Many on the Latte Left facilitated this new era of fascist censorship. Remember when people didn’t care that folks who were accurately assessing the situation between Ukraine and Russia were targeted and silenced?
Many on the Latte Left facilitated this new era of fascist censorship. Remember when people didn’t care that folks who were accurately assessing the situation between Ukraine and Russia were targeted and silenced?
I’ve heard that accusation plenty, and believed it until I looked into it. Ukrainians in large numbers were willing to fight and die for a movement which wasn’t a coup until the president fled to Russia. They’re not puppets with no agency who can be ordered around from Washington or Brussels. As such, the popular support the government received, and still does, tends to support the idea that it’s not just a Western puppet.
And, even if it was all true, does it not speak strongly against Putin’s willingness to negotiate? He could have tried diplomacy before, but if he chose invasion because he saw Ukraine/NATO as unreliable parties, why would that change now?
He did try diplomacy before! Shortly after the war began there were talks, and then the US put the breaks on it.
Again though, it’s disingenuous to say he tried diplomacy when his demands all infringed on a sovereign nation’s ability to self govern and determine. And don’t give me the NATO bullshit line. Russia was already bordered by other NATO nations. And frankly even if it was not, he doesnt get to decide who they can form deals and relationships with. Theyre no longer a USSR vassal state, no matter how much he’d like them to be. This was a land grab for resources, strategic access, and one old fucks personal delusions of grandeur.
Their “self governance” was disrupted by a coup with support from the West. The actually elected democratic government was dissolved, and the Russian ethnic minority was against this.
As for self determination, why don’t ethnically Russian people in Crimea or the Donbass region get to have self determination? The majority sure seem to hate the new government and support Russia.
So! Russia wants territory and Ukraine wants territory. A reasonable compromise would be UN monitored referendums on the question for the people living in those places, with both sides agreeing to respect democratic decision making.
Compromise is possible. Give peace a chance.
Not going to keep repeating myself. See my response above. TL;DR: you’re presenting a false equivalence and the self-determination argument on the Russian side is tainted by their 2014 invasion and the meddling they’ve done since then to build this so called “native” ethnic Russian coalition.
As for giving peace a chance, I agree with you there. Russia should pull all of their troops from all Ukranian regions and stop attacking its neighbor. It’s the aggressor. Ukranians have zero reason to negotiate peace with a hostile foreign invader.
They might want to avoid becoming another forever war like Iraq or Afghanistan. Avoiding more bloodshed is, itself, a good reason.
There’s a reason there were negotiations before the US put a stop to it.
I think you’re being overly moralist and not really looking at this materially.
That’s perplexing! Not that I didn’t hear about it—U.S. media and all—but that it didn’t work. I mean, Zekenskyy stood up to a U.S. President in one-on-one conversation, foregoing aid money to stick to his anti-corruption principles. How did Biden successfully put the brakes on Russia-Ukraine talks?
Also, it only takes one member to tank the accession of a new member state into NATO. I would have thought that Putin, or Russian diplomats could have peeled off just one vote. Orbán in Hungary, for instance, seems like he’d be a slam dunk ‘no’. Or even Turkey, perhaps, since the two countries had enough mutual trust to negotiate the grain deal.
How the hell did Russia fail at that?