It’s a liberal cesspool full of people who refuse to listen when you speak. I explained how the SMO in Russia was justified going all the way back to fucking WWII and Stepan Bandera to Russia not wanting Ukraine in NATO and some dickhead told me to “tOuCH gRaSS”. Didn’t even address any of my points, just that “dEnAziFIcaTioN iSnT a gOoD rEasOn, iT’s aS bAd aS wMDs”.
Fucking moron. I hate that fucking place so fucking much.
Were they not on the cusp of joining before Russia invaded? I thought that was one of the reasons for the invasion, to prevent Ukraine from joining NATO?
There has been talk for years. But it never went anywhere and was never going to. I don’t remember right off hand why ( I just woke up and my brain is still foggy) but I do know it was never going to happen. Putin just wanted more land and believed that since NATO was never going to vote to have Ukraine join, it was going to be a quick conflict and the thing would be over. He took Crimea and the world did nothing. If it worked once why wouldn’t it work again?
Man was he wrong.
How does the civil war factor in?
Because if Ukraine is part of NATO and Ukraine is being invaded then NATO basically has to directly join in the fight. Which means direct conflict between NATO and Russia. That is never a good idea.
And there is no civil war. Well no more then there is in the US. There are certain groups in the US that want to break away. Obviously that won’t happen. They never gain any real traction.
In Ukraine they wouldn’t have gained traction either , but Russia decided to back and also arm the separatists. That was done for the sole purpose of giving Russia an excuse to invade and annex Crimea.
So it’s okay for NATO to arm Ukraine, but it’s not okay for Russia to arm people who are being killed by their own government?
You’re missing some facts here. There was a civil war. 14,000 people killed. 30,000 injured. 1.3+million displaced. All reported by the UN.
Except that there was and still is a civil war. A large part of those fighting on the Russian side are Ukrainians, and not just from the Donbass either. The civil war started in 2014 after the Maidan coup, and the first rebels had virtually zero support from Russia, they had to fight with whatever they could get their hands on. Most of their equipment was actually acquired from units of the Ukrainian military and police who deserted to the side of the rebels, and from the units they went on to defeat. Russia was heavily criticized by many of the people living and fighting in the new Donbass republics and by more hardline Russians for not doing more to support the rebels at that time, and even intervening to stop their advance when they had just inflicted a massive defeat on the Kiev regime forces. It was because of Russia’s insistence on stopping the fighting and trying to get a diplomatic resolution that the rebels had to leave the liberated Mariupol - one of the first cities that rose up against the Maidan - which then was re-occupied by Azov Nazis who went on to torture and brutalize the local population for years until Russia finally recaptured it last year.
And why shouldn’t Russia arm the side of the civil war which chose to reject the undemocratic, western engineered fascist coup that overthrew the legitimate government of Ukraine if the West was backing the other side, giving them money, weapons, training and more? Why the double standard? By the same logic you could say that without western interference the coup would not have succeeded in the first place or that the regime would not have survived after the coup.
The fact that you see the Maidan regime as legitimate, and the rebels (who by the way did not start out as separatists, merely as people who rejected the violent overthrow of a government they had elected and whose initial demands were merely for autonomy; portraying them as “Russian backed separatists” to delegitimize them is a characteristic of pro-Maidan propaganda) as illegitimate just shows which side you stand on.
“Putin just wanted more land” has to be the most ignorant thing I’ve ever heard about this conflict. How do you even imagine this happened? He was just sitting there bored one day and decided “you know what, more land sounds great!”
Do yourself a favor and look up the Euromaidan coup.
Have you taken a look at Russia on a map lately? Why would Russia need or want more land? More than anything else newly liberated regions are a massive financial burden on Russia. They would have required huge reconstruction efforts even without a war as they have been neglected for 30 years by the succession of kleptocratic, neoliberal, post-Soviet governments of Ukraine since 1991. Russia didn’t “take” Crimea, Crimeans voted to re-join Russia in a referendum after a fascist coup overthrew the legitimate government of Ukraine and replaced it with an ultra-nationalist russophobic regime. Crimea being majority ethnically Russian feared having the same shit happen to them as happened in Odessa when the Nazis burned dozens of people alive for protesting the coup.
The notion that Putin simply decided to attack Ukraine one day because he wanted more land or just felt like conquering someone is incredibly childish, not to mention it requires that you purposely close your eyes to all of the actual real factors, all the events, all of the history that led up to the intervention, and all of the vital national interests and concerns that Russia had and which any government would have been compelled to act on.
If Putin just wanted land why wouldn’t he take it from say, Kazakhstan, which is far less supported by the West, has a much weaker military than Ukraine - which at the start of the conflict was the second strongest military in Europe - and whose mostly empty land is nowhere near as defensible as the highly urbanized and industrialized regions of eastern Ukraine and yet far more rich in natural resources?
And why did he spend eight years refusing to allow the Donbass republics to join Russia - something that the people living there were practically begging for since it became clear that they could no longer live in peace under the post-Maidan government of Ukraine - and instead insisting on trying to maintain the territorial integrity of Ukraine by entering into agreements like Minsk I and II?