Re:The euro and the dollar are a penny away from parity for ...
by ben_w on Monday July 11, 2022 @12:22PM
(#32058196)
Unfortunately there is evidence that Putin was deliberately stirring up trouble.
Even more unfortunately, at that level propaganda is beyond my ken to reliability disabuse, and I know full well that hawks want me to fear more than I need to.
Yet it is the locals he's claiming to want to liberate who are shooting his troops, the cities he's saying he wants to save that are being flattened by his missiles.
Reminds me of the stories of Afghanistan, where we blew up weddings and then were surprised the locals didn't like us.
Maybe if Germany had Russian-majority areas, had started banning the use of Russian, and had violent demonstration clashes resulting in neo-Nazis burning ethnic Russian supporters and seperatists alive - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Odessa_clashes
I don't support Putin or the invasion at all, but it's not like he just invaded out of the blue. Ukraine also failed to allow Donetsk and Luhansk to hold independent referendums for secession - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minsk_agreements#Elections_in_...
The situation is nowhere near as black and white as just "Putin madman". A peaceful compromise around referendums and the right to self-determination would have been the best outcome, but now we should be neutral and put the stability of our own countries first.