Apples and oranges. US is not and never was plundering Cuba, unlike Russians who plunder every single state in their sphere of influence until nothing is left. This is not about some nukes on Cuba, this is about living like a normal person and not in a corrupt, fascist despotism where you die decades prematurely and nobody cares.

You're going to have a hell of a time convincing anyone that the Cuban missile crisis nearly started a nuclear war because the US felt bad for Cuba.

I said it's apples to oranges, didn't I? This comparison just makes no sense whatsoever.

The comparison makes complete sense when we speak about the roles of buffer states, which is the conversation that the parent post started.

Your off-topic complaint that distracted from that point, is that eastern imperialism was worse than western imperialism. Maybe it's true, maybe it's not [1], but it's not relevant to the subthread.

[1] It's difficult to have a meaningful conversation on this subject, because every empire of note has a long history of being smeared in shit, and spends a lot of effort indoctrinating its subjects that its brand of imperialism is way better than all the other ones.

It's not off topic at all. If somebody abuses their buffer states this much they can't have them. Perhaps there wouldn't be such opposition to the claims of reasonability of their request if the Russians treated their buffer states nicely (or at least not so badly).

I'm curious what your definition of "plunder" is, considering the USA's track record towards Cuba.

https://www.reformer.com/opinion/columnists/usategui-us-poli...

Look up what the Russians did in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Lithuania, Hungary etc. That's my definition. What the US did is nowhere near that. My grandmother said she preferred the Nazis to the Russians.

Talking about corrupt despotism it is not clear to me if you are talking about Russia or Ukraine.

Sure, Ukraine had - and still has - problems.

But one thing is to have your own problems, and entirely another thing is to be forced to have Russian problems and to have every hope for change destroyed by Russia because it's threatening their position that they built on sponsoring the corrupt people.

Consider that it was revealed that FSB has/had a massive corruption campaign in Ukraine funded with billions of US dollars per year. Let's wait with judging Ukraine until we can judge fairly.