this post was submitted on 11 Dec 2023
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Stopping NATO expansion would be an absurd demand if Russia did not have the power to stop do so by force which is what it's now doing. Russia gave NATO a choice of either stopping expansion to its borders, or resolving the situation by force. NATO chose to resolve the situation by force. The whole narrative that Putin started the war and nobody else is beyond infantile because it just ignores all the history and geopolitical context pretending as if this was some random event that happened out of the blue and for no logical reason.
NATO has maintained a policy of might makes right since the fall of USSR, it has invaded and razed numerous countries over the past few decades, and now it's run into a country that will no longer tolerate an aggressive military alliance on its borders.
NATO did not fire a single shot during this war. Russia was the one who started all the shooting. Not to mention that Ukraine is a sovereign nation that gets to choose if it wishes to associate with NATO. Russia decided to use force to prevent Ukraine from doing that.
There is no history or geopolitical context here that justifies Putins invasion of Ukraine. To claim anything else is an endorsement of Putins flavour of fascism, where he is literally saying that Russian might makes right. It's insane how deluded you are to literally draw the opposite conclusion from facts that do not support your arguments at all.
The whole point of a proxy war is that you use somebody else to do the fighting for you. Meanwhile, Ukraine lost its sovereignty back in 2014 when a democratically elected government was overthrown in a western backed coup. Painting this as Ukraine freely choosing to associate with NATO is the height of intellectual dishonesty.
Meanwhile, bleating about justifications is just a distraction from the reality of why the war happened. Pretty hilarious of you to run around calling others deluded while spewing utter nonsense. One thing that's abundantly clear here is that you don't care one bit about the actual facts. You're an ideologue regurgitating propaganda you've memorized.
You are ignorant of the facts. The democratically elected Ukrainian parliament adopted a treaty for closer association with the EU, which Yanukovich tried to block. After sending snipers to fire at protestors against his deeply unpopular decision, the Ukrainian parliament voted by a large majority to remove Yanukovich from his post. There is no evidence of Western involvement here, and the only nation that spoke of a "coup" was Russia, as Putin lost his ally in Yanukovich. All of this happened through democratic votes, by a democratically elected governing body.
And one of the first things the interim government did? Hold new elections. How did Putin respond? By sending in troops and illegally occupying Crimea. And in Donetsk and Luhansk the pro-Russian separatists tried everything to disrupt the elections and deprive the Ukrainians there of their democratic right to vote.
Had Yanukovich decided not to send in snipers, the protests would have happened without bloodshed. Had Putin decided not to send in troops, there would not have been bloodshed. Every single time the decision to use violence was taken by Putin or one of his allies.
Rich coming from someone who only regurgitates Russian talking points verbatim.
No, I'm not ignorant of any facts. And this has been extensively documented in western media. https://archive.ph/BAxYc
The regime that got in power started doing these kinds of things to people of Donbas, as was openly reported by CNN at the time.
Now, let's take a look at a few slides from this lecture that Mearsheimer gave back in 2015 to get a bit of background on the subject. Mearsheimer is certainly not pro Russian in any sense, and a proponent of US global hegemony. First, here's the demographic breakdown of Ukraine:
here's how the election in 2004 went:
this is the 2010 election:
As we can clearly see from the voting patterns in both elections, the country is divided exactly across the current line of conflict. Furthermore, a survey conducted in 2015 further shows that there is a sharp division between people of eastern and western Ukraine on which economic bloc they would rather belong to:
Turns out that the civil war started exactly where the current line of contact is, and it started precisely because the nationalist regime the west installed started doing ethnic cleansing.
Ah yes, Russian talking points as reported by western media. You're an utter clown.