Two undersea cables in Baltic Sea disrupted

It could be an accident, sure, but suspicion of sabotage is not paranoia.

And also, like, the German government (and European governments generally) DOES need to spend more on their military. They underinvested for decades and are now stuck needing to catch up very quickly.

And providing Ukraine with aid so that they don't get steamrolled is not morally wrong. Nor is refusing to do so so that Russia can more quickly get around to torturing and repressing the population a moral right.

Ah, your oddly-vague wording must of course be referring to how Russia explicitly promised to respect Ukraine's borders [0], a line they are violently crossing as we speak. First with an undeclared guerrilla-war and annexation, and more-recently with a massive "surprise" invasion--after spending several weeks of lying about their buildup and pretending that other countries were just trying to make them look bad.

If you are sarcastically suggesting something else... Well, go ahead, share the evidence for whatever-it-is, the kind of documentary evidence which countries ensure is always abundant for any remotely important international promise. (That is in contrast to self-serving lies from the Kremlin, which rely heavily on refusing to explain.)

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budapest_Memorandum

Indeed it's not, because that's an extremely distorted and misleading narrative. For example, on multiple occasions (notably 1994 and 1997) Russia signed treaties validating NATO expansion long after this supposed "explicit promise" (which also wasn't quite what you seem to think). We also have statements from the two most important players on the Soviet side (Gorbachev and Shevardnadze) thoroughly discounting this version of events.

Whatever source you got that narrative from is simply misinformed, or worse.

That may be true in the most narrow and mechanical sense, but the way it presents blame is very wrong.

The first rule of kremnology is that Russia always lies without a shame, as lies are usefull and they incur zero cost on the liar.

Russia invaded because they felt Ukraine was showing a bad example of slavic people becoming a democracy.

Also Russia has always had an affinity towards Ukrainian genocide. See Holodomor.

Also there is the narrative of lost colonial honor, Crimea, Catherine the great, and other idiotic pseudo-historical ramblings of a demented autocratic propagnada.

Russia returns Crimea, Donbass etc and Ukraine promises not to join NATO.

Strange that Putin hasn't proposed such a deal.

NATO membership has never had anything to do with it. Note how Finland has joined NATO since 2022, and faces no repercussions from Russia, despite a third of their land-based nuclear missiles within 400 km of the Finnish border.

>prepared to fight their proxy war to the last of them

The natural corollary to this ridiculous "fighting Russia to the last Ukrainian" argument, which you guys never seem to acknowledge, is that it already assumes that Russia will murder every last Ukrainian and take their land. That's just a given, and you then try to blame the West as though they stuck their hand into a lawnmower or something.

None of this holds up to any scrutiny, though. The whole NATO expansion narrative barely exists in Russia, they don't talk about that, they talk about standard-issue Imperialist narratives like "Ukraine doesn't exist, it's not a real country, not a real language, not a real ethnicity, Ukrainians are 'little brothers' to the superior Russian spirit, everything good in Ukraine is Russian and everything Ukrainian is bad, and we Russians must liberate them from their mental delusions of being something other than Russian and restore Russia to our natural greatness & place in the world"

Yeah, nothing like nato when it comes to anti-imperialism...

How about Russia? Whose proxy are they?

Anyone parroting that phrase is simply repeating Kremlin-sourced propaganda, intended to wrench at the weak minds of “useful idiots” and supply a pretext for what they truly wish: lily-livered appeasement that rewards aggression with recognition.

Life under Russian occupation is one of rape, torture, kidnapping, looting, execution. Would you like to be raped and tortured? How about your family, in front of you, before they are executed? No? No.

That is why Ukraine fights.

“Proxy war”, my ass. Ukrainian resistance to Russian aggression is existential.

After it was itself promised NATO wont expand eastwards and Ukraine will not be used to get their bases next to its borders. Not really strange how they broken this agreement after 30 years of broken promises, sanctions, open threats, an orange coup in their neighbor, among other things.

But sure, nothing more anti-imperialist by a coalition formed by the foremost imperialist power with its client states, expanding for "democracy"...

I wouldn’t argue that EU and the US did not screw up in 20{08,14} though. We did. Massively. We did underestimate Putins long game - had we known how far he wants to go, and I’d argue most post soviet countries knew, this would’ve been nipped in the bud.

Also, why haven't you paid me the $50,000 you promised, you disgraceful deadbeat? You say you don't remember it? It doesn't matter if I can't provide any kind of document or recording that would be standard for that kind of thing, it must have happened--or else why would I keep bringing it up?

> goat ...lovers in Afghanistan

or outright, unfettered racism

> something that they have repeatededly said they consider a casus belli

or fawning gullibility.

Ukraine isn’t a member of NATO and until 2014 was dead-set against it. Same for Finland and Sweden until 2022. Whatever happened in those years to trigger such a change in public sentiment, I wonder.

> It must be because they thought, "hey, what better than to get in a costly war", have hundreds of thousands of their own die

“Meat waves” are a decades old Soviet military doctrine that has not changed, and Putin is an ex-KGB thug. Regard for human life isn’t in that picture.

They gave up their nukes in exchange for protection from Russia and the US. Both countries have failed to keep up their end of the bargain, so it's sensible for Ukraine to get back what they gave up.

Useful word: Revanchism [0], for people who want to conquer places they claim they once-owned.

[0] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/revanchist

One strand of BS I've seen is "Ukraine now is a different country than the one we promised never to invade."

If that's really how it works, Russia should be ejected from the United Nations and apologize for fraudulently casting votes in the UN Security Council, because it's a different country than the USSR.

Was Ukraine candidate for NATO?

Yes, Ukraine has been a candidate for NATO membership. In 2008, during the Bucharest Summit, NATO members agreed that Ukraine would eventually become a member of the alliance. However, no formal invitation was extended at that time. COMMONS LIBRARY

In 2010, under President Viktor Yanukovych, Ukraine adopted a non-aligned status, halting its pursuit of NATO membership. This policy shifted after the 2014 annexation of Crimea by Russia, leading Ukraine to renew its aspirations for NATO integration. In 2019, Ukraine amended its constitution to enshrine the goal of joining NATO. NATO

In September 2022, following Russia's annexation of parts of southeastern Ukraine, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy announced that Ukraine had applied for NATO membership under an accelerated procedure. WIKIPEDIA As of November 2024, Ukraine remains a NATO partner country and has not yet achieved full membership.

The 2014 orange revolution was carried out, for starters, to put a change to that. And even when later the current leader was elected promised to normalize relationships, he was "convinced" promptly to push for the opposite direction. As for Finland and Sweden, when told to jump, they ask "how high".

Cries of "Whataboutism!" is basically "our shit doesn't stink, let's focus on the others' farts, and treat them as some unique case of foul smell producers!".

Between 2010 and later 2022 (i.e., not in 2014 or in February 2022) Ukraine was officially not pursuing membership, and France, Germany and the US were all unofficially making it clear that NATO membership was not being pursued and would not be offered.

Ukraine applied for NATO membership after Russia's invasion. It cannot therefore be a cause of Russia's invasion. At the time Russia sponsored and supported internal revolt in Crimea and Donbass, it was 2014 and Ukraine was officially and unofficially not in or applying to NATO--so how can that be the cause of Russian intervention then?

Thank you, though, for using ChatGPT to support my contention that NATO membership had nothing to do with Russia's invasion.

BTW, Russia has shared borders with multiple NATO countries, starting with Norway in 1949 when NATO was founded, and the Baltics since 2004. A neighbouring country's membership in an alliance is not a casus belli.

you’re describing international relations, none of this is specific to russia. people are indoctrinated from birth into nationalist propaganda. when these mouthpieces speak they aren’t lying, but it’s not the truth.

And I wouldn't blame them.

The West promised to protect them and failed.

You’re right about one thing, though. There’s definitely a stench here.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/December_2021_Russian_ultimatu...

Inofficially, of course the U.S. wanted Ukraine in NATO and the EU all the time. Merkel opposed NATO membership at some point, but Germany is just a vassal state.

In any case, disputin Kremlin propaganda in an otherwise well-regarded forum doesn’t feel wrong. One certainly wouldn’t bother on Twitter, for example.

Although Russia has obstinately described NATO expansion as a threat, Putin was actually more concerned about the loss of Russia’s perceived sphere of influence in former Soviet republics which were aligning themselves with the West economically and politically

So it wasn’t about NATO, it was about maintained a decaying sphere of influence.

Boris Bondarev, a Russian diplomat who later resigned in protest of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, recalled that the draft treaties had shocked many Russian diplomats and that he immediately viewed the demands as non-negotiable.

Even the Russian diplomats knew it was posturing while Russia added to the 100,000 troops already staging on the border with Ukraine. Demands made at the point of 100,000 guns pointed at you are not good faith negotiating positions.

What right does Russia have to formalized neutrality, to control Ukraine’s foreign policy? Do you think that, since “Germany is just a vassal state” that Russia deserves one too?

[ETA: formatting]

Indeed, russia started this war by refusing to be neutral. Thus, Ukraine will perhaps show neutrality if russia shows neutrality first.

https://mearsheimer.substack.com/p/who-caused-the-ukraine-wa...

It’s the ”i know they are lying, they know i know, and yet they lie”. One of the points is not to convince but to confuse.

Actually it was Putin's acting and speaking as if he could partially restore the glory of the former Soviet empire (whose collapse he called "the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century") that got Russia into its current mess in Ukraine.

He does, in any case, consider the current Russian Federation and the Soviet Union to be continuations of "historic Russia". So it's not Western rhetoric. And it isn't the West that is making him invade Ukraine and menace other countries.

"Oh, sure, they engage in extra-sketchy forms of state-sponsored violence and chronically lie about it... but that just means they know the material! They'd never lie to me, because we have a special spiritual connection."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valdai_Discussion_Club

The war is what caused Ukraine to restart its previously-repudiated attempts to join NATO, so this isn’t just wrong but entirely backwards.

But Mearsheimer's arguments are convincing.

We may find it ridiculous to be afraid of NATO or the USA. Others do not.

Putin's actions do not line up with this portrait of him as a hyper-rational long-term strategist acting on the interests of the Russian state. They line up very well with what you would expect from an aging, deeply conspiratorial cold warrior with widely publicized nationalist beliefs [0], a desire to have a legacy that compares against the likes of Peter the Great [1], and the type of delusional thinking that is the near-inevitable result of not having anyone that is willing (due to brownnosing) or able (due to corruption) to tell you hard truths [2].

Even when someone like Tucker Carlson sits down with Putin and practically tees him up to blame the war on US, he goes on ridiculous historical tangents to try to justify why Ukraine isn't real, as opposed to saying anything related to NATO. And that's not a fluke. Russian internal narratives are vastly more focused on nationalism than on anything resembling "NATO made us do this".

You also just have to look at the assassinations carried out on NATO soil - including using chemical and radiological weapons - blowing up Czech ammunition depots, etc. Years and years of unilateral kinetic escalation directly against the west. And then no response whatsoever when Finland and Sweden joined NATO.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/21/world/europe/putin-ukrain...

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jun/10/putin-compares...

[2] There's far too many instances of this to even count.

The second possibility makes much more sense (and is more informative), so I should have assumed that one instead.

What we do know is that they've been in close contact, and that he is sincerely grateful to them:

   In John Mearsheimer's 2023 book "How States Think", the foreword acknowledges him receiving a small financial support from Valdai in conjunction with Best Book award for his 2019 book "The Great Delusion".

They're not all, and are in fact easily debunked.

One just needs to read between the lines a little bit.

See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42197501

We may find it ridiculous to be afraid of NATO or the USA

Russia isn't "afraid" of either -- it just considers them to be annoyances.

Its regime pretends be "afraid" of both, for the benefit of its internal and external propaganda, and of course to entice its people to sign up for the meat grinder. But that's just its delusion, which we are under no obligation to honor or validate.