That's a fallacious argument based on a false premise. Russia has always been clear that their concern has been NATO expansion. Ukraine would have lost none of its territory had it chose to remain neutral.

Furthermore, plenty of western experts warned about this literally for decades, yet those concerns were ignored.

Meanwhile, it's kind of funny of you to talk about setting some sort of precedent when the west has set it a long time ago.

Western nations have invaded Yugoslavia, Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria just to name a few. This was done unilaterally without UN authorization. In fact, Russian playbook in Ukraine is directly modeled on what NATO did in Yugoslavia where they recognized breakaway regions and had them invite NATO for support.

What you're essentially saying here is that it's fine for the west to do these things, but we should bring the world to a brink of a nuclear holocaust when other countries do the same.

The reality is that the west has no moral high ground here unless western countries change their own behavior.

[+] vegai@suppo.fi 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

[deleted]

[–] yogthos@lemmy.ml -2 points 1 year ago

Perhaps it’s not so fallacious as you claim. Putin himself wrote a lengthy article (http://en.kremlin.ru/misc/66182) which was basically his version of Anschluß that Hitler used as reasoning for taking Austria in 1938. And Russian leaders have written a lot about how they would like to reverse the dismantling of USSR at least when it comes to territory – but since those nations are now sovereign that would amount to annexing those countries.

That article doesn't say what you seem to be claiming here.

I was talking about the precedent of using nuclear weapons to back offensive actions. USA did something like that during Korea in the 50s, but to my knowledge not since. Well ok, there was Trump, but who knows how serious that was.

And as you yourself admit the precedent is set by US which is the only country to actually commit such an atrocity. However, the bigger point here whether might makes right, and that's the rule that the west has consistently followed.

Didn’t Ukraine remain neutral about NATO until Russia took Crimea? Only after that they reconsidered that position.

No, Ukraine had a violent coup in 2014 where the legitimate government was overthrown and right wing nationalists took power. Russia annexed Crimea in response to that because the regime that took power started doing these sorts of things to the Russian speaking population:

[–] n0m4n@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The Budapest Memorandums disprove your argument. Long before Russian invaded Crimea, much less Ukraine main, a peace plan with a promise to never invade was given by Russia. Russia lied.

https://web.archive.org/web/20140317182201/http:/www.cfr.org/arms-control-disarmament-and-nonproliferation/budapest-memorandums-security-assurances-1994/p32484

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/05/science/ukraine-nuclear-weapons.html

[–] yogthos@lemmy.ml -2 points 1 year ago

I see you just conveniently omitted the whole 2014 coup when the legitimate government was overthrown in Ukraine and the regime that the west put in power started doing these sort of things to the Russian speaking population

The only one who's lying here is you bud.