this post was submitted on 11 Mar 2022
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It's not hindsight when the experts have been warning you that this will happen for many decades.
Russia literally spent 8 years trying to get meaningful security guarantees from NATO, and it was stonewalled. Stop trying to rewrite history.
This is a profoundly absurd statement.
Do you know why NATO troops are deployed at their eastern borders ("enhanced forward presence")? Because of the annexation of Crimea and the Donbas war. Of course Ukraine wants to be in NATO when their neighbor does stuff like that. Russia brought this to themselves. And with that they're trying to play the victim in this story. They want security guarantees? How about they guarantee the security of their neighbor first and get out of there, then there might be a chance to talk
Why is the second statement absurd? Okay I overdid it a little, but placing tens of thousands of troops at a border for months is a huge logistical undertaking and certainly not something someone would do just like that. I don't know a reason to do this other than to invade a neighbor
That's some impressive historical revisionism there. Last I checked NATO overthrew the legitimate democratically elected government in Ukraine and replaced it with a right wing regime. This is what triggered Russia to annex Crimea and Donbas to seek independence. That's well documented history by the way:
Russia was perfectly fine with Ukraine doing its own thing until NATO overthrew their government. How about NATO not going around starting color revolutions and invading countries for the past 30 years?
Russian invasion of Ukraine is not justifiable, however it's reductionist to ignore the reasons behind why the invasion happened. The war is a result of tensions that were largely escalated by NATO, and plenty of experts in the west have been warning about this for many years now. Here's what Chomsky has to say on the issue recently:
https://truthout.org/articles/us-approach-to-ukraine-and-russia-has-left-the-domain-of-rational-discourse/
https://truthout.org/articles/noam-chomsky-us-military-escalation-against-russia-would-have-no-victors/
50 prominent foreign policy experts (former senators, military officers, diplomats, etc.) sent an open letter to Clinton outlining their opposition to NATO expansion back in 1997:
George Kennan, arguably America's greatest ever foreign policy strategist, the architect of the U.S. cold war strategy warned that NATO expansion was a "tragic mistake" that ought to ultimately provoke a "bad reaction from Russia" back in 1998.
Jack F. Matlock Jr., US Ambassador to the Soviet Union from 1987-1991, warning in 1997 that NATO expansion was "the most profound strategic blunder, [encouraging] a chain of events that could produce the most serious security threat [...] since the Soviet Union collapsed"
Academics, such as John Mearsheimer, gave talks explaining why NATO actions would ultimately lead to conflict this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JrMiSQAGOS4
These and many other voices were marginalized, silenced, and ignored. Yet, now people are trying to rewrite history and pretend that Russia attacked Ukraine out of the blue and completely unprovoked.
NATO? You think Euromaidan is a creation of NATO? If anything you might mean the US here. Right wing regime? Yeah there were right wing groups involved, but they didn't exactly make it into the government. Poroshenko wasn't good either, but he was democratically elected and certainly not worse than Janukowytsch. I can't attest to the validity of those elections though, I wasn't there. Also Zelenskyy is of jewish heritage and no far right party gained a seat in the 2019 government, you can hardly call that a right wing regime.
You're aware Janukowytsch was basically Putins puppet right? That's not Ukraine doing its own thing. I'm still convinced Putin enabled this whole mess in eastern Ukraine because he lost his puppet and wants to bring it back. If Ukraine joined NATO, that would become impossible. This is why Putin is so scared of NATO
Agreed
Disagreed. I believe if NATO didn't expand to the east (those countries joined voluntarily by the way), Russia would have caused much more chaos there in the past 30 years. Or maybe it could have worked out better, we will never know since it didn't happen.
It's easy to find people who predicted the future when it's already in the past. But in the present things are not as obvious
That's it from me
Literally linked you sources, and yes Euromaidan is very much a NATO project with US being in the driver seat of the whole organization. These groups very much did make it into both the government and the military.
Arguing that Zelensky is of jewish heritage is like saying US doesn't have a problem with racism because Obama is black. Also, wait till you find out about Israel.
That's a pretty big claim. I don't see how he was Putin's puppet any more than Scholtz is Biden's puppet.
All the experts on the subject matter disagree with you, but I'm sure you know best.
People have predicted this since 1997, I've literally linked you examples of that. At least read the comment you're replying to.