Russia-Ukraine war and related tensions Megathread

[Beet]

Big if true….but trusting the Sun? That’s a gigantic leap of
faith.

Would you trust PBS? They reported four days ago they reported the following:

The United States believes Russian President Vladimir Putin has decided to invade Ukraine and has communicated those plans to the Russian military, Western and defense officials have told the PBS NewsHour.

Two additional administration officials tell the NewsHour that they expect the invasion to begin next week—reiterating what U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on Feb. 10.

https://web.archive.org/web/20220211200039/https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/putin-to-invade-ukraine-next-week-according-to-u-s-officials

Interestingly enough however Sullivan was saying they didn't know yet. The headline was later changed, but not before it was widely reported.

[PSOL]

🍿

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

🍿

This isn't some kind of game.

[Former Dean Phillips Supporters for Haley (I guess???!?) 👁️]

Everything looks pretty much as you would expect if they were in fact going to invade.

This doesn't mean it is 100% certain that they will.

However, if it looks like a duck, if it walks like a duck, and it quacks like a duck, it could in fact actually be a duck. With 80 years without a major duck in Europe, it is understandable that we have started to get to the point where a duck seems to many people to be almost unimaginable. But couldn't what looks like a duck actually be a duck?

If so, all we can do at this point is hope that the damage and destruction that will follow is not too severe.

[Silent Hunter]

Everything looks pretty much as you would expect if they were in fact going to invade.

This doesn't mean it is 100% certain that they will.

However, if it looks like a duck, if it walks like a duck, and it quacks like a duck, it could in fact actually be a duck. With 80 years without a major duck in Europe, it is understandable that we have started to get to the point where a duck seems to many people to be almost unimaginable. But couldn't what looks like a duck actually be a duck?

If so, all we can do at this point is hope that the damage and destruction that will follow is not too severe.

The people of the former Yugoslavia would question the lack of presence of a major duck.

[Silent Hunter]

He could keep them there for months if he wanted.

[Former Dean Phillips Supporters for Haley (I guess???!?) 👁️]

The people of the former Yugoslavia would question the lack of presence of a major duck.

This is of course a fair point. It depends on the definition of major, yes. And also on the definition of duck.

In terms of its effect on the people directly involved, any duck is inherently "major."

However, there is a difference in scale, and you could call the Yugoslavian conflict mostly a "civil" or "domestic" conflict, as opposed to a full-on conflict between conventional militaries of large nation-states.

[Torie]

I found this bit in the New York Times:

" The websites of Ukraine’s defense ministry and army, as well as the interfaces of the country’s two largest banks were hit by cyberattacks on Tuesday, a Ukrainian government agency said.

The announcement came as Ukraine girds for a possible attack by Russian forces massing on its northern, eastern and southern borders."

...

"Pavlo Kukhta, an adviser to Ukraine’s energy minister, said in an interview that the hackers were possibly preparing for a larger attack, which could target the country’s “vulnerable” power grid."


https://www.nytimes.com/live/2022/02/15/world/russia-ukraine-news#hackers-attack-ukraines-defense-ministry-army-and-state-banks-agency-says

[Storr]

Big if true….but trusting the Sun? That’s a gigantic leap of
faith.

Would you trust PBS? They reported four days ago they reported the following:

The United States believes Russian President Vladimir Putin has decided to invade Ukraine and has communicated those plans to the Russian military, Western and defense officials have told the PBS NewsHour.

Two additional administration officials tell the NewsHour that they expect the invasion to begin next week—reiterating what U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on Feb. 10.

https://web.archive.org/web/20220211200039/https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/putin-to-invade-ukraine-next-week-according-to-u-s-officials

Interestingly enough however Sullivan was saying they didn't know yet. The headline was later changed, but not before it was widely reported.

I’m not saying the Sun is definitely wrong. But British tabloids do not the greatest track record when it comes to accuracy in reporting. If UK intelligence was able to find out the date and time of invasion, you might as well leak that information to a publication like the Sun. It’s more likely to get printed/publicized faster there than somewhere like the BBC, which would want thoroughly verify such information before publishing it.

[compucomp]

Ukraine joining NATO at this point is about as likely as Turkey ever joining the EU.
 

So why not tell Putin that publically.  If Russia invades then Putin will have a hell of a job trying to explain to his people why Russian blood needs to be bleed on something the West and Ukraine is already making concessions on.

Because this is geopolitics and that's not how things work. For example, everyone knows Crimea now is Russian and it is never going back to Ukraine, but they're not going to say that publicly in order to not legitimize Russia's hostile annexation of it until the Ukrainians agree to cede it.

Look, Singapore to throw out a random place has a right to join NATO. That doesn't mean they will ever actually get approved to join. The EU are never going to allow Turkey in nowadays, they're still considered a candidate. The Russians seem to want a written-down treaty to be agreed to reorganizing Europe's security infrastructure, and that takes years, not a couple months with your forces around a border.

The Russians are apparently willing to settle for Ukraine guaranteeing it in their laws, probably as a part of their constitution. This would be the biggest L possible IMO for the US, their eastern expansion into Ukraine thwarted without being able to punish Russia for it.  This would probably tempt the US to launch another regime change in Ukraine, which would give Russia a much more solid casus belli.

What do you mean by "another" here?

*heavy sarcasm* Didn’t you know Euromaidan was actually a NATO backed coup? The thousands of protesters in Kiev were all CIA operatives.

The fact that the Americans found local lackeys to do their bidding doesn't change the fact they orchestrated the regime change when Ukraine changed their policy to align with Russia. In particular, Victoria Nuland, who may still be at the State Department, was caught with her hand in the cookie jar and on tape talking about it. Biden talked today about the right of countries to determine their own futures. Well, what if Zelensky decides that the future of Ukraine is neutrality? Then it's time for a new Ukrainian president, huh?

One would think that after the Russians foisted Trump on the US and caused us all the mayhem and misery of the last 4 years, Americans would realize that what they did in Ukraine in 2014 was a big mistake. But hypocrisy looks like it is the true enduring hallmark of American foreign policy.

[Lief 🗽]

🍿

This isn't some kind of game.

It absolutely is for fascists like PSOL.

[KaiserDave]

compucomp really is the worst poster on the site

[Orwell]

🍿

This isn't some kind of game.

It absolutely is for fascists like PSOL.

PSOL is many things, stupid, yes. But calling someone a fash who isn’t one just lessens the meanin.

[Former Dean Phillips Supporters for Haley (I guess???!?) 👁️]

https://mobile.twitter.com/CBSWalsh/status/1493688067361849349

[Absentee Voting Ghost of Ruin]

https://twitter.com/MarQs__/status/1493702377744048129

[Dereich]

Ukraine joining NATO at this point is about as likely as Turkey ever joining the EU.
 

So why not tell Putin that publically.  If Russia invades then Putin will have a hell of a job trying to explain to his people why Russian blood needs to be bleed on something the West and Ukraine is already making concessions on.

Because this is geopolitics and that's not how things work. For example, everyone knows Crimea now is Russian and it is never going back to Ukraine, but they're not going to say that publicly in order to not legitimize Russia's hostile annexation of it until the Ukrainians agree to cede it.

Look, Singapore to throw out a random place has a right to join NATO. That doesn't mean they will ever actually get approved to join. The EU are never going to allow Turkey in nowadays, they're still considered a candidate. The Russians seem to want a written-down treaty to be agreed to reorganizing Europe's security infrastructure, and that takes years, not a couple months with your forces around a border.

The Russians are apparently willing to settle for Ukraine guaranteeing it in their laws, probably as a part of their constitution. This would be the biggest L possible IMO for the US, their eastern expansion into Ukraine thwarted without being able to punish Russia for it.  This would probably tempt the US to launch another regime change in Ukraine, which would give Russia a much more solid casus belli.

What do you mean by "another" here?

*heavy sarcasm* Didn’t you know Euromaidan was actually a NATO backed coup? The thousands of protesters in Kiev were all CIA operatives.

The fact that the Americans found local lackeys to do their bidding doesn't change the fact they orchestrated the regime change when Ukraine changed their policy to align with Russia. In particular, Victoria Nuland, who may still be at the State Department, was caught with her hand in the cookie jar and on tape talking about it. Biden talked today about the right of countries to determine their own futures. Well, what if Zelensky decides that the future of Ukraine is neutrality? Then it's time for a new Ukrainian president, huh?

One would think that after the Russians foisted Trump on the US and caused us all the mayhem and misery of the last 4 years, Americans would realize that what they did in Ukraine in 2014 was a big mistake. But hypocrisy looks like it is the true enduring hallmark of American foreign policy.

There's this absurd idea that EVERYTHING happening internationally happens only because of or in opposition to the United States. The United States, still pushing the "Russia Reset" idea at the time, had no reason to support protests to overthrow Yanukovych. If you really really want to point to some hidden hand behind the Maidan protests and regime change, the US is not the best culprit. The spark for those protests was the Yanukovych regime backing out of their association agreement with the EU; the EU would really be the ones with an immediate reason to back the protests and they did get their agreement. The US had nothing to gain and did in fact gain nothing from Yanukovych's overthrow. Of course, no one blames the EU for Maidan because its an absurd idea that they'd be able to secretly and successfully organize a revolution under Russia's nose if the EU could even get its members to agree to wanting to do so.

Meanwhile, regular Ukrainians had EVERY reason to want Yanukovych out. Ukraine has been a basketcase since the fall of the Soviet Union. They've been one of the 10 worst performing countries in the world in growth since 1990. And the EU has been a wildly successful project for everyone in Eastern Europe who got in. Ukraine was richer than Poland at the end of the Warsaw Pact and are now 30% poorer. Why WOULDN'T the people of Ukraine be outraged that their government was throwing away the chance to associate with the EU?

[PSOL]

🍿

This isn't some kind of game.

It absolutely is for fascists like PSOL.

PSOL is many things, stupid, yes. But calling someone a fash who isn’t one just lessens the meanin.

Stupid, maybe but I’m not a fascist

Anyway I somewhat doubt that this isn’t just another ruse, but even if it is not I can only see positive things from it decades from now in bettering international politics by making everyone I dislike lose compared to the carnage. And my opponents losing means more opportunity for the common good. 

[Storr]

https://twitter.com/MarQs__/status/1493702377744048129

It would be 1939-40 all over again.

The Soviet Union took over what is now Western Belarus and Western Ukraine (major cities including Lviv, Brest, Grodno, Vilnius, Lutsk, Ternopil, and Rivne) from interwar Poland as part of the Nazi-Soviet non aggression pact in September 1939. Then the Red Army occupied Bessarabia on June 28, 1940 after giving an ultimatum to Romania on June 26, 1940. Several counties were incorporated into Soviet Ukraine (thus why Moldova doesn’t have a Black Sea coastline) and the remainder included in the new Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic on August 2, 1940.
 
The Soviets also occupied the Baltics in June 1940, but that won’t be happening this time for obvious reasons.

[jojoju1998]

I think Pope Francis is the best person to mediate.

[Orwell]

I think Pope Francis is the best person to mediate.

There are very few Catholics in either of these countries though

[Storr]

I think Pope Francis is the best person to mediate.

There are very few Catholics in either of these countries though

Yeah, I feel like Pope John Paul II would have been a better fit to mediate since at least he was from Eastern Europe.

[○∙◄☻¥tπ[╪AV┼cVê└]

I think Pope Francis is the best person to mediate.

There are very few Catholics in either of these countries though

Maybe that allows the pope to be more neutral.

[jojoju1998]

I think Pope Francis is the best person to mediate.

There are very few Catholics in either of these countries though

Yeah, I feel like Pope John Paul II would have been a better fit to mediate since at least he was from Eastern Europe. Maybe in the 12th Century Popes were useful for mediation of international conflicts, but not today.

1. John Paul II mediated a dispute between Argentina and Chile in the 1980s, so this isn't out of the picture.

2. Ukraine apparently wants Pope Francis to intervene, like now. https://www.newsweek.com/ukraine-looks-pope-francis-help-end-conflict-russia-report-1679024

Although there are not that many catholics in either country, Pope Francis is seen as the most trusted moral leader  in Ukraine.

[Orwell]

I think Pope Francis is the best person to mediate.

There are very few Catholics in either of these countries though

Yeah, I feel like Pope John Paul II would have been a better fit to mediate since at least he was from Eastern Europe. Maybe in the 12th Century Popes were useful for mediation of international conflicts, but not today.

1. John Paul II mediated a dispute between Argentina and Chile in the 1980s, so this isn't out of the picture.

2. Ukraine apparently wants Pope Francis to intervene, like now. https://www.newsweek.com/ukraine-looks-pope-francis-help-end-conflict-russia-report-1679024

Although there are not that many catholics in either country, Pope Francis is seen as the most trusted moral leader  in Ukraine.

It makes more sense between Two heavily catholic countries like Argentina and Chile

[KaiserDave]

https://twitter.com/olex_scherba/status/1493672265942241280

Just to push back on some more inane Putinist narratives