I'll answer this more completely tomorrow (knackered now) but very briefly: legitimate reasons to invade? Absolutely no. Legitimate concerns and grievances? Absolutely yes (and pretty much nobody denies this, even the UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres stated it after he met Putin last month and said his biggest regret was that the UN didn't get involved sooner as a mediator in the Donbas war that started in 2014). But no concerns and no grievances justify invading Ukraine, much less justify the horror of what he's now doing. He had countless other routes he could have taken to address his concerns. Putin's biggest complaint is that nobody in the West listens to him but he'd have more success finding a willing audience there if he stopped poisoning his critics on their soil and messing around with their elections.
Russian invasion of Ukraine | Fewer tweets, more discussion
- Thread starter Wednesday at Stoke
- Start date
Well that is when this invasion started so unless Guterres thinks he could have convinced Putin to pull back his forces to pre 2014 invasion borders I don't see what the UN could have accomplished.
Ok. This sounds humiliating in itself. Saying we gotta avoid humiliating Russia is enough humiliation. But it is still doesn't mean what you wrote:
You said : " but according to Macron the important thing is that Russia dosent get humiliated. To me that sound like France doesnt give a shit about Ukraine or the Ukrainians, they only want Russias cheap gas and oil no matter the cost of human suffering. "
I am not saying France (or Germany, or Poland, or anyone) cares enough about Ukrainians for humanity or something like that. Governments normally care about their own interests, and Ukraine happens to align with those interests. And France is certainly doing as much as could be expected of them in helping Ukraine (non-EU, non-Nato member). It is sad the West isn't doing more, but actually it is doing a lot compared to what was expected...
The word ‘Trump’ is doing all of the heavy lifting in that tweet.
Well, look who was in charge then.
feck me, did you really type all that shit? Let's hope the war is over ASAP without all your stressy bollox
First of all, please don't mix in Poland with the likes of Germany and France. Poland is taking in milions of Ukrainian refugees all while donating more material than most other nations so they should not be compared to the likes of Germany and France. And no France is not doing as much as could be expected of them when their leader seems more intersted in saving face for the Russian murderes then anything else.
You actually believe anything that Putin says? Good grief.
Putin invaded Ukraine for a combination of reasons, including (as a major reason) because he fears the example to the Russian people of a free and democratic Ukraine, but also because he wants to restore some mythical "Golden Age" of Russian Empire (with himself seen as saviour Tsar), wants to distract the younger generation of Russians from sliding away from Soviet values towards Western liberalism, and also because he is lost in delusions that he can shift the international order in Russia's favour by confronting the West.
On that basis I hereby reclaim the USA for England.
Gun-ownership will be banned, all American spellings will be changed, and American supporters of Spurs will become your new national role-models.
How about healthcare? I can stomach the spelling for healthcare
This article (sorry for the paywall but you get the gist here) is relevant on that subject, as well as the impact of sanctions which has been in question…
Understood, thanks for the reply - It's always nice to see a different perspective with these things. Such a messy situation. Personally, I agree with what Glaston has written below pretty much exactly. Not that it matters now I suppose, war is war. How it will end is the question now..
As was pointed out in another thread, if you go to this site
https://archive.ph/
And type in the URL of the article you want to read, you can get a HTML version of the text.
https://archive.ph/
And type in the URL of the article you want to read, you can get a HTML version of the text.
You have a really weird view of western journalism. There was never anything even remotely close to unanimity among them neither in making predictions nor in what should be done about the invasion and you very conveniently leave out that at the beginning of invasion the consensus was much closer to "it's only a matter of days, maybe weeks, before full occupation of Ukraine" and even a ton of relative optimists weren't really pointing to any real possibility of Ukraine holding anything, but were pointing that occupation might be too expensive for Russia to be viable.
Overarching trends might have changed (which to a certain extent is to be expected, since changes on the ground are not consistent Ukrainian gains anymore), but you could absolutely find those voices since start of the invasion (and regarding inflation in a lot of countries even before it). Those editorials really aren't nearly as special as you seem to imply.
Well, the turn of events is sure a very welcome one compared to my original anticipation from a few months back that China would try sending something equivalent to the Condor Legion to help Russia as ideological allies. At the same time, it also blatantly shows that China's word has to considered as (very probably) meaning jackshit if any country holds talks with them.
They were always going to act according to a calculation on what was in their long-term own interests, same as the US (on the rare occasion we think long-term).
The irony here, regarding a war Russia ostensibly started in order to reclaim land that should’ve always been theirs, is all the land China gave up to them only a few generations ago.
Big irony is that the All Saints monastery is affiliated with the Moscow Patriarchate, which is run by Patriarch Kirill. Kirill is a long-serving Putin ally who has given his blessing to the war in Ukraine.
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Seems like Severodonetsk is now back under Ukrainians (at least a majority of it) if Russians are falling back on artillery strikes now on the city.
I find this quite amusing, just as I did the NYT article about this. Russia has been a fascist state for quite some time now by any metric (like Eco’s list, for example).
I don’t think that Putin was lying in his address or in his quasi-historical article about Ukraine that he had released previously… he does seem to believe in that stuff. Obviously what he says is entirely disconnected from what you can roughly call an objective truth, but still, he quite clearly believes what he says so you can certainly deduct a lot of his motivations by simply listening to him.
Been away from this thread for a few days.
Macron is a fool and can inly say such cause it is not his country that was invaded.
Macron is a fool and can inly say such cause it is not his country that was invaded.
Whether Putin believes in the legitimacy of his actions or not is somewhat irrelevant.
It is totally unacceptable for one country to invade another for ideological reasons. Because Ukraine was posing no military threat at all to Russia.
Or the Russian people.
That’s not even a question.
I was replying to Glaston questioning whenever you can trust Putin’s words when you’re trying to establish his motivation — and you can, to an extent.
Wasn't meant as a question. Simply a statement.
You replied to my post with this, so I specified that the legitimacy (or illegitimacy to be more precise) of Putin’s claims was not in question. We were discussing whenever Putin’s words align with his beliefs.
I guess we will see which side cracks first.
Don't wait too long to leave if you really can. The Gulags were full of people who thought they had time or it could never happen to them and having UK links is not going to be popular if / when Putin loses the war and control. The most dangerous time to live in an autocracy is when the leadership is challenged or changes.
Ok. I will leave you to your cosy discussion but question whether you have never responded to another post with your own views....
When you think about it, its only four months ago he was telling everyone he wouldn't invade Ukraine and that the west was being hysterical and should calm down. He lies compulsively and at this point we should just stop listening to him all together.
I must have missed the memo asking him to be western mediator.
He can mediate for France as much as wants he doesn't speak for the EU or the west or Ukraine.
He has been poor on this crisis from the beginning and every time he opens his mouth he loses credibility.
I’d separate the two. In terms of the ideology he had been pretty consistent and in my opinion, truthful, with his anti-NATO, anti-Maidan, Pax Rossica etc. rhetoric since the Munich address in 2007 (inevitably escalating towards complete madness).
When Putin talks about his immediate plans, how he’ll never attack first, that there were no Russian soldiers in Crimea & Donbass, how he’ll never change the constitution etc., he obviously talks bullshit — to the point that as a rule of thumb you listen to what Putin or Peskov say on the matter and assume that the literal opposite is true, it works 95% of the time.
I feel that @DT12 adds a lot to this discussion. I might not like what he writes but it's interesting to read another view on things.