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.
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.
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.
NATO won't protect Turkey if they are the aggressors. NATO is a defensive alliance.
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.
Preventing allies from retaliating
More like Revolution of Installing Puppet Government by western nations.
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.
It is not the same as the Ukrainian Armed Forces, which includes the army.
Several of your comments here are regurgitations of Kremlin propaganda. Please stop spreading misinformation.
> It is not the same as the Ukrainian Armed Forces, which includes the army.
This is a bizzare distinction to emphasize. The National Guard is an armed unit. During war, their role is exactly the same as the armed forces.
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.
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.
https://meduza.io/feature/2022/04/17/ot-bandery-do-azova-otv...
"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.
[1] - https://time.com/5926750/azov-far-right-movement-facebook/
[2] - https://propertyofthepeople.org/document-detail/?doc-id=2202...
* 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.
The Nazis were just as much far left as far right, if not more. It's funny to me how people are unwilling to acknowledge this.
He has every right to say that the West (and a bit of Turkey) are aggressors and he is defending his country by bombing cities in it.
So did NATO in 1999 bombing of yugoslavia.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/1999/may/08/balkans <- cluster bombing a (farmers) market
https://www.theguardian.com/world/1999/apr/24/balkans3 <- tv station, "Serb TV station was legitimate target, says Blair"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grdelica_train_bombing <- civilian train and bridge (and having to speed up the video, to make it seem non-intentional)
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-48134881 <- even a chinese embassy
http://edition.cnn.com/WORLD/europe/9904/07/nato.attack.01/i... <- "school, a monastery and other civilian facilities"
http://edition.cnn.com/WORLD/europe/9904/14/refugees.02/inde... <- albanian refugees
http://edition.cnn.com/WORLD/europe/9905/01/kosovo.military.... <- bus
etc.
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.
How is this principially different from Assad?
We are much closer to this.
Also guess who might have joined Russia after Ukraine? You don't think having Russia suddenly as your neighbor doesn't matter?
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.
Did the US want to annex that country into the US? And convert its citizens into obedient Americans? And murder everyone who resisted?
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.
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.
The Serbs are still stirring things up in Bosnia. Stop now and embrace Tito's genius.
You learn something new every day...
So no, it’s not the same at all as NATO intervening in an actual ethnic cleansing campaign.
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.
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).
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?
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.
Also, who gives a f*ck what Putin says?!?