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this post was submitted on 09 Sep 2023
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So you think it’s all or nothing for Ukraine?
If someone invades your country and kills your countrymen you don't negotiate with them. You tell them to get the fuck out or we'll kill every one of you motherfuckers that decides to continue being on our land. Why? You going to advocate being like Chamberlain? Or Quisling? What do you suggest someone does if their country is invaded?
Do you think Russia will unconditionally surrender and stop fighting when Ukraine reaches the Russian border?
Do you think Ukraine is going to invade Russia after they push them to the border?
I don't think Ukraine is about to conquer Russia or capture Moscow, even if they wanted to or if we want them to.
Do you think Russia will unconditionally surrender and stop fighting when Ukraine reaches the Russian border?
I have no idea. Even if they don't, Ukraine just has to defend their territory, which they have proven more than capable of.
The only one party that can end this conflict is the aggressor.
The only thing they've proven is that the West really wanted to get rid of their old weapon stock.
A safety buffer zone of a few kilometers, on the Russian side, past the Ukrainian country, sounds reasonable. Depending on how far they still keep shooting.
More likely there will simply be no peace and they'll technically stay at war, with a huge minefield in between the two countries, until one of them runs out of money.
How do you show you've never heard of the war of the triple alliance or of Paraguay, without saying war of the triple alliance or Paraguay.
Weirdly specific
So we're fighting to the last Ukrainian then?
They are, mate. You act like the West is standing behind Ukraine threatening to shoot anyone that retreats. We're sending em guns and money, if they wanted to stop fighting they could make that decision tomorrow.
You haven't seen the video of the Ukrainian lieutenant throwing a grenade into the trench of the Ukrainian soldiers who disobeyed an order to charge the front. Or the daylight kidnappings of Ukrainian citizens by the recruitment officers.
I sure haven't
You don't negotiate with terrorists.
The UK negotiated with the IRA.
The US negotiated with the Japanese.
The allies negotiated with the Nazis.
I'm fine with the Japanese solution, which Russian cities should we delete?
The German solution seems awfully similar.
I'm fine with winning the lottery. That isn't likely either.
Ukraine doesn't have nukes, so the Japanese solution is off the table.
Ukraine isn't about to conquer Moscow, so the German solution isn't feasible either.
North Korea has nukes, you're honestly telling me ukraine, the ones who figured it out in the soviet union, can't figure it out too?
Ukraine is the smart remnant of the soviet union, Russia needs to surrender out of sheer terror.
No, but the US does. I, for one, as an SSBN sailor, am ready and willing to set condition 1SQ for Strategic nuclear launch at any time. Slava Ukraini, HOOYAH AMERICA. Kill the Bear!
I really don't like how often I see people ok with the idea of nuclear war. I like Fallout as much as the next person but I don't think it's an accurate representation of nuclear apocalypse.
I’m pretty sure the negotiations consisted on total surrender and heavy controls of power in the three cases, which Zelenskyy agrees on. Just giving more territories to Russia is not what they want. That would only mean a new offensive in a few years.
In other words, even Zelensky knows there'll have to be negotiations somewhere down the line.
It's just a question of when and under which circumstances.
It's in Ukraine and Europe's interests, that these negotiations occur when Russia has been pushed back to the border. Otherwise they'll have been rewarded for their military adventurism.
And obviously Russia can't be trusted, so the moment a cease fire is signed, it's imperative that Ukraine gets defacto NATO membership (or something approaching it) and is armed to the teeth.
They had been open to negotiations in the past, and surely are open now, but the first step is for Russia to get the fuck off Ukraine and stop the aggression. It's not a negotiation of your have a knife to your neck.
You know both these groups surrendered unconditionally, right?
Yes. The terms were harsh, but ultimately both parties agreed to them. A negotiated settlement.
Note also how the reality is slightly more nuanced. For example, Hirohito remained in power and all members of the Imperial House were spared criminal prosecution. That was an unfortunate but necessary compromise. If the world was fair, they'd have hanged them all, just like much of the Nazi establishment.
This also why at one point Japanese officials, basing themselves on the Potsdam Declaration, argued to MacArthur that Japan's surrender had in fact been contractual and conditional. Obviously he told them to go fuck themselves, and because the country was by now occupied, there wasn't exactly much they could do about it.
It's unfortunate, but this is almost certainly what will happen with Russia. A ceasefire will be agreed under conditions both parties accept. The better Ukraine does, the worse the conditions will be that Russia is forced to accept. With a bit of luck, the conditions will be so bad that Putin falls out of a window and is replaced with someone slightly more sane.
Once the ink is dry, the west will hopefully arm Ukraine to the gills, perhaps institute a no fly zone, give them NATO membership or something approaching it, etc. etc.
But before that happens there will still need to agree to a ceasefire, hence all wars end with a negotiated settlement, unless you engage in genocide.
That worked out really well lol
Literally yes. If they capitulate it's only a matter of time before Putin tries again, either by fomenting a revolution and installing another pro-Russia dictator, or restarting the war. This is a fight for the very survival of Ukraine.
Survival of human beings 👎
Survival of the nation 👍
Putin is trying to kill both. Those human beings deserve to live and they deserve a country too -- the country they are dying to defend.
I think them conscripts would rather do something other dying for their country. I know I would.
Have you ever read Catch-22? Yossarian likes to go on about how everybody is trying to kill him. If you're a Ukrainian soldier it's not just Putin who's out to kill you. It's your own government too, and apparently the average western lib on this very internet forum.
If you believe this why are you not advocating for the Russian conscripts who are forced to fight a madman’s war of aggression and territorial expansion? Like sympathizing for the Ukrainian troops forced to fight is fine but I think you fail to realize the alternative for them is to die at the hands of the Russian military.
Only one side here is engaged in a purely optional war of territorial expansion. And it isn’t “the west” or Ukraine.
Oh I do consider the Russian soldiers victims that should be helped to escape their situation.
No need to figure out how or why this war broke out, Putin is simply mad. It follows from that also that you can't reason with the guy. Do you think this is a children's cartoon?
You gotta explain this. Last time I checked, the civilians casualties in this war weren't that high, and civilians can and do usually stay clear of the front lines. They might even leave the country if the men were allowed to. So if they weren't soldiers, they almost certainly wouldn't die at the hands of the Russian military.
The war broke out because Putin covets Ukraine and always has. He is a kleptocrat and dictator with no interest in his own people’s happiness or their rights; he seeks personal enrichment and power and that is his goal here as well. I think “madman” is a perfectly acceptable way to describe him, and we haven’t even begun to discuss his army’s conduct in the war.
Russia is targeting Ukrainian civilians specifically. It is even targeting children.
Given this, why do you believe if the Ukrainians lay down their arms Russia wouldn’t continue doing exactly what it has been doing — trying to kill their civilian population and deport their children?
There’s absolutely no evidence Russia would let anyone leave and quite a lot of evidence they would continue committing war crimes against them.
Edit: and this article literally just got published today: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/10/world/europe/russian-ukraine-torture.html
Always has? They didn't start talking about annexation till well into the invasion. In the Minsk agreement he wanted the Donbas to remain part of Ukraine, didn't even recognize the DPR/LPR right until the start of the invasion. Maybe, just maybe, they actually feel threatened by NATO encirclement, like they've been saying since basically forever, and which even prominent US politicians and foreign policy experts have been warning about. But I guess you prefer pseudo-psychological explanations to realpolitik ones. Fuck reality we got vibes!
Why would they? "His army's conduct" is about par for the course. You should read about how much civilian targets the US hit during the Iraq invasion. Of course the civilians will be a lot safer once the fighting stops. The goal of this invasion is not to kill as many civilians as possible, that would look way different. The Nazis had extermination squads trailing the front just committing one huge massacre after another. They had death camps. This is not what's going on in Ukraine. Fighting age civilian men get imprisoned and "filtrated", but are usually released after a while and then allowed to get Russian passports. "Harmless" old people and women and so on aren't even filtrated. Ukrainian children are returned to their parents if/when they show up. This isn't some extermination campaign.
In what sense does any amount of anxiety justify a war of territorial aggression and the committing of war crimes against a population and the deportation of its children?
If Russia was worried about NATO there are many better ways to handle that than creating a bunch of corpses. Or trying to take Ukraine’s territory, which again they have already demonstrated their desire for after doing it in Crimea.
I have actual sources of the war crimes they’ve committed. Where is the proof they’re not committing the well-documented war crimes against the civilian population that you assert? That it’s simply temporary?
Because it is actually an extermination campaign. Putin wants the land and he doesn’t want the people on it. His actions to this point make that quite clear.
I'm not saying they're not committing war crimes. I'm saying the goal of the war is not extermination, since an extermination war would look very different. The war crimes are very similar to what the US did in their recent wars, like Iraq. So unless you think those were extermination campaigns, then that's not good evidence. You'd have to compare it to e.g. the Nazi's eastern campaign, which, again, looked very different. Where are the extermination camps? Where are the ghettos? Where are the death squads? Did the Nazis try to make every Pole get a regular German passport? The rhetoric of liberating their quasi-Russian brothers and sisters from Banderite ideology and Western vassaldom is also very different from the Nazi "Untermenschen" crap.
Whether or not "anxiety" justifies the war isn't important. We were talking about why they invaded, and they did this in the sincere belief that this was necessary to protect against a hostile military encirclement. This is not an unreasonable belief. The US would react similarly to such an encirclement, even if the other side repeatedly insists they don't have hostile intent. Even if there is actually no hostile intent (I doubt it), that's still not great, since plan and intent are subject to change. Who's going to guarantee that some future administration doesn't want to leverage the strategic advantage gained by parking an army and/or nukes near Moscow?
So this is what's called a provocation, and it suggests that the Russians aren't "mad" or irrational. They're behaving as expected by the theory of realpolitik. This would mean that this war could be deescalated by backing off and agreeing to a neutral Ukraine.
Edit: Russia invading Ukraine has therefore two main goals:
Prevent Ukraine from becoming a NATO member. So long as Ukraine is in a war (or just a territorial dispute) with Russia, most NATO members will not want to admit Ukraine into NATO, since that could drag them into war with a nuclear power.
Drive back the anti-Russian NATO-equipped Ukrainian army (quite a large force actually) from their core territories. This would give Russia a buffer to better absorb an attack from the territory of Ukraine (which is btw the direction both Hitler and Napoleon used to attack Russia). This also suggest that Russia is probably going to try to expand the buffer zone unless Ukraine gets demilitarized and neutralized (as in become neutral), if they can.
The goal is not to murder Ukrainians. And the primary goal is not to take territory, that just follows from the primary goal of creating a security buffer.
I actually definitely believe the US was looking to do some light ethnic cleansing in Iraq. But even so, there’s many documented instances of Russia doing it; so no need to compare them to the US. Their war aim seems to include some amount of ethnic cleansing.
Look up the articles I linked you. Children are being shipped to ghettos; adults are being moved to death camps. While not as endemic as Nazi Germany it is still clear what Russia is trying to do. That the machinery is not as advanced as the actual Holocaust doesn’t mean it isn’t a genocide.
It doesn’t matter if their belief is sincere or how real their anxiety is. There is no justification for a war of territorial aggression on territory a dictator has clearly coveted in the past and the genocide of its native population. Literally this is the same level as excusing Hitler’s aggression against Poland. It doesn’t matter how encircled a country feels; it does not justify a war of territorial aggression and the murder of the country’s native inhabitants.
If their goal is not to murder Ukrainians and take their territory, why is that exactly what they’re doing and what they’re claiming? Literally today a Russian general said Ukraine is simply the first stop to an invasion of Europe. How much more proof do you need that this has nothing to do with NATO or the west, and is only Putin’s mad ambitions for expanding the Russian empire?
Can you point out exactly where it says that? This is the first time I'm hearing of death camps.
I just debunked this in another thread, let me quote myself:
This btw, is totally consistent with what I said before. Russia thinks they are being provoked and that the next step after NATO encirclement is them getting attacked.
Ukrainians would disagree; they're the ones to want to fight and if their government tried to give up, they'd throw them out and find someone willing to keep going
If they all want to fight so bad, why are the men not allowed to leave the country? Why has Zelensky recently announced a crackdown on draft dodging? Why are there so many videos of men getting dragged kicking and screaming into vans by military ~~recruiters~~ kidnappers?
Why is Putin waging a war of territorial ambition and spending innocent Russian blood to do it?
Your perspective here is backwards. One side could end this war immediately by calling back their armies and forfeiting their territorial ambitions. And it is not Ukraine.
Is this a serious question? The existence of exceptions doesn't negate the trend. The crackdown on draft dodging is part of Zelenskyy's anti corruption measures to bring Ukraine in line with EU and NATO standards. Do you think about your questions at all before asking them?
Either you give them land from which they can prepare their next attack or you show them that they're unable to take and hold land. So yeah. Pretty much.
I mean at the current pace it's just all or all, nothing doesn't seem possible anymore unless something big happens.