People who can't see what's wrong with this are brainwashed beyond repair.
Countries joining NATO want to join NATO. The majority of people in Ukraine want to join NATO. Russia is currently demonstrating to the world exactly why Ukraine wants to join NATO. Also Russia knows exactly NATO would never dare to attack Russia, just like NATO knows exactly Russia would never dare to attack them. Russia (Putin) is not scared about a NATO attack, he's scared he won't be able to insert a puppet government in Ukraine ever again. Let's not pretend it's about something else.
NATOs eastward expansion (in the past 30 years, not 60) is the product of those countries wanting to be in NATO. The Warsaw Pact was with the Soviet Union. Not sure if you noticed, but the Soviet Union does not exist anymore. Oops. I want to introduce my own whataboutism here: what about the Budapest Memorandum that Russia broke in 2014 by annexing Crimea?
Yes NATO did bad things and will do bad things in the future. This does not legitimize Russias invasion at all.
And sorry for being silent about things going on in the world years ago, I was too young to understand shit at the time. But anyway, when there's police fatally shooting hundreds of protesters, it's a sign the Maidan revolution was absolutely necessary.
Even Chinese state media (CGTN) is criticizing the invasion.
USA bad != Russia good
I come from Germany, we hate both of them here.
Where have I been the last 60 years? Nonexistent, mostly. Probably just like you. Stop this whataboutism
Again, NATOs eastward "expansion" is going on for 30 years, and it doesn't happen by force but by those countries voluntarily joining it. And Russia is still doing great advertisements showing why someone should join NATO. They do this to themselves. The only thing forbidding this expansion is an old agreement with the Soviet Union, which still doesn't exist.
And where is the 0.2% Nazis nonsense coming from
Good question, I don't know where it's coming from either. I don't see it anywhere in this entire thread, so it must be coming from you. I already explained in another comment what a straw man is, thanks for the great example. You even combined it with Godwin's law.
But since you bring it up, why doesn't Russia bother getting rid of their own Nazis first? The Wagner Group? Why do they not-so-covertly sponsor many far-right parties in European countries? Why does a presence of Nazis even warrant an invasion? If Russia just never bothered annexing their land and sponsoring seperatists, things like Azov (which I assume is what you're on about here) would have never even existed in the first place.
I didn't suddenly "wake up" to this war by the way. I have friends and relatives in Ukraine, I have actually been there and seen the country and the people. Did you? I talked to people who were fighting the separatists, and who are fighting in Kiev now. The parents of a friend are stuck in Sumi right now, a shop next to their home was bombed a few days ago. They sure love being "liberated" by Russian artillery.
And before you say "whAt AboUT tHe USa??!": yes they invade countries too and it's bad too. Finally something we can agree on
I won't feed this discussion any further
Wrong facts. NATO's eastward expansion has been going on since 1959, and we are not living in 1989.
Between 1959 and 1998 only Spain became a new NATO member (see your own graphic) which I would hardly call eastward expansion 🤨
You calling something "hardly" does not matter. After all, Ukraine is also just 1 country by your logic, just like Spain, right?
My point was rather that Spain is in the far west of Europe and therefore I would hardly call it eastward expansion.
I meant 1949 and not 1959 to demonstrate NATO expansion
Makes more sense in that case, especially considering Greece and Turkey.
Also, I think, one can debate whether German reunification in 1990 counts as expansion since the 2+4 treaty states that no NATO troops may be placed permanently in eastern Germany and as far as I know this was not violated yet.
Why is your username nachtigall?
See this comment from 2 month ago. Never heard of Stepan Bandera and the battalion before.
It's hilarious that the Azov Battalion was formed from a bunch of racist rednecks because Russia invaded Crimea. And now you use it as the justification to for another invasion? Russia needs to learn to stay in it's lane.
As for Wagner Group, it is directly operated as a thinly veiled proxy army. They are a Kremlin asset whose leaders flash Nazi insignia as much as those Azov yokels. I wonder how the Ukrainian denazifacation of Wagner is going in Kyiv? Three foiled assassination attempts so far...
What the west should have done was Marshal Plan eastern Europe. Build them up with loans and investments rather let them wallow in corruption and poverty. Look at Japan and Germany today, compared to Russia. It was a cruel, conscious choice to use them as a cheap labor stock. And now we have to deal with the results: peace in our time? Or checking an aggressor before he starts World War III.
Ha ha, yep, NATO scared Putin so much he invaded an unaligned nation in response. Nobody cares to invade Russia. Russia would be a NATO member, if it wasn't trapped in the cold war mentality of Putin. What do you get in return? Finland 2.0? Afghanistan 2.0? And a new batch of EU and NATO members. Putin has outmaneuvered himself.
Ukraine would have become Afghanistan 2.0 if NATO was allowed to take over.
Are you saying that western powers were planning a military invasion of Ukraine? This makes no sense, as there was no major military deployment indicating it, nor was there any psyops in the west to mount a narrative justifying such invasion.
As strong North Korea? They're totally dependent on China, too. Ukraine is Russia's next Afghanistan. Remember that fiasco? When American made Stingers cleared the sky of Spetsnaz helicopters? Does that sound familiar?
Who genocided the muslim populations of the USSR? Was it the USA and western colonizers too? Does that ring any bells? From the wikipedia page on Deportation of Chechens and Ingush:
The deportation was prepared from at least October 1943 and 19,000 officers as well as 100,000 NKVD soldiers from all over the USSR participated in this operation. The deportation encompassed their entire nations, as well as the liquidation of the Checheno-Ingush Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. The demographic consequences of this eviction were catastrophic and far reaching: of the 496,000 Chechens and Ingush who were deported (according to Soviet archives; Chechen sources put the deportees at 650,000[1]), at least a quarter perished. In total, the archive records show that over a hundred thousand people died or were killed during the round-ups and transportation, and during their early years in exile in the Kazakh and Kyrgyz SSR as well as Russian SFSR where they were sent to the many forced settlements. Chechen sources claim that 400,000 died, while presuming a higher number of deportees.
Just because western empires are evil does not mean other empires have to be good.
Can we talk about French genocide of Algeria? Or USA’s ongoing genocide of Yemen since many years?
Please do. We've been talking about it for years, but more conversation/information is always welcome.
That's true. Sorry for not knowing how fucked up this world was back then.
It's because I was told that in times of pressure, freedom of information or civil liberties wouldn't be affected. But this was just dumb thinking.
I was told that this was better, and that this would lead us to an answer. That's why I believed that this wouldn't happen.
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