Two undersea cables in Baltic Sea disrupted

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.

>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"...

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.

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!".

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

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.