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Re:Japan Breaks with U.S. Allies, Buys Russian Oil at Prices... by 5040 on Monday April 03, 2023 @09:42AM (#35423423)
>The fact that there's a major land war in Ukraine, which the US did not start and had no power to prevent

Come now, two of the more plausible candidates for the beginning of this whole thing are the violated promise not to expand NATO Eastward and the American invasion of Serbia. Relations between America, and its allies, and Russia have been soured for decades now, with America being largely to blame.

Re:Japan Breaks with U.S. Allies, Buys Russian Oil at Prices... by simonh on Monday April 03, 2023 @09:55AM (#35423608)
NATO never made any formal commitment not to expand eastward, and Russian presidents from Yeltsin onwards were completely relaxed about eastern European countries choosing freely to join NATO. Gorbachev is on record saying he was never even aware any such statements had been given.

In May 2002 Vladimir Putin said Ukraine was entitled to decide on its own whether to join NATO and that he did not see such a decision as one that would “cloud” Russian-Ukrainian relations.

I think it's highly loaded to phrase this as NATO expansion. It sounds like NATO somehow coerced these countries into joining, or annexed them somehow. These countries came beating on NATO's door desperate to be let in. The instigating trigger for Putin's 2014 annexation of Crimea wasn't anything anyone in NATO said or did, it was the newly elected Ukrainian government's signalling that they wanted to join NATO.

Re:Japan Breaks with U.S. Allies, Buys Russian Oil at Prices... by 5040 on Monday April 03, 2023 @10:17AM (#35423973)
>I think it's highly loaded to phrase this as NATO expansion. It sounds like NATO somehow coerced these countries into joining, or annexed them somehow.

That's not where I would put the emphasis. Though there was some courting, the anti-Russian sentiment in these countries was genuine.

Russia shares its borders with 14 other nations. What happened is that, one by one, many of these joined, or became partner to, an alliance which views Russia as something to be contained. Russian leaders may not have been worried at first, but that changed later.

Re:Japan Breaks with U.S. Allies, Buys Russian Oil at Prices... by simonh on Monday April 03, 2023 @10:49AM (#35424572)
>views Russia as something to be contained.

Contained within it's borders. You mean like constrained from territorial expansion and annexation of neighbouring territory? Yes. Just as all the European countries are contained within their borders.

Being constrained within your borders should be the default for everyone. The fact that Moscow has a president that doesn't think that way is exactly the problem NATO was created to deal with.

I'm a realist, I know there are cases when military interventions are necessary. Preventing genocide in Kosovo, kicking the Iraqi army out of Kuwait. There can be messy situations where the right course of action isn't clear, but Ukraine is not one of those. Flat out annexing large swathes of neighbouring countries is precisely the problem NATO was created to counter. It turns out for very, very good reason.

Re:Japan Breaks with U.S. Allies, Buys Russian Oil at Prices... by racnid on Monday April 03, 2023 @10:28AM (#35424161)
You're joking right?
Re:Japan Breaks with U.S. Allies, Buys Russian Oil at Prices... by mcphage on Monday April 03, 2023 @09:51AM (#35423538)
> two of the more plausible candidates for the beginning of this whole thing are [...] the American invasion of Serbia

Are we talking about 1999?

Re:Japan Breaks with U.S. Allies, Buys Russian Oil at Prices... by 5040 on Monday April 03, 2023 @10:01AM (#35423704)
Yeah. Those initial airstrikes really freaked Russia out. Relations were never the same after them. NATO's first military attack really shook them.
Re:Japan Breaks with U.S. Allies, Buys Russian Oil at Prices... by mcphage on Monday April 03, 2023 @11:26AM (#35425336)
> Relations were never the same after them.

There have been... a lot of momentous geopolitical events since 1999.

Re:Japan Breaks with U.S. Allies, Buys Russian Oil at Prices... by simonh on Tuesday April 04, 2023 @04:20AM (#35436633)
They were shaken so much they decided to bomb and shell the living crap out over every square inch of Chechnya to get it out of their system. I'm sure blowing up some of their own apartment buildings that September helped them de-stress. I'm sorry, but the Russian government isn't a bunch of children. They're not that easily rattled.

That was long after the whole mess in Bosnia, so it's not like we hadn't seen a horrible bloody genocidal conflict that the US and European countries intervened in before.

Re:Japan Breaks with U.S. Allies, Buys Russian Oil at Prices... by Iwan-Zotow on Monday April 03, 2023 @10:01AM (#35423689)
yes, 1999