discuss this sort of topic as it's obviously always impossible.
It is also plausible that some residents would prefer to go east to west. Not every resident of Eastern Ukraine supports the government. And we don't hear about it much, but reprisals and extra judicial killings of "collaborators" are happening.
Finally there is self interest. It's by no means certain that refugees who go west will be able to return to Mariupol after the war.
This will all get me voted down because it doesn't suit the narrative. I don't like the Russian invasion and I want it to fail but I also wish we were interested in the truth more than "winning the information war".