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I think the most disturbing type of argument around Ukraine is the one that pretends to be doing it "for their own good". Like "Why don't you want peace, why don't you want peace? Why do you want your people to die?" to the victims of a dictator invading their home, bombing their cities, kidnapping their children and stealing their land. If they aren't settling for your offer it's probably because they don't think your offer is good enough to actually protect them. They're in desperation, if an offer was convincing they would take it. So why not?
They've been promised security before, they gave up their nukes for it. They sign a deal that Russia won't punch them in the face, Russia violates it twice and if they don't want to just sign another without a stronger third party guarantee, it's not because they don't want peace. It's because they know Russia can't be trusted.
They don't think American investments means much, before the war there was that joke rule of "no two countries with a McDonald's have ever been at war" which was essentially emblematic of this concept. That international business interests for peace were simply too strong for a country to overcome, and yet the war happened anyway.
If someone doesn't want to support Ukraine fine, there's lots of other bad stuff we ignore and don't help out with. But those people spreading this idea that "they must want to be invaded and die so not helping them is actually the best help", I just find that really sickening.
A peace deal where there is some type of integration of Ukraine within some sort of broader alliance system and there is some peacekeeper force to dissuade aggression, is actually the morally best path and an end to a nightmare of never ending bloodpath. Interestingly Russian nationalists like Rurik Skywalker see peace as a case of Putin being a traitor to the west.
However a ceasefire as a prelude of WW3 and new war against Russia is a bad idea. As would a ceasefire that leaves Ukraine completely vurnerable. Having some boots on the ground but with the leadership behind not be warmongers, as a way to dissuade Russia, and to stop new conflict, seems to actually be the morally superior path that ends the bloodpath and sustains peace. This kind of peace deal then would have most of Ukraine integrate itself with NATO forces alliance even if nominally it doesn't enter NATO and would also include a failure of Russian war aims.
There seems to be a show where American and friends policy makers intervene with plenty of corruption of contractors and client groups making money and help escalate things in a region both through their own warmongering or supporting other groups and then other Americans frame things from the perspective of how Americans don't need to help these foreigners. I do think that sometimes going there, creating chaos and then washing your hands away from the whole issue is also irresponsible. And now Trump has been trying to get a very onerous agreement on Ukraine that gives profits even from income of Ukrainian harbors.
There isn't a conflict where we have a moral do gooder side and an immoral side here among American interventionists. Europeans should actually not like the mainstream neocon agenda sans Trump, because it has been at their expense in regards to destroying nordstream, steering conflict, and isolating them with Russia and cheap energy.
I do think that Russia it self is a potential threat to other European countries if it was more successful.
Anyway, the neocon warmongers are probably responsible for the most death and destruction in the 21st century both directly and through the chaos they caused. And every time a simple moral fairy tale that tries to copy WW2 narratives was used to justify the destruction of various countries. It is actually the moral and better path for this kind of agenda to stop.
A peace deal here would be an improvement that genuinely helps Ukraine. I actually agree with the Ukrainians that Trump's demand is too onerous. However, it is also true that Ukrainians although much less, and much less successfully than Jews, in the USA are trying to influence the country in their direction. And there are also other than Ukrainians, deep state creatures. Secondarily, there is a problem with throwing many billions around in wars. There must be an effort to audit where the money went and to go after and punish corrupt and to stop biological weapon research, and defund deep state intelligence types getting funded. Like the attempted minsinformation czar in the Biden administration, that had Ukrainian ties. I sympathize with this idea of not blindly throwing around billions of money.
In general, it would be preferable for both the Russians, Chinese and Americans and European countries to try to deescalate from great power and spheres of influence conflict, and see more benefit through trade and peaceful relations. This does involve though not allowing the Chinese for example to send fishing fleets worldwide and deplete fish supplies, and actually organizing to stop this fleet. While rhetoric about the evil Putler isn't the way to go, what I am recommending of diplomacy, requires of course countries like Russia and China to go along as well and it isn't just one way street. Even though we should see a freeze of the fanatics from the western foreign policy leadership. Whether they are fanatics due to having grudges related to the area, or fanatics about American world domination. But not being fanatical, doesn't entail letting Russia or China walk all over the interests of european countries. So peace requires strength. It doesn't require blindly throwing money around and not curtailing corruption though.
Also, it is good for European countries to be more skeptical of USA and to stop seeing Trump and republicans as the only bad guys. It is really self destructive for European countries to like the American Democratic party and its agenda because it has been a very anti european agenda. Skepticism is warranted towards MAGA agenda too. Again though, cooperation is better than conflict, and diplomacy is important. But from some of the rhetoric I see, there is this delusioanl interpretation of vassalage as being in the own good of European countries. To an extend European elites buy into this and there is a lot of delusion and irrationality. The USAID type of American influence can be detrimental in many key ways. So part of this might be the fact that European elites might had been funded by such programs or world economic forum new leaders programs or such.
And the right is correct that there is a bigger threat. And USAID was part of the problem of this threat but only one facet of the influence of a worldwide faction. The agenda of self destruction through self hatred of one's own national identity, community and its right to exist, and siding with all sorts of foreign nationalists who combine their forces with local likeminded political factions, to take over and make the natives into second class citizens colonized in their own land, is in fact a huge problem that requires focus. The fake moralistic neocon agenda, in addition to all the destruction and conflict it has brought, can both can distract from that and justify some of the key people pushing this who are part of this agenda. Although there are others, including people who might be funded by Russia or China which historically (in Russia's case more when it was USSR, but it isn't necessarily against it today neither) sided with this kind of agenda as well.
I'm no neocon, but successful interventions are easily forgotten, botched ones never area. How many lives did intervention save in Sierra Leone? In Kosovo? Operation Barkhane (until Mali kicked them out)? How many might have been saved if the West have been more active in Rwanda or Bosnia?
Foreign policy decisions seem to often suffer from the lessons of over-learning from the past. True, this does indeed mean that not every dictator is a Hitler. But equally not every plausible intervention is another Iraq.
Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria are the four major interventions prior to Ukraine. All four were complete disasters, and the two we committed hardest to did meaningful long-term damage to America in the form of trillions in additional debt and eroded social cohesion.
These were pretty marginal 'interventions'. In the case of Libya it was a no-fly zone and some sporadic airstrikes, and for all Hillary bloviated I doubt that the outcome of the Libyan Civil War would have been any less disastrous if the West did nothing except maybe Gaddafi kills a few more rebels on his way out. Post-Gaddafi the West has done almost nothing. While there has been slightly more involvement in Syria, this has been mostly fighting ISIS and didn't really start until the civil war was well underway - again, it's hardly as if absent US action Assad would have regained control over Syria. Occasionally airstriking an airfield hardly changed the course of the war. Objectively, in terms of actual action taken by the West, Kosovo and Sierra Leone were far more 'major' interventions and were successes.
Iraq was obviously a total disaster, but it was preceded by totally disastrous non-interventions and some successful interventions - this is precisely the point I'm making about over-learning lessons - not every intervention is another Iraq.
After all, Ukraine or most other contemporary foreign policy problems are not analogous in any meaningful way to Iraq or Afghanistan. The west should take some lessons from those two disasters, but the ghosts of the past can't dictate foreign policy forever.
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It is sickening, but that's the world. Absent foreign intervention (and Ukraine has been lavishly supplied by foreign benefactors relative to the Confederacy) Ukraine finds itself in roughly the same situation as the Southern Confederacy did during the American Civil War (and the combat looks a lot like the eastern theater of that war, aka. a static attritional grind with both sides unable to adapt to the fact that technological advances have invalidated their tactics,), outnumbered by the foreign enemy and stuck with frontier territories of dubious loyalty (There are probably more Ukrainians fighting in the Russian army than all foreign volunteers fighting for Ukraine combined. General Sherman's personal escort during the March to the Sea was a cavalry regiment from north Alabama.).
As a Southerner, at what point did/does the dying cease to be worth it? In retrospect I find myself angry with the likes of Jefferson Davis, brave with the lives of people like me and for what? Being perpetually poorer than the north? The "slaveocracy" whose idea of white supremacy was to import, support, and nourish ever more non-whites? The CSA richly deserved to die, and the only tragedy is that Southerners were shockingly able and brave enough to keep the war going and incur genocide-tier casualties in doing so. Ukraine pre-2014 had transformed itself from one of the better off Soviet republics to one of the poorest countries in Europe, literally worse off than Belarus.
I don't proclaim myself able to speak for Russians or Ukrainians, but from my perspective as an American this war isn't our war. I don't like the eastern-European emigres who have far too much influence in our government. There isn't going to be justice in that region. Justice probably entails digging up the graves of those responsible for failing to manage the fragmentation of the USSR into at least a customs union.
They’ve had foreign intervention and still can’t drive out the Russian military. I think honestly we should have stayed out from the start as we’ve just made them lose more slowly which means more deaths and destruction. Ukraine almost fell in tge first weeks of tge war, and if it had, Ukraine would be in better shape even if the Ukrainians like tge west more. Live under Russia, or die in a ditch so those who survive can … live under a Russia.
Why? It allowed the US to blow up some pipelines consequence free and completely tanked the German/European economy, blew up a bunch of Russian materiel, and forced European higher-ups to spend sociofinancial resources on something they really, really hate (their fighting-age men).
The only people who care less about Ukrainian lives than the US does are the Ukrainians themselves. Granted, the US put a lot of effort into assuring the Ukrainian people they wouldn't lose those lives- but American assurances over the last 60 years where they haven't directly intervened in a conflict have been worth jack shit (ignoring Israel for... reasons).
I see the same bellicose rhetoric thrown around among Canadian Boomers angry about Orange Man's taxes- the only people who care less about Canadian standards of living than the Americans are Canadians.
The point is that the people who don't want to live under a Russia are dead (wars are not functionally distinguishable from mass suicides), and no man, no problem, as they say.
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What strikes me about most of the people in the "surrender for their own good" camp is that they would never in a million years apply the same logic to themselves.
You don't need to worry. Ukrainians will not surrender. I give greater chances that they will die out as a nation due to bad demographics than they would be living under Russian government.
Eastern regions are more Russian populated, the language is dialect continuum between Ukrainian and Russian and their loyalties might be more towards Moscow than Kyiv but the rest of Ukraine is strongly nationalistic.
Think about Palestine and Israel, unsolvable problem because Palestinians are imbued with hate towards Jews. They don't care about their own country, only how to harm Israel. That's how bad nationalism works but it is a reality that no one knows how to solve.
Ukraine is similarly 100% imbued with idea that Russians are their oppressors. Except that in this case they really are. Russification worked better during the Soviet times because technically it was an independent republic. I think it even had its own seat at the UN then. The Soviet government was more like a local tragedy (like Trump in America) and not occupation.
Anyone harbouring hopes that if we let Russia win and occupy whole Ukraine thus creating peace and stop people from dying does not know anything about Ukraine. They read dry analysis that doesn't tell what real people in Ukraine feel.
I learned about Ukrainians during my time with Hare Krishnas. When the movement sizzled in the US, it became very popular in Russia and other Soviet countries. Hare Krishnas are very apolitical, their only interest in politics is if the governments will let them do what they want to do – preach, sell books, distribute food, dance on streets etc. For many hinduism is not a religion you can convert to, it is something you are born into. With Hare Krishnas it is that they go deeper and consider that your material body, your family origin is temporary and irrelevant, you are eternal soul and your natural tendency is to be a Hare Krishna. Apparently putting on robes, dancing on streets, changing diet to strictly vegetarian, even leaving the family and practically becoming a monk requires strong determination to throw away previous conceptions and in practice I didn't observe any discrimination due to nationality, race or previous status in this movement. You could criticise them for many things but not for racism.
I was living among many Hare Krishna devotees for several years and the cooperation and trust between them was phenomenal. I have never seen a better community since then. But sometimes we talked about our origins which country we are coming and what traditions we used to practice before. Devotees from Central Asia told me about their islamic practices like ramadan etc. Georgians made hachapuris, their national dish. Ukrainians however mostly told stories about Russians, how they were suffering under their rule (Holodomor), different jokes that put Russians into bad light etc. It didn't create any enmity though. The understanding was that it is all past and nationalistic designations no longer apply to devotees and it seemed they had all overcome this.
But these Hare Krishnas are practically monks. They are not like regular people who still hold these grudges. I could better judge how deep this resentment against Russians goes into Ukrainian psyche because as devotees they became more open, more willing to share these stories, to analyse and discard them as material contamination on their path to spiritual uplifting. But when I had to travel to Lviv, they warned me not to speak Russian on the street because I might get beaten by locals. I speak Russian but not Ukrainian, so it would be better for me to pretend not speaking Russian and use English instead. I spoke Russian anyway and didn't get beaten and they were nice, probably they sensed that I have an accent in Russian.
In short: anybody who thinks that you can ask Ukrainians (Zelensky is irrelevant, any other leader will be required to do the same or will be removed by another maidan) to make peace with Russia, should first show that he can make Palestinians to make peace with Israel. I mean why this is even a problem? Invite them to come to the White House, sign the peace treaty and they live in peace forever, right? Build a high wall between both countries to avoid unintended incursions and everybody is happy. Where is the problem?
You do know that the Holodomor wasn't something the Russians did to the Ukrainians in particular, don't you?
And it wasn't something that specifically Russians did. Collectivization which caused the famine was a communist project mostly supported by local communists. Documents related to Holodomor were in part written in Ukrainian by Ukrainians.
Also, all of this affected every grain producing region of the USSR, not just Soviet Ukraine, with not the Ukrainians but the Kazakhs suffering the highest per capita losses (technically within the borders of Soviet Russia at that time, as Kazakhstan wasn't a Soviet republic yet).
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I think you are trying to troll the discussion.
I ask you to avoid remarks like this.
Someone, somewhere convinced the Ukrainians with outside help that the Holodomor was an intentional Russian genocidal policy. It's 100% relevant to your argument.
First, Ukrainians, at least, the ones I spoke with mostly don't think it was intentional. Just a bad policy for which they blame Russians.
Second, it is not relevant. My argument is to show what Ukrainians feel and not if their feelings are morally justified.
Third, you are trying to be inflammatory. I refuse to discuss like that. I like motte. I can find really good information here, good gems. But please, avoid biting like that with lazy remarks.
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I think it would apply if Americans were in the same situation— under the guns of a power that we could not hope to win against, and slowly grinding away at the population while destroying infrastructure and the economy. If aliens land, the smart move is to surrender simply because the other choice is the destruction of everything you care about.
Historically this did happen to Americans (in the Civil War) and they surrendered rather than be ground down or begin systematic partisan warfare.
And they came to regret it. As did the indians.
Sometimes, dying with dignity really is the best option.
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The Hungarian leftist opposition, for one thing, agrees with you completely. On the other hand, they also parrot with absolute certainty the talking points that
Hungary should never have entered WW2 in the first place as she had no good reason to get involved in a war between great powers who never cared about her, and should have surrendered for her own good at the first chance
following a foreign policy after WW1 aimed at regaining the two thirds of her territory which she was forced by the Entente Powers to surrender was a grave mistake
For this reason, this argument rings utterly hollow to me.
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They must make peace with their Russian brothers, we must never surrender to woke degenerates or something.
I guess 'or something' would include 'not see the woke in the same light as an invading military force literally shooting people in the street, obviously, why would we?'
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Who is "they?" Most of the soldiers fighting in Ukraine weren't old enough to vote for the security agreements in the 90s. And Ukraine was famously corrupt so it's not like their vote would have counted anyway. They also don't have much choice about whether to fight since they're conscripted.
I've heard too many anecdotes of Ukrainian soldiers saying they no longer want to fight this war, they just want it to end even if they have to give up some territory. Of course anecodotes are not data, but that's all we have to go on. And realistically, the fastest way for this to end is for the US to endorse such a deal. Zelensky can't make that deal because he's built his image as this hardcore fight-to-the-end no-matter-what guy.
Although given reports that the average UKR soldier is now in their 40's, they might not be far off.
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You should watch some of the videos I’ve seen of guys getting dragged away screaming to go die at the front, their mothers often wailing in the background. Changed my perspective
Elections in Ukraine are banned right now btw
Putin is obviously the chief villain here. But this halfway alliance is the worst of both worlds - no peace but no chance of victory. Let’s just declare war on Russia if you care that much (but they never actually do care that much, it’s just virtue signalling)
the UK are now organising a coalition of the willing so maybe there are countries that want to do more than virtue signalling. also, maybe Trump is a genius and is capable of getting other people to do his bidding because they consider him an evil oracle and they believe they can do good by doing the opposite of Trump. similar to the inverse cramer index. but i guess similar to smart is not the opposite of stupid, good is not the opposite of evil.
While not personally holding an overly positive view of Trump's policies vis-à-vis Ukraine, I will observe that it has been quite successful in convincing Europe and the rest of the West to step up defense spending, which has been one of his stated policies since his first administration. Whether this is the actual intent (4D chess meme here) or worth the costs to American foreign relations is less clear to me.
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Starmer isn’t actually doing that, he’s just using a lot of weasel words to make it sound like he is. If there is a peace treaty and if that peace treaty involves a DMZ and if that DMZ needs to be patrolled then Starmer is more than happy to contribute some troops to patrol that DMZ as part of a multinational task force.
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What's the plan for the Europeans here? Go to Ukraine, get your troops killed, and then invoke Article 5?
This seems incredibly hazardous to the survival of NATO. Indeed Elon Musk retweeted this take from Thomas Massie:
It's true, the UK did send a few token troops to "help" the US with our various misadventures in the Middle East. That does not mean that we should back them up if they square off against a nuclear-armed peer adversary.
What's the game plan here? The UK doesn't have the cards. To prevent disaster, they should be told in no uncertain terms that American troops will never be sent to Ukraine.
Dead troops on foreign soil doesn't trigger Article 5.
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Do you forget that this is exactly why NATO was built? Squaring off against a nuclear armed peer adversary.
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Starmer and the others have been quite clear that any potential coalition of the willing sending troops would send the troops to be a tripwire after a cease-fire. I don't think anyone is really expecting, in the current situation for Article 5 to result to US intervention if Europe was to send troops right now, int he middle of war.
Article 5 is only if Russia attacks the mainland. foreign soldiers in Ukraine are fair game.
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I dont think they could have kept their nukes, because if they could have they would have. Nukes are obviously much better than security guarantees. It always was questionable whether the US would use nukes if they arent threatend themselves, and even if, security guarantees dont last forever in reality. 20 years may be on the short end, but at most one country has lost nukes so far. Treating those guarantees as a serious political force, or their violation as a sign you cant be trusted, is a big mistake IMO.
They never really had nukes anyway.
There is still only one country that has ever given up its nukes: South Africa.
Thats the case I had in mind with "maybe one country has lost nukes", because in that context Im not sure if that counts as a "loss". Ive edited that to be clearer.
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And if we ask the question if there has ever been a political regime that willingly surrendered its nuclear arsenal, the answer is no.
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I’m not sure if you’re aware of who has been influencing Ukraine and what that means for “sovereignty over their land”. Kolomoisky, a Jewish oligarch, is responsible for Zelensky’s rise to power and has an outsize influence in Ukraine. Some information about him —
Kolomoisky associates with and helps mostly other Jews, not just when he launders his money to his tribe abroad, but also at home:
His money went toward building up a parallel ultra-orthodox Jewish colony in Ukraine:
His relationship to Zelensky:
Kolomoisky gained his power by hiring gangs to kill whoever stood on his way, at least according to Ukrainian authorities last year. And according to the Atlantic Council:
Kolomoisky, of course, owned the TV station that first propagandized Zelensky to the public. He played a character who becomes President, a way to manipulate the public into eventually voting for him.
So yeah, when I think of “sovereignty over my land”, I don’t think about Kolomoisky taking over the resources of a country through murder, illegally extracting all the money he can, spending that money on a lavish 100 million dollar “Menorah Center” and services for his foreign tribe members, funneling the rest of the money through his tribe members to help his co-ethnics 5000 miles away, and then using this media control to boost the popularity of yet another tribe member by depicting him as the president in expensive TV series. When I think of sovereignty, I do not think of “the largest money laundering operation in history”.
If I were Ukrainian I would not want to be controlled by these guys. I would rather be controlled by my brothers in Russia. The fact that they have put out calls for their tribe to flee Russia tells me all I need to know.
And here I'm reminded of a friend-of-a-friend who matches that. Specifically, an old friend of mine, when we were talking one time, told me about another friend of his, a Neo-Nazi Ukrainian expat. Said expat's opinion (as relayed to me second-hand) was that of course the primary enemy of the Ukrainian people is Putin and his half-Tatar mongrel hordes, but the second biggest enemy is Zelenskyy, who was installed by International Jewry to punish the Ukrainian people in vengeance for the Khmelnytsky pogroms almost four centuries ago.
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Do you have some kind of strange belief that Putin’s Russia is a terrible place for powerful and well-connected Jews? There are plenty of Jews aligned with Putin. Kolomoisky is currently in jail awaiting trial with many of his domestic assets already nationalized without compensation. Much of this was already in motion before the Russian invasion. Is that all part of the plan?
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Why have you given your account password to SecureSignals?
In addition to what @Stefferi said, the whole "Ukraine as Russia's antithesis" thing was started by Poroshenko, the previous president, who in 2019 lost his reelection to Zelensky, who ran as a conciliatory candidate. Z only flipped his stance in early 2021, when his hastily assembled "drain the swamp" party slumped in the polls.
You don’t have to be as extreme as SecureSignals to see how crazy this scenario is. Ukrainian’s talk about “land” and protecting their sovereignty when a foreigner owned most of their land’s resources via corruption, to launder to his own people thousands of miles away. You mention Poroshenko, but Poroshenko had the awareness to go after Kolomoisky, which is why Kolomoisky fled to Israel (until Zelensky’s reelection, which was his own project). Kolomoisky really wanted his Jewish protege Oleksandr Lazorko in charge of Ukraine’s oil industry at a separate company, and when Poroshenko fired him…
When foreigners raid your country’s resources with their own paramilitary forces, and arrange for people to become president, you don’t have sovereignty. The reason these people fled Russia is because Russia stamps down on this stuff — replacing it with their own Slavic version, sure, but at least it doesn’t go to an insular tribe from a different culture. See what they did with Bill Browder.
Kolomoisky owned “most” of Ukraine’s resources? What?
The Jews who leave Russia leave, like many others, for economic reasons, not because there’s some huge fear of United Russia pursuing pogroms.
A project that has now ended with him in jail, stripped of citizenship, with billions of dollars of his assets seized and sold by the Ukrainian state without compensation…
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How would it be different if a true-blood ethnic Ukrainian who could trace his bloodline hundreds of years through Galician Cossacks or whoever owned most of Ukraine's resources through corruption and laundered it to his billionaire friends thousands of miles away (at their mansions on private islands)?
The comparison with SS is entirely valid when you shrug at "hyper-rich corrupt monopolists who don't give a fuck about the common people" but it's suddenly worthy of attention when they happen to have Israeli citizenship. One wonders what the chances of you Noticing ancestry of any other ethnicity would be.
You, as in a common citizen, don't have sovereignty and it's not your country whether a "foreigner" or a co-ethnicist (his tribe is hardly the same, just like Red Tribe and Blue Tribe aren't the same) does that.
In my first comment I point to how Kolomoisky doesn’t simply spend his ill-gotten funds as the prototypical prodigal son, but instead very meticulously allocates his resources to help his own tribal members. The 100 million dollar Jewish center may employ hundreds of Jews, may give out scholarships, etc. It gives aid to the ultra-orthodox to ensure a high birth rate. There’s the Chabad donations, donations to Jewish educational media, to “Federation of Jewish Communities of the CIS”. This isn’t a billionaire who wants to live and let live, this is someone who is fundamentally transferring the resources of one people to another. It’s pure tribalism: exploit the resources you have momentarily seized, and then give those resources out to thousands of Jews across the world, in the form of enormous endowments and donations.
Got it, so he's not just the same as a regular corrupt billionaire, he's better.
Regular corrupt billionaire: donates mostly to his family, I see none of it even if he happens to have the same haplogroups as I.
Jewish tribalist billionaire: donates to Jews, I see none of it but the Jews who intersect with me in a non-ethnic grouping do.
I would agree with the point you are making if I believed that a Russian would be just as corrupt as Kolomoisky. But I don’t think this is true. A Russian would be corrupt, yes, but probably not as corrupt. And a Russian who is spending lavishly on prostitutes and vodka is at least keeping resources within the economy. If I’m not mistaken, the consensus is that Putin has the oligarchs under control.
Why, yes, I do believe that a Jewish oligarch does not have some inherent drive to be more corrupt than a Russian one. Russian oligarchs are known to have, to a large extent, either gangster or nomenklatura origins, they're not some sort of wholesome old money gentlemen who rule like benevolent if somewhat venal nobles.
You're under the impression that they would be so rubeish as to purchase Russian prostitutes and vodka?
If I'm not mistaken, the consensus is also that Putin controlling them does not mean he's going to channel their riches towards the good of the countrymen, merely that he won't allow them near the levers of power.
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If Kolomoyskyi has an outsized influence in Ukraine, why did this happen?
This is literally the third paragraph of the Wikipedia Kolomoyskyi page where your other quotes are from - don't you think it's more than a bit mendacious to not include this detail when discussing Kolomoyskyi's supposed influence?
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What on Earth does this have to do with Russia attacking Ukraine and killing hundreds of thousands of people?
Because this influence in Ukraine — that pushed for a NATO alliance despite the promise of war, funded programming to change sentiments, bought the current president’s popularity, funded battalions that waged violence, exploited the resources for their own gain and their tribesmen — have less in common with the average Ukrainian than Vladimir Putin. So when we are talking about:
We should consider who the victims are, who the dictator is, and who has ties to the land. The other complaints in the post, about bombings and invasion, are a natural consequence of a war caused by a foreign influence within Ukraine — a corrupt influence which stole resources from the people and sent it off to their foreigner cousins 5000 miles away, in the largest money laundering case in history. Do you want what is best for the people or not? The post appears to imply that the current Ukrainian leadership that is negotiating is interested in “[the Ukrainians’] Own Good”. Per the above, that is very doubtful. Their past history shows that they consider Ukraine a resource to extract for their own clan.
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Let's talk about this for a second.
On the one hand, if Ukrainians want to fight to the last man, that is their right. I will not suggest they don't have that.
On the other hand, guess what? Unless your opponent is going to systematically kill you all (and there are examples of this sort of thing), defensive wars are rarely justified in terms of a cost-benefit analysis of human life. For instance, England could almost certainly have saved a great many British lives by surrendering to Hitler during World War Two.
What defensive wars do (if they succeed, which they can do even if they are technically a loss - witness the Finnish Winter War) is enable a unique culture and people group to preserve and maintain that culture and the state sovereignty that protects it. And, sadly, Ukrainian culture was already on shaky ground before the Russian invasion. But the war really accelerated that development, between out-migration to Europe and the absolute meatgrinder in the trenches. The Ukrainians understand this (which is why their conscription law blocks recruitment of young men - prime fighting age - to preserve their demographics). Continuing the war means that the already severe Ukrainian demographic problems will continue, and they might have to dip into their "seed corn" of young men. This would be a tragedy.
Ukraine will never recover from this war. It is never getting Crimea back, and it is almost certainly never getting back the areas of Western Ukraine currently occupied by Russia. Its population is shredded, its infrastructure increasingly weakening and its considerable Soviet-era inheritance largely spent. There is a possibility that they are already at the point where their best-case outcome postwar even if they did regain territory back to 2022 lines was that of a vassal or client state, clinging to the EU for dear life and trading away its vast natural resources to foreign investment firms in exchange for an influx of cash and workers to help rebuild their infrastructure...and the worst case scenario is one where they actually become a failed state, possibly losing their sovereignty again, perhaps to the Russians, but perhaps to blue-helmeted UN peacekeepers sent in to Kiev to keep the peace...or just keep the lights on.
Every single Ukrainian who dies in the trenches pushes the country as a whole a little closer to this dark outcome. At a certain point, if you wish to preserve the Ukrainian heritage, you have to ask yourself "how is this goal best served."
I agree that ultimately this is a decision the Ukrainians have to make. But it is worth considering.
Are people saying this, or are they irritated because the Ukrainians still seem hung up on getting Crimea back after a decade? (I understand the Ukrainians being hung up on Crimea, but it is probably a severe obstacle in negotiations if they really mean it.)
I agree with everything you said but I am somewhat skeptical of this:
I was not under the impression that Ukraine possessed valuable resources. The "mineral deal" thing was just a way for the US to provide some sort of security promise while maintaining strategic ambiguity. As another commenter said, rare Earths aren't actually rare, it's just that they are so diffuse they cannot be profitably extracted. Happy to be proven wrong though!
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the issue with rare earths production isn't so much the diffusion, but the absolutely massive environmental damage extracting and refining them reaks- not like 'causes global warming' but like 'the drinking water is unsafe for hundreds of miles around'. It makes sense to set up extracting them in extremely poor countries(eg Ukraine, most of Africa) who might consider the toxic lakes the size of small US states worth it.
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Ukraine has a lot of very fertile land, which has traditionally been a large part of their geopolitical importance as I understand it. I suppose it is probably true that if Putin plowed them all under with a new superweapon the United States could simply build more farms in Kansas but that still seems fairly important to me.
(Based on occasionally reading stuff along the lines of "Russians after heated four week long gunfight finally conquer the first room in the Razelgrazelsky Salt Mine, a hardened nuclear-proof underground facility constructed in 1984 with 100,000,000 tons of concrete to house the Soviet Union's Winter Soldier program" I believe there's also a fair amount of conventional mineral extraction potential, but I'm not sure how significant that is comparatively.)
It’s also fertile arable land that the projection models suggest won’t be much affected by global climate change in the next 40 years. By 2060, it could be a significantly larger percentage of the world’s remaining agricultural output than it is now. I know not everyone here believes that GCC is a real phenomenon, but it is an indisputable fact that many high up military and government people in many countries do.
Climate change is real of course, but it's a non sequitur. Food production per capita is going up, not down. Climate change won't alter this state of affairs.
We're also much less reliant on fertile land and specific weather patterns than we used to be. See my comment below.
More importantly, Ukraine is currently only about 2% of global wheat production. That's its most important crop. Figure that Ukraine is responsible for less than 0.1% of global food calories. Even if that share doubles, it doesn't make a dent. And then consider that food is less scarce than it has ever been, and this trend only gets bigger every year.
Ukrainian wheat fields were very important in the days of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. Their importance is small now, and will be even less in the future.
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Ukraine pre war was something like 0.5% of world's agricultural output. Every single major European country produces more food (by value) than Ukraine. Even if their yields fall due to climate change (highly unlikely: agriculture can adapt to climate change very easily), it's extremely unlikely that Ukraine's fields would make a significant difference. I certainly hope that high up military and government people are not so innumerate to take this seriously. As it happens, the silly climate change deniers would be more correct on this than you.
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Yeah, IIRC, Ukraine has one of the highest percentages of arable land in the world, up there with Bangladesh.
Since I like tangents... I believe that fertile land is worth less now that at any time in since the neolithic revolution. The amount of food produced per capita has never been higher, and it just goes up and up every year.
In the US alone, maize yields are up 40% since the year 2000. Milk production per cow is up 60%. Yields in other countries have increased even faster as they catch up to US standards. We still haven't fully unlocked the amazing gains that the Haber Process made possible over 100 years ago.
Empires used to be built on fertile land. Egypt was once the most valuable piece of real estate in the world since the flooding of the Nile river guaranteed food production every year. It produced enough surplus to feed the urban poor in Rome, and later, Constantinople. When Egypt was lost in the 7th century, Constantinople emptied out.
The most densely populated places in the world today are still often river valleys: The Ganges, the Nile, the Niger, etc...
But we've cracked the code. We can make our own fertilizer. We can irrigate the desert. Indio, California is the driest city in the US. And it is an agricultural powerhouse. Population may grow geometrically, as Malthus stated, but food production has grown geometrically at a faster rate.
The wheat and rapeseed fields of Ukraine matter less than ever.
On top of everything else, 40% of American corn gets turned into ethanol and added to gasoline despite this plausibly being worse for the environment than just burning gasoline and corn ethanol having an EROI much worse than gasoline.
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A great tangent!
Yes, I think you're right. (It's also potentially interesting given the speculation that global warming will make northern climes much more arable, IIRC Russia in particular could benefit). And the more right you are, unfortunately, the more likely it is that Ukraine will suffer a worse outcome.
Ukraine also has, or had, a lot of Soviet-era technical and industrial capacity. I'm not optimistic much of this will survive the war intact and in Ukrainian hands, however.
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IIRC US bulk crop production has expanded even though the amount of farmed acreage has declined substantially in the last few decades. It's a huge change and not one that gets talked about often.
What surprised me is how big the increase has been just since 2000.
I would have assumed that progress had leveled off, but no, it just keeps getting better.
Unfortunately it’s extremely dependent on the Haber-Bosch process. Modern crops aren’t grown in soil as much as they are grown in a six foot deep layer of fertilizer. Much of the phosphates for that fertilizer comes from Russia which is part of why food prices have been going up so much over the last few years.
No, they don't. Russia produces 5.6% of global phosphate output which is about 60% of US production.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phosphate
Could be wrong but I doubt it. Phosphate prices started going up in Feb 2020 and were quite high, but have now reduced to the merely elevated levels of 2012 since the end of 2024.
https://www.indexmundi.com/commodities/?commodity=rock-phosphate&months=240
That said, this graph is a little weird looking, so maybe it's not totally trustworthy.
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No one told my $NTR stock about higher prices. Potash shortages are always 30 years away.
https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/NTR/
Russia has been very good about defeating the oil sanctions (with some huge percentage of the world oil fleet turning off their transponders). It's likely they are shipping nearly as many phosphates as they were before too.
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I posted my own treatise a few days ago. But the short summary is:
My contention is that #1 is maximally bad for Ukraine, it's an attritional war, and Russia can easily out-grind Ukraine over time. #2 may be maximally bad for the world (if it triggers WW3), though it may be the morally correct answer (depends on your morals, of course). By the actions of the aid providers, #2 is off the table because Russia losing is a red line for most. #3 stinks, but given the remaining choices, seems to be better.
I also don't think that a negotiated peace is sucking Putin's/Russia's cock or anything. It's accepting the present reality, especially when considering that we're not letting Russia lose.
Another angle is that saying that one "supports Ukraine," while sending a generation of her men to die is, to me, repugnant. It's treating the Ukrainian people as a pawn to use against Russia to simply tie them down and deplete their resources. While at the same time effectively destroying Ukraine in the process. I don't count that as effective "support." I will concede it's a rational idea if one is solely against Russia at all costs, but I think it's disingenuous to call it supporting Ukraine.
The 'with or without guarantees' in 3 is the crux of the entire disagreement though, isn't it. To simplify, Europe and Ukraine want 3 with guarantees, the US wants 3 without guarantees.
The version without guarantees is the one that could be said to be fellating Putin since it asks literally nothing of him that he doesn't want.
We can examine the various scenarios here.
With a security guarantee -- the mere suggestion of having NATO (or even NATO adjacent) troops in Ukraine is one of the things that caused Putin to start this war. If we are trying to negotiate a peace, there's little chance that Russia would agree to this. Honestly, the only way that I think this could happen is if Russia were to actively lose this war and terms could be dictated, as was the case for Germany post WW2. The West doesn't seem to even want Russia to lose, so this is a non-starter, regardless of my opinions.
Without a security guarantee -- this splits into two possibilities. A lasting, if tenuous peace, or a pause followed by more fighting. If there is peace, hooray! If it devolves into more fighting, then you're no worse off than the status quo realistically. If Russia truly wants to destroy Ukraine, then unless the West actually steps up to defeat them, I don't think Ukraine could prevent this outcome. It's exactly the same as the first option of perpetual stalemate wherein Ukraine eventually runs out of men and has to concede.
The US-led proposal that was shot down was a middle ground, IMO. There are no troops on the front line (which is what Russia would never agree to), but there are Western civilians that would be there acting as a sort of trigger. It's far more palatable and could be presented to the Russian people as more of a victory. It would give them an offramp to peace.
The idea that the West can dictate and compel Russia what they must do with only a stern talking to is kind of pants-on-head crazy wishful thinking. The only way to achieve that outcome is to force a defeat. Forcing a defeat requires force, and all the good and bad that could potentially come from that.
That's not true -- you have reinforced Putin's notion that he can use foreign diplomatic pressure to pause and resume conflicts whenever it is convenient.
I mean, that is true it isn't a notion. He can stop and start fighting in Ukraine for whatever reason he wants. Just like Turkey in Northern Iraq and Syria. There is no regional power capable of checking such whims and the risks of effective responses from non-locals is too high.
Far too much of this Ukraine scenario, and international relations generally is people pointing at a state of being that never was and saying, "I want that thing I pretend I used to have."
Putin can order his troops to stop advancing and hunker down defensively but he cannot just halt the entire war unilaterally. Same for Zelensky. A ceasefire has to be mutual.
But even more relevantly -- the notion isn't about Putin's decisions on the battlefield, it's about whether he can induce the wider world to pressure Ukraine into adopting a ceasefire or treaty only to cynically renege on it and restart hostilities at a whim.
If Putin wants to stop fighting, he'll need to ask for peace on terms to which his enemy are willing to agree. Likewise Zelensky. They don't get to pause/unpause it like a video game.
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It's hard to know exactly what is tenable without knowing what's being discussed behind closed doors, all I have are questions:
-Did the US-led proposal even involve Western civilians on the border? It didn't specify that from what I can tell, just that the US would have a future investment stake in Ukraine (not that the mines would be operated by westerners, or that they would be built soon, or that they would be near to the front line).
-Is there not a wider possibility space where Russia's negotiated peace comes with official acceptance of its new borders and in exchange Ukraine gets NATO membership? I would think there is give and take to be had here (though I am just a guy on the internet).
-Isn't there also the possibility of peacekeeping troops from a selection of nations on the border without Ukraine having NATO membership?
Even having US interests close to the border would serve as quite a deterrent in my opinion. It also gives Putin an out because it wouldn't be troops on their border.
I'll start by saying I'm not being a mind reader of Putin, but I would be surprised if he went for this. My gut feel it there would have to be a lot more concessions in terms of a DMZ on the Ukrainian side for anything like this to even be considered, and I'm not sure if you could even have an ascension into NATO if you're in that type of agreement. It would be in Ukraine's interest in this case to goad Russia into a conflict so they could invoke Article 5. I think this would apply in the case of NATO or just unaffiliated troops.
...also just a guy on the internet...
How true is this, really? Off the dome, I can think of at least two cases where governments have nationalized American interests and gotten away with it (Cuba, Venezuela). Economic interests don't seem to guarantee immunity.
Sure, I'm not going to argue with that. I think the argument made elsewhere that I'm just repeating is that it gives at least a deterrent, as well as casus belli if they were literally attacked.
It feels rather different to be nationalized than to be taken by an armed force. In the hypothetical world where US companies were operating on the Ukrainian frontier, I would very much doubt that whoever is running Ukraine would nationalize those operations.
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It’s very unlikely Putin would agree to any deal that allows Ukraine to join NATO. That’s the whole reason he started the war in the first place, and he would be better served just continuing to grind on if that was the offer.
I think he might concede to a Kievan rump state being granted NATO admission if he was given maximalist territorial claims. For obvious reasons this probably is not a great deal for Kiev.
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We shouldn't self-own just because it means Putin gets what he wants.
The problem with guarantees is that Zelenskyy would be motivated to then antagonize the Russians to draw NATO troops into the fight. It's the only way he can ever win back back the lost territories.
The mineral deal was an elegant solution because it provided a sort of guarantee while giving the U.S. strategic ambiguity to cut Zelenskyy loose if he went rogue. That's why it's so concerning that Zelenskyy appeared to walk away from this deal (or have a spat with Trump, either way it's bad). Personally, I'm glad the deal didn't go through because I don't want to hear about how we stole their worthless minerals for the next 5 decades.
Going forward, we should promise Ukraine a massive transfer of weapons contingent on peace. But the US must maintain strategic ambiguity. A guarantee is untenable, both because it could draw NATO into the war, but also because Russia would never accept it.
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Why doesn't Europe give guarantees then?
I suspect that "Europe" (which could have given guarantees at any point since 2014, or 1991, or 2014) perhaps wants the United States to give guarantees. Or at least they don't want to give them unilaterally.
Indeed – they were obviously hoping/assuming the US would be part of any guarantee, but I would imagine European leaders are, right now in London, trying to figure out what guarantees if any they can plausibly offer by themselves.
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I think the most disturbing part is how little everyone with such strong opinions knows about Ukraine, Russia, and the conflict between them.
Russia is absolutely in the wrong for invading, but let's look at the actual political and military realities when we're talking about the issue.
The eastern provinces had a strong enough Russian-aligned sector of the populace (with some surreptitious Russian help) to functionally secede from Ukraine and fight the Ukrainians to a standstill for years before the invasion. Ukraine hasn't had any real sovereignty over those territories for over a decade now.
Yes, it's a violation of their treaty for Russia to take their territory. This may shock people, but governments often violate their treaties. For instance, virtually everyone in NATO is violating that treaty.
The military situation has been fairly static for years. Neither side seems to be on the verge of winning. Both are having trouble with getting enough troops to fight, but Russia can draw from a much larger population, plus allies like North Korea. Ukraine is supplementing with mercenaries, but that's expensive.
The economic sanctions on Russia have failed to impact their economy enough. In fact, it's basically just made Russia less exposed to economic sanctions from the west, and more in hock to the Chinese, who now provide most of their consumer goods.
I support Ukraine primarily in this matter, I support funding and arming them to resist the Russian invasion. But I also think we need to be realistic about what peace will look like absent major escalations on our part. The Ukrainians haven't been capable of recapturing their lost provinces militarily. How long should they keep fighting for territories where most of the remaining population don't really want to be part of Ukraine?
Ultimately, it is the Ukrainians who have to answer these questions, not us. At the end of the day, they still live next to Russia, and we don't. I really hope this war reaches its conclusion soon, and I hope the Ukrainians don't lose anything more than necessary. But unless the military situation changes drastically, the Russians aren't just going to give back the territory. And no one can make them without risking nuclear war. That's the realpolitik situation.
I think the eastern territories aren't really the issue, nor is it a question of whether Ukraine loses more or less in the eventual settlement.
Rather, I think it's whether or not the Ukraine gets to live the next couple of decades with the notion that the settlement exhausts everyone's claims -- that whatever has happened is done and final.
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I am extremely sympathetic to Ukraine over Russia on racial and religious grounds. But the fact remains that the best way to save Ukrainian lives is calling a ceasefire and retrenching. No Putin isn't a trustworthy actor but he'll be licking his wounds for a long time, and Ukraine isn't getting its lost territories back. We need to live in reality and that means accepting that Crimeans will get their wish to be ruled by Russia.
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What choices are there?
What actual peace proposal is even credible?
Ukraine can cede the annexed land to Russia and then do what, promise it won't align with NATO and stay neutral? What happens if Russia decides it wants to capture even more of Ukraine in a few years, for whatever reason? The tools available for resolving that are the same as the tools we have now. All that was accomplished from that was that Russia was granted even more edge.
Ukraine should just unconditionally surrender? Their people won't accept that.
Russia won't accept any deal that involves a security guarantee for Ukraine. The West can impose one anyway but some worry that will lead to a nuclear exchange.
It's a shit sandwich no matter where you bite into it.
Didnt the vast majority of wars end this way though? Loser making some concessions, winner in no way reducing his ability?
Sure, though whether or not it's a good idea depends on what the goals of the invader are, no?
Russia has engaged in a series of expansionist salami-slicing tactics like this. Giving in just seems to embolden them.
Sure it depends on the goals. Its just that very few wars are fought to the last, and its not because the typical warmonger is so much nicer than Putin.
Before the second phase of the Ukraine war, they variously supported seperatist and revolutionary movements, and that seems to be fair game for anyone.
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1: We fund the Ukrainians until they can't fight anymore, then they get a worse deal or none at all.
2: We enter the war on the side of Ukraine, mudstomp Russia for six minutes before the nukes fly, and we all sing Kumbaya as the bombs fall.
3: We strongarm Ukraine into making a bad deal and hope it gives us time to strongarm Europe into maybe starting to think about having a military at some point in the future.
4: Pre-emptive nuclear strike which will fuck Ukraine worse than the Russians.
Any other ideas?
So. What are the limits to nuclear armageddon blackmail here? Why can't Russia just invade a NATO member like Finland and say fuck you, they're a threat to our security, surrender or the nukes fly?
Because of a treaty that isn't worth the paper it's printed on. You know this stuff.
However, in this scenario it's the US invading Russia, right?
I don't follow. If it's not worth the paper it's printed on why does the "Because" happen?
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my country's core interest: so nowhere close to Russia's borders which is why expansion of NATO up to Russia's borders was idiotic
the other side of this is, of course, what is the limiting principle of ignoring nuclear armageddon blackmail?
if you allow Russia to threaten us with nuclear armageddon if we surround Moscow and bomb it to ruins, you're just giving the nuclear armageddon blackmailer what they want which basically means Finland is next, and also Sweden, and also Denmark, and also Poland, and also Germany, and also France, and also the UK
the fact you don't like it that others aren't willing to face armageddon over Juensuu, Finland, doesn't mean there are no limits to nuclear blackmail, just that most put their limit much closer to their own country's core interests (which could be their borders or even within their borders) instead of on Russia's border
at some point, nuclear superpowers' core interests are distant enough that neither is willing to face the risk of nuclear Armageddon and then we have a détente where the nuclear blackmail isn't a credible threat; that may not always be the case, e.g., Pakistan v India, but it is the case with the US and NATO and Russia
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They might well accept one if it is provided by a party that would not be seen as likely to help or look away as Ukraine + backers prepare to reconquer lost territories. China or India, on the face of it, would be good candidates - the problem is that it's unclear if you could actually convince the Indians to do it, and the West might not fully trust China and moreover under Trump is unlikely to be interested in raising its diplomatic prestige in such a fashion.
The problem is that it also seems unlikely that the Ukrainians would accept such a security guarantee, or in fact any security guarantee that is not actually a guarantee of cover and support as they prepare for reconquest. Especially in the eyes of the leadership, the prospect of being left in perpetuity with exactly what they have now might be scarcely better than actual complete defeat, and they still estimate the value of their position as higher than that. I mean, European boots on the ground are, if anything, more likely now that Trump has sent everyone into hysterics - South Vietnam and France also held out for years with their situation going from bleak to bleaker until the US finally caved and sent in its own GIs.
Right, I doubt Ukraine would give up its sovereignty simply to appease Russia. I don't quite blame them.
Doesn't this also raise the risk of nuclear exchange? It's not like Europeans aren't nuclear powers themselves.
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"they" that you talking about is an abstract nation-state entity called "Ukraine" and/or its rulers. We peaceniks don't mean them when we say that immediate ceasefire is in everyone's interest. We talk about actual everyday people who suffer, who are locked in this country and are forced to fight. I don't see how nationalists' tears about lines on the map or pride of a certain someone are worth hundreds deaths every day.
If Ukrainians actually want to fight to the end then open the borders, make army volunteer only, maybe pay enough to recruit people willingly(which is still terrible because this willingness both in Ukraine and Russia comes from the utter poverty that its rulers are responsible for). If the problem is with security after the war then you can either get it with joining Nato or at least adjacent web of alliances or you don't and continuing the war won't solve this.
Do you believe that all conscription is always wrong, or that it’s only wrong in this case?
Conscription may be necessary for practical reasons.
"If conscription is against the law, then only criminals will have conscription."
But for those who advocate stuffing men in vans and then shipping them off to die, why does the civilian population get a pass? Why are they not also enslaved in factories producing weapons?
Fun fact: most people don't realize that German wartime production actually peaked in late 1944, long after the war was a foregone conclusion. At the start of the war, the civilians were mostly living as normal, and it took years for Speer to orient the entire economy to wartime production.
At a minimum the following things should not exist in Ukraine while conscription continues: night clubs, restaurants, old age pensions above meager subsistence, construction of civilian buildings etc... If you are going to enslave men and force them to die, then the whole economy should be oriented to giving them the best chance.
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I would say yes, while still understanding that there are many specific examples where you can justify it. But here many nuances and arguments for no longer apply. Like for example the question of deterrence is already solved, it's already shown that any future war wouldn't be a walk in the park.
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Wasnt that basically Heinlein's take? Any nation that requires conscription doesn't deserve to continue to survive? The problem, of course, being that in that case the world may end up with only "nations that don't deserve to survive" on the map.
For this reason, conscription is ironically good because it allows meatgrinder-wars that eliminate the populations of “nations that don’t deserve to survive.” If we do this enough we might end up with some deserving nations coming up.
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Tbf you probably wouldn't need conscription if you had Mobile Infantry!
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I’ll just come out and say it: I don’t see a good reason for why Ukraine shouldn’t simply be annexed by Russia (or at least, brought into the Russian sphere of influence with a pro-Russian government).
Zelensky is right. Without security guarantees from the US, there’s a high chance that Russia will keep coming back every 5-10 years and taking another bite out of the country until they’ve either taken the whole thing or installed a proxy government. I don’t think it’s in the US’s best interests to provide security guarantees to Ukraine (and it seems that multiple US administrations have agreed with me, otherwise Obama would have sent in troops in 2014 and Biden would have sent in troops in 2022). So why don’t we simply get it over with and let Russia have it? That’s the long-term stable equilibrium.
I imagine that’s the position that the “it’s for their own good” camp is gesturing towards but doesn’t articulate.
Because it's not a stable long-term equilibrium, especially with pro-Russian US leadership rather strongly indicating they won't actually follow through on US defense commitments.
I’d argue that this shows just how much Western “help” has been propping up an Ukraine too weak to exist. And like most other instances of the west maintaining these life support situations (whether by supplying weapons, by forcing or shaming the stronger party into not winning the war, or by invading on behalf of these states) we create more conflict. Israel/Palestine will continue to be fought to the last Jew or Arab. They’ve been at it for 3/4 of a century more or less, and they’ll keep fighting for the next century unless one party is driven to capitulation by the other. The complete destruction of Gaza is probably an unfortunate but necessary step in this as it demonstrates that under no circumstances can they actually get the state they want. Ukraine should probably face a similar “you can’t get what you want” moment. In both cases, the result is a lasting peace in which the ethnic groups in question still exist, and they can even live in their own region, they just have to accept that they aren’t actually strong enough to take control. It’s certainly more stable than having major cities reduced to rubble once a decade in a bloody war they can’t hope to win.
That’s how I see these conflicts— intervention doesn’t mean peace, it just means reloading and digging in for the next round.
Yeah, I don't buy this at all. A policy of acquiescing to aggression encourages aggression and the idea of nations being 'too weak' to exist presumes there is some sort of natural arrangement that is being violated. International relations is 100% artifice. Nations don't stand or fall on their own, and Ukraine being too weak to be independent of Russia without Western support is another way of saying Russia is too weak to dominate Ukraine with Western opposition.
The Russo-Ukrainian War is fundamentally a product of western ambivalence (or, less charitably, cowardice) towards Russian aggression. It certainly didn't have to be this way. The people saying "that's just how it is" are creating the world they purport to describe.
A major problem with this theory is that this has been apparent for literally decades. It hasn't brought peace.
It’s also a question of choosing your battles and making sure that the good is actually good. Ukraine isn’t and has never been in a position where they can be completely politically independent. It’s not been true historically, and as far as the rest goes, I don’t see it changing anytime soon. I’d say the same about Palestine. They simply don’t have the wherewithal to hold their ground let alone carve out a state. In both cases, us choosing to ignore that and propping up a situation in which a war is frozen in place by outside actions and sanctions and court orders does no one any good. If the state in question cannot hold its independence, I don’t see it as a question of “ignoring Russian (or Israeli) aggression.” I see it as asking whether giving more and more aggressive, invasive and expensive medicine to a 90 year old dying of cancer is doing anyone, including the patient any good. The minute we drop the aid to these people both in Palestine and in Ukraine, they get steam rolled. That could be today, it could be 100 years from now. Either way, it’s life support on a comatose patient that we can keep alive as long as we keep them plugged in to the life support.
I’m also not sure the old way of handling borders and nations was so bad. Is it really such a crime against humanity that not every ethnic group gets its own flag and Olympic team? The bad old world was not prone to getting into huge conflicts over such things. In 1830, Gaza would have been Israeli within ten years of independence, and the Arabs would be either willing to accept that, or would have left. In the case of Ukraine, much like the vast majority of its history, Ukraine would be an outpost of the Russian Empire.
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This explanation has always seemed the most reasonable to me. Plenty of nations (in the ~tribal sense) don't control their own sovereign states, and many live subject to much more culturally different nations (Kurds, Uyghurs, etc). This is how Ukranians lived in the past as well, as I understand it. It seems to me better to face the fact that "you can't get what you want" and bide your time than to fight a doomed cause at such great cost that your homeland is destitute, most of your men are killed in war or flee, and your women emigrate are absorbed into foreign nations. One leads to subordination but survival, while the other leads to the destruction of one's nation.
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Moving borders through war comes at a tremendous humanitarian cost and is rarely justified from a utilitarian point of view.
Putin's system of government (with oligarch allies controlling key national industries) is much less conductive to human thriving than liberal democracy.
Nobody in NATO wants to risk WW3 over Ukraine. Sending in US troops after Putin had attacked in 2022 would predictably have let to NATO troops shooting at Russian troops, which would have carried a high risk of turning into WW3. To the degree that NATO can make security guarantees to Ukraine (e.g. in the form of membership) without immediately starting WW3, I think it is prudent that we should -- given that our defensive alliance has become a lot less obsolete than previously thought, we obviously would want the one country whose military has experience fighting the aggressor in it.
Perhaps, but perhaps not. It could also be that the outcome of an occupation would be akin to The Troubles, or the resistance to Putin might turn to asymmetric warfare instead. Putin is not going to win the hearts and minds of the current generations of Ukrainians, and it is in the geostrategic interest of Europe to bind as many of his troops within Ukraine as we can, so we would likely support separatists with explosives and the like.
Hmm. I think I agree directionally, but I am not sure the gap between Russia and a sort of Average Homogenized Liberal Democracy (if you will) is staggeringly vast.
A look at a few indices, just by Googling around (so buyer beware, you place your mental model in the world in the hands of the Google algo here!)
In short, it seems to me that Russia is behind, say, the United States in GDP per capita, but it seems fairly competitive with post-Soviet liberal democracies in GDP. It severely lags in happiness (although again perhaps that is a non-objective measure, but the suicides are not). Over the long term, however, their outlook is better than many (although perhaps not all) of their liberal democratic peers, with competitive birth rates, manageable debt, and at least some of their populace willing to engage in violence on behalf of their country. This data also suggests that liberal democracies can have a horrific failure mode in South Korea, where Happiness Index scores are nearly as low and suicides nearly as high as Russia, but the debt is higher and the TFR is cripplingly low.
I think, as an American, I would probably rather live in most any of these liberal democracies I've mentioned than Russia. If I had to choose where to be reincarnated a native, I might rank Russia above South Korea.
I would argue that liberal democracies also have a big advantage in R&D, and that in general technological progress is required for human thriving. In my world model, slavery and feudalism did not stop because people saw the light and decided that they were immoral, but because technological progress moved the equilibrium solution away from them.
While the USSR certainly made significant contributions to science, my general feeling is that Putin's Russia does not focus on selling high tech to the world, but rather natural resources. Basically, you can make your buddies boss of the natural oil companies, and they will extract revenue and have your back. However, if you were to put your buddies in charge of Google, that would likely result in smaller companies eating their lunch. It takes a special kind of person to run a successful tech company, not just some goon. This in turn makes innovative companies a power base which can not be easily controlled, so most autocrats do without them.
I realize that China is a counter-example: a country which performs cutting-edge research while also being totalitarian. But at least as far as tech companies go, they do have a problem with billionaire tech bros and strip them of their companies sometimes when they become to powerful for the CCP to tolerate.
I would say that Russian tech is quite successful for their position. It's obviously hampered by lawlessness, economic isolation and brain drain, but it did win the competition with American analogues in their own country, which you can't say of any other European IT sector. And it happened before government bans.
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Not as big an advantage as you'd think, hearing Westerners talk about how backwards the USSR was during the Cold War (while in real life the Soviets, while behind in many areas, still repeatedly lapped the West in important defense technology).
This suggests that an optimal amount of technological progress is required for [greater] human thriving, not that continuing technological progress necessarily correlates to greater human thriving. It seems possible that, say, vaccines, clean water, electricity, fission power, fertilizer are all massive wins for human flourishing and that things we have discovered since either have diminishing or negative returns. And of course this would track what I believe we see in the West (or at least in the States), that happiness has leveled off or even decreased over the past fifty years.
I'm not sure this is true (if I had to guess, there is something of a pendulum effect overall, as we develop the means to mitigate the prior mistakes we made) but I don't think it's right that there is inevitably a direct and linear progression between human flourishing and access to technology.
Russia's military equipment, which they export relatively successfully, counts as high tech, I think.
Perhaps, but the Soviets seemed fairly good at recognizing talent (see a guy named Mikhail Kalashnikov) and channeling it in productive directions. I have no strong opinions about if Putin's Russia does this or if they are handicapped by the dynamics you mention. However, you seem to miss that, if you're an oligarch, you have no objections to a special kind of person running the tech company, you just want the profits. Which is really the same dynamic that happens in American capitalism (tech founders or leaders do not necessarily reap most of the profit from their own companies).
Well so far it seems like a lot of examples we have of totalitarian states were actually pretty good at scientific research. The Soviet Union held their own. Nazi Germany obviously is the ur-example (to an exaggerated degree) of a totalitarian country that was quite capable of scientific research, in many ways ahead of its peers. The Japanese lagged behind, and I think the Italians did too, but the Japanese started on the back foot and still managed some impressive accomplishments (and I do not think the Italians ever managed to be quite as totalitarian as the Nazis or of course the Soviets). You can even go back a little bit further to the Civil War and watch an agrarian confederacy with feudal characteristics out-innovate their industrial neighbor in naval warfare (despite, or perhaps because of, comparatively little inherited expertise in the matter).
You can chalk the North Koreans up as a pretty un-innovative totalitarian regime, I suppose.
I think perhaps it is worth considering if scientific gains flow from wealth and industrial or information power and that liberal democracies might have an advantage there (especially with wealth, Communists were notoriously good at literacy education but not so much at generating prosperity). You can map this pretty accurately into the past 100 years: the United States, British Empire, and Germany were probably the industrial front-runners in World War Two [with the Russians having lots of mass but not yet as much sophistication] and then with the Soviet Union and United States were the frontrunners and that's where all the progress was made and now China and the US seem to be the frontrunners because they are the wealthiest and most industrialized (and now) informationalized.
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where do you draw the line? if they can eat all their neighbours one by one they will be a threat to the rest of the world eventually
I draw the line at the borders of the United States and countries we have pre-existing security agreements with.
I don’t advocate for pulling out of NATO.
Bingo. You create credibility concerns for yourself by failing to follow through on promises, not by failing to follow through on things you never promised. The US maintains a posture of ambiguity about things like Taiwan specifically (I think) so it has the flexibility to bail without losing credibility.
Frankly, yanking Ukraine around by teasing them with NATO membership was shameful, IMHO, although I am ready to be explained to as to why that was Necessary, Actually.
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Are you talking about Russia or NATO?
you cant compare the two, one is a defense pact you have to join voluntarily and can quit if you want, the other will go to war with you to take away all your autonomy
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(One thing I really hate about Putin is how he forces me to play the role of a NATO apologist.)
NATO and Russian imperialism are very much not the same. For some reason, most of Eastern Europe (e.g. Poland) tried very hard to get into NATO and did not try at all to become part of Putin's sphere of influence. NATO is a club you can quit (de Gaulle came very close to that), but being part of Putin's empire is not something you can quit -- Ukraine tried that with the orange revolution and look how Putin reacted.
You mean the revolutionaries, who evidently couldn't win by democratic means, tried? Meanwhile, de Gaulle did not in fact quit the club, and I hear Georgescu (who was anti-NATO and ahead in polls) just got arrested in Romania. Armenia also seems to be well in the process of quitting "Putin's empire", though that's still a wait-and-see situation.
Serious question- does Armenia have another choice?
Armenia is a tiny country whose archenemy with probably-genocidal intentions is backed to the hilt by a regional hegemon which tried to exterminate their people barely outside of living memory and still denies having done it and which has an enormous degree of influence over the actions of the world hegemon in the region. Their only options for allies- and without allies they will be occupied by enemies which, again, tried to exterminate them within the memories of the grandparents and have a state ideology that it didn't happen and was a good thing anyways- are Russia and Iran. Russia might allow Nagorno-Karabakh to be conquered, but they continue to deter a crossing of the internationally-recognized borders of Armenia.
Azerbaijan has already crossed the internationally-recognized borders in some places, too.
A big story that might have gotten little play in Western media due to the Ukraine conflict is that Armenia currently has a pro-Western president, who has been gradually cutting ties with Russia in favour of French guarantees - there is even mutual finger-pointing between him and the Russians, with his allies claiming that the Russians let the Azeris take NK unopposed to spite him, while Russians and their allies in Armenia claim that he ordered the Russian peacekeepers to stand down and remain in their base.
Some more conspiracy-theory-minded Russians even think that he used Armenia's CSTO access to pass some information about Russian air defense and strategic forces disposition to the Ukrainians via France, as part of a larger deal that looks something like "Russia humiliated, Nagorno-Karabakh surrendered, Zangezur Corridor connected, but Turkey and Azerbaijan refrain from further squeezing Armenia".
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So Ukraine doesn't settle for this offer and holds out... and it gets worse for them. Ukraine gets bombed more. Their graveyards expand. More territory gets annexed by Russia.
This is just epic-scale sunk cost fallacy among Western leadership and especially Ukraine. If there is one thing the foreign policy elite class really struggles with, it's accepting defeat. But the costs of propping up Ukraine aren't worth the gains. Slowly but surely the message is sinking in and the wiliest rats are leaving the sinking ship.
Who is going to provide them security guarantees that are innately non-credible? Why would the Russians expect the US, Britain or France to risk ruination over Ukraine? Why risk making a bluff that will be called? Ukraine's not a treaty ally and they can't become a treaty ally, the war is about that amongst other things. The gap in determination between Russia and the Western nuclear powers is too great. It's like the reverse of Serbia, Russia didn't guarantee them, they helped Serbia but didn't make bluffs that would be called.
So there aren't going to be security guarantees that bring on a risk of humiliation or extreme danger for the guaranteeing power. That's not going to happen. No matter how impressive Ukraine's stalling tactics are (and they have fought impressively) the logic of size and numbers is against them and the prognosis is very grim.
Stringing along the understandably desperate and somewhat stupid leaders in Ukraine with insincere promises of guarantees at some unspecified future is ignoble behaviour.
It doesn't get worse.
Before invasion in February 2022 certain western leaders offered Zelensky a ride. Basically they told him not to resist to save human lives. The reality was that Ukrainians would have resisted anyway but most probably would have lost. It would have led to terrible retributions from Russia. Think about Bucha multiplied hundreds of times.
Obviously, we cannot with 100% confidence say what would have happened but the idea is that Zelensky saved a lot of lives. Now pacifists are angry with him that he didn't save all lives. A lot of Ukrainians still perished and still dying on the battlefield.
It is a very hard concept for many to accept.
P.S. Unrelated to the war, but the same unwillingness to accept that some deaths will happen anyway let to higher mortality during covid pandemic. Still majority haven't accepted that despite clear data that Sweden fared best of all. They had about the same mortality from covid that the UK or any other western country and yet their excess mortality was practically zero whereas it was very high in the US. Why? The secret was to tolerate some deaths from covid as inevitable. There was no need to call Tegnel a nazi like some politicians did it hastily.
Everyone who wanted to resist Russia and was brave enough to do so has joined the army by now and a large number of them are dead! Many who didn't want to resist have also been forcibly drafted and died.
Even comparing with the hypothetical 'hundreds of Buchas' scenario Ukraine still comes out worse for resisting, especially if resistance ends with them being crushed. Conventional war is much bloodier than unconventional war.
Zelensky doomed the country.
Most Ukrainians are not in army, it doesn't mean they wouldn't resist if suddenly Russians would appear to take their homes.
A lot of Ukrainians work for army, produce weapons etc. but not actively fighting.
Zelensky saved a lot of Ukrainians lives. Without his actions more deaths would have happened.
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So, the lower bound is 73200=14600 dead and the upper bound is 458900=412200?
I would expect a decimation of Ukrainian siloviki plus some targeted repressions against those promoting Ukrainian nationalism:
Ten percent of this amounts to 42000, plus 8000 civilian nationalists for a round number of 50000 casualties.
Thanks, really good numbers.
I think it would be even greater, a lot of civilians would be killed too. And indirect deaths from violent occupation should be counted too.
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The whole Bucha story still stinks to high heaven. I don't think nothing happened, but it seems like the number of killings of civilians that are actually backed by solid evidence can be counted in the tens, and is more in the class of wanton violence by undisciplined military units that both parties in this conflict have been engaging in whenever they were in an area with a hostile civilian population than anything resembling the systematic massacre the pro-UA press wants it to be. The initial messaging about it was chaotic, too - I still remember the strangely arranged shots of "streets full of corpses" that were circulated in the earliest days of the narrative, with the bodies wearing something resembling military fatigues with white armbands (before the Western press had realised that white armbands were and continue being used as friend identification by Russian units - Ukrainians use blue).
There is really no reason to assume that a few civilians killed by trashy soldiers shooting at everything that moves, in a chaotic situation where an expected victory was turning into a rout, would have translated into many more in a setting where the victory proceeded as expected. Of course it's plausible that there would have been a French-style resistance, which attracted many more participants who would die in their subsequent armed struggle - but resistance fighters are not hapless civilians.
Sorry, I don't engage in obvious falsehoods.
I have so many Kremlin apologists doubting that MH17 happened. I don't have time and energy to respond to all this. It is not very productive use of my time.
Doubting Bucha when we have so much confirmed evidence is pointless. It is what before we used to call FUD at the start of internet. I am that old.
Then don't. Either respond politely and according to the rules or not at all.
Specifically, do not accuse your opponents of being apologists. It's not constructive.
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I think it's fairly realistic to assume that many (maybe most?) of the civilian dead in Bucha who were shown on Western media were killed by Ukrainian units who reentered the town in retribution.
Uh...why would you assume that? What could possibly make that more likely?
It's more likely than the notion that all local civilian death were caused by the Russians. Also, many of the dead provably had white armbands, which at the time was already pretty much established to be the marker of local collaborators.
I wasn’t asking about all deaths. Why do you think “many or most” were killed by Ukrainians?
It is possible that the Ukrainian military slaughtered dozens or hundreds of their own citizens on reclaiming an unoccupied town. It is unlikely that they did so while encouraging foreign journalists to come document the scene as a propaganda coup. I find it much more likely that the invading army happened to kill some civilians to keep order or for sport. That’s an incredibly common human behavior.
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That argument is as relevant to this topic as if I brought up Ukraine apologists doubting that Azov is led by neonazis as an argument against a Bucha massacre.
I'm pretty sure the term was around long after the average Mottizen (wasn't our average age in the mid-thirties last time anyone polled?) started using the internet.
Anyway, I actually reviewed the Wikipedia page before making my initial response, and from what I can tell, there is still no evidence of more than some tens of victims from any party that is not either directly controlled by pro-Ukrainian interests or citing their numbers. We used to have mechanisms to get neutral information in these situations (e.g. the Indian observers in the Korean war, who also uncovered a lot of BS that was and is sometimes still being treated as fact in US reporting - just compare the account of the Geoje uprising in "This Kind of War" to what has by now even made it into the Wikipedia article); if this case is so clear-cut, why is nobody inviting a neutral party to investigate here?
As I said, I rest my case. You will probably ask next why no neutral party investigates ivermectin?
Are you unable to make your case without insinuating that those who disagree must also hold some other beliefs (that you presumably find it easier to argue against)? Unfortunately for you, I am not an Ivermectin believer.
Ivermectin is a good test how serious the person is. Obviously we all might have different beliefs, some of them will be wrong and others will be correct. I wouldn't disqualify anyone on that. But ivermectin issue is such a low bar that I use it as a filter whether a person takes time to verify his own opinions. I am sorry if it offends some.
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As a sidebar, I started in the internet around 1999, in the forum era. So I missed usenet and bbs. FUD is from that era? What corner of the internet was this? Asking sincerely, was it the anti-war crowd?
As I’m sure you know, FUD has now been taken up by pro-establishment types online. I’m curious about the lineage of the groups that use this term.
I don't know the history well. FUD just means Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt. When internet was started (dialling in), everybody thought it will be a revolution but then spammers and FUD started. It can be about anything. It became clear that with open communications it is not easier to get true information as people are not inherently searching for truth but just want to express their opinions.
The great example is ivermectin effectiveness. Why this should be controversial? The story is very simple – we tried many things at the start of pandemic including ivermectin. There were some signals that it could be useful. But more studies were done and the signal disappeared. It happens with a lot of potential medicines. In about 10 prospective treatments only 1 passes final studies and are approved. Everybody can read data and this story. Starting from wikipedia and then Scott Alexander article for deeper interested laypersons. Specialists will simply read original sources. We have no controversy. Even Scott's assertion that it was ivermectin's anti-parasites effect that worked is a stretch and might not be true but I will assume that it is real.
Any information that somehow ivermectin effect is not resolved is FUD. I don't know why people continue bringing it up. Maybe they are really confused, maybe they have poor skills distinguishing real data from garbage, maybe they are propagandists or grifters. I don't care even if they are true believers. It is such a non-issue, not as close to that the earth is round but not that far either.
Obviously, sometimes we have to discuss things that the earth is round or that ivermectin is not effective. Usually with children or some learners. But it is boring to have such discussion in serious forums.
I'm sorry, is it your contention that it is the people who thought ivermectin could help who employed FUD? Not the establishment forces who proclaimed it horse medicine and dangerous?
I have spent some time studying things outside my professional field, for example, about economics. I am not an expert, far from it, but I am quite confident about some basic principles in economy. I read Noah Smith, Marginal Revolution and some others. Anyone interested can gain a similar level of understanding without studying economics at school, just purely for interest, not too deep and because it is quite important in our society. I started with many false beliefs, but took time to read a lot of things online, and now I can see consensus about these basic principles and how things work. Obviously there are many opinions about certain policies etc., but they do not differ in a fundamental way.
But then there are others who haven't given any thought about things at all but who listen to some populists and immediately form an opinion that they proclaim loudly as irrefutable truth. For example, I have taken interest in Milei, the president in Argentina. His reforms generally are viewed as good and necessary. There is no resistance from mainstream economists. Even World Bank has recommended many things that Milei has undertaken. Milei words usually are stronger than his work but even that can be understood due to Argentina's long stagnation and lack of growth.
But then other people demand that we need Milei in our country (Latvia) because our economy is in tatters. It is not objectively true. There is objectively vast difference between GDP between Argentina and Latvia. For some reason Latvia has experienced significant growth, its GDP has grown about 10 times in the last 30 years. It started below Argentina and overtook it and succeeded while Argentina's GDP during this time has mostly stayed flat. Obviously, the situation is completely different that one needs to provide special arguments why it is similar to Argentina because by all measures it is not.
Maybe some smart people have some insights about corruption, growth retarders etc. But most will simply repeat some slogans they have heard from Milei and others, mix them with some vitriol against “establishment”, Word Forum, Bill Gates or whatever is popular each season. When probed, they will admit that they don't know much, it is probably the first time someone has told them what is Argentina's GDP, how GDP is calculated but definitely know that it is a false measure and should not be used because it only hides the truth which is that everything is bad and the elite should be exposed for their crimes etc.
I am tired discussing with people who only want to proclaim their opinions and don't want to learn.
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It is a test if a person is serious and takes at least some time to check if their opinion about something, for example, his beliefs about ivermectin are valid. If I had never known anything about ivermectin, just read something on internet that it is good for covid or that is a poison that kills you, I wouldn't trust it too much, maybe with 5% confidence. If I was asked to provide an opinion, I would do some research, starting from wikipedia, Scott Alexander's article etc. If one cannot bother to do that, why should I listen to his or her opinion about ivermectin and other things?
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It's far older than that, originates in the 1920s and was a term of art in marketing in the 50s and 60s long before the Internet.
But it did get popular in computer circles when Amdahl left IBM and used it to describe the anti-competitive practices of his former employer. Then the torch of being computer Satan passed to Microsoft and it was applied to them until it became the general purpose term we see today, in a somewhat fitting return to its marketing roots.
ESR tells the story in the Jargon File.
Thanks, it is really interesting to know.
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Funny how tens of thousands dead in Gaza is collateral damage. A tiny, tiny fraction of the deaths when taking Kiev and people are losing their minds. They should go investigate the Libyan war, Afghan war, or the unprovoked full scale occupation of Iraq. Far, far worse than Bucha.
This is from the section: yes, bad things happened, but elsewhere even worse things happened...
Not just some random "elsewhere", but "where your allies were in charge". If you want to argue that a Russian control of Ukraine is undesirable because atrocities were committed under Russian auspices, then it surely is relevant if the side you want to control Ukraine instead committed greater atrocities in areas it dominated.
No, it is not. First of all, it is not of the same scale. Not of the same time, and not of the same magnitude either. Details are important.
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it's weird, Russia has captured and lost many a town and city over the last few years and recaptured many a town and city over the last few years
and yet it was only in Bucha, during peace negotiations in Istanbul which factions in Ukraine were trying to scuttle, that the Russians just decided to slaughter a bunch of civilians, something which they have gone out of their way, and lost many men as a result, to avoid since the start of the war and to this day
this Bucha narrative isn't believable and claiming Russian control means additionally this unbelievable Bucha narrative multiplied hundreds of times is simply ridiculous
and even if someone accepts the doubly unbelievable claim and even if one accepts the Ukrainian's claim that 400+ something people were killed (and no one should), a hundred Buchas would be 45,000 people dead which would be less than 10% of the likely dead Ukrainians already in this war
and the result will still be the same just like it was always going to be the same
the concept is easy to understand and accept, the issue is the particulars as applied to this war are not credible
I don't think they ever claimed it was just Bucha where atrocities happened/happen, just that Bucha was the most notable example. eg. see this or this, for example.
The issue with the mass graves in Izyum is that there's no realistic way to delineate victims killed by Russians from those killed by Ukrainians.
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Thank you for other examples as it better illustrates the web of belief for people who believe it, but to be frank, as a general rule I'm pretty skeptical believing people who think their cause is existential in nature because one who thinks this also places the cause above honesty, and then on top of it the Ukrainians have a years long history of just laughably ridiculous lies (which the BBC amplifies regularly).
It's been clear from the beginning there was a large and growing chasm between what various factions believed as reality on the ground in Ukraine and it's been unbridgeable most of the time and it's made dialogue about it difficult. As reality comes crashing through the propaganda as things start to fall apart over there, it's making real dialogue about the conflict possible again.
Do you generally believe that "an invading, occupying army commits atrocities" is by definition so improbable that it warrants a basic assumption that such claims are propaganda?
I think it regularly happens and it is regularly lied about, so these claims should be met with enhanced skepticism which can be satisfied with a low amount of evidence.
But I'm unsure why this abstracted statement would mean much in this particular circumstance. I know many specifics about the parties, about the claims, and about the available evidence (at least in the Bucha scenario). I remember the emerging story and the contradictory videos and pictures.
If I think the Ukrainians lied about Bucha, I'm not going to believe any further claims about other "atrocities" without a fair amount of independently verified evidence. The BBC repeating "Ukrainians found X" is nowhere near that standard.
I don't particularly blame the Ukrainians for the comical levels of lying because they believe they're in an existential war, but a casualty of that is they have no credibility.
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Of course not. Is it not also possible that a country that has engaged in false propaganda to engender support might lie about atrocities that again helps generate support?
That is, one should not believe that Russia is unlikely to commit atrocities (there almost certainly were some as its war) but also one should not believe the Ukrainians that something truly awful beyond the normal cruelty of war occurred.
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I think this gloss you are using is abstracting away too much detail. You can remove detail from almost any scenario to make it not sound "improbable by definition" - imagine if I told you that Donald Trump is a cannibal, and then if you were skeptical, I asked you if you generally believe that "an omnivore avails itself of a source of animal protein" is by definition so improbable (...).
The combination of it being a small army controlling the area for a short amount of time, the ethnic similarity of the two peoples, the lack of claims of a proportional scale from other, larger places where the same army was in control for a longer amount of time, the conspicuous lack of independent verification and the incongruences in early evidence (such as, as I mentioned in another response, the white armbands on the depicted victims), and the existence of a means and motive for the Ukrainians to make it up (extremely friendly and uncritical media-NGO complex, the knowledge that rousing sufficient moral indignation in the Western public may be necessary and sufficient to win the war) and parallel anti-motive on the Russian side (they had enough trouble just fighting the Ukrainian military, and were equally aware that Western support weighs more than anything either Russia or Ukraine can bring to the table), together warrant the basic assumption.
I think this is very much in the eye of the beholder: Western progressives happily lump together "White" Poles and Germans, but that didn't stop any number of atrocities on the ground in WWII. They also wouldn't generally distinguish between "Black" Hutu and Tutsi in any context that wasn't directly related to the relevant genocide. From someone far away (maybe you are not, but I am), it's hard to qualify feelings on the ground. Surely those genetically similar, Abrahamic-religion-followers in the former British mandate of Palestine are getting along nicely.
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Russians do not slaughter more civilians in Ukraine because they are not able to. That's how powerful Zelensky's defence is.
Obviously, Russia is still very powerful and is able to take over more territory but it is relatively small size.
Not believing that Bucha is reality is like believing that ivermectin is effective in treating covid and covid vaccines are pure poison (instead of not very effective in stopping infection but moderately effective in elderly reducing death and severe outcomes).
No offense, but this is just obviously wrong! If old Vlad's terminal goal was to kill civilians, he could crack open the silos and there's not much Zelenskyy could do to stop it.
But even setting that aside, Russia has been targeting military and dual-use infrastructure successfully. If they wanted to, they could shift all of those fire missions to hitting purely civilian targets like schools,* orphanages, museums, street vendors etc. Late last year, Russia demonstrated a conventional hypersonic intermediate-range ballistic missile with multiple reentry vehicles; they targeted it at a missile plant instead of downtown Kiev.
*ones that aren't be occupied by Ukrainian troops, that is. Relevant to this topic, Amnesty International went a-seeking for evidence that Russia was shelling civilian areas indiscriminately without justification (and they did find that) but while they were looking, they also found evidence that Russia was shelling civilian areas because Ukraine was staging military assets there.
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This is pure polemic. In what way are those two beliefs similar?
You are trying to argue for your position by tarring its negation by association. Would you find a "counterargument" like "Believing Bucha is reality is like believing that Donald Trump is a fascist dictator who was hypnotised by the KGB in 1980 to advance Putin's agenda" convincing? I'm sure we could find some people who believe both, too.
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You simultaneously believe Russia was powerful enough to slaughter hundreds in Bucha because they controlled it with soldiers, but are also not powerful enough to slaughter hundreds of people in each of the many dozens of other towns and cities they've captured and controlled with soldiers over the last few years?
How are soldiers powerful enough to massacre hundreds in Bucha but soldiers in other towns and cities not powerful enough to massacre the civilians there?
I think people were massacred at Bucha, I just don't believe Russians did it and a more believable narrative is Ukrainians killed people who accepted help from and/or collaborated with the Russians, and I also believe ivermectin was an effective early treatment for Covid and also that the Covid injection is ineffective at best and dangerous, so I guess we'll just leave it at that.
QOD. I rest my case...
If you don't have a response, don't respond. If you have a response, issue it. Responding that you aren't going to respond is just wasting people's time.
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Why do you and others keep lying about the Budapest Memorandum? I can assume that you know perfectly well that it wasn't a binding security guarantee (which is precisely why it was called a 'memorandum'), and that it was signed primarily because it served US interests (to curb the then-scary prospect of nuclear proliferation), not because it was meant to benefit Ukraine.
Why are you insinuating that the Ukrainians are a blameless party in this conflict who can be trusted all the time?
Also, where is your enthusiasm? All I was hearing throughout the war from Atlanticist mainstream media was triumphalism promising total victory, because the Moskal are just a bunch of freezing, starving orcs who will use up their last functioning tank, cruise missile, artillery shell and pair of socks in two weeks. Where is the victory? Where is the glorious counteroffensive?
This is a bit over the line of too antagonistic. Especially the accusation of lying.
This is a warning, cool off a bit.
The flip side is that it has been three years and these things have been discussed regularly. If someone makes a top level post making obviously false claims about a very prominent event that has been on going for three years, the reasonable explanation is they are lying or engaging in such low effort that they should be ignored.
And let's also keep in mind that a nuclear arsenal in itself won't deter an enemy invasion anyway, as evidenced by the Yom Kippur War.
You know I’ve always wondered what exactly the Arab leadership was expecting to happen if they won. Just whistle past the graveyard and hope to not get vaporized?
Retrieve the territory that was lost in 1967, I'm sure.
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Nobody suggested that the agreement was some act of charity, it was as you said part of a much broader attempt at non-proliferation by the US after the Cold War. But they wouldn’t have agreed to it without the firm assurance that Ukraine could enter the US orbit and not be invaded by a foreign power, otherwise why would they have given up the weapons? The US doesn’t have a policy of sanctioning other countries with nukes bar actual foes locked in existing frozen conflicts (North Korea) or which are engaged in a series of consequential proxy wars (Iran). Ukraine is relatively large and quite high IQ by most statistics despite being poor, they could have maintained some weapons.
When discussing Budapest Memorandum it is worth noting that it was signed in 1994 by Leonid Kravchuk who was a Soviet-Ukrainian leader. Ukraine at that time, while having some historical reasons to distrust Russia, was in perfectly good terms with them and in the heads of the ex-Soviet leaders an invasion by USA or UK, while also remote, may have seemed more likely than by Russia. Like all ex-Soviet countries, Ukraine was also completely bankrupt and money to maintain the nuclear weapons was going to be a significant drain to the newly created country. It is also worth noting that it was the country of freshly experienced Chernobyl-disaster and anything nuclear did not ring positively with the population.
While Ukraine had no ambitions at the time to become "western", by signing the agreement they definitely planed to enter the world stage as a partner of both the west and Russia and not as adversary.
With hindsight this agreement seems very naive and bad for Ukraine but the alternative of maintaining the nuclear status had many drawbacks, including international isolation with significant economic costs.
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this is nonsense; they agreed to it because they were paid a bunch of money including ongoing "support" to decommission weapons and they didn't have control or possession of the weapons anyway
no one at the meeting thought the fluff language about respecting sovereignty meant a security guarantee and even if they did the respecting sovereignty would mean the US complains to the UNSC on which Russia sits and can veto
and the US has satisfied this many magnitudes more than was necessary even if one believes the memo means something those who negotiated and signed it didn't believe and even if one believes it's in any way binding
the deal was they either get paid money or they get invaded to recapture the weapons and take them off Ukrainian territory right then and there
I'd also add that surely similar agreements were signed with other non-Russian former Soviet republics with nuclear weapons on their soil, namely Byelorussia and Kazakhstan. Maybe this also happened in Budapest, I have no idea, but probably not. Anyway, these agreements are long forgotten for a good reason, but I'm fairly sure they also didn't contain any clause that could be interpreted as "permission to enter the US orbit in the future with an additional security guarantee to deter a Russian invasion".
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What’s your estimation of Russia’s ability and willingness to fund and mount an invasion of all of Ukraine in 1994?
A US invasion is likewise absurd, the US did barely more than vaguely attempt to track the mountains of missing post-Soviet nukes, some of which made their way to far more hostile states.
There was no enemy at the gates that would have forcibly taken the nukes from them in 1994, that’s just the reality of the situation.
You claimed:
"Firm assurance" to do what? Under which conditions? For how long? What does "enter the US orbit" even mean? If the big pile of money wasn't the motivating factor but "respecting sovereignty" language was, then the Ukrainians are too stupid to be trusted with nuclear weapons anyway because "respecting sovereignty" fluff language in a memorandum is a far cry from "firm assurance" let alone "security guarantee."
No, the US didn't give security guarantees or "firm assurance [Ukraine] wouldn't be invaded by a foreign power" in 1994, over 5 years before it added Poland to NATO. It just didn't happen. No American nor any Russian who signed the memo thought that's what happened.
And besides, the US has already satisfied even stronger language. The US alone has sent hundreds of billions and enough equipment to equip an army larger than any other in Europe except Russia. The US has already all but fired weapons at Russians and engaged in other acts of war and the only reason it wasn't labeled as such is because the Russians don't want them to be acts of war but there is a line at some point.
It would be less "mount an invasion of all of Ukraine," and more "Moscow aligned soldiers who possessed the nuclear weapons would leave their bases and meet up with Russian soldiers coming across the border to secure the weapons and transport them to Russian territory," with American support, i.e., Americans were fine with this happening. Although if it became clear the Ukrainians attempted to seize and then traffic the weapons, I do not think it's absurd to think even a joint-operation would be on the table.
Ukraine couldn't use the nukes it "possessed" (but didn't), it would have to capture them and then disassemble them, obtain a trigger and then reassemble them before they would have had nuclear weapons. The status quo was Ukrainians didn't have useable nuclear weapons.
The question would be which Ukrainians were going to do this and with what army? Or which Ukrainians were going to stop the Moscow-aligned soldiers in in or before 1994 from doing it? The Ukrainian and Russian militaries didn't even disentangle for a decade after the memo.
It's easy to fall into this end-of-history re-remembering history. Admittedly, I'm not re-remembering anything, but I can read what contemporary people at the time were saying and the sort of implication that it was inevitable the US or others could do whatever and the Russians would do nothing is just nonsense. If you told someone in 1994 that the US was proxy fighting Russia not at the Rhein but at the Oskil River, they would have assumed the nukes already went flying and the world was destroyed.
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Had the Ukrainian government ever knowingly facilitated or permitted the trafficking of nuclear weapons from their country to any rogue state and the US government learned about it, I think it's fair to assume that this was going to result in a US military intervention to topple the government, as in Panama in 1989, and seize the weapons, because this was precisely the scenario the Budapest Memorandum was designed to prevent.
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NB: they'd have had to dismantle them and rebuild them, not just maintain them, in order to actually have usable nukes; the Soviet weapons were locked with PAL-equivalents and Kiev didn't have the codes. Dismantling and rebuilding nukes is easier than building them from scratch because you already have the weapons-grade actinides, but it's not trivial (except for gun-types, and AIUI the Soviet arsenal had few if any of those by 1991).
IIRC a good chunk of the infrastructure for nuclear production was located in Ukraine; they easily could have rebuilt their nukes if they made a conscious decision to do so.
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Can you or anyone else link to the part of the memorandum that says anyone is supposed to do more than go complain to the UNSC if Ukraine comes under attack? The terms aren't secret. The war and the discussions surrounding it have been going on for years at this point. Much like Botond above I'm very tired of hearing Ukraine supporters lie about it constantly.
It's reached the point that I just mentally discard anything that makes reference to it as being in bad faith. Anyone who cares enough to participate in such a discussion should know better by now.
Nobody is alleging hidden terms. The reality is that Ukraine signed a terrible deal and no nation acting in its own interests should ever willingly give up nuclear weapons, ever (barring strange situations like the South African regime change). It’s more of a question of honor, and whether a country has any duty to another that they goaded into demilitarizing, then funded an anti-Russia revolution in. For most of the last 10 years, Zelensky was much more pro-Russia than the US was.
So in fact they did agree to give up their nukes without firm assurance that they could enter US orbit, etc. Glad we're clear on that. That being the case, I hope we can see an end to support-maximalists waving the Budapest Memorandum around as if it says something it doesn't.
Ukraine lacked the ability to launch those nukes and neither the US nor Russia were interested in allowing them to keep them. They gave them up because the alternative was to fight the world, and they received a meaningless deal in exchange because they had no real leverage.
America was never especially interested in Ukraine outright winning this war in the first place. Even the /r/worldnews drones complaining that Biden wouldn't give them the good stuff or let them shoot into Russia had it figured out. Ukraine was always a pawn meant to let the US buy Russian blood on the cheap, like a sale on milk. All we're doing now is arguing over how much money we really need to spend on milk regardless of how much of it we're getting for our dollar.
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That line of argument at least ascribes some agency to Ukrainians' decision to stand and fight. Others seem to claim that they've been bewitched into fighting for America's interests by some magic spell the CIA failed to cast on the South Vietnamese, Iraqi, or Afghan armies to turn them into highly motivated cannon fodder, and that if the US and Russia cut a deal we can snap our fingers and all the puppets will drop their guns and go home.
As someone coming from a family that emigrated west from the ruins of Soviet Union myself, I can tell you that there is an obvious candidate for that magic spell, namely the dangled opportunity to freely move to a Western country (as far as I can tell, the use of Ukrainian colours in that video is pure serendipity) or perhaps even have their country turned into one (like Poland or Slovenia). The degree to which life in the West is mysticized in those cultures is hard to comprehend for those of us spending our lives on forums kvetching about it, and the median person would absolutely be ready to kill and risk death in return for a chance for themselves or their children to enjoy it. This offer was never really put on the table for the South Vietnamese, Iraqis of Afghans.
Is it mysticism or simply the same calculation that anyone comparing Warsaw and Minsk might make regarding which side offers a better future for them and their children? The West can't exactly assuage the fears of Russian leaders or stamp out the desire of Ukrainians to join the EU and NATO when its very existence as a more prosperous alternative is what creates those feelings.
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it's hard to look at the various groups and their beliefs about what reality looks like (and the chasm between those beliefs) and not liken to something like a magic spell being cast and being effective on some
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This is a Reddit-tier strawman. Find one person one /r/themotte who ever said "they wanted to be invaded".
But yes, if the U.S. is going to provide Ukraine with weapons, which it is under no obligation to do, then it is incumbent on the US to decide if those weapons are doing more harm than good. The US is sovereign. It alone should decide which countries to help and why.
More importantly, we have no idea what supporting the people of Ukraine even means any more. Elections have been suspended. Does the average Ukrainian want to continue prosecute the war? Nobody knows. But we definitely know that many of the soldiers don't want to fight. Otherwise they wouldn't have to be kidnapped off the streets to fight and die on the front lines.
The war should be easy to end. Take the current front line. These are the new borders.
Is it just? No. Is it peace? Yes. The US must stop funding a meat grinder which kills real men every day. Once there is peace, then there can be money for weapons to secure it.
And anyone who want to support Ukraine more meaningfully can do so right now. Put your own life on the line instead of another man's.
For a ceasefire the (perceived) costs of continuing to fight must exceed the gains from fighting. Whilst one party believes they have more to gain from fighting than not, fighting continues. What made Kellogg's peace plan workable on paper is that it shifts the cost calculus for both parties such that costs from continuing to fight far outweighed the gains.
One necessary prerequisite for this that America must signal its willingness to commit. If Ukraine believes that Russia believes that American is fickle they won't come to the table in the first place, if Russia believes it America will flake out they will violate the agreement when convenient.
Peace doesn't happen just because one party wants it, especially not a third party.
There is actually consistent polling on the attitudes regarding the war.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/653495/half-ukrainians-quick-negotiated-end-war.aspx
Props for finding the polling.
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Well, we are talking about Trump here. From where I can stand, Trumps MO is to take the policies of previous presidents and reject them on general principles. Obama made a deal with Iran, therefore Trump will break the deal. NK was kept isolated, thus Trump will of course meet with Kim. The Biden administration has supported Ukraine against Russia, so Trump will naturally support Russia against Ukraine. Previous presidents have expertly wielded soft power to make the US the uncontested No 1 superpower in the world, so of course the first thing Trump does is to talk about annexing Greenland and Canada.
If the US commits to stationing troops in the non-occupied parts of Ukraine as part of a peace deal, then I would fully expect these troops to miraculously being ordered back to the US about a week before Putin takes the next bite out of Ukraine. From what we have seen so far, the US under Trump is only slightly more neutral than Belarus is.
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Except that’s why Trump was so pissed with Z. Trump wanted strategic ambiguity (where the US government had an interest in Ukraine) but Trump determined that Z simply wanted more US support so Z could try to reclaim lost territory.
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Why are you and every other pro-russian so consistently dishonest about this? You say that elections have been suspended as if that was somehow a point in favour of Russia.
Let's first ignore the fact that Ukraine can't hold elections. Elections during war is illegal under Ukranian law. Even if they weren't, what do you propose they do?
Either they just let the Russian occupiers conduct elections on the Russian side of the front line, in which case these areas would of course have the electroral outcomes that most favour Russia, or they could have elections only in the parts of the country the Ukranian state controls, in which case you'd be on here whining about the elections not being fair because people in the eastern parts of the country couldn't vote.
I am not pro Russian. Nothing I’ve ever said on this forum is pro Russian.
I assume therefore you are not arguing in good faith.
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In America we had an election in the middle of our civil war. We had elections on time and on schedule no matter what.
And so we expect others to hold themselves to the same standard.
This is an irrelevant argument. It is as relevant to the current situation as a point than ancient Athenians had elections during Peloponnesian War. A better (since more recent) parallel is the suspension of elections by UK during WWII. It is definitely easier to conduct elections before the age of bombers and missiles hitting your polling stations.
However, what matters is that elections are suspended during the state of war according to the Ukrainian Constitution. Lifting the state of war would be criminally stupid when there is an ongoing war (the state of war allows some actions that are illegal during peace, like having a firing positions in private property by the military). Surely, there can be some legal trickery, like rolling suspension of state of war or some other legal tricks but this will not make it any more democratic that what it is now and there is still a matter of missiles raining from the sky. I would not like to see a headline "Presidential elections conducted in Ukraine. 25 dead, 150 injured, and 25,000 ballots destroyed in fires".
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The South was not included.
Also postwar political violence in the South meant that the 1876 Presidential election could not be counted. Hayes was not chosen as POTUS over Tilden as the result of votes being cast and counted, but because a botched Democratic scheme to bribe the neutral chair of the Electoral Commission led to him resigning.
The US elections that happened in the worst security situation were the 1862 midterms. I haven't found any detailed account of how they were run.
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Somehow didn't stop them from getting Virginia's permission to split in half! American democracy is truly incredible.
Vae victis.
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The election in 1864 explicitly excluded the seceded states / confederacy, which is exactly what the previous post was talking about. You would consider it fully democratic for the Ukraine government to hold an election only in regions under full control of the Kiev government, then?
no, but at least it would be like the election in 2019 which brought the current government and Zelensky into political office originally
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Certainly a lot more reasonable compared to “no election.”
I fail to see how holding elections only in the part of the country that isn't guaranteed to vote wrong, implicitly signing off on the rest, is "a lot more reasonable" than suspending elections.
It's especially funny to see people suddenly care about the legitimacy of Ukrainian elections despite normally acting like their elections, along with any elections that aren't the glorious USA true freedom elections, are worth nothing.
I think the payoff is that it slightly expands the options of the Ukrainian public (that is, the portion of the country that would get to vote in the election).
They could conceivably be against the war and vote out Zelensky, an option which they don't really currently have: the press is censored and the country is under martial law, speaking out publicly to overturn Zelensky is probably pretty dangerous.
If they just vote Zelensky back in with overwhelming approval, then things end up exactly as they are with elections suspended, but we at least have the information that their heart is still in the fight, that they had the opportunity to back down in a secret ballot and chose not to take it.
Of course, this is dependent on the elections being conducted fairly, which may not be the case. But if Zelensky holds an election and rigs it/intimidates voters/whatever, that would just put him in the same position he is right now, but with the added risk of information on his actions leaking out.
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Just because tyranny is legal (constitutional even) or convenient doesn't make it legitimate.
The Press is totally lawful, I still think the men running after youths to throw them into the meat grinder of a war that's already lost are the dregs of humanity.
But ultimately, it's not like we're talking about France in WW1 where every party is fully committed to national union and postponing elections is a formality. It's closer to a Lundendorff type situation.
Zelensky has ostensibly used war powers to ban his political opposition, kill journalists and pretty much done all that you expect of a corrupt Slavic dictatorship.
Maybe you need to be a dictatorship to survive an existential war, that doesn't mean that it's automatically right to fight a lost war to the last man.
Source on killing journalists?
I assume he is referring to the Gonzalo Lira case. Most outright killings (that we have documentation of) seem to have happened before Zelensky (though not all). There is more evidence of non-killing crackdowns on the press since well before the 2022 invasion.
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I think one reason the justification for suspending elections is particularly unsympathetic to Americans is that we held an election even during a raging civil war.
It’s not exactly the same scenario as Ukraine, but it some ways it was worse. And it was 150+ years ago, and we still managed to do it.
That election excluded the confederate states by design, though. Russia apologists would certainly consider such a move for a new Ukrainian election to be illegitimate.
As someone frequently accused of being a Russia apologist, I have to disagree - people living in Crimea should be voting in Russian elections, not Ukrainian ones. If Ukraine doesn't want to let the people in the contested regions vote, they're simply making the implicit case that those regions are not part of Ukraine.
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Do you really think that? I’m sure some might make those mouth noises but the argument would be ignored. Whilst the argument for an election is at least not crazy
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This is a fair point, and that’s why I said it’s not a precise comparison.
Do we have examples of elections being held in circumstances exactly like Ukraine’s? I genuinely don’t know, although I know elections have been held in war torn countries before.
The Confederate States of America also held congressional elections in 1863-1864 while Grant's and Sherman's armies were busy trashing the place. I think that counts. The CSA didn't hold presidential elections because IIRC the CSA presidency was a 6-year term and the CSA didn't, um, last long enough for Jefferson Davis to have to worry about elections....
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If this offer were on the table, backed by security guarantees, Zelenskyy would take it in a heartbeat. Trump has not made any such offer.
Putin cannot be trusted without security guarantees, but I fear Zelensky cannot be trusted with them. Fundamentally, neither side trusts each other or wants to stop fighting, and I completely understand why. Unfortunately for Ukraine, US support is not unconditional or unlimited, and at some point it's just throwing good money after bad. Ukraine gave Russia a bloody nose, and they've made Russia pay dearly for little gain. Russia was expecting a cake walk, and it has been anything but. They will think twice before repeating any such adventurism. For this, Ukraine should certainly be celebrated, but they are outmatched even with material support. They have no path to victory. If anything less than complete withdrawal of Russian forces is unacceptable, then I think Ukraine will lose everything rather than something. Western elites who continue to talk in those terms are fundamentally unserious, incapable, and unwilling to commit the forces necessary to make that happen. These are people who had nothing good to say about Ukraine until Putin invaded, and their stance today is motivated far more from fear and hate of Putin than love of Ukraine. For them, Ukraine is worth sacrificing to preserve their sense of international order. Ironically, Ukraine underestimates their peril, because they're surrounded by enemies on both sides.
This is exactly the point. The west (or at least America) doesn’t trust Z not to try to draw US into the conflict so they came up with the idea of creating some economic benefit for the US that creates some strategic ambiguity. It really was a smart solution and those on the other side either are unwilling to admit Z can’t be trusted or want what Z wants (a war in Ukraine with US boots on the ground).
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My understanding is that mosf of those people are trying to play a waiting game... if Ukraine keeps holding out. surely at some point Russia's economy will collapse under the weight of war/casualties/sanctions, and at that point Ukraine can get favorable terms and/or retake most if not all of its territory.
I unfortunately have no idea of how to evaluate that likelihood (beyond my personal view of "it's a nice dream, but highly improbable"), as all the reporting on the state of the Russian economy/military is... distorted, to say the least, and I don't claim to be an economic expert to begin with.
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The problem is that there are few plausible ways to offer security guarantees that would actually be reassuring to both parties. Between the Minsk agreements, Western insistence that making Ukraine acknowledge Russian sovereignty over land it captured is off the table, and a simple look at any Western newspaper or comment section, it is clear that any Western country would see it as not just possible but morally and strategically imperative to use any ceasefire or peace treaty as an opportunity to prepare Ukraine for an eventual reconquest of lost territory. Even if the text of the treaty were to preclude it, what would be the consequences for the Western side for breaking it? The problem is that when you are the top dog, giving yourself more latitude to act, as the US-led block did (snubbing the ICC, freezing Russian assets and thinking out aloud about confiscating them and sending them to Ukraine, flexing its public opinion control machinery, forcefully aligning NGOs like Amnesty), paradoxically turns out to actually weaken your hand in a situation like this - you gave up something akin to what certain legalists like to call the "right to be sued", that is, the ability to be held to your promises.
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It seems unlikely that Trump will do that. In fact it’s about as likely as Ukraine retaking Crimea. It seems like the reason it’s off the table is that many think Ukraine want that so they can continue to instigate Russia, draw the US into the war, and retake territory. If the entire Atlantic alliance blows up over Ukraine, I will blame Zalensky and Ukrainian intransigence.
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