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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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