If you're a farmer, you're going to buy fertilizer from wherever and whomever unless prevented legally from doing so--and I, as a citizen of the US dependent on others growing this food on behalf of me, appreciate it.
And I, as an European, hate EU government for taking a self destructive way of introducing various sanctions that affect lives of the EU citizens in a very negative ways, without doing anything to help their proclaimed goals.
At this point I am not sure if they are stupid, evil, corrupt or they just despise and hate their citizens. Or maybe all of that.
You Americans are least have a pragmatic government that at least occasionally does something for your benefit. They at least say "America first", while the EU also says "America first" instead of saying "EU first".
The European response to the war is populist and, as you say, self-destructive.
But economies and people can only suffer to a limited extent. EU will return to Realpolitik soon.
Let's face it, the whole bashing of Russia as a "regional power" was idiotic and wrong on the same level as starting the Ukraine war and believing they would win it within a week.
The EU will not return to anything, because it can't do anything on its own.
There are East/North European member states that are genuinely concerned that Russia could attack them next. They advocate for stronger sanctions. And while it's not said aloud, they believe the sanctions should be in place until there is (at least) a regime change in Russia. For them, the real issue is not the war in Ukraine but Putin. And if the economy crashes as a result of the sanctions, it's a small price to pay for safety. That's Realpolitik for them.
Then there are West/South European member states that are safe from Russia and mostly just see the economic consequences of the sanctions. They are economically stronger and have more political influence. But if they try to force the issue and lift the sanctions too soon, it could well be the end of the EU.
Russia has invaded and taken territory from Georgia and Ukraine, both former Soviet republics. They have not (yet) invaded the former Soviet republics of Lithuania, Latvia or Estonia. These countries are all EU and NATO member states now.
The real issue is that the invasion of Ukraine doesn't make sense either. Russia expected a quick victorious "special operation", where the troops go in and the Ukrainian regime collapses with minimal fighting. Those expectations had no basis in reality, and Russia ended up in a major war it didn't want and was not prepared for.
If the current Russian regime can start a war based on gross misjudgment, they can do it again. That's a real threat, even if Russian military is not as strong as we used to believe.
This is simply wrong as you dont take history and dont take future into account.
History: brzezinski sums it up well. Russia has some weird imperialist interest in Ukraine. They have ZERO historical interests in the Nordics.
Future: Finishing this war will take how long? Active conflict 1 year give or take + licking wounds 3 year + restoring economy and finding your way in the new world order 5 years + getting ready for your theoretical war against the Nordics 10 years (this is the time Russia took to get ready for this one). In total: 19 years. How old is Putin again?
Russia has a weird imperialist interest in Finland. Our history can largely be summarized as "trying to cope with living next to Russia, with varying degrees of success". From the dawn of history, until Napoleonic wars, there was an invasion from the east every generation or two. The invasions only stopped after Sweden lost Finland to Russia. After Finland gained independence, it took only 22 years before there was another invasion.
The Cold War and the decades after the collapse of the USSR were the exception. We had a lifetime of peace and prosperity by leaning to the West while maintaining good relations with Russia. But that is over for now, as Putin no longer cares about having good relations with anyone. Russia is big, it's next to us, and it has become unpredictable again. Dealing with that takes priority.
So you, as a Finnish, are fine with Sweden controlling, occupying and plundering Finland for centuries, but complain about Russia doing the same, only for a shorter time. What's the difference?
You're getting downvoted by Americans with big fat paychecks in the Bay Area and other coastal cities on the energy self-sufficient North American content. Like it or not, Europe runs on Russian gas/oil/grain for the time being. The current crop of EU officials are probably not evil, but they are incredibly incompetent. By any object measure, the sanctions have filled the Russian Government's coffers and made Europe much poorer.
Russia has actually raised minimum wage and pensions by 10% due to the huge inflow of tax revenue. They also reduced the emergency 20% interest rate to 9.5% (about same as before). And I can't find the article, but I read somewhere that they're only losing about 1/3 of the original reserves that was originally announced.
The EU is getting played by both Russia and America.
> Russia has actually raised minimum wage and pensions by 10% due to the huge inflow of tax revenue
This is less than inflation. (Curious to see a source spinning it as a result of tax revenues. Even for the Kremlin, that's an idiotic argument.) It's also about the amount Russia's economy is expected to shrink this year.
Nobody has argued Russia isn't making a killing off its energy portfolio. But a quarter of a billion dollars of revenue, not profit, in a booming global economy no less, doesn't make up for a similar quantity of frozen reserves.
Russia is weaker and poorer than it was at the end of last year. The Russian state is doing far better than was expected, domestically. Credit due where owed. But it's a growing share of a shrinking pie situation.
I downvoted them and I'm Polish - I see Ukrainian people on our streets every day, I hear their stories and their suffering all the time, my family is housing several refugees already. The stuff that Russia is doing to that country is making my blood boil.
If anything, I'm incredibly upset that EU is not doing more to tighten the screw on Russia. If we are unwilling to send our militaries to fight Russia in Ukraine, then we should completely and entirely stop doing any business with that murderous, warmongering country, no matter the cost to ourselves. I mean it.
If it wasn't for Russia having nukes I think your government may have already joined the war at this point. Poland has made Germany look really bad in how much more forthcoming its been in aiding Ukraine against Russian aggression.
Propaganda and fear mongering in Poland is so high that news are meaningless. The current political topic is that Germany would support Russia if Russia invaded Poland and would split it between. This is not a fringe thing it is a political topic of the day! In the mean time the current president looks like a Zeleski's bro, and PiS supporters chant for Jarek the same way you would chant for Putin.
Yes you hear Ukrainian/Russian in the street, but I am not sure you hear much gratitude. I certainly do not and I also live and travel in the country. I actually know of families hosting for 2 months and the people they hosted left in one day and never said anything back. Others had everything set here, like employment housing etc but went back to Ukraine or to Germany. The ones who went to Germany regret it as they are not pampered like in Poland. Hell even in euro vision song contest the polish got the taste of Ukrainian gratitude for the polish unconditional solidarity.
There are grateful Ukrainians but those already were in Poland got their life's easier now thankfully. The refugees could not care less about Poland. Actually historically the Ukrainians and Poles haves as bad blood as with the Russians or Germans.
As a foreigner what i see Poland needs, is to continue to get stronger economically so it can support a very advanced armed forces that could wipe the floor with the Russians. Poland needs to be needed and that is achieved by being an economic powerhouse on which the great powers depend. In the past Poland was left alone because it was not worth the trouble. Look at Taiwan, they sure know how to make themselves worth the trouble. The "honor" thing in polish culture is so self destructive: Throw everything away for honor. Let's keep growing and stronger, it will not be long before Russia is a nuisance.
The goal is to survive and to win, not to go down in history with honor.
You, as a European, must know that this problem has been brewing for years, since the Germans decided to turn off their nuclear plants and use Russian natural gas instead,right? Right!?
Oh and, the US didn’t mandate Germany to do this, its voters did.
This bullshit again. Nuclear power was 20% of Germany's electricity production and Germany replaced it with renewables. When Germany turned off its nuclear power plants, imports from Russia decreased for several years. Over the past 25 years, the only country where Germany has been importing more gas from is Norway.
It's not only about gas and sanctions, there are many examples of EU government doing harm to Europeans. I mentioned sanctions only to highlight a contrast to the parent comment.
quit in terms of US is importing, but the EU is expected to stay strong ideologically.
Look. We all understand that the reaction to the war activistic and ideological. The more time will pass, the more politics will move towards Realpolitik.
> United States Imports from Russia of Fertilizers was US$1.28 Billion during 2021 [1]
> Using data on ship movements, real-time tracking of gas flows through pipelines and estimates based on historical monthly trade, the researchers reckoned Germany alone paid Russia about 9.1 billion euros for fossil fuel deliveries — mostly natural gas — in the first two months of the war. [2]
Let's not pretend these are comparable numbers.
It's not like the US is about to run out of food anyway. We're a massive exporter. The goal is to boost US food production enough that the 3rd world doesn't starve to death (and if food prices go through the roof, it also helps Russia). Frankly, if we were being ruthless about it, the US might be financially BETTER off if there was a worldwide grain shortage. We're still trying to stop it.
Germany is importing Russian natural gas to avoid turning on nuclear power plants for ideological reasons.
Other countries can provide fuel. Multiple countries have already signed contracts with American and French companies to manufacture fuel for their(Soviet designed) reactors. It's already happening. Also a fully fueled reactor can run for a long time before it needs refueling. Germany doesn't want to turn its reactors on for like the above poster said - ideological reasons. And yeah there is a startup process, but they could have been spun up by now since the start of this war.
You have to understand the utter diplomatic and geopolitical incompetence of the current US adminsitration.
You're talking about the same administration that literally admitted in the open to be executing cyber attacks on Russia[1]. The fact that they haven't made most of North America glow in the dark is an utter miracle.
And to make my point clear, the issue isn't that they're conducting cyber attacks - that's a given.
The issue is admitting it, in the open, to the news media. Everyone knows this is happening, but you don't say the quiet part out loud because it's an escalation against a nuclear power and gives them carte blanche to retaliate.
And yet, we're not glowing. That's because cyber attacks are not viewed the same as physical attacks, especially when it doesn't lead to loss of life. This is literally the US AND Russia's stance, so it's not a completely untoward thing to do. I'm not in support of it, but, that's the reality
Putin definitely thought the incursion would be minor. He didn’t think the Ukrainians would be (backed with advanced western weapons and intelligence) fighting back with such vigor.
You think that Russia would "make North America glow in the dark" because the US disclosed cyberattacks that were obviously attributable to the US? Like, literally, bringing on nuclear Armageddon over some computer hacking and internet trolling? Actually not even computer hacking and internet trolling, just public acknowledgment about coputer hacking and internet trolling?
I judge middle school debate and this still has to be the most wildly insane geopolitical take I've heard in a long time.
You must be hot boxing some strong stuff... might be time to roll down the windows of that information bubble and get some fresh air ;)
> over some computer hacking and internet trolling?
No, no, "some computer hacking" (because who would worry about not being able to watch funny cat videos for a while? it's not like people do anything important using computers...) won't do much. But the next Stuxnet targeted at Russian infrastructure could well spell the end of us all. Honestly, I'd be quite content in that situation - witnessing, for however short before dying to radiation, the literal end of history (instead of the pseudo-one from the '90s) could be strangely rewarding.
But okay. Suppose there were a cyber attack sufficient to trigger full scale nuclear war and which also didn't fully disable Russian's nuclear armament.
Do you really think that Russia would not launch nukes just because the US didn't publicly declare responsibility for the attack even though Russia knows the US is responsible? Because, to be clear, that was OP's assertion:
>> And to make my point clear, the issue isn't that they're conducting cyber attacks - that's a given. The issue is admitting it, in the open, to the news media. Everyone knows this is happening, but you don't say the quiet part out loud because it's an escalation against a nuclear power and gives them carte blanche to retaliate.
What you think is the "quite part" is actually not. It is standard practice to announce the nature of the military attack, especially against a nuclear power. That is the reason why you see the exact weapons being sent to Ukraine. If you do these things unannounced, and later get caught, that is what gives Russia the carte blanche to retaliate.
No it doesn’t. Russia has been taking increasing amounts of direct action against other nuclear states for years (including sponsoring cyber attacks and e.g. criminally intervening in US elections). They aren’t going to start a nuclear war over e.g. the USA compromising their military computer networks and distributing the information discovered there.
Putin is doing everything he can to prevent escalation to a direct shooting war with NATO because he knows that in a conventional war NATO will wipe the floor with the Russian military, and a nuclear war is mutually assured destruction.
I've actually been pleasantly surprised at how well Biden's administration has walked the tightrope on Ukraine. And though I'm very liberal by US standards, I'm not terribly partisan when it comes to foreign policy—I think Obama's foreign policy was largely disastrous, and have a lot more good things to say about Trump's than I thought I would when his term started (admittedly, more about intentions & gestures than actual effects, and there was still plenty that I didn't like)
Obama had the problem that he was a young guy who came in with big ambitious promises and good intentions but inherited a complete shitshow from his predecessor (both the wars and an economic crisis). His opposition was intransigent and did everything they could to undermine the USA for their own narrow political interest, and his party got bashed up in the 2010 midterm elections. He then let himself get pushed around by the US military establishment.
But if we compare to the Bush Jr, Clinton, Bush Sr., Reagan administrations (let alone the Vietnam war era), it can’t really be called “disastrous”.
Trump’s foreign policy was largely symbolic and incoherent, if anything focused on corrupt self enrichment, breaking up US soft power to aid Russia (he backed out of various treaties, halted diplomacy around the world, wanted to pull the US out of NATO, ...), symbolically opposing China to appeal to anti-Asian racists, making up nonsense about Latin American immigrants to appeal to anti-Latino racists, continuing middle East aggression (and the Muslim ban etc.) to appeal to anti-Arab/anti-Muslim racists. His antics (on top of the Bush Jr. wars) further pissed away America’s global reputation. To the extent things went okay it was largely down to incompetence and uncoordination.
Syria was the worst part, because the fallout from that was really bad. Not sure we'd have had Brexit without the extra pressure that put on Europe. Likely empowered Erdogan somewhat (doubt it made a big difference there, admittedly) and contributed to the rise of far right parties in Eastern Europe. Plus, you know, sucks for the Syrians.
Nb. what I blame him for isn't the Syrian civil war itself, but for choosing to get involved in such a way that it's dragged on indefinitely, rather than concluding it one way or the other much faster. This also contributed to destabilization and suffering in Iraq.
Continuing to allow Afghanistan to bleed for his entire 8 years while everyone at the top (and probably most folks in the middle, and at the bottom) knew no progress was, had been, or would be made was a straight-up crime (see: the Afghanistan papers).
But sure, it's hard to beat Bush II for "foreign policy fuck-ups". Dude's a legend in that regard. I wouldn't be surprised if historians in 2100 will look back at that and see it as America falling on its face at the starting line, for this century, and never really recovering.
> Trump’s foreign policy was largely symbolic and detail-free, focused on breaking up US soft power to aid Russia, symbolically opposing China to appeal to anti-Asian racists, making up nonsense about Latin American immigrants to appeal to anti-Latino racists, continuing middle East aggression (and the Muslim ban etc.) to appeal to anti-Arab/anti-Muslim racists. To the extent things went okay it was largely down to incompetence and uncoordination.
Pushing NATO members to meet their defense spending obligations ended up being damn-near prescient, even if the rest of his action on NATO was mostly bad. I'd love to see more breaking down of trade relations with China, so that part was fine by me. Lots of his rhetoric was idiotic but at the same time it was refreshing to see anyone in power talking anti-neoliberalism, for once, even if he was either too ambivalent in-fact or too incompetent to accomplish much. Withdrawing from Afghanistan was way overdue and it disgusted me that NPR ran with "it's just too hard to withdraw in more time than it took to put the same number of soldiers and same amount of equipment in-theater" bullshit, in response. All his stuff related to the Southern border was moronic, of course.
I'm not saying I think he was great—dude belongs behind bars 10x over, I'd say, including for some of his foreign policy actions. In fact, a lot of it's just that, after his predecessors, accomplishing very little was kinda an improvement.
Agreed. Obama came in from the context of the wars in Iraq/Afghanistan and wanted to avoid another similar, and was too cautious and non-confrontational, especially once Russia got involved.
> Pushing NATO members to meet their defense spending obligations ended up being damn-near prescient
This was not “pushing” so much as “ineffective trash talking”. And it had nothing to do with making NATO or European militaries effective, but was based on Trump’s inability to understand anything except in narrowly transactional terms, not comprehending the possibility of second-order effects or complex systems and therefore unwilling to listen when people try to explain that supporting NATO and maintaining the prevailing geopolitical order is in America’s long-term interest. With maybe some bonus of trying to help Putin.
> I'd love to see more breaking down of trade relations with China
Trump’s #1 foreign policy “accomplishment” was pulling the USA out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, undermining US economic and social power in the region to China’s great benefit.
> Withdrawing from Afghanistan was way overdue and it disgusted me
The USA should have pulled out of Afghanistan years before (or never gone in at all), but the way the Trump administration handled the transition was profoundly incompetent, and made things much harder for the Biden administration (the only president of the past 4 with the guts to go through with it).
> Trump’s #1 foreign policy accomplishment was pulling the USA out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, undermining US economic and social power in the region to China’s great benefit.
Yeah, I know. Again, I'm not saying he was good. Just that I didn't think there'd even be a single half-assed compliment I'd be able to muster for anything he did. He exceeded sub-zero expectations, and probably, for whatever reason (yeah, likely largely ineffective management of his administration) at least didn't do anywhere near as much harm as the the guys who ran things the prior 16 years. Not via his foreign policy actions, at least.
Sorry if any of this came off as "I like most of Trump's foreign policy". What I'm getting at is that I'm pretty harsh even on popular Democratic presidents, and not incapable of admitting "that was kinda OK" with Republicans even when they're an actual no-BS joke like Trump, but still think Biden's not screwed the pooch so far (he still might, certainly) on foreign policy. And I'm inclined to dislike him because I'm getting really sick of ancient dudes sitting in the Oval Office—could we get a youthful 60-year-old, even? Please?—and don't care for a lot of his legislative record.
Point is, if Biden's badly screwing up foreign policy, this particular devoted foreign policy cynic isn't seeing it. But, again, there's always tomorrow.
If Trump was so bad for NATO and Ukraine's defense, why didn't the current war didn't begin in 2017-2020?
Let me guess: You think that the current state of the Ukrainian military (in terms of training and weaponry) that enabled it to survive the initial Russian invasion in February when few believed it could, somehow magically began in January 2021. It is a fact that the Trump administration continued and accelerated the training and arming of Ukrainian military by the US that his predecessor began.
Let me also guess: You are one of those gullible who say that Merkel was always against German dependence on Russian gas but could not do anything about it. For 16 years!
There is more "evidence" that Merkel is a long-term Russian intelligence asset, recruited from her youth in East Germany,^1 than that of Trump being the same. One guess on which claim is incessantly repeated by the bien-pensants of the chattering classes.
^1 Something else never talked about is how her parents moved from West to East Germany when she was a baby
Trump was literally impeached for secretly withholding congressionally appropriated military aid to Ukraine and then extorting the Ukrainian president to make up a fake scandal about his political opponent in return for keeping aid flowing. Several of Trump’s top advisors/officials were directly corruptly involved with previous Russian puppet leaders of Ukraine and corrupt pro-Russia Ukrainian oligarchs, notably Paul Manafort, who had directly worked for years to undermine Ukrainian democracy (Manafort was imprisoned in the USA for his illegal Ukraine-related fraud, among other charges. If you want to single out an American to blame for the current war, Manafort is your best bet.)
Remember, Trump fired the US ambassador to Ukraine because she was opposed to Ukrainian (and American) corruption, and instead sent Rudy Giuliani, Rick Perry, and Gordon Sondland – an incompetent hotel developer who bought his way into a cosplay job as EU Ambassador – to further his corrupt schemes, including not only the extortion plan to invent scandals about Biden, but also replacing the leadership of a Ukrainian state-owned gas company so that it could give contracts to Trump’s corrupt American allies, ending the US attempts to extradite Firtash (a criminal Ukrainian oligarch with Russian mafia ties who hired Rudy Giuliani and other Trump allies), etc.
When Trump’s extortion scheme was exposed and blew up as a scandal, Congress appropriated additional aid for Ukraine, and Trump was driven by the scandal and intense public and congressional scrutiny (not to mention pressure from the US military) to continue the aid. (He still wanted to be re-elected, remember, so didn’t want to look totally corrupt.)
Thankfully the USA is not (as of 2016–2022) a dictatorship, and the president does not personally decide all national policy. So when Trump had some bright ideas like nuking a hurricane or selling off Puerto Rico, those didn’t actually happen. When Trump suggested pulling the US out of NATO, there were still enough powerful and sane figures in the US defense establishment who were able to thwart that proposal.
* * *
You are right that the US and NATO did some (though in retrospect it perhaps should have been more) to help Ukraine from 2014–2021. That training, funding, and support was surely one important part of the Ukrainian army’s recent success. Score one for the US military and US federal government.
* * *
> who say that Merkel was always against German dependence on Russian gas
I don’t know about Merkel per se but German political parties clearly have significant corruption problems. The German response to the Ukraine war has been a disappointing indictment of the whole German political class.
More generally, many Europeans (and Americans, etc.) have been bought off (explicitly or implicitly) by money embezzled from the Russian people by various oligarchs and organized criminals. Russian corruption is a serious worldwide problem, and other countries should continue to make large-scale coordinated responses, ending money laundering, seizing corrupt assets, and imposing legal liability on local residents (e.g. the legal, real estate, and financial services industries) who knowingly participate.
Would you please stop breaking the site guidelines? Posting aggressively like this is totally not ok, and it also looks like you've been using HN primarily for political/ideological battle, which is against the rules regardless of your politics or your ideology.
I, as a citizen of the US dependent on others growing this food on behalf of me, am fine with reduced yields and higher meat prices, to put more pressure on Russia.
I also wish we'd send in the big guns to put a lot more pressure in focused places.
"Reduced yields" and "higher meat prices" is a benign way of saying "people may starve to death".
What may be an inconvenience to you, a probably-rich person on the global scale, who can afford to outbid poor people when food gets short, is not necessarily just an inconvenience for others.
People do not need to starve to death. We use a ton of land to grow a ton of plants that we then feed to a ton of animals which we then feed to humans. Or we could, you know, just eat the plants. Calculations vary (a lot), but doing that could reduce global agricultural land use from 4 billion hectares to just 1.†. On top of that we're completely wasting 30-40% of the food we do produce.††
This is not to say that all meat consumption is 'inefficient'. Cattle can graze on land that is not suitable for farming, and animals generally eat more of the physical plants than we do (animals on a feedlot are often eating fibrous parts of the plant like stalks and stubble and not just the parts we humans like to eat). But there's no way around it, industrialized meat in its current form is an extraordinarily inefficient use of land and has terrible environmental consequences.
Also relevant to any discussion on fertilizer is that excessive usage basically destroys the soil. We've moved away from time-tested methods of managing crops through things like crop rotation, cover crops, promoting natural vegetation in key areas... to over-tilling, over-fertilizing, mono-cropping, and this is taking its toil on the ground we use to farm. Fertilizer is also responsible for eutrophication (nutrient pollution) which destroys local ecosystems and poisons the water. Not to mention nutrition != calories.
Fertilizer is absolutely a modern technological wonder which has allowed humanity to produce food at tremendous scale, and I would not argue that it does not have its place in farming. But the current singular focus on "more yield per hectare" is a very modern, naive approach to farming that throws out a ton of considerations, and is absolutely unecessary.
> I, as a citizen of the US dependent on others growing this food on behalf of me, am fine with reduced yields and higher meat prices, to put more pressure on Russia.
You are missing a critical piece of information here: what is your yearly income and what is your family size?
I don't know what it is, but it seems something is not right.
On the one hand the US is asking the EU and allies to stop buying oil and whatever from Russia. A few large retailers pulled out of the Russian market due to perceived pressure to do so. We tell India (traditional non-aligned country) not to buy from Russia, we chastised Brazil for buying fertilizer from Russia (despite our objections), we tighten our own embargoes and then we're like, ahhhhh, nevermind..... WE'RE going to buy from Russia.
Is it lack of coordination, foresight, credibility, it's something.
I am now going to imagine the hysterics Pelosi and Schumer would have if Biden suddenly and for no reason declared himself an "R". At this point maybe he should to save the Dem party.
> tell India (traditional non-aligned country) not to buy from Russia
This is an odd one to include given it's almost administration policy at this point to look the other way while New Delhi goes out of its way to buy Russian oil.
"India has also denied recent reports that Russian crude imported by India was being shipped on as refined products to other countries, including the US."
Even if it is true the oil shipments origins are being hidden so the US and Europe don't know it's from Russia. You implied they were aware it was from Russia but were ok because it went through.
> India has also denied recent reports that Russian crude imported by India was being shipped on as refined products to other countries
Which makes zero sense. I'll also note that there is no citation. India is one of the largest exporters of refined petroleum products in the world. If the refineries ramp up purchase of Urals crude, guess what ends up in exports?
It's political. (I don't mean that as a negative, just reality.)
The US is coming up on an election. The party in power is extremely unpopular right now, and about to get walloped according to polls.
Polling shows that inflation is a big driver for their unpopularity. So they're trying to square two semi-incompatible positions: support Ukraine via sanctions and fight inflation too.
>The party in power is...about to get walloped according to polls.
I think this is the most overblown talking point right now. In the most favorable wet dream scenario for Republicans where every tossup goes their way[0], they're still only going to hold a 56-44 Senate lead over the Democrats. That's not filibuster-proof and certainly isn't the doomsday scenario that everyone keeps predicting. Keep in mind that Republican primaries have already screwed a lot of those races too. Herschel Walker, a man with a documented history of DV and a noted evolution-denier, will not be winning over Raphael Warnock no matter what the polls say.
It's not filibuster-proof, and it's even less veto-proof. But it would let the Republicans set the legislative agenda, and nothing would pass without their approval.
But that's basically true right now. The Democrats aren't getting anything done without the approval of Manchin and Sinema and still wouldn't post-2022.
In 2014, the Republicans held 54 Senate seats after the election. In the very worst case for 2022, we're back to 2014. However, if you actually go look at the upcoming races for this year, it seems much more likely that we'll end up closer to a 50/50 split given how weak many of the Republican candidates are.
The apocalypse scenario would be either party acquiring 67 seats in the Senate (to overrule presidential vetoes), which would obviate any need to win the presidency. However, anyone claiming that the Republicans are going to win 67 seats in 2022 is simply wrong.
Yeah. I have no idea why Biden tried to govern as if he had a strong majority when he had a 50/50 Senate. He's from the Senate himself; he absolutely should have known how weak his hand was. He could have done some things with it anyway, but by playing it as if he had more than he does, he got shot down time after time, and wound up looking quite ineffective.
> Yeah. I have no idea why Biden tried to govern as if he had a strong majority when he had a 50/50 Senate.
There's no other way to govern. You govern like you can lead and Congress either does or doesn't follow, or you are an irrelevance. Biden got more of his agenda accomplished than he would have with any less aggressive approach.
> he got shot down time after time, and wound up looking quite ineffective.
Doing nothing risky let's you look ineffective without getting shot down, but it doesn't actually make you look effective. And if you get shot down—especially on something publicly popular—that’s a campaign issue. If you don't try, it's...nothing.
> On the one hand the US is asking the EU and allies to stop buying oil and whatever from Russia.
> WE'RE going to buy from Russia.
Having spent three years consulting for federal agencies, this behavior seems to align with my experiences. You learn not to say anything because it's a waste of time and energy. There are other ways to constructively spend your time, like focusing on the mission and the task at hand.
Putin might not be the best military strategist but he clearly is a master troll.
It’s fascinating where a decade+ of policies ranging from stupid (green tech) to batshit crazy (shutting down nuclear) has led the West (US and especially the EU/Germany). And things are only starting to unravel…
I think the reference is about following the slogan, rather than developing tech. In other words, adding regulation to shut down fossil fuels (especially coal for energy) before being able to secure the economy with "clean" energy.
And of course, the misnomer of nuclear as dirty, rather than clean and efficient.
Anyone claiming that we could be 100% non-nuclear non-CO2 is completely delusional. There are only a few tiny examples (like Greenland) that have sufficiently bizarre local sources of energy. And that’s not even taking into account plastics, fertiliser etc.
The price of this delusion is being paid right now: impeding famine, energy costs exploding, Europe financing Russian war in Europe.
The goal was “clean abundant energy” but the green movement focused on clean to the detriment of abundant…
> Anyone claiming that we could be 100% non-nuclear non-CO2 is completely delusional
Not even half as delusional as the pro-nuclear power talk here, where every argument in favor goes, no matter how outlandish, unrealistic, or flat out wrong.
A spike in food prices. We can probably weather it OK in the developed world, but last time something like this happened it helped kick off the Arab Spring. Abrupt, large changes in quality of life tend to spark revolutions. They usually get people killed, and often don't result in a more-liberal government taking power.
Also these aren't just minor increases, e.g. Allianz estimate a 31% increase in prices in 2021; for people who live hand to mouth in the developing world this is catastrophic.
As a result of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, their destruction if Ukrainian agriculture, their blockade of Ukrainian ports, and sanctions on Russia (which don't cover foodstuffs)*
> Pastocalle has been a flash point of protests called by the powerful Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (Conaie) against rising fuel prices and living costs, which saw protesters block roads across the country on Monday.
The hypocrisy needs to be called out. Just a few months back US put a lot of pressure on countries like India to not buy Russian oil but now it's ready to buy Russian fertilizers? US media played along with multiple reports on India buying oil when Europe was buying in much larger quantities. Countries like India should buy cheap oil from where ever they can since inflation due to high oil prices can kill people. I am glad India resisted US pressure.
It's only hypocrisy if you assume there are some greater moral principles driving the behavior of nations. There's not.
The US puts pressure on people to do what it wants, just like every other country does in proportion to its power. The US just happens to be a global hegemon so it's gets what it wants more often than not, and has disproportionate control over the narrative of what's happening. Russia is particularly good at realizing and exploiting the few pain points there are in US hegemony and uses that to its advantage.
Everything else is just propaganda/ideology to keep you from paying too much attention to what's going on. There's no moral narrative being played out here, and those driving policy in nation states don't sit in big rooms talking about what's "right". They talk about what they need to do to continue to prosper/remain in power and how to do it. They let the media handle attaching a narrative to it that makes it easy to swallow for the public.
"India's oil purchases from Russia would not violate any of the sanctions imposed by the US on that country, according to President Joe Biden's Spokesperson Jen Psaki.
Asked during her briefing on Tuesday about reports that India was planning to buy "discounted crude oil' from Russia, she said, "Our message to any country continues to be that obviously abide by the sanctions that we have put in place and recommended."
However, she added, "I don't believe this would be violating that."
Making a moral appeal to cut off petroleum commerce, she added, "But also think about where you want to stand when the history books are written. In this moment in time any support for Russia, the Russian leadership, is support for an invasion that obviously is having a devastating impact".
However, NATO allies of the US continue to import Russian gas and petroleum."
The difference is that oil is a money maker for Russia, grains and fertilizer are not so much (and are likely subsidized as part of an effort to exert influence).
Russia has little problem withholding food resources as a way of forcing cooperation. If the US can actually get Russia to agree to play their best card in exchange for almost nothing, it could be an overall win.
Oil is, unfortunately, used everywhere. As you say, inflation due to high oil prices can kill people. And do you know what else can kill people? Starvation due to lower crop yields due to sudden lack of fertilisers. Ask Sri Lanka how their sudden ban on fertilisers went to see what happens when suddenly a country is forced to switch to fertiliserless agriculture.
The results from high fertiliser prices and lack of availability are drastically worse than high oil prices.
The best solution for this is years of weaning the soil off of chemical inputs towards a no-till, cover crop, managed grazing solution. It takes a few years of regrowing the soil before it can start to output as much as a synthetically fertilized field.
Because, as we have seen here, most of the green solutions to our industrial problems are not really viable at scale at the present moment. If they were this war would have been trivially ended since Russia would have no power over the developed world.
This war is a perfect object lesson in exactly how dependent we are globally on fossil fuels. That we are more decades than we have left away from solving our hydrocarbon problem. And that if we do happen to cross peak oil in a few years (which will actually be good for climate change) the result won't be a transition to green energy but global war on an unprecedented scale.
People paying close attention have been pointing this out for decades but dismissed as "pessimists" by green idealists.
The cost of living in "good times" where things are plentiful due to the status quo and existing policy is we have to listen to idiots who claim we're doing it all wrong and that we need to change our ways. These people's voices are squashed when times aren't so good because we have to actually succeed and get things done. But they'll be back once things are back to being good, complaining about everything, claiming the world is ending and that nothing is sustainable and that everything is broken.
Compost takes years to make, and is bulky. Ammonia-based fertilizer can be made on an industrial scale with continuous processes and is basically pure nutrients for plants.
Compost takes 20 days to 20 months depending on the feed stock. The main issue with compost is that it can be effective in high-intensity operations like market gardens, but it's much less effective on large acre operations (corn, soy, wheat, etc).
Not to mention that compost is really difficult to come by now.
Unless a farmer is making compost on the side, they can't really treat it as a known input.
I would also argue that chronic over-usage of ammonia-based fertilizers and over-tiling has contributed to degradation to much of the world's farming soil. Which has given rise to many adverse effects such nutrient runoff, poor water infiltration, soil erosion, and downstream effects.
As I understand it, the hydrogen in most industrially produced fertilizer comes from petroleum products. Given that, Russia being a big producer of fertilizer makes sense.
Nitrogen fertilizer is what I was talking about. Atmospheric nitrogen is combined with hydrogen from natural gas.
I can't really say why Russia would also be a large supplier of potash and phosphate, except to guess that they wanted to cover all of the relevant bases in a market in which they were a big player.
It's just a side-effect of basing the entire economy around fossil fuel exports. Fertilizer production then is like one elementary school step away from that.
It's a huge country in terms of land area. 1/5 is only a bit above the odds if you predict potash and phosphate deposits are evenly distributed across the world.
The US government has completely lost the ability to act strategically.
Biden is currently in Saudi Arabia begging for more oil production, meanwhile he's blocking measures to increase North American oil production. So, instead of fixing our own problem with inflation, we're asking one of the worst regimes on Earth for help and enriching Russia with higher prices simultaneously. Even if you support greener energy, like I do, this policy makes no sense other than to appear greener than you are.
The US consumer could easily handle food inflation and energy inflation if we weren't also dealing with inflation on a bunch of other fronts -- from policy-induced labor shortages and policy-induced supply chain problems. But since we've got multiple compounding problems with inflation, we're pushing everyone towards an unnecessary recession.
And of course the background here is a Fed that is whipsawing from creating trillions of dollars to destroying trillions of dollars and giving markets whiplash in the process.
Are the supply shortages policy-induced? Or do you mean not by the Biden admin, but just the regulatory status quo (incl tariffs from the previous admin)?
This entire thing has been some kind of bizarre politics induced self flagellation. Regardless of whether or not you think it is right or wrong, it has been no secret for decades that this conflict would be an outcome of Ukraine alignment with the west, yet the west continued to pursue it even after 2014, even with the huge increased dependency on Russian and Ukrainian resources while limiting domestic investment in energy because of ESG policies. And this is just the sprinkle on top of the inflation sundae that they have cooked up these last couple years.
Now everyone is in too deep with costs so high, there is limited ability to back out and save face and spin the story without it looking like the massive screw up with huge costs and limited benefit that it has been. At the end of the day, we are going to get a global recession and mass food insecurity and starvation in the global south for what?
> At the end of the day, we are going to get a global recession and mass food insecurity and starvation in the global south for what?
If you are asking what the west nations got in exchange of making the economy dependent on cheap oil and gas from Russia, the answer is pretty simple. They got money. Politicians got political credits at the time from being anti-nuclear, and infrastructure wise they gained short terms budget savings by not replacing existing heating infrastructure that depend on burning gas. The cheap oil also helped keeping air traffic and shipping traffic cheaper, and the cheap artificial fertilizers created from Russian natural gas made food production cheaper.
At the end of the day we traded independence in exchange for cheaper fossil fuels, and we went into dependency without having a backup plan.
Not issuing drilling licenses? Besides, there is, or so I heard, so much political pressures that drilling has become a high-risk business that those companies either can't afford insurance or can't get one.
Why would oil companies invest in production when the politicians plan to phase out oil in the near future? Infrastructure is expensive and takes a long time to break even.
And what investments they do make, like the Keystone XL pipeline, are blocked by the government.
Yeah, you're right. Just saw on Youtube that a Biden aid, Brian Deese, said they are not blocking expanded oil and gas production but killed refinery expansion, preventing 1M+ acres of oil/gas leasing. Per him, "I guarantee you, we're going to end fossil fuel & I am not going to cooperate them". It looks they are taking a long term view, and I hope the execution will be smooth: we can manage short-term increased cost while figuring out a way to keep the planet for our children".
It feels bad to us to have these ridiculous politicians who spend 95% of their time on theatrical in fighting as the US has for the last ~15 years but in terms of first order effects, it doesn't really matter. Like the risk of something like a kinetic civil war is still roughly zero in the US.
But the problem is, no one actually believes that there is any need to do things like have a cohesive foreign policy or actually administer the government, people view the job of the politicians as to just repetitively engage in the kabuki theatre of dunking on the other team over over and again.
Which was fine when the world was basically peaceful and we could just lord over everyone with our massive military and totally dominant currency which were built up in the previous era. The problem is that this system is going to fail spectacularly when there are actual complicated geo political issues to deal with and I think we are in the early stages of witnessing right now.
Someone else made the observation that we are effectively trying to deal with this problem but cancelling Putin over twitter, because canceling people on twitter is one of the primary modes of governance in the US right now. That may sound hyperbolic but I think it's actually pretty accurate, a lot of the sanctions on Russia were companies self sanctioning after getting attacked on twitter.
It turns out saying mean things on twitter is not particularly effective against tanks and artillery.
Like the risk of something like a kinetic civil war is still roughly zero in the US.
To us people on the outside, listening to US people denigrating each other on the web, it seems to us that it's 50-50 whether the US will be involved in a Civil War or a big peer-to-peer International War first.
It's mostly a tiny number of loud and influential people drowning out the majority who either have a balanced view and wish someone would listen through all the shouting or can't make sense of any of it and shut down a long time ago so they could get on with their lives. The latter group is where you find most of the swing voters both parties try to woo every election but ignore otherwise.
> meanwhile he's blocking measures to increase North American oil production.
Increasing local oil production will do little - the barrel prices are not exactly high, but the price at the pump is high - why? Refining. And that's all controlled by oil companies. I wonder why? Perhaps they're just ginning for extra profit?
I remember that on TV Trump was telling German chancellor that they should seek energy sources outside of Russia, and the media was mocking him for being populist or for being anti globalization (or for being paranoid as Russian would need buyers? I can't remember exactly). Is the orange man so bad that whatever he touches is a taboo? Is there any truth in what he does, and the executive branch can be less political but focus more on execution?
BTW, what's with all the politicians telling people to buy electrical cars so they don't have to worry about high energy price, as if they didn't know how expensive or unpractical those cars are for ordinary American families? I somehow find that stance insulting.
>I remember that on TV Trump was telling German chancellor that they should seek energy sources outside of Russia, and the media was mocking him for being populist or for being anti globalization (or for being paranoid as Russian would need buyers? I can't remember exactly). Is the orange man so bad that whatever he touches is a taboo? Is there any truth in what he does, and the executive branch can be less political but focus more on execution?
Trump and Jens Stoltenberg of NATO argue on camera (<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vpwkdmwui3k>). Who turned out to be right? Who turned out to completely, totally, 100% wrong?
I recently listened to a podcast in which two senior political advisers talked about how they were surprised by the importance of fertilizers and the fact that a lot of fertilizers come from those countries. They had no idea before hands, and nobody around them talked about it.
We see incompetent people around us every day, but sometimes we forget that there are incompetent politicians as well. The big difference, and what bothers me the most, is that they never admit their mistakes because of all the political party BS that is often the main priority and goal.
The West could've ended this war by now if they just went all in on sending howitzers, MLRS and other heavy equipment into Ukraine but they keep slow dripping it, or just doing nothing like Germany. The most powerful societies in the world history just twiddle their thumbs while negative consequences keep mounting.
I really don't get it - the west must a) either know more about Russia and its plans than the public or b) are somewhat complicit in gaining from a long war.
The 2 aren't mutually exclusive but anyone who doesn't believe in A is pretty naive.
It's saying that we, keyboard warriors on a programming forum, are just as knowledgeable as e.g. Biden who has the full briefing and resources of the CIA
> west must a) either know more about Russia and its plans than the public or b) are somewhat complicit in gaining from a long war.
Or didn't know what was going on until well after the war was underway. U.S. tactical intelligence has no match on earth. American strategic intelligence is almost predictably garbage. From Iraq to Kabul to Kyiv, we've consistently called the shots wrong.
> When's the last time the US fought against a near-peer?
When's the last time any major power fought a near peer?
I would have said we're getting solid evidence of American intelligence supremacy out of Ukraine. But given the incompetence of the Russian military it would be embarrassing to put them in the same league as China.
The Russian military is only incompetent on American social media. Despite the memes and all the projection going around, they're running a master class in modern combined arms maneuver warfare. Their territorial gains and low losses relative to Ukraine speak for themselves; the Donbas is weeks, perhaps days, from being consolidated.
If you consider that the US has been 'at war' with Russia since 1945, then the conflict in the Ukraine is one battle, not a war, and winning battles but losing the war is how the USSR disintegrated in the first place.
More of that was luck than the State Dept will ever admit, but here we are, and I'll be damned if I know where we are 'going'. There's a tendency for armchair commentators to imagine an opponent 'disappearing' once beaten. If you can make 6.6 million square miles of country disappear, then we should all be kneeling before you and calling you Zod.
The US is interested in a protracted war in Ukraine to both make money for weapons and other supplies manufacturers, and to drain the Russian economy. The Ukraine war was precipitated by years of US machinations, despite media characterizations to the contrary.
It's important to note the money drip from Afghanistan has been cut off, with manufacturers looking for more ways to drain tax money away from domestic projects and into the war machine, a status quo since at least Vietnam.
It is literally the exact opposite. Escalating the war in Ukraine by going "all in on sending howitzers, MLRS and other heavy equipment" is exactly what the defense companies want.
It's genuinely amazing to see the mental gymnastics here to come to the conclusion that buying fewer weapons is exactly what the defense contractors are lobbying for.
They have approved 40 billion. Is it really that hard to imagine that a protracted war would benefit defense contractors. Do you think these multi billion dollar war machine only thinks in simplistic first order effects.
It requires no mental gymnastics whatsoever. Actually the counter argument is where you need to twist yourself to believe otherwise.
Eh, re-read the comment--I'm agreeing with you. I'm saying they want that status quo, without war they don't sell weapons. But interestingly enough someone did attempt those same gymnastics.
Hardly. As someone local to this conflict I see it as a simple matter of Russia needing a war (or just something internally recognized as a "success") from time to time for whatever internal reason du jour. Wouldn't even be the first time it happened in history.
I would believe that there are some defense contracting companies hoping for a protracted war, but "The US" in terms of political leadership is absolutely not. This war is hurting the US economy in a number of ways that will not be helpful during the next election.
The Biden administration's goal isn't to stop the war, it is to reset geopolitics by creating regime change in Russia. For this to happen the Ukraine conflict needs to be drawn out as long as possible, perhaps even with an insurgency in southern/eastern Ukraine.
Biden isn't the only person shaping the war though. Western Europe pretty clearly wants this conflict to end, and has pushed Ukraine to accept Russian concessions.
It's reasonable for Americans to want to drag this conflict out, as they are more insulated from the direct effects of the war, and a pro-American Russia would bring a lot of benefits. But it is clearly having a destabilizing effect on the rest of the world and this may spill over into western europe as well.
Yeah and Russia could have ended the war by now too by simply launching their nukes.
I think it's weird you don't think anyone involved in the problem has thought of your proposed solution, or that you don't think there's any potential negative effects from antagonizing an unhinged despot with his finger on the nuke.
I do believe that it's not "at all cost" though. Otherwise a nuclear power could do literally anything and you wouldn't be able to stop them "because nukes". If Putin started rolling tanks into Poland saying "don't stop me or I'll fire nukes" that would be the time to call his bluff, even if the consequences of getting this wrong are dire. The line has to be somewhere - right now it's the border of NATO member countries.
Not actually true. Current borders of Russia are defined by its reckless self-destruction in 1991.
Also some land on the east of Russia was given away without any fight.
For example, Alaska or Fort Ross.
> It's the spineless cowards like you who brought us to this point.
Lmao okay buddy.
I'd argue that emotionally-charged rhetoric like that is exactly what got the West (the US especially) into the mess in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Charged rhetoric by emotional war hawks who kept shouting "you're either with us or against us" used to mask lies by US politicians and the media.
Note - I'm not saying we do nothing to help Ukraine. Economic sanctions and supporting the Ukrainian military is great. But the West must be careful to avoid escalating to WW3.
Oh yes Afghanistan where the fears of nuclear retaliation ran especially high.
But whatever. If Ukraine folds, 24-feb-2022 will be pinned in history books as the start of WW3 and in a few years all your fears will come to fruition. A coward dies a thousand deaths.
If you have nukes you can pretty much do whatever you want, short of launching them at another nuclear power. That's just like, reality.
Remember this the next time everyone bellyaches about "unfair sanctions" or whatever when some country even hints that they're pursuing a nuclear program.
And if you don't have nukes, nuclear powers can do pretty much anything they wsant to you.
As we have seen in Lybia, Serbia, Iraq, Syria.
So don't be surprised when another country is rushing for nukes at all cost. These are the only thing that protect you against the West.
> Then what are you suggesting? That Putin ought to be allowed to do literally anything he wants because if we tried to stop him he might nuke everyone?
"Henry Kissinger, who wondered in his 1957 book Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy if extending the American deterrent to all of Europe at a time when the threat of total destruction hung over the US itself would actually work: ‘A reliance on all-out war as the chief deterrent saps our system of alliances in two ways: either our allies feel that any military effort on their part is unnecessary or they may be led to the conviction that peace is preferable to war even on terms almost akin to surrender... [1]"
In summary, the concern you raise is actively discussed in security circles. Post Ukraine, it's increasingly common to see the absolute nuclear taboo questioned.
Until the first nuclear power lobs a tactical nuke and doesn't suffer reprisal, we'll be in an uncomfortable transition period, analogous to the time immediately preceding MAD. (And let's be honest. If Putin lobbed a tactical nuke at Ukraine, does anybody seriously think he'd face military force?)
I’m suggesting that outright war can be disastrous. That if we’re to take out Putin, it would need to be in a way that would not prompt him to Nuke any part of the planet. Personally I’m in favor of internal strife within the Russian government or assassination. Anything that does not give him the chance to leave a spiteful gift.
He's not unhinged, he's essentially a boss of a drug cartel, flaunting his strength and cruelty but respecting the power of others. There is no real value for him to launch nukes unless he thinks the West is absolutely weak and I'm afraid that conviction is actually growing.
This is exactly what everyone said about Putin invading Ukraine.
Putin invading Ukraine was impossible because he's not unhinged and it would be an insanely stupid thing to do. He's just gathering his armies next to the border because he's flaunting his strength.
>I'm afraid that conviction is actually growing
Based off your in-depth research of casually browsing NY Times headlines?
> This is exactly what everyone said about Putin invading Ukraine.
First, not everyone, Ukrainians knew. Second, after the end of WW2 we lived (wanted to live) under a spell that conquering whole countries with some opportunistic genocide on top is not going to happen anymore, or at least not in the "civilized" Europe. Now, I hope the spell is off, we can see the world more clearly, and it's a raw power competition in which Putin thinks he has the winning cards or can at least out bluff everyone.
What do you expect him to say, "Putin bring it on?". In some random interviews he said Ukraine is prepared [1].
And yes, no one was sure that this Feb military build up results in war cause there was already a build up in April before that. But this invasion was inevitable with the current Russian leadership, UAF underwent a series of reforms since 2014 to prepare for it.
> What do you expect him to say, "Putin bring it on?".
That's an absurd take. He was clearly completely unprepared for the invasion and was not expecting it in the slightest.
If he was expecting it, he wouldn't have been in complete denial of US intelligence and wouldn't decried it as "the West sowing panic for political gains".
> In some random interviews he said Ukraine is prepared
I have no idea why you're looking at "random interviews" when you can just look at exactly what happened.
Ukraine was completely unprepared for Russian invasion and they were clearly shocked when the Russians invaded.
Did Zelenky evacuate any civilians beforehand? Nope. Did he ask NATO countries for aid? Nope, it was the exact opposite.
NATO countries were offering aid and he was calling them alarmist.
Sounds like you were not following the events because invasion was effectively "announced" by US Intelligence weeks before the actual declaration of war. Besides, this was not the only sign and if you know the way Putin talks and you listened to him days before the invasion (talking about Russian Empire's old glory) you'd see that he already made his mind up way before the actual day of invasion. Of course, it's easy to see things in hindsight (and I did truly predict the invasion before it happened) but sounds like you're not even aware of all the available data.
You're arguing my point! Which is that people knew about this invasion, US intelligence knew, Ukrainians were preparing as well despite the rosy rhetoric of Zelensky.
The media and the vast majority of US pundits were saying the invasion was impossible. US intelligence was being criticized before the invasion for being alarmist.
Again, just read the news articles from January/February of this year.
It sounds like you weren't paying any attention to this in Feb and are just trying to come up with arguments to support your points.
In fact, this is really simple: If Putin wants to launch nukes, he will launch nukes. If Putin thinks it will help his cause, he will launch nukes. There's nothing we can do about this.
The strongest weapon Russia has right now is the threat of launching nukes it seems...
> Yeah and Russia could have ended the war by now too by simply launching their nukes.
This sentiment is nuts, in my opinion. Russia isn't the only nation that has nukes folks... everyone around Russia has them too...
If Putin were to nuke a major metropolitan area, it would be the end of Putin (literally) and likely the end of Russia (at least it's current government). The unification of NATO, the EU, and the entire "west" would be so strong and unanimous, there would be no positive outcome for Russia.
Let's stop cowering because one dude threatened the entire world... the world is much bigger than Russia.
They don't much care if Ukraine wins, they want Russia to lose as much as possible. If Ukraine wins too fast or effectively, there's a risk of Russia getting desperate and using nukes, but also there's a chance Russia will pull back before taking as many military losses as possible through a protracted conflict.
This just isn't true. Putin never signalled a willingness to hold good faith peace talks. Quite the contrary, he has continuously signalled how important he believes Ukraine is to his legacy. Nothing short of his death would have stopped this.
You're literally asking for more death and destruction. Just think of what you're saying. Russia wins this war no matter what and the pointless cheerleading from the media and some politicians has been nothing but disposing of Ukrainian lives for the sole purpose of getting some type of bizarre revenge on Russia who they believe got Trump elected, or something.
Sending more and more weapons only prolongs it and adds to the body count. A humanitarian mission to remove those at risk from the areas Russia wants to invade would be a far better response. Sanctioning Russia is fine but shooting ourselves in the foot by refusing to buy their fuel is ridiculous and destroying our economies leading to real people losing their livelihoods here.
Just look at what's going on right now? They've just about succeeded now in claiming the Eastern territories they want and it won't be long now. Everything has turned the last few weeks since their initial offense was repelled and they regrouped.
Why are some people rooting for more and more needless death and destruction?
First, letting Putin run over Ukraine is a guaranteed destruction of Ukrainian culture and identity, or at least a setback for several decades or centuries until Russia collapses again. Another generation of poets, writers, citizen sent to mass graves. Fine, you might think that physical safety of a majority outweigh such ephemeral concepts and the minority of cultural elites can be sacrificed to Putin but not everyone thinks that way. Many Ukrainians, for instance, are willing to sacrifice their physical safety for the survival of Ukrainian culture.
Second, letting Russia win will not stop further death and destruction when Putin continues his expansion westward, only then with Ukrainian conscripts as a cannon fodder.
Are you suggesting that Putin ought to be allowed to invade any country he wants without resistance because resisting would only increase the death count? Or is there something specific about Ukraine?
No, the situation in Ukraine is so much more nuanced. There's a lot of history there and Ukraine is't an innocent bystander in this situation. It's fair to say Russia has been provoked in many ways and although I'm not sure an invasion is justified, it isn't all together unexpected based on how they've been treated regarding this over the last 10 years or so.
The breakdown in diplomacy with Russia is the worst part. The previous administration at least had diplomacy. The current one just pushed them into this.
Invasion started in 2014, when diplomacy was okay. Russia kept rotating their knife in Ukrainian back all this time, you can't with a straight face victim blame Ukraine here.
> The breakdown in diplomacy with Russia is the worst part. The previous administration at least had diplomacy. The current one just pushed them into this.
If by diplomacy you mean kowtowing to everything Russia does, I'm not sure that's much better.
As time goes on and the current popular media fades into obscurity, Trump will be held in higher and higher regard. His prediction about the current admin - high fuel, high inflations, crashing markets - was 100% spot on.
I am sure Ukrainians feel very sorry about inconveniencing Europeans but apparently they have decided to fight regardless of whether the West sends them weapons or not. At this point the West can watch them die or help them fight.
It doesn't really matter now. Russia is about to reclaim the Eastern lands it wanted and then we'll hear about "negotiated cease fire" and the war will be over and a pointless waste of lives will have occurred as well as trillions in economic damages.
Russia literally had a 0% chance of losing this thing in the end. Ukraine did well to defend early and Russia certainly mismanaged the strategy. Going at the mainland was stupid and indefensible and the Ukraine fighters should be commended. But it was never the main objective and the truth is, Russia is on the verge of accomplishing their main objective.
why do you assume Russia wanted only the Eastern lands? Putin said he wanted all of Ukraine. The invasion started with attempt to take Kyiv. Why level Kharkiv if all you want is Donbas?
I think it was strategic to end the war quickly. They knew if they invaded the East it would be a drawn out thing. So they went for the head shot right away and hoped they could pressure a negotiation. But to their credit, Ukraine stood up to it and the Russian execution of their plan was poor. So they've since abandoned that strategy and have now settled for plan-b, which they will win eventually.
It's time to stop losing lives and to try diplomacy.
You think the strategy was to take Kyiv(the cradle and former capital of Kievlyan Russia)and then exchange it for war-torn Donbas? That would be like Israelis exchanging Jerusalem for Gaza
Russia could stop the bloodshed today by simply withdrawing their forces from the region. The LNR/DNR forces would surrender (they are reliant on Russia's support) and peace and stability could be achieved rapidly. The power is in their hands.
It's important to remember that this war has really been going on since 2014. Eastern rebel forces were starting to crumble until Russia began offering direct military assistance (Not just material but also boots-on-the-ground. Ukraine captured VDV and Spetsnaz POWs and would regularly exchange Russian troops with the DNR/LPR for POW swaps).
Edit: One of the big lessons Europe learned during the first half of the 20th century is that nationalist/ethnic conquests over land and border disputes makes everyone worse-off (World War I), and such acts should be powerfully deterred - through force, because capitulation doesn't work (World War II).
They withdraw now and a year later theres a NATO base in Mariupol.
Donbas is the location from which the Nazis launched the attack on the USSR which almost lost them WW2. Its strategic significance cant be understated. Finland and Sweden are not as important.
There's already NATO bases in the Barents Sea (and Turkey via the Black Sea) in addition along their land borders via the baltic states (minus Belarus). Their actions have also pushed Finland and Sweden into the arms of NATO.
The thing about the Cuban missile crisis is that Kennedy was able to get Russian missiles AWAY from the United States. Russia's actions are getting hardware placed closer.
And why is that? Probably because Russia will tolerate it in exchange for territorial expansion. Even after the 2014 invasion of Crimea there was open talk about how NATO was obsolete and a waste of money and effort. Russia could've probably eliminated any NATO threat without firing a single shot. It was already seen as a relic of the cold war. Instead, Russia's actions have given a renewed justification for NATO's existence.
>The thing about the Cuban missile crisis is that Kennedy was able to get Russian missiles AWAY from the United States.
It only happened in the first place because the US put missiles in Turkey. Take them away and suddenly the soviet union is ok with removing the cuban nukes.
In this case a simple "Ukraine wont be joining NATO" would have prevented this war.
>Russia's actions are getting hardware placed closer.
The strategic significance of the other locations is far less than the donbas. Note the whole "location where they almost lost ww2" thing. It's kind of important. The US/NATO wanted a base in Mariupol because its the perfect location to threaten Russia, and they almost got it. Finland was the consolation prize.
It's amazing how many people just can't seem to see any reason for Russia's behavior other than making their leader into a cartoon who just wants to do evil things to be evil.
Honestly, since the Soviet Union collapsed, NATO has only expanded and crept closer and closer to Russia. How are they supposed to feel? As for this particular thing - the areas they are want are mainly Russian anyways and recent Ukrainian pol's have done everything they can to marginalize the people and their Russian cultures in these regions.
Russia isn't perfect but this is a nuanced thing and was preventable through diplomacy.
And they started down that road earnestly in the 1990s. But it required extensive military and certain Democratic reforms Russia didn't want to commit to so they abandoned it. And that's totally fine: nobody is required to join NATO. Ultimately, since the early 90s, Russia helped form the CSTO which serves a similar function.
> recent Ukrainian pol's have done everything they can to marginalize the people and their Russian cultures in these regions.
The current Ukrainian president is a native Russian speaker and was quite popular in Russia. They have spent the last 8 years dealing with a Russian-instigated (and supported) civil war with the so-called LPR and DPR. Is the southern United States oppressed because the Union didn't allow it to secede? That certainly was the argument people used to justify segregation!
Anyway, the stated justification for this war is not NATO expansion but "denazification"
And then America interfered in their elections in the 90’s and trust began to erode. We literally sent agents there to install American style politics to get Boris re-elected. It’s no wonder they don’t trust anything!
> In this case a simple "Ukraine wont be joining NATO" would have prevented this war.
Given the myriad of non-NATO excuses, including outright restoration of Russian imperial territory, that have been cited by Putin since day one, if you pay attention to anything besides the message crafted by the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs for Western audiences (and faithfully relayed by Russia’s useful idiots in the West), and Russia pattern of aggression against it's neighbors, that doesn't really seem likely.
(It's more likely that simply letting Ukraine skip ahead straight to joining NATO would have stopped the war.)
The myriad of excuses were for domestic propaganda purposes. Russia wasnt about to sacrifice this much for language rights in the donbas or Putin's belief that Ukrainian identity is bullshit but selling the idea of nascent potential military threat of gradual military encroachment to Russian audiences isnt a winner despite how fundamentally critical it is.
For the integrity of Russian borders theyd sacrifice 100,000 in the blink of an eye. And have to ensure Mariupol wont ever host a NATO base.
If Putin simply wanted to invade only for territory he would have taken it years ago when it would have been militarily easier. He invaded because the military threat it posed was slowly growing as Ukraine formed ever closer links to NATO.
>if you pay attention to anything besides the message crafted by the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs for Western audiences
I monitor all sides (neutral, russian, western), but the above analysis I read from a military analyst who hates Russia.
Your idea of what constitutes Russian propaganda and "useful idiot" is comically out of whack.
It's also pretty hard to get exposed to Russian propaganda accidentally despite what a bevy of Americans raised on 1950s red scare tactics seem to think.
>It's more likely that simply letting Ukraine skip ahead straight to joining NATO would have stopped the war.
Yep, but NATO doesnt actually give a fuck about any of the countries bordering Russia and isnt willing to start a hot war with Russia over any of them. The decades long drawn out application process is simply to let them gradually up the threat to Russia without having any real obligation until its certain that obligation wont have to be invoked.
This is slowly starting to dawn on Zelensky, I think. He's pretty mad at us right now for providing restrained help against the onslaught.
> If Putin simply wanted to invade only for territory he would have taken it years ago
He did invade and take the most important territory years ago (as soon as there wasn't a Russian puppet governing Ukraine), when Ukraine was incapable of much resistance, and then paused to complete the integration of the territory seized at the time.
"Hitler wins this war no matter what, just let him kill all the Jews and enslave non-Aryans so that we could avoid needless deaths and suffering" — does that sound right to you? This is exactly how this ignorant nonsense sounds to a Ukrainian.
This is genocide. Not resisting means millions killed and tens of millions brutally oppressed, a whole nation and its culture erased from existence, and an invitation for further imperialistic wars and atrocities, because evil unpunished only leads to more evil on a larger scale.
Yeah, I don't think they are similar at all. This current situation is way more nuanced. This isn't Hitler blitzing into France.
This is not genocide, you're exaggerating here. Honestly, if anything the Russian culture of the Eastern regions Russia is about to take was being wiped out. That was the actual genocide. It's why there are so many Russian supporting people there.
When Russia came into Kiev I agree, it was a step too far and the Ukrainian's needed to fight. But now Russia is only attempting their main mission of taking Donbas, etc. It's time to cease fire and negotiate and stop the pointless death at this point.
At this point you're just parroting Russian propaganda without any clue of what you're talking about, so I don't think there's any point in further discussion.
I don't think so. I don't have a horse in this race and have read many sources on this conflict and it sort of results in a very grey picture here that isn't anything like what some popular news stations want to make it out to be. I think there's a lot of nuance here and isn't so black and white.
I think the initial reluctance was because they didn't want Russia to capture a whole bunch of intact, powerful, advanced weapon systems if Ukraine capitulated fast, plus not being sure how Russia would react to extensive Western involvement. Both don't seem to be problems, now, but they easily could have been.
Total number of howitzers, MLRS etc across all NATO countries combined is in the same range as what Russia posesses. So that is not going to end the war, just more people will die. This is not a soccer game.
Meanwhile RUB to USD is at its highest in nearly 5 years. Cutting Russia off from SWIFT has only strengthened their ties to India and China. Russia is still invading Ukraine, and now we're dealing with soaring food and energy prices at home. At some point you have to consider whether this level of diplomatic incompetence is intentional.
Can the gas coupons be used for buying consumer goods? Right now doesn't seem to be the case.
Money flows one way. Since Russians don't produce anything except raw materials, high currency value doesn't matter since they can't spend it.
“Set its value at X”. There is no nob or “setting” to do this.
There are plenty of Forex exchanges trading RUB for any currency. Including USD, EUR and others. Governments don’t have control over all exchanges so they can’t set the price. The price is determined by supply & demand (ie: the market). Governments do have some levers they can use: buying or selling reserves to put up or downward pressure on the market price.
To limit trading of a currency you’d have to limit exchanges to any other currency. If you limit RUB-USD for example, people could still trade RUB-EUR and EUR-USD, thus still creating a defacto RUB-USD pricing.
Easier immigration. Smart people generally want to leave authoritarian governments. We've been making it increasingly difficult for almost 2 decades now. It's ridiculous that we turn them away when there is clear evidence that they grow the economic pie for everyone.
It's also messed up that we don't consider the downstream effects of sanctions as collateral damage. How many millions of people can the west allow to starve due to sanctions and still hold the moral high-ground?
As somebody living under another strongman not far from Russia, I second that. Anybody with half a brain here wants to emigrate (and mostly not for economic reasons, but for political/social ones, and to get a chance to make something of yourself), but it's been close to impossible for at least 20 years unless you have millions in the bank (which an honest person is unlikely to have), or manage to win a green card lottery (which several of my acquaintances have done, but it's pure luck).
Pretty weird to read all these articles about shortages of IT professionals, and compare that to the immigration barriers your governments have put. Although I guess your typical HN visitor probably wouldn't be very interested in influx of cheap labor that will bring down his salary to sane levels.
Not sure how that question is relevant, but if you think the politicians and military brass are worried at all about the “murders of children and women” I have a bridge to sell you.
Noble intentions and I agree with you it should be avoided, but again I’m confused that you’re suggesting that morality is the major driver for the actions or inactions of nations around the world when it comes to war. It probably is the major driver for most people as you say, but geopolitics simply don’t work that way.
>"Continue doing business as usual as if they're not murdering women and children?"
No we should do everything possible to stop it.
There is a problem though - when "murdering women and children" is done by approved country "Continue doing business as usual" is pretty much what the West does. And I am not aware of any real repercussions for the crimes committed.
You have to pick your battles and fact is, the American public wants to stop Russian atrocities in Ukraine. They don't want to do anything about Yemen or Syria. I'm sure many books have been written about how and why people get involved to help strangers.
It's simpler than a conspiracy, although a conspiracy may exist. Ukrainians are white, Christian, hold Western values and millions of people of Ukrainian descent live in the US and Canada. Opposing Russia is an easy sell.
The problem for both Syria and Yemen with US audiences is that the USA just went through 2 decades of jingoistic anti-Muslim propaganda and complicated Middle-East wars ending in political failure.
The war in Ukraine is a straightforward story with an obvious bad guy, and it doesn’t require much self reflection to figure out or cause much cognitive dissonance.
>"They don't want to do anything about Yemen or Syria."
"They" were fine with their own government killing hundreds of thousands in Iraq and whole bunch of other countries. They're fine with their government threatening ICC as organization and its members. They've definitely picked their battle and frankly I think by doing all those things without any repercussion they are being hypocrites and setting example to other countries. No high moral ground here. The whole world affairs are quite disgusting for that matter.
Personally I just try to think about nice things that humanity still manage to produce and as I am a creative person my brain is always busy with rather more inspiring matters.
And what about Ukraine? Why should it's sovereignty be surrendered? Why are you blaming the victim of agression they didn't surrender? When else would you apply that same logic?
sovereignty is not surrendered by respecting the condition of avoiding all military bloc alliances, under which such sovereignty was granted initially [1]: "The Ukrainian SSR solemnly declares its intention to become a permanently neutral state in the future, which does not participate in military blocs and adheres to three non-nuclear principles: not to accept, produce or acquire nuclear weapons."
First, intention of Ukraine. Not "condition" for independence.
Second, that was also based on the promises made in the Budapest memorandum. Seeing that Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014, the situation is already drastically different. Ukraine's choice post-2014 were to surrender to Russia's whims, or try to find allies to protect it from future Russian incursions.
And third, the Ukrainian SSR had sovereignty before it declared independence ( nobody "granted it sovereignty"), de jure ( being a component of the USSR with at least nominal, if not real depending on the guys in Moscow, autonomy) and de facto.
> First, intention of Ukraine. Not "condition" for independence.
These are the same in the followed legal events (see below)
> Second, that was also based on the promises made in the Budapest memorandum
The Budapest memorandum was signed in 1994. The Declaration on the State Sovereignty of Ukraine was signed in 1990 and it pre-dates all further legal documents that led to Ukraine's independence. All subsequent legal documents and events are predicated on respecting and referencing the declaration of 1990. The Constitution of Ukraine of 1996 references and follows the Act of proclamation of independence of Ukraine from August 24, 1991, which in turn follows and references "Implementing the Declaration of State Sovereignty of Ukraine" [1]. Implementing the declaration means following and executing all intentions of the declaration, that's why I said above that "conditions" and "intentions" mean the same thing in the underlying legal procedures.
> Seeing that Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014
you forgot to add: after a prior armed coup against a legitimately elected president in Kyiv. The coup, among many other things, violated the right to a political representation of the people's voice who voted for that president. In case of president Yanukovych, these were the people of the eastern Ukraine, including Crimea, who were deprived of their right to a democratic process in their country.
> And third, the Ukrainian SSR had sovereignty before it declared independence ( nobody "granted it sovereignty"), de jure ( being a component of the USSR with at least nominal, if not real depending on the guys in Moscow, autonomy) and de facto.
Blatantly false, the Ukrainian SSR had certain autonomy under the Union, as did a few other european and asian SSR's, but it didn't have sovereignty [2]. This is the whole reason the Declaration of 1990 exists in the first place, as it was the means to declare and begin a legal transition to a sovereign state. And in that sense sovereignty was granted to Ukraine, because there only are two ways a nation can obtain sovereignty: either by fighting for it in a war or by coming into a peaceful legal agreement on mutually respected terms and conditions. In 1990, the second approach was taken and the terms and conditions were declared and signed by all parties in the Declaration on the State Sovereignty of Ukraine.
[2] Under the Soviet one-party model, the Ukrainian SSR was governed by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union through its republican branch: the Communist Party of Ukraine. No decision of the government of Ukraine (Council of Ministers) was adopted without approval of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukrainian_Soviet_Socialist_Rep...
If they're gonna be murdering women and children regardless, we might as well not crash our economies...
I wonder, how many people will die because of Russia (war) vs. because of Western sanctions (famine+energy crisis). So far Russia is "winning" but let's wait until the winter...
The world economy was experiencing severe problems due to the pandemic. Russia's attempt to secure Ukraine for itself may have pushed it over the edge, but it didn't cause the collapse.
This [1] is a 1.5 minute video of NATO expansion since 1949. It was well understood that eastern expansion would, sooner or later, result in conflict with Russia (or the Soviet Union prior). We decided to not just poke the bear but to go cover our arse in honey and twerk in front of it with Aqua's Barbie Girl pumped up to 11.
And of course it sounds nice to say sovereign nations ought be able to choose their own alliances and relationships, yet how long do you think that rhetoric would last if Russia managed to get Mexico to join a military alliance that was more or less openly framed as a force to "contain" the United States? And to add extra icing on the cake, what if they managed to get Mexico to join only after actively and overtly supporting an insurrection that overthrew a democratically elected pro-US regime?
You're brave. I tried giving a more balanced perspective on this war in the comments here 3 times, and I was called a Russian troll in the first attempt, flagged in the next one, and I lost a lot of karma in the third. You're going to be - at least - downvoted a lot, so I thought I'll join and will get downvoted with you. The more the merrier, right.
Bad diplomacy in recent times has the same roots - a lot of people stopped accepting balanced views. They think that solely their own opinion is correct, and they start calling names (racist, sexist, troll, etc), downvoting whenever someone expresses a different point of view. Being good diplomat requires very mature and balanced behavior, which a lot of modern politicians lack.
Except Putin himself calmly explained recently its all bullshit, the Nato expansion, Nazis, harasser Russian population, all lies. Putin is after "lost land and glory"
They included a link [1] to their source. Always go to to the source! Helpfully enough, this one is even in English! All of their comments were taken from one section. Here it is:
"Peter the Great waged the Great Northern War for 21 years. On the face of it, he was at war with Sweden taking something away from it… He was not taking away anything, he was returning. This is how it was. The areas around Lake Ladoga, where St Petersburg was founded. When he founded the new capital, none of the European countries recognised this territory as part of Russia; everyone recognised it as part of Sweden. However, from time immemorial, the Slavs lived there along with the Finno-Ugric peoples, and this territory was under Russia’s control. The same is true of the western direction, Narva and his first campaigns. Why would he go there? He was returning and reinforcing, that is what he was doing.
Clearly, it fell to our lot to return and reinforce as well. And if we operate on the premise that these basic values constitute the basis of our existence, we will certainly succeed in achieving our goals."
He's obviously speaking by analogy about Ukraine without stating as much, but there's something much more specific he's referencing. This [2] is a map of Ukraine by native language, which is about as close as you can get to ethnicity. After the pro-Russian government in 2014 was overthrown, it's essentially those areas in red that declared their independence and have remained independent since.
Buying time is the same as saving thousands of lives. I would hardly say that means it doesn't work.
Then there's the nuclear arsenal of NATO. Would Hitler attack Poland if it had nukes capable of putting an end to the Fuhrer himself, his Volk, and his Reich? From what I learned he wasn't suicidal until much later. Is Putin right now? Possibly, but I think he'd get assassinated long before his order to perform "special military operation" against a NATO country could reach his troops.
> Buying time is the same as saving thousands of lives
How so? If you prepare for war in the meantime ( like Ukraine did between 2014 and now), yes, but otherwise i don't see anything but postponing that loss of lives.
Yes, exactly - I should have written it more clearly:
> Buying time is the same as saving thousands of lives. I would hardly say that means it doesn't work [- unless you decide to waste that time by not preparing sufficiently.]
In short, you're right - buying time on its own doesn't help much.
I don't think Ukraine prepared sufficiently, by the way. I don't know what their leaders thought, but joining NATO was effectively a pipe dream due to the unresolved civil war in the east. Without NATO nukes it was obvious that they will need to fight for survival at some point. How come they need so much weaponry and ammunition right now? Where are the stockpiles accumulated over the last 8 years, where are the nationalized factories that produce tanks and guns, where are the roads, railways, bunkers, weapon caches, evacuation routes, minefields, trenches, and so on? Apparently in Switzerland - the most peaceful, neutral country (in Europe at least) - they have enough bunkers to house all its population and then some. They are used as warehouses normally... and mostly for long-lasting foodstuffs, too. How come Ukrainian civilians, after 8 years of preparation, need to hide in theaters? You could say that it's in hindsight that we know Russia would attack, but.. It's Russia we're talking about! They have a lot of similar wars in their history, both in the past ~1k years and in the past 50 years - enough to conclude that they will try to attack if the circumstances are favorable to it (after a major, world-wide crisis, preferably).
> OK, you can have Czechoslovakia! (stop there, please)
indeed, the UK, France, and Italy should not have been allowed to sign The Munich Agreement of 1938, moreso Poland should not have been allowed to annex Trans-Olza from Czechoslovakia, certainly not in an act of a military ultimatum.
I just checked: only Moldova is left that's not in NATO and in place where Russians could march to (but they would need to get the western Ukraine first). Poland, Slovakia, Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia are all under NATO nukes protection; Sweden and Finland will join shortly. Are you sure Putin - and all the people around, at the same time! - are insane enough to risk eradication of all its cities?
Nuclear weapons changed the circumstances so much that direct comparison with 1938-1939 is impossible. We neither can give Slovakia away, nor have we a reason to. On the other hand, for Ukraine, swallowing the bitter pill and losing territory would also clear the way for NATO application (the civil war in the east makes it de iure impossible) and would give them time to prepare to defend from much better fortified positions, with much greater access to Western weaponry, and with much better contingency plans.
Yes, because he isn't afraid. He attacked because of once in a lifetime perfect storm: USA maxing out its credit card, CoVID, China hunkering down, Molotov-Ribbentrop 2.0 with Germany, highest access to Western lobbyists it ever had, Turkey in turmoil, and so, so, so.
He will not let the West to recover. Were his 200,000 troops to march into Poland instead of Ukraine in February, the entirety of NATO in Europe would' be in a giant trouble until USA would've brought forces from North America.
For as long as the West will be showing fear, he will continue to attack.
Damn right you are (not in the literal sense of a secret deal, but the effects are similar). IMO Germany bears the most responsibility for this situation, on par with Putin himself. Ukraine was screwed big time by German diplomacy and their ambiguous stance. That Ukrainians still want to belong to the West is a miracle. Once the war is over, they should, and I think they will, start asking questions about all the "NATO membership is on the table, the doors are open" alternating with "well, you'll need to wait some 20 years to get past the doors anyway". I sincerely hope this will weight on the conscience of Germans enough to substantially lessen the amount of money they will demand from Ukraine for the support they (reluctantly) are showing now.
-The sanctions were ultimately ineffective, for the reasons you explain above
-China takes Taiwan during major US political unrest, at BEST destroying the fabs and at worst gaining full control of the leading 3nm/2nm etc process
-A deeper China-Russia alliance, which was expedited by our ineffective sanctions now, puts the screws to US/western companies by blocking access to the latest semiconductor tech
Russia has so far demonstrated that it isn’t capable of much on that front. Ukraine is a big country, they’re barely doing a city at a time, and they’ve only had success on a small front that they’re very familiar with.
-The sanctions were ultimately ineffective, for the reasons you explain above
This remains to be seen - they’re definitely “effective” because they’re changing everything, question is how the West could be “miscalculating”.
-China takes Taiwan during major US political unrest, at BEST destroying the fabs and at worst gaining full control of the leading 3nm/2nm etc process
That would require China to launch an enormous large scale operation, which they’ve just seen can be a total shit show. An invasion would probably not allow them to “take” the 2-3nm process either, and it wouldn’t give them the returns on the investment. Most importantly China currently does not need to be invading Taiwan to be in an advantageous strategic position - they’re “winning” as is.
-A deeper China-Russia alliance, which was expedited by our ineffective sanctions now, puts the screws to US/western companies by blocking access to the latest semiconductor tech
Currently Russia has only managed to weaken and isolate itself. The symmetrical relationship Putin would need probably isn’t on the table, and Russia isn’t a worthwhile partner for China in such a terrible and toxic condition.
(Question is if putting “screws” on western companies is “bad” thing, but that’s another matter.)
All of these things worried me before the war, but Russia’s total incompetence has, if anything, greatly held back the China-Russia relationship.
People don’t realize Donbas is Ukraine’s last real line of defense and their only stronghold. After it falls, and it will soon, it’s a matter of siege and patience. Ability to counterattack will be completely removed.
After Donbas falls, if history is any lesson - the political situation in Ukraine will implode quickly. We might see a military coup and whoever takes over come to an agreement with Russia.
> Meanwhile RUB to USD is at its highest in nearly 5 years
Is that meant to demonstrate economic strength?
* Russians have massive amount of brain drain. Most of tech employees have left, leaving only people extracting oil, people who turn it into fertilizer and gasoline and supporting roles.
* They can't build military tech because of sanctions. Starting to use 1950s and 1960s tanks.
* They've privatized and violated tons of foreign companies (for example Renault gave away 68% of car manufacturer Avtovaz to the state). Nobody in their right mind will bring money there in the future.
* They can't import smartphones, tech or luxury cars (things that keep russian upper middle class happy).
> Cutting Russia off from SWIFT has only strengthened their ties to India and China
There has been both strengthening and weakening. Russia depends on China, not the other way around.
> and now we're dealing with soaring food and energy prices at home
It hurts both ways. This is normal. Appeasement would be a better choice?
Anecdotal, but I know several Russian programmers who've taken jobs in Russia (formally working for western companies) because now with the RUB so strong, they actually make more money working for local companies.
It hurts the Russian, but the Russian lived in the Soviet Union and survived the Crazy 90s. They can suffer way more than Westerns spoiled by prosperity.
And the best thing - rich Russian escaping Russia end up being sanctioned, hence, many stay.
Let's see who can suffer more: Westerns + accepting a global food crisis with millions of dead people in the Third world (thanks to the sanctions, NOT the war per se) or the Russians who lived like shit before and know that this is yet another round of sufferings.
> It hurts the Russian, but the Russian lived in the Soviet Union and survived the Crazy 90s. They can suffer way more than Westerns spoiled by prosperity.
From the Mongol invasions to WWII to the Soviet Union, Russians have a lot of experience with collective suffering and deprivation.
Yes, but why? Why do these people have to suffer all the time?
One reason I heard my Russian friends repeating is that "it's a bit country so we need a strong ruler to keep it together". But history shows this is not true. Also a federation of states like the USA would probably work better than the current setup where a short guy from Moscow is sending Buryat boys to die in a country they haven't seen before.
> a federation of states like the USA would probably work better than the current setup where a short guy from Moscow is sending Buryat boys to die in a country they haven't seen before
Excuse my ignorance… but how is it different from a tall guy from Connecticut sending, I dunno, Montana boys to die in a country they haven't even heard of? I'm just trying to understand the difference.
Russia has historically been invaded by such people as Genghis Khan(actually his grandson, Tamerlane, Napoleon, Charles )I forget which one) of Sweden, and Hitler.
The USA on the other hand is protected by two oceans and has not had a foreign army on the continent since 1815.
>Russia has historically been invaded by such people as Genghis Khan(actually his grandson, Tamerlane, Napoleon, Charles )I forget which one) of Sweden, and Hitler.
What I mean is the attitude of the rulers toward their own people, not other countries, these are two separate things. In Russia, you basically have a long history of peasants and common folk trying to get free and the tsars suppressing them. Finally in 1917 they managed to overthrow their ruler only to discover they had been duped again, and the red tsardom was even worse than the white one. And it basically never ended: most Russians have never had a chance to live in a free country. And for some reason they stopped rebelling [0].
> global food crisis with millions of dead people in the Third world (thanks to the sanctions, NOT the war per se)
Yeah, I keep hear Putin repeat it, always blaming the West. There are two logical fallacies here: first, the Russian fleet is blocking Ukrainian ports, not the other way round, and second, even if we ignored the situation on the Black Sea, it is Putin who started the war. I know Russian accept this logic and victim-blaming, but its' strange to see it on HN.
As for Russians living through bad times, I still wonder why do you have to accept all this crappy treatment. I know when you revolted in 1917 the result was a total mess but maybe it will be better this time. I really believe the Russian people deserve a better fate than what the next years are going to bring you.
How long before their economy collapses? Of course with the idea that everything you're saying is true. Which at this point, I have no basis to disagree with you. I'm just wondering how long you think it will take for all of this finally come to a head.
Once they run out of military hardware probably. Russian military doctrine has throughout ages been to throw massive amounts of human lives at the enemy, same is true for today. At some point however, without military hardware it will become absurd even for them.
Russians themselves have gotten used to consumer goods etc from the west, but they are mostly too afraid to rise up against or fight for Putin, who has most of modern russian state built around himself. So, no uprising from within probably.
Altogether if not the end of summer, then it's into very scary territory. Famine + energy prices - while Russia being unable to advance in Ukraine because of seasonal changes.
Considering that commodities matter and Russia has them in spades, is run by (mostly) competent people (notice I didn't say moral or ethical) and has many friends outside the west, including the most populous countries, their economy is not collapsing any time soon.
What would you say of Russia's overall trajectory from the late 1990s to present times by most any quantifiable value: economy, security (as in personal safety), opportunity, and so on? I'm not trying to be snarky or rhetorical, and am asking out of genuine curiosity. I'm sure you know what I'm referencing and this tends to give me a quite positive view of the competence of Russian leadership, but I'm also an outsider and am certain there are things I'm missing or not considering.
"The pontiff warned [..] against what he said was a fairytale perception of the conflict as good versus evil"
"We need to move away from the usual Little Red Riding Hood pattern, in that Little Red Riding Hood was good and the wolf was the bad one [..] something global is emerging and the elements are very much entwined."
This isnt little red riding hood. It's a crips (US/NATO) vs. bloods (Russia) turf war with Ukraine trying to join the crips for protection and beat off the bloods using nazi paramilitaries.
Geopolitics aint no fairy tale. It's gang warfare writ large.
What makes the pope, a man who has dedicated his life to the study of religion and God an expert in global politics, that a quote from him has more value than a comment from anyone here.
He mentions in the article that an unnamed world leader told him Russia would get upset at NATO being so close to their border. Putin has publicly mentioned this multiple times before the war with Ukraine.
Finally, Ukraine has the right to join any alliance it wants and for Russia to invade over that is bullshit. If you want to bring up promises about not joining NATO then we must talk about promises not to invade. Russia has already done this before in 2014
> Finally, Ukraine has the right to join any alliance it wants and for Russia to invade over that is bullshit.
In geopolitics, nobody has any particular rights. Whoever has the bigger stick and better propaganda gets their way.
One could argue that there’s no reason to have sanctions on Cuba, that Palestinians should also have the right to self determination, that America doesn’t have the right to interfere in the developing world.
That’s not how the world works, regardless of right or wrong.
IMO - the west could have prevented this war. Regardless of what Ukraine wants, an agreement that NATO will not expand eastwards for 60 years in exchange for Russia not invading. That was all we needed.
Why does it matter if a NATO country is on the border anyway? In the age of ICBMs, stealth bombers, and drones is the real concern that some large NATO force would march over the border for a land invasion of Russia?
And yet doesn't recognise other countries' "Monroe Doctrines". I'm waiting for the Chinese to declare their version of the Monroe Doctrine forbidding Western Nations from East Asia. Imagine the screams from the US. <grin>
> Why does it matter if a NATO country is on the border anyway?
This question, no matter how well intentioned, is irrelevant.
Russia views NATO as an existential threat. It’s irrelevant whether you agree with that NATO is such a threat or not. Russia does not want NATO on or by its borders. They’ve been making this clear since the collapse of the Soviet Union.
You can disagree with them, argue in favor of NATO expanding eastward, or specifically making Ukraine a member state, etc. These are all moot points.
Russia has made their position extremely clear. The war is obviously not a surprise.
It's not a surprise but it's still wrong. Also his opinion that NATO is a threat needs to have some backing otherwise I don't accept it as a valid fear
“Wrong” or “right” is meaningless. The only alternative is war, and that’s what we have happening now.
Tell us something. Why does it matter to the US when China tries to expand its sphere of influence over HK or islands in the Pacific?
What would happen if a Chinese bloc propagated itself to the Western Hemisphere and established an alliance with Cuba or South America?
Surely the same argument - that none of it matters in the day of nuclear weapons and ballistics capabilities - that same argument would valid, right? But would Washington stand for this? Absolutely not.
Cuba is still being punished to this day. The Monroe doctrine is still very real.
Russia warned about this for decades. The West basically told Russia that they don’t matter, that they’re a has been, and NATO will do whatever it wants.
Well, here we have the consequences. Now Bidens administration is quietly admitting that the war is becoming an economic liability for the US, but I digress.
Please stop with this. Ukraine is an independent nation that can do what it wants. They may have wanted to provoke this war as Russia threatened it. That is their prerogative. It's possible they simply wanted to become part of Europe, and leave Putin, Luchenko, and the rest of the Eastern Kleptocratic Dictatorships behind. Can anyone blame them?
Sometimes it's because exactly what is obviously the reason.
> Please stop with this. Ukraine is an independent nation that can do what it wants. They may have wanted to provoke this war as Russia threatened it.
Ukraine can do whatever it wants. It was up to NATO to flat out reject any prospects of Ukraine’s membership and prevent the war, but they egged it on.
Ukraine can do whatever it wants, but the simply truth is that Ukraine is now just ground zero in Washington’s proxy war with Russia. They could have remained neutral and avoided this disaster.
> Finally, Ukraine has the right to join any alliance it wants
No, it doesn't have this right to join ANY alliance, as it may violate one of the conditions (military bloc neutrality) under which their sovereignty was granted to them by the USSR, which Russia is a legitimate successor of: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31746866
There's no relation, as the annexation of Crimea has everything to do with a prior armed coup (you can call it "a successful January 6 event", if you wish) against a legitimately[1] elected president in Kyiv. The coup, among many other things, violated the right to a political representation of the people's voice who voted for that president. In case of president Yanukovych, these were the people of the eastern Ukraine, including Crimea, who were deprived of their right to a democratic process in their country.
[1] The election has been widely recognized and endorsed as being fair and an accurate reflection of voters' intentions by all international agencies observing the election including the OSCE and PACE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Ukrainian_presidential_el...
I wouldn't consider it similar to January 6th at all
You provided a source to show the elections were valid
but who was questioning that? The cause of the uprising (from wiki)
"In November 2013, a wave of large-scale protests (known as Euromaidan) erupted in response to President Yanukovych's sudden decision not to sign a political association and free trade agreement with the European Union (EU), instead choosing closer ties to Russia and the Eurasian Economic Union. "
And you also speak about lack of representation but
"A total of 315 of the 349 MPs registered in the sitting hall supported the document on Friday." [1]
That's a huge majority in any political system. I think there's room for debate whether the people were represented sufficiently by the president's actions.
Regardless, again unlike jan 6th, a foreign country was involed and later invaded. Two, the revolutionaries reason was truthful and not a lie about election fraud , and three a meaningful percentage of the population was involved which gives some merit to a revolution.
Apologies for the hoard of links here, but I think they're necessary. There's so much disinformation and misinformation on this topic that I want to emphasize everything I'm stating is accurate and can be verified easily.
The motion you are mentioning was the Ukraine cabinet passing a resolution (in other words a statement of intent) to continue working towards an EU Association Agreement, the exact same sort they currently have with places such as Israel, Egypt, South Africa, Syria, and many other such nations. [1] That cabinet then chose to not pass any further acts that would have been necessary to move forward with said agreement. Instead it started moving towards the creation of a 3-way association agreement between Ukraine, the EU, and Russia that would help ensure trade could flow amongst all parties. [2]
That's when you started getting protests, which quickly escalated into riots and insurrection efforts. And you then also get completely bizarre scenes like this [3]. That is John McCain in the capital of Ukraine, telling protesters that America is with them and that their future is with America and Europe. Imagine if you had something comparable during January 6th from comparably high level Chinese/Russian officials. It's not only completely surreal, but also understates the issue. Because this was effectively a superpower declaring war on the current establishment of a much weaker country, which is going to endlessly embolden insurrection efforts.
As for merit, neither the protests nor insurrection were supported by the majority of the country [4], at least not until the government was overthrown at which point there were reasons for self censorship, and likely also disrupted polling as various regions began rejecting the new government and declaring their independence. And I don't believe you've considered the implications of your statement that so long as a "meaningful" percent of people participate in an insurrection, it has merit. US elections are regularly decided on near 50/50 scales. Obviously you don't support the idea of the losing party now just trying to violently overthrow the winning party. The only thing that large participation would show is the degree of radicalization among the losing party, which is certainly not a positive thing.
Is this a surprise? They’ve been vocally against NATO’s eastward expansion for a long time, and Ukraine was a known line in the sand.
Of course, one could argue Ukraine has a right to self determination, but we effectively egged them on and on. And now here we are - Ukraine is getting destroyed in a war of attrition, more or less a proxy war.
> Of course, one could argue Ukraine has a right to self determination, but we effectively egged them on and on.
One could argue that, but that would be their eagerness to ignore and dismiss important details of Ukraine's founding legal documents that made their independence possible in the first place.
If one reads the Declaration on the State Sovereignty of Ukraine from 1990 [1], one will find it in Chapter IX: "The Ukrainian SSR solemnly declares its intention to become a permanently neutral state in the future, which does not participate in military blocs and adheres to three non-nuclear principles: not to accept, produce or acquire nuclear weapons".
Ukraine's constitutional sovereignty has always been and still is predicated on respecting these conditions, but a whole lot of politicians, foreign and domestic, want you to believe otherwise because it serves their political goals.
Yeah, you just keep believing that. Western media was happy to report the mass exodus at the beginning of the war, but for some reason didn't notice that the vast majority of them have returned by now. Undoubtedly, some will be better prepared next time and will leave for good, but that definitely won't be 'most of tech employees' because there's nowhere for them to go. It's really hard to emigrate to the West (you have no idea how difficult it is even for those working in IT), and neighboring countries can't soak up that many (I'm from one of them).
* Those who left have already returned, my coworkers never left, nor will I in near future.
* Electronics can be imported via China and Kazakhstan. Thousands of kilometers of line of contact, plenty of T62's in good condition, why not give them to separatists? It is not as if Ukraine has anything better to offer. Cruise, ballistic missiles on the conveyor and in the air. Every day and night.
* So? You are not planning to restart the business in the near future as a result of your position? Bye. Toyota, Honda, and Nissan have all already announced their return. Asian cars it is. Although, cars are still very expensive.
* Lol. Again, China and Kazakhstan. It's been cheaper to order from China than ever before (or since 2016 as I remember). Aside from that, phones and other electronics are available in store at prices even lower than before due to market rate prices. GPU's are literally more accessible than three months ago.
What hurts is inflation, but it's everywhere. Also, it's kinda annoying not to be able to pay for some services that I usually use through russian bank's credit card. I guess I'll need to travel to another country in order to get a regular card, many russians did that already.
> It is not as if Ukraine has anything better to offer.
They have 260+ captured Russian tanks, for one thing. Ukraine has asked supporting countries to instead send howitzers, anti-air guns/missiles, and multiple-launch rockets. By the end of this war Ukraine might end up with the largest tank army in Europe. https://oryxspioenkop.com/2022/02/attack-on-europe-documenti...
By most reports Ukraine (and Russia for that matter) are both much more limited by supply of trained tank crew than lack of physical tanks. Hundreds of Russian tanks requiring 3 crew members were already being driven by crews of 2 (in some cases untrained), and therefore combat ineffective right from the start.
Russia has lost an estimated 1000+ tanks in 3 months of war, and now has all but stopped doing maneuver operations, whether because they are scared to lose more or have run out of supply. From what I understand Russia’s tank production has entirely stopped for lack of microchips and other components.
> Cruise, ballistic missiles on the conveyor and in the air. Every day and night.
The rate of Russian use of long-distance missiles dropped off dramatically after the first couple months of the war. They wasted their missiles blowing up hundreds or thousands of militarily irrelevant civilian targets (apartment buildings, hospitals, schools, etc.). External experts don’t have perfect knowledge of Russian supplies, but the most plausible inference is that the Russian military is running out of whatever stores they were willing to use here. (Presumably there is still some reserve, but missiles getting used are not being obviously replaced.)
What the Russian military does have a lot of compared to Ukraine is artillery and artillery ammo, and unguided rocket launchers. Pretty much all of the stockpiled 152 mm (Soviet caliber) artillery ammo in Europe was already sent to Ukraine and Ukraine has almost run through it all, but Ukraine doesn’t yet have enough 155 mm (NATO caliber) howitzers to replace the 152 mm artillery that is out of ammo. Hopefully they will get hundreds more NATO howitzers in the coming weeks and months.
Ukraine is currently getting hammered by Russian artillery in Donbas, and suffering 100+ dead soldiers per day (as reportedly is Russia). They will only win with large amounts of ongoing foreign military and economic aid from committed partners.
Why would they try to go to Moscow? They don’t have the logistical capacity to pull it off and it would be in nobody’s interest. Unlike Russia they don’t seem to be ruled by crazy people.
More realistically Ukraine will lose a bit more ground and a few more towns in Donbas before the Russian offensive culminates, and then as more supplies come in they will eventually counter-attack when they get a chance. The Russian military will run out of soldiers and equipment while the Russian economy sputters, and will be slowly pushed out of Ukrainian territory. What happens as a result to domestic policy in Russia will be highly volatile and is hard to predict.
> They ran out of both two months ago, didn't you hear?
Russia has lost on order 20k dead soldiers and some multiple of that wounded, thousands of lost pieces of equipment, etc. But that is still less than half of the resources they committed in Ukraine. Despite steep losses, attrition hasn’t yet completely obliterated the Russian armed forces.
But since they have done no general mobilization in Russia, those lost troops are not being replaced, and more and more units are losing combat effectiveness with each passing month. They are also running out of untrained separatist cannon fodder from Donbas.
Ukraine has also suffered tens of thousands of casualties and lost a great deal of equipment. But since Ukraine is fighting for survival, it has much more available manpower, and its soldiers have better morale and motivation. The bottleneck for Ukraine is training and advanced weapons like artillery, rockets, missiles, and fighter jets.
> Any evidence [Russian economic trouble] is happening or will happen?
Lots of Russian industry has already shut down, and GDP is expected to contract 15% this year and an additional several percent the year after (for reference, US GDP contracted by 4.3% in the great recession, and by about 30% during 1929–1933). Europe is transitioning to other energy sources as fast as possible. In the medium term Russia is not capable of continuing much of its domestic oil production without foreign equipment and expertise. Few foreign investors are going to feel any confidence to invest in Russia, for years.
"By the end of this war Ukraine might end up with the largest tank army in Europe."
As Ukraine officials beg for help, and ask for half of US army armor 4th month into the war, you guys keep inhaling copium, dreaming in your beds about Russia "being destroyed" in Ukraine. I wouldn't expect anything less from western propaganda enjoyers tbh. Also taking oryx stats seriously, that's fun.
While some parts were definitely messy, and it really is a tradegy donbass and crimea situation had to be resolved this way, you'll soon be aware about the real situation in Ukraine, no matter how bad you want to believe the lies.
"The rate of Russian use of long-distance missiles dropped off dramatically"
I offer you to check Ukrainian telegram channels, like "труха" for example (2mil followers) which will gladly tell you about this "dramatic decline".
> really is a tradegy donbass and crimea situation had to be resolved this way
“It’s unfortunate those pesky Ukrainians had the audacity to exist, which forced us to invade their sovereign country, shell their cities to rubble, and mass murder their civilians. Just like we were forced to mass murder Chechens, Georgians, and Syrians. And might have to mass murder Poles, Finns, Lithuanians, Romanians, or Kazakhs in the future.”
> Just like we were forced to mass murder Chechens
Just like the US "was forced" to mass murder Iraqis because, in addition to fake WMD claims, the US intelligence was linking Saddam to Bin Laden.
I wonder how exactly you would characterise Khattab, among other "prominent" "freedom fighters", and his role in the Chechen wars. Would you be willing to accommodate similar kind of characters in your country of origin and, possibly, give them a freedom to attract and gather a following among certain kinds of radicals? Would the US be willing to accommodate Al-Qaeda in, say, Texas?
Most people in the USA agree that the Iraq war was a senseless tragedy fought on false pretenses, and a gross violation of international law. Iraq posed no threat to the USA, the USA had no good reason to invade, and the outcomes of the war were tremendously destructive and destabilizing. If it were up to me, the perpetrators would be locked up.
If nothing else, the Iraq war led to a sharp political change in the USA. With any luck the senseless war of aggression in Ukraine will lead to similar changes in Russia. But since Russia is a fascist dictatorship, peaceful politics is outlawed and any changes are likely to be more violent.
* * *
The 1999 apartment bombings in Russia attributed to Khattab (among others) were most likely a false flag operation undertaken by the Russian state security service, under orders from Vladimir Putin. Using self-terrorism killing hundreds of your own civilians as a pretense for launching a war and mass-murdering tens of thousands of your unhappy oppressed colonial subjects while obliterating their cities is a hell of a way to cement personal power.
> The 1999 apartment bombings in Russia attributed to Khattab (among others) were most likely a false flag operation undertaken by the Russian state security service, under orders from Vladimir Putin.
right, and in line with this level of evidence and argumentation, 9-11 in the US was presumably organised and conducted by a joint operation between the Pentagon and FBI.
“This level of evidence” is pretty significant, though the Russian government did a thorough enough cover-up that it’s hard to meet a strict burden of proof from publicly available information. Unless secret documents are someday published, the public will probably never see a convincing conclusion about what happened.
> 9-11 in the US was presumably organised and conducted by a joint operation between the Pentagon and FBI
This is not very plausible given the extensive available evidence about the plane hijackers and their biographies. More plausible (though still unproven) is speculation about the role of Saudi elite. Zacarias Moussaoui claimed in a deposition that major donors to Al Qaeda included “Prince Turki al-Faisal, then the Saudi intelligence chief; Prince Bandar Bin Sultan, the longtime Saudi ambassador to the United States; Prince al-Waleed bin Talal, a prominent billionaire investor; and many of the country’s leading clerics.” (quotation from NYT) Of course, while he had the access to know about what happened, Moussaoui is not the most credible source.
> In the US where free speech is protected, those who made various claims and conspiracy theories about the September 11 attacks (Bush did it! Israel did it! The CIA did it! etc.) didn’t get locked up or murdered
Only, for some reason the free speech protection did not help Assange from being prosecuted and his life being destroyed for broadcasting US war crimes evidence in Iraq [1]. The same could be said about your prior mentioning of the Battle of Grozny. There were real terrorist groups in Grozny that had to be eliminated, and in a 2007 Baghdad there was nothing but a false pretence.
Assange was arguably mistreated by US law enforcement, but he never went on trial for the crimes he was accused of because he instead fled (to spend years on the run as a pathetic Putin stooge and apologist).
If he ever is successfully extradited to the USA, he will be afforded the same protections of the law as any other accused person. He will face a trial by jury, and have access to an attorney. The prosecutors will need to prove to the jury that he committed a specific crime.
But he won’t be assassinated, summarily executed, or imprisoned without trial, as regularly happens to government critics in Russia.
> Would you be willing to accommodate similar kind of characters in your country of origin
Khattab and his friends like Basayev and other "freedom fighters" have a long and undisputed history of butchering civilians that they were proud of. Taking a maternity ward hostage, or beheading western communication engineers, or, say, stuffing an elementary school with explosives and taking the kids hostage, and many other similar things were done in broad daylight with these lunatics officially bragging about killing civilians. But you've conveniently swept it under the rug. Well, here is the answer: if a group like that operated in the US, they would have been shot like rabid dogs at all cost, very quickly.
> Iraq war led to a sharp political change in the USA
What change? US continued to have troops on the ground in those countries for decades, culminating with the rise of ISIS in Iraq _on Obama's watch_, no less. Matter of fact, there are still several thousand US troops in Iraq _and_ Syria, doing God knows what there, on my dime.
In the USA, violent groups are treated as a law enforcement problem, unless direct police violence is necessary to prevent them from harming someone. Extremists who commit local crimes are arrested and prosecuted, and afforded all of the normal protections of the legal system.
There is a chance domestic terrorists could be let off based on prosecutorial incompetence or sympathy, jurors’ personal beliefs, or a future executive pardon, but going through a legal process is much better than extrajudicial assassination.
> Russians have massive amount of brain drain. Most of tech employees have left
I doubt this will continue.
The West has clearly demonstrated that their sanction and Russo-phobia will target not just politicians and oligarch, but normal people as well. Students being expelled, employees and artists fired, hospitals not treating them, etc.
Ordinary Russians aren't safe/welcome in the West, and they know it. Going home is their only choice (or praying that Russia collapses soon and Russo-phobia ends... sounds like a gamble).
This is an active topic in the Russian community: which countries are the most Russia-friendly. In general, the countries the closest to Russia and most likely to be invaded next are the most hostile (Baltics, Romania etc.). However, the countries further away care less, and in non-Western countries practically nobody cares. You will be just labeled "white" an that's all.
> They can't build military tech because of sanctions.
Russia is ahead of the west both in ballistics & air defense using mostly off the shelf consumer chips that are very easy to smuggle in via 3rd parties.
> Starting to use 1950s and 1960s tanks.
Retrofitted tanks that get the job done. These are being sent to the rear for policing (occupying) operations as well as given to the Donbas separatists.
> Renault gave away 68% of car manufacturer Avtovaz to the state
Pretty sure that was on Renaults own volition. The Chinese are more than glad to take up the slack.
It's not pumping up Russia to be honest about the realities of the geopolitical and war situation. And the failures and lack of long term thinking in the current crop of western leadership. And yeah, it's a sick war. They all are.
If I had you pegged wrong, then I apologize. But even the slightest whiff of Russian propaganda makes me see red. It has eaten away at the minds of my parents' and grandparents' generation, and a number of my slavic friends are suffering greatly because they don't know how to deprogram their loved ones. Just obvious, blatant fascism that's being repulsively consumed and regurgitated by the Russian media and population in a grotesque feedback loop. All an engineered frenzy by some deplorable propagandists high up in the Russian government. And now I see it spreading among contrarians in the Western world, too.
That's the scent I get from these comments. The same lies that I've been hearing on Russian TV for years and years. "Sanctions? Russia's doing better than ever! Failures? The entire war has been going exactly as planned! Technology? We have some of the most advanced military tech in the world! Ukraine? It was never a country to begin with!"
>Russia is still invading Ukraine, and now we're dealing with soaring food and energy prices at home.
For several years we bet the global economy on the idea that we could safely coexist with an aggressive dictator. That bet did not pan out. I agree with you that the least painful time to remove our dependence on Russian fuel was several years ago, but we failed to take the ample warnings and here we are in a crisis. At least we're finally dealing with it.
No, we bet that creating closer ties economically would disincentivize aggressive behavior. It is still to be seen if that pans out, this is the greatest test of the liberal world order, but the repercussions are not seen overnight.
Russia will not come out of this any better. China and India are gleefully picking the bones, and it's hard to blame them. The fudged numbers of the Ruble are irrelevant.
Of course - through necessity. But this will force them to move away and look for other options. You can go ahead and congratulate them on their short term "victories", but long term, I don't see how this benefits them.
Russia can find new customers before EU can find new suppliers (at least regarding natural gas), which is precisely why we're seeing increases in energy costs.
It takes infrastructure to move natural gas. They can find customers - but can they get that NG there? Not right now they can't. And there are material shortages everywhere - it will take a long time and it will be more costly in the long run than their European markets.
Tensions are already rising between the Saudi's and Russians, who are frustrated with Russia's drop in output since the war started. This will only exacerbate the west moving away from fossil fuels - essentially weakening oil power world wide.
On top of that, all the money they're making from oil has been pretty much paying off accumulated foreign debts. People are concerned about the export - but it doesn't matter if you export a lot if you can't import what you need for an extended war effort or for your citizens.
I think Russia has already lost this war from a geopolitical perspective. Even if they take the Ukraine, their position is worse than it was from before.
The problem is, if you decide to give up and sacrifice Ukrainians on the altar, there is no guarantee Russia will stop at Ukrainian borders. And several Russian politicians, including Putin himself, suggested otherwise, arguing it's just taking back what's theirs. This basically means invading several other European countries - obviously not now, but at some point in the future.
So yes, you could turn a blind eye on Russian soldiers murdering people, stealing, raping, and so on, but it would be naive to think it will eliminate the problem: it will make it worse in the long term.
Taiwan is going to become part of China, so we should just stop wasting money patrolling those seas. North Korean nukes are going to level Seoul someday, so we should divest our electronics manufacturing from there and send it all elsewhere to secure low prices tomorrow. Also, Poland is bound to fall once Russia invades after being handed Ukraine on a silver platter, so may as well have the EU cut their losses while they can. More money in our pockets.
No, it's really not that simple. Inflation causes are many fold and it was an issue prior to Russia's invasion. Might help, but inflation isn't going to vanish with a "simple" policy change.
It seems to me that there is another concern entailed by this topic: climate change, and along this dimension: the use of fertilizers in the context of farming methods which release, instead of capture, carbon. What's emerging in that space is regenerative agriculture, aka no-till agriculture. Perhaps it's the case that the fertilizer in play is not really necessary?
I see a lot of comments like "Putin will never attack Eastern European/Nordic countries". No. Some information about the main topic of internal Russian propaganda for the last month:
- Russia must return all lands that once belonged to it
- Russia must solve "the Ukrainian question"
- the west is our enemy, Russia have reliable allies in the east
- Putin is the reincarnation of Peter the Great (hello Finland and Sweden)
Any peace talks or "business as usual" will lead to a new war in a few years against Poland, Finland, etc. and more blood and refugees. This is how an authoritarian, fascist militaristic state works.
And by the end of Biden's term whose blame is it gonna be, "Trump of course"
Some people have just lost their ability to think clearly in the US, I (a mexican) lived there for a couple of years and the only thing I can say is that America (as it is now) sucks badly to the point that I prefer mexican corruption and (narcos) crime than america's sick society (were teenagers are murdering people at schools), stupid policies and, the indoctrination of their school system which even before today's stupidity of "gender as an abstract concept" was already really bad, now the whole place its just plain riduculous
Off topic rant here but I'm getting tired of headlines with the word 'quietly' put in them to make things seem more sinister then they are. Can HN make a filter to automatically remove this unnecessary qualifier. They can even do so quietly, for ironic effect.
In this case, it's not 'quietly' because it's sinister, it's 'quietly' because it's extremely embarrassing. The US used all its political might to force a global boycott of Russia. Now it's telling farmers to buy Russian fertilizer. I'm no expert, but even I know Russia is a (the?) leading source of fertilizer. And to do this when we were already suffering high inflation? It's a blunder at best.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 334 ms ] threadIf you're a farmer, you're going to buy fertilizer from wherever and whomever unless prevented legally from doing so--and I, as a citizen of the US dependent on others growing this food on behalf of me, appreciate it.
At this point I am not sure if they are stupid, evil, corrupt or they just despise and hate their citizens. Or maybe all of that.
You Americans are least have a pragmatic government that at least occasionally does something for your benefit. They at least say "America first", while the EU also says "America first" instead of saying "EU first".
But economies and people can only suffer to a limited extent. EU will return to Realpolitik soon.
Let's face it, the whole bashing of Russia as a "regional power" was idiotic and wrong on the same level as starting the Ukraine war and believing they would win it within a week.
Edit: stop downvoting. How silly are you?
There are East/North European member states that are genuinely concerned that Russia could attack them next. They advocate for stronger sanctions. And while it's not said aloud, they believe the sanctions should be in place until there is (at least) a regime change in Russia. For them, the real issue is not the war in Ukraine but Putin. And if the economy crashes as a result of the sanctions, it's a small price to pay for safety. That's Realpolitik for them.
Then there are West/South European member states that are safe from Russia and mostly just see the economic consequences of the sanctions. They are economically stronger and have more political influence. But if they try to force the issue and lift the sanctions too soon, it could well be the end of the EU.
People will not carry this ideological politics as soon as they will feel the pressure over a longer period.
Sanctions will go, mark my words.
If the current Russian regime can start a war based on gross misjudgment, they can do it again. That's a real threat, even if Russian military is not as strong as we used to believe.
History: brzezinski sums it up well. Russia has some weird imperialist interest in Ukraine. They have ZERO historical interests in the Nordics.
Future: Finishing this war will take how long? Active conflict 1 year give or take + licking wounds 3 year + restoring economy and finding your way in the new world order 5 years + getting ready for your theoretical war against the Nordics 10 years (this is the time Russia took to get ready for this one). In total: 19 years. How old is Putin again?
Russia has a weird imperialist interest in Finland. Our history can largely be summarized as "trying to cope with living next to Russia, with varying degrees of success". From the dawn of history, until Napoleonic wars, there was an invasion from the east every generation or two. The invasions only stopped after Sweden lost Finland to Russia. After Finland gained independence, it took only 22 years before there was another invasion.
The Cold War and the decades after the collapse of the USSR were the exception. We had a lifetime of peace and prosperity by leaning to the West while maintaining good relations with Russia. But that is over for now, as Putin no longer cares about having good relations with anyone. Russia is big, it's next to us, and it has become unpredictable again. Dealing with that takes priority.
With you until this point. Higher energy prices have in no way made up for the loss of Russia's reserves.
The EU is getting played by both Russia and America.
This is less than inflation. (Curious to see a source spinning it as a result of tax revenues. Even for the Kremlin, that's an idiotic argument.) It's also about the amount Russia's economy is expected to shrink this year.
- https://fortune.com/2022/06/14/putin-russia-oil-gas-profit-r...
- https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-06-10/russia-cu...
Keep mind that the Russian government budget operates on a $40 gallon barrel of oil budget.
Russia is weaker and poorer than it was at the end of last year. The Russian state is doing far better than was expected, domestically. Credit due where owed. But it's a growing share of a shrinking pie situation.
If anything, I'm incredibly upset that EU is not doing more to tighten the screw on Russia. If we are unwilling to send our militaries to fight Russia in Ukraine, then we should completely and entirely stop doing any business with that murderous, warmongering country, no matter the cost to ourselves. I mean it.
Yes you hear Ukrainian/Russian in the street, but I am not sure you hear much gratitude. I certainly do not and I also live and travel in the country. I actually know of families hosting for 2 months and the people they hosted left in one day and never said anything back. Others had everything set here, like employment housing etc but went back to Ukraine or to Germany. The ones who went to Germany regret it as they are not pampered like in Poland. Hell even in euro vision song contest the polish got the taste of Ukrainian gratitude for the polish unconditional solidarity.
There are grateful Ukrainians but those already were in Poland got their life's easier now thankfully. The refugees could not care less about Poland. Actually historically the Ukrainians and Poles haves as bad blood as with the Russians or Germans.
As a foreigner what i see Poland needs, is to continue to get stronger economically so it can support a very advanced armed forces that could wipe the floor with the Russians. Poland needs to be needed and that is achieved by being an economic powerhouse on which the great powers depend. In the past Poland was left alone because it was not worth the trouble. Look at Taiwan, they sure know how to make themselves worth the trouble. The "honor" thing in polish culture is so self destructive: Throw everything away for honor. Let's keep growing and stronger, it will not be long before Russia is a nuisance.
The goal is to survive and to win, not to go down in history with honor.
Oh and, the US didn’t mandate Germany to do this, its voters did.
Look. We all understand that the reaction to the war activistic and ideological. The more time will pass, the more politics will move towards Realpolitik.
> Using data on ship movements, real-time tracking of gas flows through pipelines and estimates based on historical monthly trade, the researchers reckoned Germany alone paid Russia about 9.1 billion euros for fossil fuel deliveries — mostly natural gas — in the first two months of the war. [2]
Let's not pretend these are comparable numbers.
It's not like the US is about to run out of food anyway. We're a massive exporter. The goal is to boost US food production enough that the 3rd world doesn't starve to death (and if food prices go through the roof, it also helps Russia). Frankly, if we were being ruthless about it, the US might be financially BETTER off if there was a worldwide grain shortage. We're still trying to stop it.
Germany is importing Russian natural gas to avoid turning on nuclear power plants for ideological reasons.
[1] https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/imports/russia/fe...
[2] https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-business-europe-ge...
You're talking about the same administration that literally admitted in the open to be executing cyber attacks on Russia[1]. The fact that they haven't made most of North America glow in the dark is an utter miracle.
And to make my point clear, the issue isn't that they're conducting cyber attacks - that's a given.
The issue is admitting it, in the open, to the news media. Everyone knows this is happening, but you don't say the quiet part out loud because it's an escalation against a nuclear power and gives them carte blanche to retaliate.
---
[1] https://news.sky.com/story/us-military-hackers-conducting-of...
I judge middle school debate and this still has to be the most wildly insane geopolitical take I've heard in a long time.
You must be hot boxing some strong stuff... might be time to roll down the windows of that information bubble and get some fresh air ;)
No, no, "some computer hacking" (because who would worry about not being able to watch funny cat videos for a while? it's not like people do anything important using computers...) won't do much. But the next Stuxnet targeted at Russian infrastructure could well spell the end of us all. Honestly, I'd be quite content in that situation - witnessing, for however short before dying to radiation, the literal end of history (instead of the pseudo-one from the '90s) could be strangely rewarding.
But okay. Suppose there were a cyber attack sufficient to trigger full scale nuclear war and which also didn't fully disable Russian's nuclear armament.
Do you really think that Russia would not launch nukes just because the US didn't publicly declare responsibility for the attack even though Russia knows the US is responsible? Because, to be clear, that was OP's assertion:
>> And to make my point clear, the issue isn't that they're conducting cyber attacks - that's a given. The issue is admitting it, in the open, to the news media. Everyone knows this is happening, but you don't say the quiet part out loud because it's an escalation against a nuclear power and gives them carte blanche to retaliate.
No it doesn’t. Russia has been taking increasing amounts of direct action against other nuclear states for years (including sponsoring cyber attacks and e.g. criminally intervening in US elections). They aren’t going to start a nuclear war over e.g. the USA compromising their military computer networks and distributing the information discovered there.
Putin is doing everything he can to prevent escalation to a direct shooting war with NATO because he knows that in a conventional war NATO will wipe the floor with the Russian military, and a nuclear war is mutually assured destruction.
But if we compare to the Bush Jr, Clinton, Bush Sr., Reagan administrations (let alone the Vietnam war era), it can’t really be called “disastrous”.
Trump’s foreign policy was largely symbolic and incoherent, if anything focused on corrupt self enrichment, breaking up US soft power to aid Russia (he backed out of various treaties, halted diplomacy around the world, wanted to pull the US out of NATO, ...), symbolically opposing China to appeal to anti-Asian racists, making up nonsense about Latin American immigrants to appeal to anti-Latino racists, continuing middle East aggression (and the Muslim ban etc.) to appeal to anti-Arab/anti-Muslim racists. His antics (on top of the Bush Jr. wars) further pissed away America’s global reputation. To the extent things went okay it was largely down to incompetence and uncoordination.
Nb. what I blame him for isn't the Syrian civil war itself, but for choosing to get involved in such a way that it's dragged on indefinitely, rather than concluding it one way or the other much faster. This also contributed to destabilization and suffering in Iraq.
Continuing to allow Afghanistan to bleed for his entire 8 years while everyone at the top (and probably most folks in the middle, and at the bottom) knew no progress was, had been, or would be made was a straight-up crime (see: the Afghanistan papers).
But sure, it's hard to beat Bush II for "foreign policy fuck-ups". Dude's a legend in that regard. I wouldn't be surprised if historians in 2100 will look back at that and see it as America falling on its face at the starting line, for this century, and never really recovering.
> Trump’s foreign policy was largely symbolic and detail-free, focused on breaking up US soft power to aid Russia, symbolically opposing China to appeal to anti-Asian racists, making up nonsense about Latin American immigrants to appeal to anti-Latino racists, continuing middle East aggression (and the Muslim ban etc.) to appeal to anti-Arab/anti-Muslim racists. To the extent things went okay it was largely down to incompetence and uncoordination.
Pushing NATO members to meet their defense spending obligations ended up being damn-near prescient, even if the rest of his action on NATO was mostly bad. I'd love to see more breaking down of trade relations with China, so that part was fine by me. Lots of his rhetoric was idiotic but at the same time it was refreshing to see anyone in power talking anti-neoliberalism, for once, even if he was either too ambivalent in-fact or too incompetent to accomplish much. Withdrawing from Afghanistan was way overdue and it disgusted me that NPR ran with "it's just too hard to withdraw in more time than it took to put the same number of soldiers and same amount of equipment in-theater" bullshit, in response. All his stuff related to the Southern border was moronic, of course.
I'm not saying I think he was great—dude belongs behind bars 10x over, I'd say, including for some of his foreign policy actions. In fact, a lot of it's just that, after his predecessors, accomplishing very little was kinda an improvement.
Agreed. Obama came in from the context of the wars in Iraq/Afghanistan and wanted to avoid another similar, and was too cautious and non-confrontational, especially once Russia got involved.
> Pushing NATO members to meet their defense spending obligations ended up being damn-near prescient
This was not “pushing” so much as “ineffective trash talking”. And it had nothing to do with making NATO or European militaries effective, but was based on Trump’s inability to understand anything except in narrowly transactional terms, not comprehending the possibility of second-order effects or complex systems and therefore unwilling to listen when people try to explain that supporting NATO and maintaining the prevailing geopolitical order is in America’s long-term interest. With maybe some bonus of trying to help Putin.
> I'd love to see more breaking down of trade relations with China
Trump’s #1 foreign policy “accomplishment” was pulling the USA out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, undermining US economic and social power in the region to China’s great benefit.
> Withdrawing from Afghanistan was way overdue and it disgusted me
The USA should have pulled out of Afghanistan years before (or never gone in at all), but the way the Trump administration handled the transition was profoundly incompetent, and made things much harder for the Biden administration (the only president of the past 4 with the guts to go through with it).
Yeah, I know. Again, I'm not saying he was good. Just that I didn't think there'd even be a single half-assed compliment I'd be able to muster for anything he did. He exceeded sub-zero expectations, and probably, for whatever reason (yeah, likely largely ineffective management of his administration) at least didn't do anywhere near as much harm as the the guys who ran things the prior 16 years. Not via his foreign policy actions, at least.
Sorry if any of this came off as "I like most of Trump's foreign policy". What I'm getting at is that I'm pretty harsh even on popular Democratic presidents, and not incapable of admitting "that was kinda OK" with Republicans even when they're an actual no-BS joke like Trump, but still think Biden's not screwed the pooch so far (he still might, certainly) on foreign policy. And I'm inclined to dislike him because I'm getting really sick of ancient dudes sitting in the Oval Office—could we get a youthful 60-year-old, even? Please?—and don't care for a lot of his legislative record.
Point is, if Biden's badly screwing up foreign policy, this particular devoted foreign policy cynic isn't seeing it. But, again, there's always tomorrow.
>This was not “pushing” so much as “ineffective trash talking”.
Trump and Stoltenberg argue on camera (<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vpwkdmwui3k>). Who turned out to be right? Who turned out to completely, totally, 100% wrong?
If Trump was so bad for NATO and Ukraine's defense, why didn't the current war didn't begin in 2017-2020?
Let me guess: You think that the current state of the Ukrainian military (in terms of training and weaponry) that enabled it to survive the initial Russian invasion in February when few believed it could, somehow magically began in January 2021. It is a fact that the Trump administration continued and accelerated the training and arming of Ukrainian military by the US that his predecessor began.
Let me also guess: You are one of those gullible who say that Merkel was always against German dependence on Russian gas but could not do anything about it. For 16 years!
There is more "evidence" that Merkel is a long-term Russian intelligence asset, recruited from her youth in East Germany,^1 than that of Trump being the same. One guess on which claim is incessantly repeated by the bien-pensants of the chattering classes.
^1 Something else never talked about is how her parents moved from West to East Germany when she was a baby
Remember, Trump fired the US ambassador to Ukraine because she was opposed to Ukrainian (and American) corruption, and instead sent Rudy Giuliani, Rick Perry, and Gordon Sondland – an incompetent hotel developer who bought his way into a cosplay job as EU Ambassador – to further his corrupt schemes, including not only the extortion plan to invent scandals about Biden, but also replacing the leadership of a Ukrainian state-owned gas company so that it could give contracts to Trump’s corrupt American allies, ending the US attempts to extradite Firtash (a criminal Ukrainian oligarch with Russian mafia ties who hired Rudy Giuliani and other Trump allies), etc.
When Trump’s extortion scheme was exposed and blew up as a scandal, Congress appropriated additional aid for Ukraine, and Trump was driven by the scandal and intense public and congressional scrutiny (not to mention pressure from the US military) to continue the aid. (He still wanted to be re-elected, remember, so didn’t want to look totally corrupt.)
Thankfully the USA is not (as of 2016–2022) a dictatorship, and the president does not personally decide all national policy. So when Trump had some bright ideas like nuking a hurricane or selling off Puerto Rico, those didn’t actually happen. When Trump suggested pulling the US out of NATO, there were still enough powerful and sane figures in the US defense establishment who were able to thwart that proposal.
* * *
You are right that the US and NATO did some (though in retrospect it perhaps should have been more) to help Ukraine from 2014–2021. That training, funding, and support was surely one important part of the Ukrainian army’s recent success. Score one for the US military and US federal government.
* * *
> who say that Merkel was always against German dependence on Russian gas
I don’t know about Merkel per se but German political parties clearly have significant corruption problems. The German response to the Ukraine war has been a disappointing indictment of the whole German political class.
More generally, many Europeans (and Americans, etc.) have been bought off (explicitly or implicitly) by money embezzled from the Russian people by various oligarchs and organized criminals. Russian corruption is a serious worldwide problem, and other countries should continue to make large-scale coordinated responses, ending money laundering, seizing corrupt assets, and imposing legal liability on local residents (e.g. the legal, real estate, and financial services industries) who knowingly participate.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
I also wish we'd send in the big guns to put a lot more pressure in focused places.
What may be an inconvenience to you, a probably-rich person on the global scale, who can afford to outbid poor people when food gets short, is not necessarily just an inconvenience for others.
This is not to say that all meat consumption is 'inefficient'. Cattle can graze on land that is not suitable for farming, and animals generally eat more of the physical plants than we do (animals on a feedlot are often eating fibrous parts of the plant like stalks and stubble and not just the parts we humans like to eat). But there's no way around it, industrialized meat in its current form is an extraordinarily inefficient use of land and has terrible environmental consequences.
Also relevant to any discussion on fertilizer is that excessive usage basically destroys the soil. We've moved away from time-tested methods of managing crops through things like crop rotation, cover crops, promoting natural vegetation in key areas... to over-tilling, over-fertilizing, mono-cropping, and this is taking its toil on the ground we use to farm. Fertilizer is also responsible for eutrophication (nutrient pollution) which destroys local ecosystems and poisons the water. Not to mention nutrition != calories.
Fertilizer is absolutely a modern technological wonder which has allowed humanity to produce food at tremendous scale, and I would not argue that it does not have its place in farming. But the current singular focus on "more yield per hectare" is a very modern, naive approach to farming that throws out a ton of considerations, and is absolutely unecessary.
† https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets †† https://www.usda.gov/foodwaste/faqs
Come back when you are willing to starve to death as this is what millions in other countries are facing
You are missing a critical piece of information here: what is your yearly income and what is your family size?
On the one hand the US is asking the EU and allies to stop buying oil and whatever from Russia. A few large retailers pulled out of the Russian market due to perceived pressure to do so. We tell India (traditional non-aligned country) not to buy from Russia, we chastised Brazil for buying fertilizer from Russia (despite our objections), we tighten our own embargoes and then we're like, ahhhhh, nevermind..... WE'RE going to buy from Russia.
Is it lack of coordination, foresight, credibility, it's something.
I am now going to imagine the hysterics Pelosi and Schumer would have if Biden suddenly and for no reason declared himself an "R". At this point maybe he should to save the Dem party.
This is an odd one to include given it's almost administration policy at this point to look the other way while New Delhi goes out of its way to buy Russian oil.
Because Indians are able to remove all evil totalitarian molecules from it.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-60783874.amp
Even if it is true the oil shipments origins are being hidden so the US and Europe don't know it's from Russia. You implied they were aware it was from Russia but were ok because it went through.
Article about the hidden sale
https://www.wsj.com/articles/russian-oil-producers-stay-one-...
Oh these famous Indian URALS oil fields!
Which makes zero sense. I'll also note that there is no citation. India is one of the largest exporters of refined petroleum products in the world. If the refineries ramp up purchase of Urals crude, guess what ends up in exports?
The cleansing waters of the Ganges wash all sins away.
The US is coming up on an election. The party in power is extremely unpopular right now, and about to get walloped according to polls.
Polling shows that inflation is a big driver for their unpopularity. So they're trying to square two semi-incompatible positions: support Ukraine via sanctions and fight inflation too.
The wrong thing to do would be to drop all sanctions to try to lessen inflation in hopes of getting elected.
I think this is the most overblown talking point right now. In the most favorable wet dream scenario for Republicans where every tossup goes their way[0], they're still only going to hold a 56-44 Senate lead over the Democrats. That's not filibuster-proof and certainly isn't the doomsday scenario that everyone keeps predicting. Keep in mind that Republican primaries have already screwed a lot of those races too. Herschel Walker, a man with a documented history of DV and a noted evolution-denier, will not be winning over Raphael Warnock no matter what the polls say.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_United_States_Senate_elec...
In 2014, the Republicans held 54 Senate seats after the election. In the very worst case for 2022, we're back to 2014. However, if you actually go look at the upcoming races for this year, it seems much more likely that we'll end up closer to a 50/50 split given how weak many of the Republican candidates are.
The apocalypse scenario would be either party acquiring 67 seats in the Senate (to overrule presidential vetoes), which would obviate any need to win the presidency. However, anyone claiming that the Republicans are going to win 67 seats in 2022 is simply wrong.
There's no other way to govern. You govern like you can lead and Congress either does or doesn't follow, or you are an irrelevance. Biden got more of his agenda accomplished than he would have with any less aggressive approach.
> he got shot down time after time, and wound up looking quite ineffective.
Doing nothing risky let's you look ineffective without getting shot down, but it doesn't actually make you look effective. And if you get shot down—especially on something publicly popular—that’s a campaign issue. If you don't try, it's...nothing.
> WE'RE going to buy from Russia.
Having spent three years consulting for federal agencies, this behavior seems to align with my experiences. You learn not to say anything because it's a waste of time and energy. There are other ways to constructively spend your time, like focusing on the mission and the task at hand.
It’s fascinating where a decade+ of policies ranging from stupid (green tech) to batshit crazy (shutting down nuclear) has led the West (US and especially the EU/Germany). And things are only starting to unravel…
And of course, the misnomer of nuclear as dirty, rather than clean and efficient.
The price of this delusion is being paid right now: impeding famine, energy costs exploding, Europe financing Russian war in Europe.
The goal was “clean abundant energy” but the green movement focused on clean to the detriment of abundant…
What's this bizarre local source of energy that Greenland has that apparently nobody else does?
There's water and fossil fuels in the rest of the world too ...
https://www.worldometers.info/electricity/greenland-electric...
There's fault zones, hot springs, fossil fuels, water, sun, wind, etc in the US. If your house has radon gas then you also have uranium.
Not even half as delusional as the pro-nuclear power talk here, where every argument in favor goes, no matter how outlandish, unrealistic, or flat out wrong.
As for the Arab spring, that never had a chance of working. Not even Turkey can deal with democracy and Islam.
Also these aren't just minor increases, e.g. Allianz estimate a 31% increase in prices in 2021; for people who live hand to mouth in the developing world this is catastrophic.
> Pastocalle has been a flash point of protests called by the powerful Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (Conaie) against rising fuel prices and living costs, which saw protesters block roads across the country on Monday.
https://www.newsweek.com/ecuadorians-fed-high-gas-prices-inf...
> In addition to a drop in gas prices, the protesters are demanding that the Ecuadorian government drop prices on basic food items.
It's only hypocrisy if you assume there are some greater moral principles driving the behavior of nations. There's not.
The US puts pressure on people to do what it wants, just like every other country does in proportion to its power. The US just happens to be a global hegemon so it's gets what it wants more often than not, and has disproportionate control over the narrative of what's happening. Russia is particularly good at realizing and exploiting the few pain points there are in US hegemony and uses that to its advantage.
Everything else is just propaganda/ideology to keep you from paying too much attention to what's going on. There's no moral narrative being played out here, and those driving policy in nation states don't sit in big rooms talking about what's "right". They talk about what they need to do to continue to prosper/remain in power and how to do it. They let the media handle attaching a narrative to it that makes it easy to swallow for the public.
https://www.dailypioneer.com/2022/india-abroad/india-s-oil-p...
"India's oil purchases from Russia would not violate any of the sanctions imposed by the US on that country, according to President Joe Biden's Spokesperson Jen Psaki.
Asked during her briefing on Tuesday about reports that India was planning to buy "discounted crude oil' from Russia, she said, "Our message to any country continues to be that obviously abide by the sanctions that we have put in place and recommended."
However, she added, "I don't believe this would be violating that."
Making a moral appeal to cut off petroleum commerce, she added, "But also think about where you want to stand when the history books are written. In this moment in time any support for Russia, the Russian leadership, is support for an invasion that obviously is having a devastating impact".
However, NATO allies of the US continue to import Russian gas and petroleum."
Russia has little problem withholding food resources as a way of forcing cooperation. If the US can actually get Russia to agree to play their best card in exchange for almost nothing, it could be an overall win.
Oil is, unfortunately, used everywhere. As you say, inflation due to high oil prices can kill people. And do you know what else can kill people? Starvation due to lower crop yields due to sudden lack of fertilisers. Ask Sri Lanka how their sudden ban on fertilisers went to see what happens when suddenly a country is forced to switch to fertiliserless agriculture.
The results from high fertiliser prices and lack of availability are drastically worse than high oil prices.
This war is a perfect object lesson in exactly how dependent we are globally on fossil fuels. That we are more decades than we have left away from solving our hydrocarbon problem. And that if we do happen to cross peak oil in a few years (which will actually be good for climate change) the result won't be a transition to green energy but global war on an unprecedented scale.
People paying close attention have been pointing this out for decades but dismissed as "pessimists" by green idealists.
Not to mention that compost is really difficult to come by now.
Unless a farmer is making compost on the side, they can't really treat it as a known input.
I would also argue that chronic over-usage of ammonia-based fertilizers and over-tiling has contributed to degradation to much of the world's farming soil. Which has given rise to many adverse effects such nutrient runoff, poor water infiltration, soil erosion, and downstream effects.
2) Poitical gains. It will be very hard for US to push other countries for sanctions when they can't hold their own.
3) Resilence of production. It's much better for economy to have your factories running and ports working.
Is there a reason Russia is so prolific a source of fertilizer? I assume it's a legacy of Soviet Union attitudes towards raw material production.
I can't really say why Russia would also be a large supplier of potash and phosphate, except to guess that they wanted to cover all of the relevant bases in a market in which they were a big player.
Biden is currently in Saudi Arabia begging for more oil production, meanwhile he's blocking measures to increase North American oil production. So, instead of fixing our own problem with inflation, we're asking one of the worst regimes on Earth for help and enriching Russia with higher prices simultaneously. Even if you support greener energy, like I do, this policy makes no sense other than to appear greener than you are.
The US consumer could easily handle food inflation and energy inflation if we weren't also dealing with inflation on a bunch of other fronts -- from policy-induced labor shortages and policy-induced supply chain problems. But since we've got multiple compounding problems with inflation, we're pushing everyone towards an unnecessary recession.
And of course the background here is a Fed that is whipsawing from creating trillions of dollars to destroying trillions of dollars and giving markets whiplash in the process.
Now everyone is in too deep with costs so high, there is limited ability to back out and save face and spin the story without it looking like the massive screw up with huge costs and limited benefit that it has been. At the end of the day, we are going to get a global recession and mass food insecurity and starvation in the global south for what?
If you are asking what the west nations got in exchange of making the economy dependent on cheap oil and gas from Russia, the answer is pretty simple. They got money. Politicians got political credits at the time from being anti-nuclear, and infrastructure wise they gained short terms budget savings by not replacing existing heating infrastructure that depend on burning gas. The cheap oil also helped keeping air traffic and shipping traffic cheaper, and the cheap artificial fertilizers created from Russian natural gas made food production cheaper.
At the end of the day we traded independence in exchange for cheaper fossil fuels, and we went into dependency without having a backup plan.
How?
Oil companies use any crisis to get more rights in the future. Biden can use wartime production laws to force oil companies to produce more.
Oil companies right now just don’t want to produce more. It’s not that they can’t. They have no reason to do more work to make less money.
And what investments they do make, like the Keystone XL pipeline, are blocked by the government.
Would you invest in that?
Which is kinda beside the point because it’s refinement that’s the biggest issue right now.
It feels bad to us to have these ridiculous politicians who spend 95% of their time on theatrical in fighting as the US has for the last ~15 years but in terms of first order effects, it doesn't really matter. Like the risk of something like a kinetic civil war is still roughly zero in the US.
But the problem is, no one actually believes that there is any need to do things like have a cohesive foreign policy or actually administer the government, people view the job of the politicians as to just repetitively engage in the kabuki theatre of dunking on the other team over over and again.
Which was fine when the world was basically peaceful and we could just lord over everyone with our massive military and totally dominant currency which were built up in the previous era. The problem is that this system is going to fail spectacularly when there are actual complicated geo political issues to deal with and I think we are in the early stages of witnessing right now.
Someone else made the observation that we are effectively trying to deal with this problem but cancelling Putin over twitter, because canceling people on twitter is one of the primary modes of governance in the US right now. That may sound hyperbolic but I think it's actually pretty accurate, a lot of the sanctions on Russia were companies self sanctioning after getting attacked on twitter.
It turns out saying mean things on twitter is not particularly effective against tanks and artillery.
Anyway, interesting times.
To us people on the outside, listening to US people denigrating each other on the web, it seems to us that it's 50-50 whether the US will be involved in a Civil War or a big peer-to-peer International War first.
Increasing local oil production will do little - the barrel prices are not exactly high, but the price at the pump is high - why? Refining. And that's all controlled by oil companies. I wonder why? Perhaps they're just ginning for extra profit?
$120/barrel is pretty high. Not the highest it's ever been, but close, and about twice as expensive as crude was from 2015 to early 2021.
https://markets.businessinsider.com/commodities/oil-price?op...
BTW, what's with all the politicians telling people to buy electrical cars so they don't have to worry about high energy price, as if they didn't know how expensive or unpractical those cars are for ordinary American families? I somehow find that stance insulting.
Trump and Jens Stoltenberg of NATO argue on camera (<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vpwkdmwui3k>). Who turned out to be right? Who turned out to completely, totally, 100% wrong?
We see incompetent people around us every day, but sometimes we forget that there are incompetent politicians as well. The big difference, and what bothers me the most, is that they never admit their mistakes because of all the political party BS that is often the main priority and goal.
It's saying that we, keyboard warriors on a programming forum, are just as knowledgeable as e.g. Biden who has the full briefing and resources of the CIA
Or didn't know what was going on until well after the war was underway. U.S. tactical intelligence has no match on earth. American strategic intelligence is almost predictably garbage. From Iraq to Kabul to Kyiv, we've consistently called the shots wrong.
When's the last time any major power fought a near peer?
I would have said we're getting solid evidence of American intelligence supremacy out of Ukraine. But given the incompetence of the Russian military it would be embarrassing to put them in the same league as China.
Ah. Got it.
More of that was luck than the State Dept will ever admit, but here we are, and I'll be damned if I know where we are 'going'. There's a tendency for armchair commentators to imagine an opponent 'disappearing' once beaten. If you can make 6.6 million square miles of country disappear, then we should all be kneeling before you and calling you Zod.
It's genuinely amazing to see the mental gymnastics here to come to the conclusion that buying fewer weapons is exactly what the defense contractors are lobbying for.
It requires no mental gymnastics whatsoever. Actually the counter argument is where you need to twist yourself to believe otherwise.
It's reasonable for Americans to want to drag this conflict out, as they are more insulated from the direct effects of the war, and a pro-American Russia would bring a lot of benefits. But it is clearly having a destabilizing effect on the rest of the world and this may spill over into western europe as well.
I think it's weird you don't think anyone involved in the problem has thought of your proposed solution, or that you don't think there's any potential negative effects from antagonizing an unhinged despot with his finger on the nuke.
"Oh those stupid idiots are scared of nuclear war"
For NATO the borders of its members are red line.
For Putin the red line is borders of Russia, that include Crimea and L/DPR for now.
There is no way Putin leaves Crimea and nukes are not send to the Washington.
The borders of Russia end where Russia gets a bloody snot.
That's truly moronic.
Lmao okay buddy.
I'd argue that emotionally-charged rhetoric like that is exactly what got the West (the US especially) into the mess in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Charged rhetoric by emotional war hawks who kept shouting "you're either with us or against us" used to mask lies by US politicians and the media.
Note - I'm not saying we do nothing to help Ukraine. Economic sanctions and supporting the Ukrainian military is great. But the West must be careful to avoid escalating to WW3.
But whatever. If Ukraine folds, 24-feb-2022 will be pinned in history books as the start of WW3 and in a few years all your fears will come to fruition. A coward dies a thousand deaths.
Uh, yeah?
If you have nukes you can pretty much do whatever you want, short of launching them at another nuclear power. That's just like, reality.
Remember this the next time everyone bellyaches about "unfair sanctions" or whatever when some country even hints that they're pursuing a nuclear program.
There was something about liberty and safety and deserving neither that some US president said long time ago that I think might very much apply here.
"Henry Kissinger, who wondered in his 1957 book Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy if extending the American deterrent to all of Europe at a time when the threat of total destruction hung over the US itself would actually work: ‘A reliance on all-out war as the chief deterrent saps our system of alliances in two ways: either our allies feel that any military effort on their part is unnecessary or they may be led to the conviction that peace is preferable to war even on terms almost akin to surrender... [1]"
In summary, the concern you raise is actively discussed in security circles. Post Ukraine, it's increasingly common to see the absolute nuclear taboo questioned.
Until the first nuclear power lobs a tactical nuke and doesn't suffer reprisal, we'll be in an uncomfortable transition period, analogous to the time immediately preceding MAD. (And let's be honest. If Putin lobbed a tactical nuke at Ukraine, does anybody seriously think he'd face military force?)
[1] https://mondediplo.com/2022/04/03nuclear
Given the performance of the Russian military what makes you think that Russian nukes (and the people who operate them) are any better?
US intelligence and capabilities are likely much more effective than anyone knows.
Putin invading Ukraine was impossible because he's not unhinged and it would be an insanely stupid thing to do. He's just gathering his armies next to the border because he's flaunting his strength.
>I'm afraid that conviction is actually growing
Based off your in-depth research of casually browsing NY Times headlines?
First, not everyone, Ukrainians knew. Second, after the end of WW2 we lived (wanted to live) under a spell that conquering whole countries with some opportunistic genocide on top is not going to happen anymore, or at least not in the "civilized" Europe. Now, I hope the spell is off, we can see the world more clearly, and it's a raw power competition in which Putin thinks he has the winning cards or can at least out bluff everyone.
That's completely false. Just read the news from February.
U.S. Intelligence was warning Ukraine that Putin was planning to invade while Zelensky was in denial.
The invasion began on Thursday Feb. 24. On Monday Feb. 21, Zelenky was insistent that Putin wouldn't be crazy enough invade Ukraine.
Here's some articles from right before the invasion
- https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-60174684
- https://www.france24.com/en/europe/20220206-us-officials-war...
- https://nypost.com/2022/01/28/zelensky-rebukes-western-panic...
And yes, no one was sure that this Feb military build up results in war cause there was already a build up in April before that. But this invasion was inevitable with the current Russian leadership, UAF underwent a series of reforms since 2014 to prepare for it.
[1] https://www.npr.org/2022/01/29/1076699748/ukraine-russian-at...
That's an absurd take. He was clearly completely unprepared for the invasion and was not expecting it in the slightest.
If he was expecting it, he wouldn't have been in complete denial of US intelligence and wouldn't decried it as "the West sowing panic for political gains".
> In some random interviews he said Ukraine is prepared
I have no idea why you're looking at "random interviews" when you can just look at exactly what happened.
Ukraine was completely unprepared for Russian invasion and they were clearly shocked when the Russians invaded.
Did Zelenky evacuate any civilians beforehand? Nope. Did he ask NATO countries for aid? Nope, it was the exact opposite.
NATO countries were offering aid and he was calling them alarmist.
Sounds like you were not following the events because invasion was effectively "announced" by US Intelligence weeks before the actual declaration of war. Besides, this was not the only sign and if you know the way Putin talks and you listened to him days before the invasion (talking about Russian Empire's old glory) you'd see that he already made his mind up way before the actual day of invasion. Of course, it's easy to see things in hindsight (and I did truly predict the invasion before it happened) but sounds like you're not even aware of all the available data.
Again, just read the news articles from January/February of this year.
It sounds like you weren't paying any attention to this in Feb and are just trying to come up with arguments to support your points.
The only thing they can end with nukes are themselves. What was even the point of attacking Ukraine, if you want to make it a nuclear wasteland?
This sentiment is nuts, in my opinion. Russia isn't the only nation that has nukes folks... everyone around Russia has them too...
If Putin were to nuke a major metropolitan area, it would be the end of Putin (literally) and likely the end of Russia (at least it's current government). The unification of NATO, the EU, and the entire "west" would be so strong and unanimous, there would be no positive outcome for Russia.
Let's stop cowering because one dude threatened the entire world... the world is much bigger than Russia.
Sending more and more weapons only prolongs it and adds to the body count. A humanitarian mission to remove those at risk from the areas Russia wants to invade would be a far better response. Sanctioning Russia is fine but shooting ourselves in the foot by refusing to buy their fuel is ridiculous and destroying our economies leading to real people losing their livelihoods here.
As they say, citation needed.
Why are some people rooting for more and more needless death and destruction?
Maybe ask on a Russian forum?
Second, letting Russia win will not stop further death and destruction when Putin continues his expansion westward, only then with Ukrainian conscripts as a cannon fodder.
The breakdown in diplomacy with Russia is the worst part. The previous administration at least had diplomacy. The current one just pushed them into this.
If by diplomacy you mean kowtowing to everything Russia does, I'm not sure that's much better.
Trump and Stoltenberg argue on camera (<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vpwkdmwui3k>). Who turned out to be right? Who turned out to completely, totally, 100% wrong?
But he didn’t have the decorum.
Russia literally had a 0% chance of losing this thing in the end. Ukraine did well to defend early and Russia certainly mismanaged the strategy. Going at the mainland was stupid and indefensible and the Ukraine fighters should be commended. But it was never the main objective and the truth is, Russia is on the verge of accomplishing their main objective.
It's time to stop fighting.
It's time to stop losing lives and to try diplomacy.
It's important to remember that this war has really been going on since 2014. Eastern rebel forces were starting to crumble until Russia began offering direct military assistance (Not just material but also boots-on-the-ground. Ukraine captured VDV and Spetsnaz POWs and would regularly exchange Russian troops with the DNR/LPR for POW swaps).
Edit: One of the big lessons Europe learned during the first half of the 20th century is that nationalist/ethnic conquests over land and border disputes makes everyone worse-off (World War I), and such acts should be powerfully deterred - through force, because capitulation doesn't work (World War II).
It seems people are forgetting these lessons.
Donbas is the location from which the Nazis launched the attack on the USSR which almost lost them WW2. Its strategic significance cant be understated. Finland and Sweden are not as important.
The thing about the Cuban missile crisis is that Kennedy was able to get Russian missiles AWAY from the United States. Russia's actions are getting hardware placed closer.
And why is that? Probably because Russia will tolerate it in exchange for territorial expansion. Even after the 2014 invasion of Crimea there was open talk about how NATO was obsolete and a waste of money and effort. Russia could've probably eliminated any NATO threat without firing a single shot. It was already seen as a relic of the cold war. Instead, Russia's actions have given a renewed justification for NATO's existence.
It only happened in the first place because the US put missiles in Turkey. Take them away and suddenly the soviet union is ok with removing the cuban nukes.
In this case a simple "Ukraine wont be joining NATO" would have prevented this war.
>Russia's actions are getting hardware placed closer.
The strategic significance of the other locations is far less than the donbas. Note the whole "location where they almost lost ww2" thing. It's kind of important. The US/NATO wanted a base in Mariupol because its the perfect location to threaten Russia, and they almost got it. Finland was the consolation prize.
Honestly, since the Soviet Union collapsed, NATO has only expanded and crept closer and closer to Russia. How are they supposed to feel? As for this particular thing - the areas they are want are mainly Russian anyways and recent Ukrainian pol's have done everything they can to marginalize the people and their Russian cultures in these regions.
Russia isn't perfect but this is a nuanced thing and was preventable through diplomacy.
And they started down that road earnestly in the 1990s. But it required extensive military and certain Democratic reforms Russia didn't want to commit to so they abandoned it. And that's totally fine: nobody is required to join NATO. Ultimately, since the early 90s, Russia helped form the CSTO which serves a similar function.
> recent Ukrainian pol's have done everything they can to marginalize the people and their Russian cultures in these regions.
The current Ukrainian president is a native Russian speaker and was quite popular in Russia. They have spent the last 8 years dealing with a Russian-instigated (and supported) civil war with the so-called LPR and DPR. Is the southern United States oppressed because the Union didn't allow it to secede? That certainly was the argument people used to justify segregation!
Anyway, the stated justification for this war is not NATO expansion but "denazification"
Given the myriad of non-NATO excuses, including outright restoration of Russian imperial territory, that have been cited by Putin since day one, if you pay attention to anything besides the message crafted by the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs for Western audiences (and faithfully relayed by Russia’s useful idiots in the West), and Russia pattern of aggression against it's neighbors, that doesn't really seem likely.
(It's more likely that simply letting Ukraine skip ahead straight to joining NATO would have stopped the war.)
For the integrity of Russian borders theyd sacrifice 100,000 in the blink of an eye. And have to ensure Mariupol wont ever host a NATO base.
If Putin simply wanted to invade only for territory he would have taken it years ago when it would have been militarily easier. He invaded because the military threat it posed was slowly growing as Ukraine formed ever closer links to NATO.
>if you pay attention to anything besides the message crafted by the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs for Western audiences
I monitor all sides (neutral, russian, western), but the above analysis I read from a military analyst who hates Russia.
Your idea of what constitutes Russian propaganda and "useful idiot" is comically out of whack.
It's also pretty hard to get exposed to Russian propaganda accidentally despite what a bevy of Americans raised on 1950s red scare tactics seem to think.
>It's more likely that simply letting Ukraine skip ahead straight to joining NATO would have stopped the war.
Yep, but NATO doesnt actually give a fuck about any of the countries bordering Russia and isnt willing to start a hot war with Russia over any of them. The decades long drawn out application process is simply to let them gradually up the threat to Russia without having any real obligation until its certain that obligation wont have to be invoked.
This is slowly starting to dawn on Zelensky, I think. He's pretty mad at us right now for providing restrained help against the onslaught.
He did invade and take the most important territory years ago (as soon as there wasn't a Russian puppet governing Ukraine), when Ukraine was incapable of much resistance, and then paused to complete the integration of the territory seized at the time.
Did you miss that?
This is genocide. Not resisting means millions killed and tens of millions brutally oppressed, a whole nation and its culture erased from existence, and an invitation for further imperialistic wars and atrocities, because evil unpunished only leads to more evil on a larger scale.
This is not genocide, you're exaggerating here. Honestly, if anything the Russian culture of the Eastern regions Russia is about to take was being wiped out. That was the actual genocide. It's why there are so many Russian supporting people there.
When Russia came into Kiev I agree, it was a step too far and the Ukrainian's needed to fight. But now Russia is only attempting their main mission of taking Donbas, etc. It's time to cease fire and negotiate and stop the pointless death at this point.
I too can issue a currency, set its value at 1,000,000 USD per unit and declare monopoly in trading it.
There are plenty of Forex exchanges trading RUB for any currency. Including USD, EUR and others. Governments don’t have control over all exchanges so they can’t set the price. The price is determined by supply & demand (ie: the market). Governments do have some levers they can use: buying or selling reserves to put up or downward pressure on the market price.
To limit trading of a currency you’d have to limit exchanges to any other currency. If you limit RUB-USD for example, people could still trade RUB-EUR and EUR-USD, thus still creating a defacto RUB-USD pricing.
What other mechanisms does the world have to try to stop Russia's invasion of Ukraine? Boots on the ground?
It's also messed up that we don't consider the downstream effects of sanctions as collateral damage. How many millions of people can the west allow to starve due to sanctions and still hold the moral high-ground?
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/apr/06/sri-lanka-faci...
Pretty weird to read all these articles about shortages of IT professionals, and compare that to the immigration barriers your governments have put. Although I guess your typical HN visitor probably wouldn't be very interested in influx of cheap labor that will bring down his salary to sane levels.
What would you suggest as an alternative? Continue doing business as usual as if they're not murdering women and children?
No we should do everything possible to stop it.
There is a problem though - when "murdering women and children" is done by approved country "Continue doing business as usual" is pretty much what the West does. And I am not aware of any real repercussions for the crimes committed.
The media & their masters tells us who to support. And Ukraine vs Russia is profitable.
The war in Ukraine is a straightforward story with an obvious bad guy, and it doesn’t require much self reflection to figure out or cause much cognitive dissonance.
"They" were fine with their own government killing hundreds of thousands in Iraq and whole bunch of other countries. They're fine with their government threatening ICC as organization and its members. They've definitely picked their battle and frankly I think by doing all those things without any repercussion they are being hypocrites and setting example to other countries. No high moral ground here. The whole world affairs are quite disgusting for that matter.
Personally I just try to think about nice things that humanity still manage to produce and as I am a creative person my brain is always busy with rather more inspiring matters.
[1] https://zakon-rada-gov-ua.translate.goog/laws/show/55-12?_x_...
Second, that was also based on the promises made in the Budapest memorandum. Seeing that Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014, the situation is already drastically different. Ukraine's choice post-2014 were to surrender to Russia's whims, or try to find allies to protect it from future Russian incursions.
And third, the Ukrainian SSR had sovereignty before it declared independence ( nobody "granted it sovereignty"), de jure ( being a component of the USSR with at least nominal, if not real depending on the guys in Moscow, autonomy) and de facto.
These are the same in the followed legal events (see below)
> Second, that was also based on the promises made in the Budapest memorandum
The Budapest memorandum was signed in 1994. The Declaration on the State Sovereignty of Ukraine was signed in 1990 and it pre-dates all further legal documents that led to Ukraine's independence. All subsequent legal documents and events are predicated on respecting and referencing the declaration of 1990. The Constitution of Ukraine of 1996 references and follows the Act of proclamation of independence of Ukraine from August 24, 1991, which in turn follows and references "Implementing the Declaration of State Sovereignty of Ukraine" [1]. Implementing the declaration means following and executing all intentions of the declaration, that's why I said above that "conditions" and "intentions" mean the same thing in the underlying legal procedures.
> Seeing that Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014
you forgot to add: after a prior armed coup against a legitimately elected president in Kyiv. The coup, among many other things, violated the right to a political representation of the people's voice who voted for that president. In case of president Yanukovych, these were the people of the eastern Ukraine, including Crimea, who were deprived of their right to a democratic process in their country.
> And third, the Ukrainian SSR had sovereignty before it declared independence ( nobody "granted it sovereignty"), de jure ( being a component of the USSR with at least nominal, if not real depending on the guys in Moscow, autonomy) and de facto.
Blatantly false, the Ukrainian SSR had certain autonomy under the Union, as did a few other european and asian SSR's, but it didn't have sovereignty [2]. This is the whole reason the Declaration of 1990 exists in the first place, as it was the means to declare and begin a legal transition to a sovereign state. And in that sense sovereignty was granted to Ukraine, because there only are two ways a nation can obtain sovereignty: either by fighting for it in a war or by coming into a peaceful legal agreement on mutually respected terms and conditions. In 1990, the second approach was taken and the terms and conditions were declared and signed by all parties in the Declaration on the State Sovereignty of Ukraine.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declaration_of_Independence_of...
[2] Under the Soviet one-party model, the Ukrainian SSR was governed by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union through its republican branch: the Communist Party of Ukraine. No decision of the government of Ukraine (Council of Ministers) was adopted without approval of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukrainian_Soviet_Socialist_Rep...
I wonder, how many people will die because of Russia (war) vs. because of Western sanctions (famine+energy crisis). So far Russia is "winning" but let's wait until the winter...
OK, now let's hear how it could be "easily avoided".
And of course it sounds nice to say sovereign nations ought be able to choose their own alliances and relationships, yet how long do you think that rhetoric would last if Russia managed to get Mexico to join a military alliance that was more or less openly framed as a force to "contain" the United States? And to add extra icing on the cake, what if they managed to get Mexico to join only after actively and overtly supporting an insurrection that overthrew a democratically elected pro-US regime?
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ug2468hDl6E
https://www.businessinsider.com/putin-says-ukraine-war-seize...
"Putin said on Thursday that the Ukraine invasion is about expanding Russian territory.
Before, Putin insisted that Russia was freeing Ukraine from so-called Nazis and preventing genocide.
Putin said it was his destiny to "return and reinforce" Russia like Peter the Great did."
"Peter the Great waged the Great Northern War for 21 years. On the face of it, he was at war with Sweden taking something away from it… He was not taking away anything, he was returning. This is how it was. The areas around Lake Ladoga, where St Petersburg was founded. When he founded the new capital, none of the European countries recognised this territory as part of Russia; everyone recognised it as part of Sweden. However, from time immemorial, the Slavs lived there along with the Finno-Ugric peoples, and this territory was under Russia’s control. The same is true of the western direction, Narva and his first campaigns. Why would he go there? He was returning and reinforcing, that is what he was doing.
Clearly, it fell to our lot to return and reinforce as well. And if we operate on the premise that these basic values constitute the basis of our existence, we will certainly succeed in achieving our goals."
He's obviously speaking by analogy about Ukraine without stating as much, but there's something much more specific he's referencing. This [2] is a map of Ukraine by native language, which is about as close as you can get to ethnicity. After the pro-Russian government in 2014 was overthrown, it's essentially those areas in red that declared their independence and have remained independent since.
[1] - http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/transcripts/68606
[2] - https://edition.cnn.com/interactive/2014/02/world/ukraine-di...
Appeasing dictators with delusions of grandeur simply doesn't work. It might buy you some time, but you better prepare during it.
Then there's the nuclear arsenal of NATO. Would Hitler attack Poland if it had nukes capable of putting an end to the Fuhrer himself, his Volk, and his Reich? From what I learned he wasn't suicidal until much later. Is Putin right now? Possibly, but I think he'd get assassinated long before his order to perform "special military operation" against a NATO country could reach his troops.
How so? If you prepare for war in the meantime ( like Ukraine did between 2014 and now), yes, but otherwise i don't see anything but postponing that loss of lives.
Yes, exactly - I should have written it more clearly:
> Buying time is the same as saving thousands of lives. I would hardly say that means it doesn't work [- unless you decide to waste that time by not preparing sufficiently.]
In short, you're right - buying time on its own doesn't help much.
I don't think Ukraine prepared sufficiently, by the way. I don't know what their leaders thought, but joining NATO was effectively a pipe dream due to the unresolved civil war in the east. Without NATO nukes it was obvious that they will need to fight for survival at some point. How come they need so much weaponry and ammunition right now? Where are the stockpiles accumulated over the last 8 years, where are the nationalized factories that produce tanks and guns, where are the roads, railways, bunkers, weapon caches, evacuation routes, minefields, trenches, and so on? Apparently in Switzerland - the most peaceful, neutral country (in Europe at least) - they have enough bunkers to house all its population and then some. They are used as warehouses normally... and mostly for long-lasting foodstuffs, too. How come Ukrainian civilians, after 8 years of preparation, need to hide in theaters? You could say that it's in hindsight that we know Russia would attack, but.. It's Russia we're talking about! They have a lot of similar wars in their history, both in the past ~1k years and in the past 50 years - enough to conclude that they will try to attack if the circumstances are favorable to it (after a major, world-wide crisis, preferably).
OK, you can have Czechoslovakia! (stop there, please)
OK, you can have Poland.
...France?
You see how this doesn't work anymore.
indeed, the UK, France, and Italy should not have been allowed to sign The Munich Agreement of 1938, moreso Poland should not have been allowed to annex Trans-Olza from Czechoslovakia, certainly not in an act of a military ultimatum.
Nuclear weapons changed the circumstances so much that direct comparison with 1938-1939 is impossible. We neither can give Slovakia away, nor have we a reason to. On the other hand, for Ukraine, swallowing the bitter pill and losing territory would also clear the way for NATO application (the civil war in the east makes it de iure impossible) and would give them time to prepare to defend from much better fortified positions, with much greater access to Western weaponry, and with much better contingency plans.
He will not let the West to recover. Were his 200,000 troops to march into Poland instead of Ukraine in February, the entirety of NATO in Europe would' be in a giant trouble until USA would've brought forces from North America.
For as long as the West will be showing fear, he will continue to attack.
Damn right you are (not in the literal sense of a secret deal, but the effects are similar). IMO Germany bears the most responsibility for this situation, on par with Putin himself. Ukraine was screwed big time by German diplomacy and their ambiguous stance. That Ukrainians still want to belong to the West is a miracle. Once the war is over, they should, and I think they will, start asking questions about all the "NATO membership is on the table, the doors are open" alternating with "well, you'll need to wait some 20 years to get past the doors anyway". I sincerely hope this will weight on the conscience of Germans enough to substantially lessen the amount of money they will demand from Ukraine for the support they (reluctantly) are showing now.
-Russia wins in Ukraine
-The sanctions were ultimately ineffective, for the reasons you explain above
-China takes Taiwan during major US political unrest, at BEST destroying the fabs and at worst gaining full control of the leading 3nm/2nm etc process
-A deeper China-Russia alliance, which was expedited by our ineffective sanctions now, puts the screws to US/western companies by blocking access to the latest semiconductor tech
Russia has so far demonstrated that it isn’t capable of much on that front. Ukraine is a big country, they’re barely doing a city at a time, and they’ve only had success on a small front that they’re very familiar with.
-The sanctions were ultimately ineffective, for the reasons you explain above
This remains to be seen - they’re definitely “effective” because they’re changing everything, question is how the West could be “miscalculating”.
-China takes Taiwan during major US political unrest, at BEST destroying the fabs and at worst gaining full control of the leading 3nm/2nm etc process
That would require China to launch an enormous large scale operation, which they’ve just seen can be a total shit show. An invasion would probably not allow them to “take” the 2-3nm process either, and it wouldn’t give them the returns on the investment. Most importantly China currently does not need to be invading Taiwan to be in an advantageous strategic position - they’re “winning” as is.
-A deeper China-Russia alliance, which was expedited by our ineffective sanctions now, puts the screws to US/western companies by blocking access to the latest semiconductor tech
Currently Russia has only managed to weaken and isolate itself. The symmetrical relationship Putin would need probably isn’t on the table, and Russia isn’t a worthwhile partner for China in such a terrible and toxic condition.
(Question is if putting “screws” on western companies is “bad” thing, but that’s another matter.)
All of these things worried me before the war, but Russia’s total incompetence has, if anything, greatly held back the China-Russia relationship.
Russia is weeks, perhaps days, away from consolidating the Donbas. An area larger than the UK and one of their primary objectives.
> Currently Russia has only managed to weaken and isolate itself.
Russia is coming out of this with multiple new trade partnerships, financial payment integrations and military alliances.
NATO population is 10 times that of Russia. The difference in economy/technology/production even more drastic. What winning are you talking about?
In Ukraine. NATO's population is irrelevant if Russia is not fighting NATO.
Imagine, somebody did it for Afghanistan in 2001 what do you think NATO response would be?
Is that meant to demonstrate economic strength?
* Russians have massive amount of brain drain. Most of tech employees have left, leaving only people extracting oil, people who turn it into fertilizer and gasoline and supporting roles.
* They can't build military tech because of sanctions. Starting to use 1950s and 1960s tanks.
* They've privatized and violated tons of foreign companies (for example Renault gave away 68% of car manufacturer Avtovaz to the state). Nobody in their right mind will bring money there in the future.
* They can't import smartphones, tech or luxury cars (things that keep russian upper middle class happy).
> Cutting Russia off from SWIFT has only strengthened their ties to India and China
There has been both strengthening and weakening. Russia depends on China, not the other way around.
> and now we're dealing with soaring food and energy prices at home
It hurts both ways. This is normal. Appeasement would be a better choice?
That's not quite true, as an engineer in Russia, I'm not witnessing massive exodus (yet?)
And the best thing - rich Russian escaping Russia end up being sanctioned, hence, many stay.
Let's see who can suffer more: Westerns + accepting a global food crisis with millions of dead people in the Third world (thanks to the sanctions, NOT the war per se) or the Russians who lived like shit before and know that this is yet another round of sufferings.
From the Mongol invasions to WWII to the Soviet Union, Russians have a lot of experience with collective suffering and deprivation.
One reason I heard my Russian friends repeating is that "it's a bit country so we need a strong ruler to keep it together". But history shows this is not true. Also a federation of states like the USA would probably work better than the current setup where a short guy from Moscow is sending Buryat boys to die in a country they haven't seen before.
Excuse my ignorance… but how is it different from a tall guy from Connecticut sending, I dunno, Montana boys to die in a country they haven't even heard of? I'm just trying to understand the difference.
Russia has historically been invaded by such people as Genghis Khan(actually his grandson, Tamerlane, Napoleon, Charles )I forget which one) of Sweden, and Hitler.
The USA on the other hand is protected by two oceans and has not had a foreign army on the continent since 1815.
here is a fun one https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish%E2%80%93Lithuanian_occu... Russia really doesnt like the fact Poland not only occupied Moscow, but also got Kings son elected Tzar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Russian_monarchs#Tsars...
[0] Some people blame the spirits: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vK7l55ZOVIc
Yeah, I keep hear Putin repeat it, always blaming the West. There are two logical fallacies here: first, the Russian fleet is blocking Ukrainian ports, not the other way round, and second, even if we ignored the situation on the Black Sea, it is Putin who started the war. I know Russian accept this logic and victim-blaming, but its' strange to see it on HN.
As for Russians living through bad times, I still wonder why do you have to accept all this crappy treatment. I know when you revolted in 1917 the result was a total mess but maybe it will be better this time. I really believe the Russian people deserve a better fate than what the next years are going to bring you.
How long before their economy collapses? Of course with the idea that everything you're saying is true. Which at this point, I have no basis to disagree with you. I'm just wondering how long you think it will take for all of this finally come to a head.
Russians themselves have gotten used to consumer goods etc from the west, but they are mostly too afraid to rise up against or fight for Putin, who has most of modern russian state built around himself. So, no uprising from within probably.
Altogether if not the end of summer, then it's into very scary territory. Famine + energy prices - while Russia being unable to advance in Ukraine because of seasonal changes.
> is run by (mostly) competent people
Citation needed.
Pope Francis says Ukraine war was ‘perhaps somehow provoked’
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jun/14/pope-francis-u...
"The pontiff warned [..] against what he said was a fairytale perception of the conflict as good versus evil"
"We need to move away from the usual Little Red Riding Hood pattern, in that Little Red Riding Hood was good and the wolf was the bad one [..] something global is emerging and the elements are very much entwined."
Geopolitics aint no fairy tale. It's gang warfare writ large.
https://www.amazon.com/Red-Blood-Tales-Sisters-Grimmer/dp/08...
He mentions in the article that an unnamed world leader told him Russia would get upset at NATO being so close to their border. Putin has publicly mentioned this multiple times before the war with Ukraine.
Finally, Ukraine has the right to join any alliance it wants and for Russia to invade over that is bullshit. If you want to bring up promises about not joining NATO then we must talk about promises not to invade. Russia has already done this before in 2014
In geopolitics, nobody has any particular rights. Whoever has the bigger stick and better propaganda gets their way.
One could argue that there’s no reason to have sanctions on Cuba, that Palestinians should also have the right to self determination, that America doesn’t have the right to interfere in the developing world.
That’s not how the world works, regardless of right or wrong.
IMO - the west could have prevented this war. Regardless of what Ukraine wants, an agreement that NATO will not expand eastwards for 60 years in exchange for Russia not invading. That was all we needed.
Why does it matter if a NATO country is on the border anyway? In the age of ICBMs, stealth bombers, and drones is the real concern that some large NATO force would march over the border for a land invasion of Russia?
This question, no matter how well intentioned, is irrelevant.
Russia views NATO as an existential threat. It’s irrelevant whether you agree with that NATO is such a threat or not. Russia does not want NATO on or by its borders. They’ve been making this clear since the collapse of the Soviet Union.
You can disagree with them, argue in favor of NATO expanding eastward, or specifically making Ukraine a member state, etc. These are all moot points.
Russia has made their position extremely clear. The war is obviously not a surprise.
Tell us something. Why does it matter to the US when China tries to expand its sphere of influence over HK or islands in the Pacific?
What would happen if a Chinese bloc propagated itself to the Western Hemisphere and established an alliance with Cuba or South America?
Surely the same argument - that none of it matters in the day of nuclear weapons and ballistics capabilities - that same argument would valid, right? But would Washington stand for this? Absolutely not.
Cuba is still being punished to this day. The Monroe doctrine is still very real.
Russia warned about this for decades. The West basically told Russia that they don’t matter, that they’re a has been, and NATO will do whatever it wants.
Well, here we have the consequences. Now Bidens administration is quietly admitting that the war is becoming an economic liability for the US, but I digress.
Sometimes it's because exactly what is obviously the reason.
Ukraine can do whatever it wants. It was up to NATO to flat out reject any prospects of Ukraine’s membership and prevent the war, but they egged it on.
Ukraine can do whatever it wants, but the simply truth is that Ukraine is now just ground zero in Washington’s proxy war with Russia. They could have remained neutral and avoided this disaster.
No, it doesn't have this right to join ANY alliance, as it may violate one of the conditions (military bloc neutrality) under which their sovereignty was granted to them by the USSR, which Russia is a legitimate successor of: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31746866
[1] The election has been widely recognized and endorsed as being fair and an accurate reflection of voters' intentions by all international agencies observing the election including the OSCE and PACE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Ukrainian_presidential_el...
You provided a source to show the elections were valid but who was questioning that? The cause of the uprising (from wiki)
"In November 2013, a wave of large-scale protests (known as Euromaidan) erupted in response to President Yanukovych's sudden decision not to sign a political association and free trade agreement with the European Union (EU), instead choosing closer ties to Russia and the Eurasian Economic Union. "
And you also speak about lack of representation but
"A total of 315 of the 349 MPs registered in the sitting hall supported the document on Friday." [1]
That's a huge majority in any political system. I think there's room for debate whether the people were represented sufficiently by the president's actions.
Regardless, again unlike jan 6th, a foreign country was involed and later invaded. Two, the revolutionaries reason was truthful and not a lie about election fraud , and three a meaningful percentage of the population was involved which gives some merit to a revolution.
Sources
1.https://www.kyivpost.com/article/content/ukraine-politics/pa...
The motion you are mentioning was the Ukraine cabinet passing a resolution (in other words a statement of intent) to continue working towards an EU Association Agreement, the exact same sort they currently have with places such as Israel, Egypt, South Africa, Syria, and many other such nations. [1] That cabinet then chose to not pass any further acts that would have been necessary to move forward with said agreement. Instead it started moving towards the creation of a 3-way association agreement between Ukraine, the EU, and Russia that would help ensure trade could flow amongst all parties. [2]
That's when you started getting protests, which quickly escalated into riots and insurrection efforts. And you then also get completely bizarre scenes like this [3]. That is John McCain in the capital of Ukraine, telling protesters that America is with them and that their future is with America and Europe. Imagine if you had something comparable during January 6th from comparably high level Chinese/Russian officials. It's not only completely surreal, but also understates the issue. Because this was effectively a superpower declaring war on the current establishment of a much weaker country, which is going to endlessly embolden insurrection efforts.
As for merit, neither the protests nor insurrection were supported by the majority of the country [4], at least not until the government was overthrown at which point there were reasons for self censorship, and likely also disrupted polling as various regions began rejecting the new government and declaring their independence. And I don't believe you've considered the implications of your statement that so long as a "meaningful" percent of people participate in an insurrection, it has merit. US elections are regularly decided on near 50/50 scales. Obviously you don't support the idea of the losing party now just trying to violently overthrow the winning party. The only thing that large participation would show is the degree of radicalization among the losing party, which is certainly not a positive thing.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_Association_Agr...
[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union%E2%80%93Ukraine...
[3] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=93eyhO8VTdg
[4] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euromaidan#Public_opinion_abou...
Of course, one could argue Ukraine has a right to self determination, but we effectively egged them on and on. And now here we are - Ukraine is getting destroyed in a war of attrition, more or less a proxy war.
One could argue that, but that would be their eagerness to ignore and dismiss important details of Ukraine's founding legal documents that made their independence possible in the first place.
If one reads the Declaration on the State Sovereignty of Ukraine from 1990 [1], one will find it in Chapter IX: "The Ukrainian SSR solemnly declares its intention to become a permanently neutral state in the future, which does not participate in military blocs and adheres to three non-nuclear principles: not to accept, produce or acquire nuclear weapons".
Ukraine's constitutional sovereignty has always been and still is predicated on respecting these conditions, but a whole lot of politicians, foreign and domestic, want you to believe otherwise because it serves their political goals.
[1] https://zakon-rada-gov-ua.translate.goog/laws/show/55-12?_x_...
Yeah, you just keep believing that. Western media was happy to report the mass exodus at the beginning of the war, but for some reason didn't notice that the vast majority of them have returned by now. Undoubtedly, some will be better prepared next time and will leave for good, but that definitely won't be 'most of tech employees' because there's nowhere for them to go. It's really hard to emigrate to the West (you have no idea how difficult it is even for those working in IT), and neighboring countries can't soak up that many (I'm from one of them).
* Electronics can be imported via China and Kazakhstan. Thousands of kilometers of line of contact, plenty of T62's in good condition, why not give them to separatists? It is not as if Ukraine has anything better to offer. Cruise, ballistic missiles on the conveyor and in the air. Every day and night.
* So? You are not planning to restart the business in the near future as a result of your position? Bye. Toyota, Honda, and Nissan have all already announced their return. Asian cars it is. Although, cars are still very expensive.
* Lol. Again, China and Kazakhstan. It's been cheaper to order from China than ever before (or since 2016 as I remember). Aside from that, phones and other electronics are available in store at prices even lower than before due to market rate prices. GPU's are literally more accessible than three months ago.
What hurts is inflation, but it's everywhere. Also, it's kinda annoying not to be able to pay for some services that I usually use through russian bank's credit card. I guess I'll need to travel to another country in order to get a regular card, many russians did that already.
They have 260+ captured Russian tanks, for one thing. Ukraine has asked supporting countries to instead send howitzers, anti-air guns/missiles, and multiple-launch rockets. By the end of this war Ukraine might end up with the largest tank army in Europe. https://oryxspioenkop.com/2022/02/attack-on-europe-documenti...
By most reports Ukraine (and Russia for that matter) are both much more limited by supply of trained tank crew than lack of physical tanks. Hundreds of Russian tanks requiring 3 crew members were already being driven by crews of 2 (in some cases untrained), and therefore combat ineffective right from the start.
Russia has lost an estimated 1000+ tanks in 3 months of war, and now has all but stopped doing maneuver operations, whether because they are scared to lose more or have run out of supply. From what I understand Russia’s tank production has entirely stopped for lack of microchips and other components.
> Cruise, ballistic missiles on the conveyor and in the air. Every day and night.
The rate of Russian use of long-distance missiles dropped off dramatically after the first couple months of the war. They wasted their missiles blowing up hundreds or thousands of militarily irrelevant civilian targets (apartment buildings, hospitals, schools, etc.). External experts don’t have perfect knowledge of Russian supplies, but the most plausible inference is that the Russian military is running out of whatever stores they were willing to use here. (Presumably there is still some reserve, but missiles getting used are not being obviously replaced.)
What the Russian military does have a lot of compared to Ukraine is artillery and artillery ammo, and unguided rocket launchers. Pretty much all of the stockpiled 152 mm (Soviet caliber) artillery ammo in Europe was already sent to Ukraine and Ukraine has almost run through it all, but Ukraine doesn’t yet have enough 155 mm (NATO caliber) howitzers to replace the 152 mm artillery that is out of ammo. Hopefully they will get hundreds more NATO howitzers in the coming weeks and months.
Sounds like they're already on the outskirts of Moscow and don't actually need the $40 billion.
Maybe we can get some of that back?
Why would they try to go to Moscow? They don’t have the logistical capacity to pull it off and it would be in nobody’s interest. Unlike Russia they don’t seem to be ruled by crazy people.
More realistically Ukraine will lose a bit more ground and a few more towns in Donbas before the Russian offensive culminates, and then as more supplies come in they will eventually counter-attack when they get a chance. The Russian military will run out of soldiers and equipment while the Russian economy sputters, and will be slowly pushed out of Ukrainian territory. What happens as a result to domestic policy in Russia will be highly volatile and is hard to predict.
Which systems exactly (models, etc)? And who exactly will field them?
> Ukraine will lose a bit more ground in Donbas before the Russian offensive culminates
Correct, that's one of their stated objectives
> The Russian military will run out of soldiers and equipment
They ran out of both two months ago, didn't you hear?
> Russian economy sputters
Any evidence that this is happening or will happen?
Russia has lost on order 20k dead soldiers and some multiple of that wounded, thousands of lost pieces of equipment, etc. But that is still less than half of the resources they committed in Ukraine. Despite steep losses, attrition hasn’t yet completely obliterated the Russian armed forces.
But since they have done no general mobilization in Russia, those lost troops are not being replaced, and more and more units are losing combat effectiveness with each passing month. They are also running out of untrained separatist cannon fodder from Donbas.
Ukraine has also suffered tens of thousands of casualties and lost a great deal of equipment. But since Ukraine is fighting for survival, it has much more available manpower, and its soldiers have better morale and motivation. The bottleneck for Ukraine is training and advanced weapons like artillery, rockets, missiles, and fighter jets.
> Any evidence [Russian economic trouble] is happening or will happen?
Lots of Russian industry has already shut down, and GDP is expected to contract 15% this year and an additional several percent the year after (for reference, US GDP contracted by 4.3% in the great recession, and by about 30% during 1929–1933). Europe is transitioning to other energy sources as fast as possible. In the medium term Russia is not capable of continuing much of its domestic oil production without foreign equipment and expertise. Few foreign investors are going to feel any confidence to invest in Russia, for years.
As Ukraine officials beg for help, and ask for half of US army armor 4th month into the war, you guys keep inhaling copium, dreaming in your beds about Russia "being destroyed" in Ukraine. I wouldn't expect anything less from western propaganda enjoyers tbh. Also taking oryx stats seriously, that's fun.
While some parts were definitely messy, and it really is a tradegy donbass and crimea situation had to be resolved this way, you'll soon be aware about the real situation in Ukraine, no matter how bad you want to believe the lies.
"The rate of Russian use of long-distance missiles dropped off dramatically" I offer you to check Ukrainian telegram channels, like "труха" for example (2mil followers) which will gladly tell you about this "dramatic decline".
“It’s unfortunate those pesky Ukrainians had the audacity to exist, which forced us to invade their sovereign country, shell their cities to rubble, and mass murder their civilians. Just like we were forced to mass murder Chechens, Georgians, and Syrians. And might have to mass murder Poles, Finns, Lithuanians, Romanians, or Kazakhs in the future.”
Just like the US "was forced" to mass murder Iraqis because, in addition to fake WMD claims, the US intelligence was linking Saddam to Bin Laden.
I wonder how exactly you would characterise Khattab, among other "prominent" "freedom fighters", and his role in the Chechen wars. Would you be willing to accommodate similar kind of characters in your country of origin and, possibly, give them a freedom to attract and gather a following among certain kinds of radicals? Would the US be willing to accommodate Al-Qaeda in, say, Texas?
If nothing else, the Iraq war led to a sharp political change in the USA. With any luck the senseless war of aggression in Ukraine will lead to similar changes in Russia. But since Russia is a fascist dictatorship, peaceful politics is outlawed and any changes are likely to be more violent.
* * *
The 1999 apartment bombings in Russia attributed to Khattab (among others) were most likely a false flag operation undertaken by the Russian state security service, under orders from Vladimir Putin. Using self-terrorism killing hundreds of your own civilians as a pretense for launching a war and mass-murdering tens of thousands of your unhappy oppressed colonial subjects while obliterating their cities is a hell of a way to cement personal power.
right, and in line with this level of evidence and argumentation, 9-11 in the US was presumably organised and conducted by a joint operation between the Pentagon and FBI.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_apartment_bombings#Rus...
https://www.gq.com/story/moscow-bombings-mikhail-trepashkin-...
> 9-11 in the US was presumably organised and conducted by a joint operation between the Pentagon and FBI
This is not very plausible given the extensive available evidence about the plane hijackers and their biographies. More plausible (though still unproven) is speculation about the role of Saudi elite. Zacarias Moussaoui claimed in a deposition that major donors to Al Qaeda included “Prince Turki al-Faisal, then the Saudi intelligence chief; Prince Bandar Bin Sultan, the longtime Saudi ambassador to the United States; Prince al-Waleed bin Talal, a prominent billionaire investor; and many of the country’s leading clerics.” (quotation from NYT) Of course, while he had the access to know about what happened, Moussaoui is not the most credible source.
In the US where free speech is protected, those who made various claims and conspiracy theories about the September 11 attacks (Bush did it! Israel did it! The CIA did it! etc.) didn’t get locked up or murdered, unlike the people investigating or raising questions about the Russian apartment bombings. For instance, Artyom Borovik, Anna Politkovskaya, and Alexander Litvinenko, all of whom were assassinated https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artyom_Borovik https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Politkovskaya https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Litvinenko
Only, for some reason the free speech protection did not help Assange from being prosecuted and his life being destroyed for broadcasting US war crimes evidence in Iraq [1]. The same could be said about your prior mentioning of the Battle of Grozny. There were real terrorist groups in Grozny that had to be eliminated, and in a 2007 Baghdad there was nothing but a false pretence.
[1] the infamous US taxpayer-funded "keep shooting" "collateral damage" done in Iraq: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zYTxuW2vmzk
If he ever is successfully extradited to the USA, he will be afforded the same protections of the law as any other accused person. He will face a trial by jury, and have access to an attorney. The prosecutors will need to prove to the jury that he committed a specific crime.
But he won’t be assassinated, summarily executed, or imprisoned without trial, as regularly happens to government critics in Russia.
you are deflecting from the question:
> Would you be willing to accommodate similar kind of characters in your country of origin
Khattab and his friends like Basayev and other "freedom fighters" have a long and undisputed history of butchering civilians that they were proud of. Taking a maternity ward hostage, or beheading western communication engineers, or, say, stuffing an elementary school with explosives and taking the kids hostage, and many other similar things were done in broad daylight with these lunatics officially bragging about killing civilians. But you've conveniently swept it under the rug. Well, here is the answer: if a group like that operated in the US, they would have been shot like rabid dogs at all cost, very quickly.
> Iraq war led to a sharp political change in the USA
What change? US continued to have troops on the ground in those countries for decades, culminating with the rise of ISIS in Iraq _on Obama's watch_, no less. Matter of fact, there are still several thousand US troops in Iraq _and_ Syria, doing God knows what there, on my dime.
In the USA, violent groups are treated as a law enforcement problem, unless direct police violence is necessary to prevent them from harming someone. Extremists who commit local crimes are arrested and prosecuted, and afforded all of the normal protections of the legal system.
For example, the Oklahoma City bombers Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols were tried and sentenced to death and life imprisonment, respectively. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oklahoma_City_bombing
There is a chance domestic terrorists could be let off based on prosecutorial incompetence or sympathy, jurors’ personal beliefs, or a future executive pardon, but going through a legal process is much better than extrajudicial assassination.
The US government has plenty of skeletons in its closet, but there is nothing in its recent history close to the annihilation of Grozny. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Grozny_(1999–2000)
I doubt this will continue.
The West has clearly demonstrated that their sanction and Russo-phobia will target not just politicians and oligarch, but normal people as well. Students being expelled, employees and artists fired, hospitals not treating them, etc.
Ordinary Russians aren't safe/welcome in the West, and they know it. Going home is their only choice (or praying that Russia collapses soon and Russo-phobia ends... sounds like a gamble).
Russia is ahead of the west both in ballistics & air defense using mostly off the shelf consumer chips that are very easy to smuggle in via 3rd parties.
> Starting to use 1950s and 1960s tanks.
Retrofitted tanks that get the job done. These are being sent to the rear for policing (occupying) operations as well as given to the Donbas separatists.
> Renault gave away 68% of car manufacturer Avtovaz to the state
Pretty sure that was on Renaults own volition. The Chinese are more than glad to take up the slack.
This is an absolutely absurd claim. I will say that it is flat-out FALSE.
Probably not a troll, but a true believer. As a Russian/American following this sick war with abject horror, it really depresses me...
That's the scent I get from these comments. The same lies that I've been hearing on Russian TV for years and years. "Sanctions? Russia's doing better than ever! Failures? The entire war has been going exactly as planned! Technology? We have some of the most advanced military tech in the world! Ukraine? It was never a country to begin with!"
Anyways:
- https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/pentagon-demurs-biden-confir...
- https://missilethreat.csis.org/system/russian-air-defense/
- https://georgetownsecuritystudiesreview.org/2019/06/26/the-r...
For several years we bet the global economy on the idea that we could safely coexist with an aggressive dictator. That bet did not pan out. I agree with you that the least painful time to remove our dependence on Russian fuel was several years ago, but we failed to take the ample warnings and here we are in a crisis. At least we're finally dealing with it.
Please, enlighten us, what should be done?
Tensions are already rising between the Saudi's and Russians, who are frustrated with Russia's drop in output since the war started. This will only exacerbate the west moving away from fossil fuels - essentially weakening oil power world wide.
On top of that, all the money they're making from oil has been pretty much paying off accumulated foreign debts. People are concerned about the export - but it doesn't matter if you export a lot if you can't import what you need for an extended war effort or for your citizens.
I think Russia has already lost this war from a geopolitical perspective. Even if they take the Ukraine, their position is worse than it was from before.
Regarding debts, the Russian federal debt is one of the lowest in the world. Google/Yandex it.
And as for the citizens, yeah - no more BMWs or iPhones (just kidding, those will come from Kazakhstan and Armenia at a markup)...
So yes, you could turn a blind eye on Russian soldiers murdering people, stealing, raping, and so on, but it would be naive to think it will eliminate the problem: it will make it worse in the long term.
[1] https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/cpi.pdf
- Russia must return all lands that once belonged to it
- Russia must solve "the Ukrainian question"
- the west is our enemy, Russia have reliable allies in the east
- Putin is the reincarnation of Peter the Great (hello Finland and Sweden)
Any peace talks or "business as usual" will lead to a new war in a few years against Poland, Finland, etc. and more blood and refugees. This is how an authoritarian, fascist militaristic state works.
Some people have just lost their ability to think clearly in the US, I (a mexican) lived there for a couple of years and the only thing I can say is that America (as it is now) sucks badly to the point that I prefer mexican corruption and (narcos) crime than america's sick society (were teenagers are murdering people at schools), stupid policies and, the indoctrination of their school system which even before today's stupidity of "gender as an abstract concept" was already really bad, now the whole place its just plain riduculous
In this case it would have been better to say "US embarrassingly urges use of Russia fertilizer"