We're stuck between having to do timid actions and full NATO escalation. This feels like constant creep.
See my response to sibling comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42177029
Which NATO member was NATO defending when it bombed Libya into oblivion?
Unfortunately russia has the strength to rape & pillage through neighbors once in a while.
Russia has enemies because for centuries it has attacked its neighbours repeatedly.
And then imposed its own idea of peace that involves tanks rolling through Budapest and soldiers executing students and poets.
Tiananmen square shocked the world, but that kind of behaviour was already familiar to Eastern Europeans. It was the same old song, different orchestra.
Russia is not your friend, no matter what the propaganda tells you and your countrymen.
You’re just momentarily useful to a warlike mafia controlling a country.
To be fair, historically Russia has also been a target of attacks and invasions repeatedly. (Generally not by the same smaller neighbours it has been attacking, of course.)
That history has nothing to do with the present-day conflict, though, except that it might be a part of what gives some Russians a feeling of being threatened. And Soviet-style aggression is of course just imperialism by any other name.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circassian_genocide https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chechen_genocide
NATO has engaged in a dozen wars and conflicts as aggressors.
A careful examination of the list below suggests that, in terms of your choice of the words "dozen" and "aggressor", the way they are usually meant in English -- you're definitely stretching things, here.
We have this thing going on in the west where we are the good guys, and every war we start is an anti-terrorist operation. For Russia, the term just now was “special military operation”.
It’s hilarious when you realise how the world works. Controlling words means controlling minds. We’ve grown quite good at it.
We went to Korea and took any of our allies who wanted to fight with us. We were already NATO then. Then we went to Vietnam. Then we meddled with some civil wars here and there. Did some “interventions” and took our NATO allies with us each time. Then we started proper pummelling the Middle East.
To our adversaries, every single bullet that is shot by a NATO country is a NATO operation. It doesn’t take a full scale mobilisation, and it doesn’t matter what we call it internally. NATO is a military alliance, and our militaries are NATO’s militaries.
Of course each time it was communists or terrorists we were killing so it doesn’t matter, right? It’s like these things happen in a vacuum and aren’t a result of our intrusive foreign policy. We don’t ever speak of the events leading up to 9/11. Crazy terrorists doing their thing, savages that they are? For some reason the Ukrainian neo-nazis killing people in Donbas aren’t that, though. Wrong side of history, I guess.
And to be fair, I’m no pacifist. What I detest is trying to change the cold realities of life and making them seem like something they are not.
The same can be said of the French, English and Germans, that only stop destroying themselves after they united to fight Russia (which ironically saved the first 2 against the last one otherwise they would not even exist as sovereign states anymore).
I think you're forgetting somebody important? Another country that was actually on the beaches in Normandy?