Weird that it got through with a mistake in point 2:
> Russia believes that time is on its side. To keep the war machine going, Russia is ready [missing a 'to' here] raise the stakes. Russia seems to believe it can “bomb” Ukraine to the negotiating table.
I assume this was written in Estonian, for people who live and speak Estonian. It was then translated to English by a non-native English speaker for additional international purposes, but as a native speaker of English I'm not the primary audience.
Really they did a pretty good job. I could do better (as a native English speaker), but it would a lot of effort. My rough drafts (which is all you find here) are much worse.
Interestingly, they didn't talk much about the information domain this year in the executive summary. However, an example from the report:
Russia uses cyberattacks to support its strategic objectives (e.g., causing fear and weakening society’s resistance to the aggressor, disrupting the functioning of the state, and creating information noise to make it difficult to distinguish reality from disinformation). The Russo-Ukrainian war confirms that cybersecurity measures 12 make it possible to withstand cyber espionage, cyber sabotage and influence operations.
Russia has had some success in its information operations. It is evident even from the number of pro-RU trolls in the comments here.
They use the term ethnic Russian-speaking minorities, but from those minorities, it's ~89% Russians, ~8% Ukrainians and ~3% Belarusians. Not sure how much Pro-Russia sentiment there is among Ukrainians in Estonia but I'd be surprised if it's significant, so it's really "Russians" in 2023, even if it was broadly "Russian-speaking" in 2014.
At this point even having a Russian speaking population is potentially a liability regardless if they’re pro-Russian or not, since Russia will just spin whatever pro-Estonian or anti-Russian sentiment they say to be propaganda and Russia will just say they obviously need to be liberated so they’re able to express their support for Russia.
While only roughly 300,000 to 450,000 of 1.3 million of Estonians have ethnic ties to Russia, 73% are near Estonia’s border with Russia:
Only if you consider a 100 year old border a dire situation. Otherwise it would make way more sense economically for Russia to offer to resettle anyone interested no longer being Estonian instead of invading yet another sovereign country.
For context:
in USSR a person could not choose to move to live in another area, city or town. that was VERY difficult to do (was possible by marriage). Baltic countries and any close to border areas were especially controlled. But military, KGB and Communist party could appoint people to live in Baltic countries. those were "special" people - that proved their allegiance I can say. That is why they are a challenge to Estonia and other Baltic countries.
Yes, but most Russians living in Estonia are post-1945 colonists or descendants of post-1945 colonists. I had imagined that the bulk of the population have a long and storied history in Estonia, but they don't. For example, no ethnic Estonians were allowed to return to Narva after the war, and was instead settled overwhelming mostly by Russian colonists. Narva is the third biggest city in Estonia, and 88% Russian. Pre-colonisation it was majority Estonian.
So the border is old but the ethnic borders are very new and based on very recent Russian colonisation.
Of note, “The status of Narva was resolved in a July 1917 referendum, when the district population, at that time roughly equally divided between ethnic Russians and Estonians, voted to attach itself to the newly autonomous and soon to be independent republic of Estonia.”
For context: there were about 2-3% russians of the total population before WWII. Russia imported hundreds of thousands of them, with the explicit goal of replacing us local estonians. Unfortunately we now have this.. large minority and a part of it yearns for the time when they, the russians were the master race in the empire, everything could be done in their language and all others were below them.
And a former USSR country (although not willingly), and it shares a border with Russia, and it's the most remote NATO country. That said, if Russia does try anything, that will escalate the conflict and get NATO involved directly.
I think the former (not willingly part of) is the intended reading, referrring to how the Baltics were forced into the Soviet fold, as opposed to how some other constituent republics joined. (Not to belittle the foul play of the creation of Soviet Union in general, either.)
Estonia isn't even really considered a former SSR if I'm not mistaken. The period of time they were an SSR was mostly considered an illegal occupation, with the legitimate and recognized government being in exile. It's similar to calling Vienna, Austria a "former German city" because of the Anschluss.
Was the process of a joining the the USSR ever a willingly thing a country could choose to do or not to do?
AFAIK, the process was something more like Russian army invades your country and says "Congrats comrades, you are now liberated and part of the Soviet Union", rather than "Hey, would you like to have a democratic vote on joining our Soviet Union? No hard feelings if you don't want to, we can still be friends."
Interestingly, the USSR also held a referendum in the Baltics, but similar to Ukraine, it was after they invaded them and installed a puppet regime. The more you study history, the more you notice the same old tricks.
But was the referendum a fair and independent one, recognized and verified by the international community, or was it a sham referendum under threat of invasion, like the one in Austria for joining Nazi Germany, with a huge YES option in the middle, and a small NO option in the corner[1]?
>But was the referendum a fair and independent one, recognized and verified by the international community
The same "international community" lead by a number of imperialist and colonialist countries still at the time maintaining protectorates and colonies all around the world whose local populations fought with huge toil for their independece?
That would be like the pot recognizing and verifying the validity of the kettle's blackness...
>The same "international community" lead by a number of imperialist and colonialist countries
OK, touché! True, most of Europe was a mess back then, with every country trying to establish an empire or defend itself from being invaded by one. There weren't many countries you could count on for an independent perspective. You had to be pro $SOME_EMPIRE and against $SOME_OTHER_EMPIRE. Unless you were Switzerland, there was no middle-ground option.
It's noteworthy that Anschluß had huge support in the 20s and 30s but the Entente forbade a unification of the newly shrunken Austria and Germany. Had the referendum happened earlier it might well have passed without such underhanded tactics.
The referendum in Crimea has been repeated by numerous Western organizations, including Gallup. [1] The results are nearly identical to what Russia said they were. Russia claimed a 97% "yes" with an 83% turnout rate. Gallup found that 82.8% of Crimeans agreed that the poll reflected the will of the people. It's two ways of saying, more or less, the exact same thing. The minority that opposed joining Russia chose to boycott the referendum, which is why it was 97% yes instead of ~83%. It's going to breakdown largely on ethnicity. Crimea is about 68% ethnic Russian, 13% ethnic Tatar (which is an autonomous republic within Russia), and then about 16% ethnic Ukrainian.
If you're looking to history - this event mirrors Kosovo, just with roles reversed. An ethnic minority, geographically isolated, within Serbia declare their independence. This is rejected by Russia and backed by the US who ensures forces are on the ready to "enforce" Kosovo's independence. The big difference is that the one remained relatively peaceful with no further largescale escalation. Ukraine, by contrast, was determined to retake Crimea and clearly had the full backing of the West. So, in many ways, this war started 9 years ago.
> If you're looking to history - this event mirrors Kosovo, just with roles reversed.
With the "minor" difference that Serbia was committing ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, while no such thing happened in Crimea.
> The big difference is that the one remained relatively peaceful with no further largescale escalation. Ukraine, by contrast, was determined to retake Crimea and clearly had the full backing of the West.
That's completely false. Crimean border has been more peaceful than Kosovo-Serbia border.
There's a whopping bit of selection bias in that Gallup poll; it polls only people still living in Crimea. Some of those are Russians who immigrated in, and there's a big missing chunk of people who left because of the invasion.
It should be unsurprising that the folks who stayed tend to be the folks who support the Russian annexation. The opinion of those who fled matters, too.
That's definitely a factor, though I'd also add across all ethnicities. Remember we're looking back with hindsight. Imagine you're an ethnic Russian in Crimea in 2014. "Your" president has just been overthrown, there's been intermittent ethnic conflict rising, and now your territory just declared their independence. Your future is not looking peaceful, to say the least.
We can look at past populations though. [1] Ethnic Ukrainians have never been more than a sizable minority in Crimea. Their peak was 26.5% in 1970. And indeed there was a sharp drop in Ukrainians from 2001 to 2014 (going from 24% to 16%), though that was following a downward trend from the 1989 to 2001 census as well.
So if we take a high end estimate and say the real number was 25% Ukrainian, you'd still likely end up with a poll result of ~74% instead of 83%.
From the article: "The U.S. made a big deal about the rights of ethnic minorities there known as the Tatars, which account for around 10% of the population. Of the 4% total that said they did not endorse Russia's annexation..."
It's unclear whether they're saying 96% of Tatar's supported Russia, or "only" 60%. I'd assume the latter for balance, but the writing sure does suggest the former. In either case it's the same story. The reason for the absurdly high poll numbers overall is that ethnic Ukrainians boycotted the referendum.
After they had forced their military bases on us, there were elections where only one candidate for each district was allowed and of course only candidates who supported the soviet union could be elected, it was a totally fake election. Then the new "parliament" voted to join the soviet union. So some stupid russians still say "but you joined voluntarily!!" and so on.
While I understand your intent, I think the wording isn't necessarily the best. You wouldn't refer to France as "a former Nazi state (although not willingly)". Similar to how you would say that France was occupied by the Nazi Germany, Estonia was occupied by the USSR.
history is history, but although they werent "willingly" part of ussr, the fact of history is that many estonians (and latvians) pretty willingly welcomed the nazis
Still, maybe Estonia should cook up a special solution now. I bet some residents who were on the fence before the recent aggression changed their minds now. I understand though it's a tricky real-politik situation. I'm lucky to not live in a country with a border to Russia.
No they shouldn't. Russia has played the "we must protect the Russian minority in that region" card before to justify military action. Its' the whole reason we have a war in Ukraine. Estonia must make ensure that no such pretense can exist in their country. Denying citizenship to people who don't denounce their Russian nationality and don't fully accept "becoming Estonian" is the right thing to do, IMO.
It’s just nonsense. If the agresor wants to invade the country- they do that regardless. Germany-Poland the obvious example. If anything, the discrimination of local russian minority makes look it extremely injusted and oppressive.
If you legalize a sizeable population loyal to another country, they can be manipulated to derail political processes in the host country via normal democratic procedures. Things like NATO or EU ascension become challenging. Estonia was right to nip this in the bud.
Sure, but what Estonian carrots can be offered today to make the russian speakers feel welcome and appreciated? I'm a strong believer in two pronged approaches to avoid marginalization. Almost everywhere it occurs, there's hell to pay later, for everyone involved. There are kids born every year who had no say in the matter.
The alien passport gives you mobility across Schengen area and free access to Russia (without having to live in Russia). For its owners it's a decent value.
> mobility across Schengen area and free access to Russia
Only to visit for up to 90 days, not to actually reside in either place. So it would be more like a stateless European getting an ESTA, which is hardly a replacement for actual citizenship in their home country.
> For its owners it's a decent value
An actual Estonian passport lets its owners work in the EU and gives them mobility across 181 countries; a Russian passport gives them access to 119. Estonian non-citizens can visit 46. Not that visa-free access to another country is the point of citizenship.
> A Russian passport requires visa application to any of Schengen states. The queues for filing I believe are into months now.
I do not think that this will really be a motivating factor. Schengen visa waiting times would be the least of a stateless person's concerns.
> Indeed, and people who can't be arsed to naturalize clearly don't see it either.
I am not sure if you are suggesting that non-citizens are refusing to naturalise because they would lose visa-free access to Russia and the Schengen area. Historically, the most commonly-cited barriers to Estonian naturalisation have been the difficulty of the citizenship test and of learning the language, according to the Estonian ministry of culture. The context of the thread was someone suggesting that naturalisation be made easier.
Look, a B1 in native language and culture/history classes are very much the baseline for naturalization all over Europe. The only unique thing about Estonian situation is they provide that opportunity to people who found themselves in the country illegally.
As a staunch supporter of the Baltics, Ukraine and against Russian aggression and its imperial ambitions, I am against denying of citizenship on principle.
I also happen to think it's counter-productive. Where can I read more about this?
One man's denying of citizenship is another's decolonization.
…about 125,000 people (most but not all of whom were Russian speakers) who failed the tests or refused to take them have become stateless, or “non-citizens”, who hold a grey passport. Tens of thousands have opted for the red Russian passports proposed by Moscow.
Main requirement frequently mentioned preventing the citizenship is unwillingness to pass the language exam. Same or similar rules (understanding the language, accepting constitution, paying taxes, etc) apply in other countries, including Russia. One of the issues is that Estonia does not accept dual citizenship and Russian citizens are often not willing to give up their passport even when they have never lived there (this attitude has changed during the last year, however).
To make matters worse, some people (66k in JAN 2022) do not have citizenship, they however have a special status in Russia, making traveling there easier than with Estonian citizenship.
This is what happened in WW2. Nobody was willing to negotiate with Hitler because it was apparent that he was utterly untrustworthy, as evidenced by his repeated aggressions through the 30s before WW2 finally broke out.
It's the same situation here. Nobody can possibly trust Putin. He's utterly untrustworthy and any treaty would presumably just be breathing space and time for Russia to continue building up its forces for another invasion, just like Hitler with, for example, the Munich Agreement. The fact is that Russia has invaded Ukraine in an act of imperial conquest under the leadership of Putin, and as a result it's very difficult to negotiate with him.
"nobody can trust Putin" - it was admitted both by Merkel, and by another high ranked politician whose name I do not remember at this moment that the goal of Minsk agreement was not to give autonomy to Donbass, which did not accept ukranian nationalism, but to buy time for Ukrainian army to rearm.
Merkel was widely misquoted. Here's what she actually said. Note that she referred to Ukraine getting more time in order to mature enough to maybe join NATO, not to be able to fight Russia on its own:
"I thought that the introduction of NATO accession of Ukraine and Georgia, discussed in 2008, was wrong. The countries did not have the necessary prerequisites for this, nor was it fully understood what the consequences of such a decision would have been, both with regard to Russia’s actions against Georgia and Ukraine, as well as NATO and its rules of assistance. And the Minsk Agreement of 2014 was an attempt to give Ukraine time.
Ukraine used this time to become stronger, as you can see today. The Ukraine of 2014/15 is not the Ukraine of today. An illustrative example was the battle for Debaltseve. At the beginning of 2015, Putin could easily have overrun them at that time. And I very much doubt that the NATO countries could have done as much then as they do today to help Ukraine."
Yes. You may dislike Merkel for her strategic decisions regarding fossil gas (I do), but there's no need to misquote her. That reads like a solid take to me.
I mean the simplest reason to misquote her is to muddy the waters and spread disinformation, so “no need” I don’t think quite holds. For some of the commenters here it seems they do have a need to do just that.
Notably, she said this after the 2022 invasion and this narrative doesn't correspond to the fact that her foreign minister Steinmeier was heavily pushing for the Minsk implementation (that's not what you do when you're just trying to buy time).
There is the mistaken understanding that this is all just an artefact of Putin. It's not. Most of the Russian elite agree with this war, since they (collectively, including before Putin) have been warning that they will not allow Ukraine to join NATO since the 1990s. This is all well documented.
All the bluster about "denazification and demilitarization" and helping the DNR/LPR aside, this war is entirely about NATO. It would make no difference were Putin replaced, in fact it may be worse since he is (surprisingly) one of the more moderate voices in Russia.
It doesn’t mean that they’d do anything about it. It’s Putin that’s eliminated anyone who can challenge him, so I assume when he goes so does the war and probably Russia as we know it.
It depends. If Russia collapses, yes. If not, you will just get someone the system accepts, and that's a Hawk, probably a Russian Nationalist Hawk. Putin is a Soviet Empire Hawk.
The Russian public has proven that it can collectively switch to believing whatever needs to be believed in order to continue the war. NATO is simply an excuse to reintegrate Ukraine into the Russian empire that it was part of for very long. When Finland, also on the border with Russia, decided to join NATO, Putin said that there's no problem with that, that it was something for the Finns to decide. Fear of enemies closing in somehow doesn't play there. But Ukraine, where there are millions of ethnic Russians and a similar culture, abundant natural resources, and history that needs to be fixed, is an obvious target if you're restoring an empire.
But the point is that Russia does nothing to prevent Finland from joining NATO. The comment I was replying to claimed that the Ukraine war is all about NATO expansion.
It’s not, and hasn’t ever really been, just about Ukraine “joining” NATO, because that was never on the cards. It still isn’t, even despite all of this. There’s a lot more to it.
Also you’re incorrect in your assessment of most of the Russian elite thinking this war was a good idea, that’s just not true, or you’re making the mistake of taking statements by them at face value, which my Ukrainian/Russian extended family will be the first to tell you to be careful of.
It also depends on what you mean by elite. The social elite in Moscow or St Petersburg does not run the show. Neither does the military. The security apparatus does.
No, this is almost not at all about NATO. This is about Ukraine drifting from Russian sphere of influence to the western sphere of influence. Russia would not allow Ukraine to join EU either, even if it promised to never enter NATO.
In short, this is about making Ukraine another Belarus.
You're not wrong, because that is true too, but it is NATO that scares Russia.
Given Russia's long history of bloody invasions, I don't think this is something Americans can at all relate to. The American Civil War is small potatoes compared to some of the things that Russians (and other continental countries) have been through.
The amount of effort you people put into not hearing what russians have on multiple occasions in plainest of words claimed to be the goal of the war is honestly mind boggling.
Was it denazification, demilitarization, or de-satanization? I've lost track of the many stated goals. Or was it to help those poor souls in the DPR shoot down more civilian jets? Can't quite remember. Or was it to protect German speakers in the Sudetenland?
And anyway, it's not a war. It's a Special Military Operation. How more plain can you get?
Please provide references to your claims that Ukraine wanted to join NATO that date before 2014. Not from Putin and Co claims. Ukraine, until very recently had no plans of joining NATO. Apparently Russia attempted Ukraine invasions starting 20+ years ago. It was always about rebuilding empire and forcing everyone back. And still is.
> Russian officials already know that any “negotiation” or treaty signed with Kiev (in fact with the US) is not even worth the paper it is written on, I had hoped the Estonian “Foreign Intelligence Service” would have been aware of that.
Can you substantiate this? Please provide to specific examples.
There are plenty. Russia is hardly a paragon of honestly, but from the Russian perspective there are plenty of examples to draw from about Western leaders ignoring agreements.
Most recently for the Russians is probably the seizing of their central bank's assets by the US and EU. I'm not sure how solid the legal rationale at the time was, but either way it happened: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/28/us/politics/us-sanctions-...
Neither side trusts the other. At all. So ultimately guns and blood will determine the result.
If Russia thinks a verbal assurance from the US SecState to a different country can bind NATO thirty years later as if it were a treaty, they're hopelessly naive. (They're not, of course. They know this is bullshit.)
It was many different leaders. I suggest you actually read the archive document(s). Yes, they're long.
Regardless of whether you think the Russians were hopelessly naive or full of shit, it is a promise broken. Remember, we're talking about negotiations, so their opinion matters too, regardless what you or I think about it.
None of which are empowered to individually and formally bind NATO to anything, let alone privately and verbally, and each to the Soviet Union, which hasn't existed for thirty years. "We're not gonna fuck with you while you're collapsing" was entirely reasonable and intentionally deescalatory at the time; pretending it's somehow a promise not to do anything while Russia moves into Georgia and Ukraine is silly.
The Budapest Memorandum, meanwhile, is an actual signed agreement by Russia.
> Regardless of whether you think the Russians were hopelessly naive or full of shit, it is a promise broken.
Nope. It's a PR meme created for 2007 Munich Security Conference where Putin made his famous speech and needes justifications for imperialistic ambitions. Stunning economic growth before 2008 crisis allowed him to build up an army, and there he declared his vision. Nobody talked about such assurance before ca 2006-2007, and the 1997 founding act on mutual relations between NATO and Russia excplicitly says that signatories must "respect for sovereignty, independence and territorial integrity of all states and their inherent right to choose the means to ensure their own security, the inviolability of borders and peoples' right of self-determination as enshrined in the Helsinki Final Act and other OSCE documents"[1].
Even if we accept the premise that such assurance was given (which Gorbachev denied), then it was given to the USSR, which does not exist anymore. Former parts of that USSR themselves applied for NATO membership. Should their status be bound forever to a non-existing state?
Furthermore, this approach is based on disgusting colonial attitude that Russians are a some kind of master race that has the right to decide over everyone else, while ethnically they made up barely half of the population of the USSR. What about the other half? Do they not have the right to determine their future? Are they forever slaves of the ghost of the USSR?
> Regardless of whether you think the Russians were hopelessly naive or full of shit, it is a promise broken.
No, Russian diplomats were not naive. They knew full well that whatever is not on paper does not exist.
It's surreal that 30 years later, we act like poor Russian diplomats didn't know that some random utterances made during long meetings won't be set in stone as an official policy forever.
Those people making such promises were not authorized to make binding promises anyway (something which Russian diplomats were aware of). There's a reason why agreement drafts undergo extensive analysis, vetting and approval process.
Their conclusion is not really deferent to either side's argument. Russia had every reason to believe in what was repeatedly said and implied, while the US had a justification in going against previous promises as the geopolitical scene shifted quite dramatically from when those promises were made.
Beyond this I'd emphasize in that geopolitical relations it's not like there's any law that forces countries need to abide their promises, whether spoken or written. If somehow there were a secret agreement in which the US overtly and explicitly agreed to not expand eastward in conditions identical to what happened, so what? Call on the UN to pass a meaningless resolution which the US would just veto anyhow?
And so in international relations, the perceived trust of a nation is ultimately far more relevant than the formality of an agreement.
Who broke the Budapest memorandum? Russia was all alone in that. It's impossible to make an agreement with Russia, as a state actor or not, while being sure that Russia won't break it the second it is beneficial for them. Claiming the contrary is pure ideology.
> It's impossible to make an agreement with Russia
Other people have mentioned it bellow me, but see what Merkel herself ("accused" of being on Putin's side, funnily enough) had to say about the Minsk accords.
Others has also cleared up the lies and misquotes. Why do you jump directly to tangent lies, instead of dealing with the main argument - that we are where we are because of Russia not upholding its promises?
Well in any non-delusional interpretation of the events Russia broke their promise of Ukrainian independence and security in 2014. Don't mention any terror bombings of Donetsk, as they have never taken place and civilians has not been dying in any numbers since '14 when Russia went into Ukraine. As documented by numerous ngos. Only Russia is in the wrong here. Full Stop. People like you are cheering on killings of civilians and colonialism.
And 20 years before that, the US tried to pull that shit in Russia, with Yeltsin's second term in 1996. Not covertly, mind you, but while advertising it on every corner and in every media like NYT as a "fight against communism". (which it partly was!)
By that point, Yeltsin was universally hated for turning Russia back towards autocracy, for botched privatization, and the Chechen war. His rating rose from 6% to 53% in mere half a year before the elections, with the help of a massive campaign he organized using the stolen money. But the fact that the Clinton administration aligned with him and tried to "help" him with the massive NGO and media work (that's only the overt part) has been remembered by most who supported the democratic change.
Instead of Yeltsin, it could have been Nemtsov, who was truly popular during that time, but refused to run exactly because Clinton+Gore supported Yeltsin... Nemtsov, remember that name? US administration suddenly did, in 2015. Too bad they didn't before.
"Do nothing" was also Russians' response at the time (except for the brief investigation that was quickly stopped by the autocrat), but that was one of the turning points in the people's minds.
And your thoughts on how democracy, despite being the least effective approach to extracting resources and suppressing dissent, was pushed on them by the US?
Afghanistan wouldn't be under Taliban control today, if the US had installed a dictator and given them a free hand.
Pro-democracy movements don't need prison camps, death squads, and institutional corruption. All of which - unfortunately - seem to happen fairly regularly when the US brings democracy to a small country which happens to be resource rich.
Can we stop pretending these are anything other than resource wars, combined with an excuse to throw money at the defence industry?
Russia looked at US actions in Iraq etc and apparently had an irrational attack of atrocity envy, blended with greed over the mineral-rich areas of Eastern Ukraine.
Neither empire is wholesome and good, but the Russians are completely crap at militarised colonialism while the US is fairly competent at it.
However... Russia is much better at subversion and bribery. Given Jan 6 and the wholesale co-option of the far right of the Republican party - which is most of it - only someone very naive would believe that the US and NATO aren't in danger of being subverted from within.
My suspicion is that Ukraine is part distraction, part attrition campaign against NATO, and part proxy war with China, with Russia as willing (because naively stupid) intermediary.
The real front is the internal politics of each NATO state.
Hungary is already lost, the UK is severely weakened by Brexit, Germany was compromised but is recovering, and the US has some very serious problems with infiltration and subversion. Which aren't being taken seriously enough.
>Russia seems to believe it can “bomb” Ukraine to the negotiating table.
I doubt Russia wants any such thing, they just want their toy back in their pram and the good
feeling that having Ukraine under their heel gave them, as well as any useful resources Ukraine might have - agricultural land, seaports, raw materials. Stuff like that.
They don't want to negotiate with anybody, they just want their stuff (back?) on their own terms and are willing to sacrifice as many Russians as it takes to get it.
The world has moved on from that kind of behaviour though, but lots of 60+ yr old Russians are living in a past they'll never get back to and are blithely ruining Russia's future to get there.
> They don't want to negotiate with anybody, they just want their stuff (back?)
And to be clear here, "their stuff" is (in their eyes) everything that was once part of the Soviet Union. Most of it is currently out of reach, but not attacking Poland next is a tactical decision acknowledging EU/Nato firepower, it's not because "we don't see a reason to attack a neighbor".
Exactly, and that's why most of Putin's vitriol and propaganda is directed against NATO, because it's a real impediment to them taking it all back.
It's also interesting to see how strongly the Baltic nations and Poland are pushing to support Ukraine, since they lived long enough under the Soviet heel and they definitely don't want to get back to that.
Good point, fortunately the US still has some strong and effectively functioning democratic institutions otherwise Putin's Trump card would still be paying dividends in the previously ongoing autocrat bromance.
I assume it's the same thing that's up with the German far right: they consider themselves in opposition to the EU / Berlin and the enemy of my enemy is my friend.
While that's also somewhat true for Poland, Poland likely calculates the risks differently based on their specific history with Russia. They don't want to become as progressive as Germany, but unlike a renewed Russian empire they don't see Western progressiveness as an existential threat to Polish independence.
> While that's also somewhat true for Poland, Poland likely calculates the risks differently based on their specific history with Russia. They don't want to become as progressive as Germany, but unlike a renewed Russian empire they don't see Western progressiveness as an existential threat to Polish independence.
IMO, another big difference is that they have both a direct border with Russia (Kaliningrad), and a larger border with Belarus - a country that is fine with Russia launch an invasion from their territory. When you're next to a country that is openly talking about reforming the USSR by force, and is actively in the process thereof, it can be pretty scary.
In contrast, Hungary is sufficiently far away from Russia that they can afford to focus more energy on more immediate rivals.
>> Russia seems to believe it can “bomb” Ukraine to the negotiating table.
> I doubt Russia wants any such thing, they just want their toy back in their pram and the good feeling that having Ukraine under their heel gave them, as well as any useful resources Ukraine might have - agricultural land, seaports, raw materials. Stuff like that.
In a technical sense, I can agree with you. The opening weeks of the war showed that Russia ideally wanted to do to Ukraine what the US did the Iraq in 1990-1991. If they had their druthers, they'd conquer the country without damaging any infrastructure. The only trouble is that Russia's military doesn't have that capability.
And Russia is perfectly willing to fall back on plan b: use artillery, drones, and missiles to level literally every building in the country as they try to conquer it 1 square meter at a time.
> ...but lots of 60+ yr old Russians are living in a past they'll never get back to and are blithely ruining Russia's future to get there.
That sounds like a Russian Federatiom Boomer generation dragging the rest of the nation down with it to rack and ruin for a nostalgic kick. For those on the ground in the Russian Federation or corresponding closely with those on the ground, is support for the war really mostly stemming from that generation and do they possess the kind of sociopolitical leverage as Boomers in the US?
It sounds overly simplistic to me to say, "lots of 60+ yr old Russians" are driving the support for the war. I'd be more inclined to subscribe to a description of an elite that control the levers of power and the economy are the drivers, and the general population like in too many nation-states (even the US, since objectively most legislation is passed by and for the elite) is more or less powerless.
As for the social leverage, I don't think they have much on the national level. However, I feel the lower-rung govt staff is mostly composed of 50-something women, and these also dominate meetings of homeowner associations. The men are either hard at work or already dead, and the younger people are not numerous and don't have much rights.
The thing is that nonetheless every war ever has ended as part of a diplomatic process. When this doesn’t happen you have something like the Korean War, which is technically still going on.
Also it’s bonkers that someone thinks Ukraine is untrustworthy this situation. Didn’t they give up all their nuclear weapons in a signed treaty under the guarantee that Russia promised to respect their territorial integrity? Doesn’t Russia now posses territory that’s “historically” German or Japanese, and expects that territory to be respected as Russian, regardless of the history? Ukraine is Ukraine, and the thing preventing the situation from reaching a diplomatic ending, which again is how all wars end, is that Russia can’t bring itself to back down now, and everything else is just excuses from the land of fiction that only work when applied unilaterally.
> Russia and Ukraine nearly had a diplomatic solution in March, until NATO stopped them.
You're going to need some reliable evidence for this and an explanation of what the solution actually was, as well as why the Ukranians aren't making more of this.
Wow, that’s a lot of unverified claims. What is the source for the diplomatic solution from March 22? What’s the source for NATO stopping a diplomatic solution?
Nukes are an irrelevant issue that keeps getting brought up. Ukraine were pressured by Russia and the US and were offered incentives to hand the nuclear weapons to Russia.
Furthermore the US even had to help Russia itself with the dismantling and disposing of some weapons over the years. It was in nobody’s interest for yet another country to have nukes when poverty and corruption would have almost certainly led to “losing” them or losing them one way or another.
You’ve commented on the historical territory out of the blue, I don’t see the parent commenter mentioning that. Keep in my mind that Ukraine possesses territory they gained after WW2 as part of the Soviet Union and there’s no indication that they want to return it. Opening up these old territorial disputes is not a good idea.
In general trying to present Ukraine as fundamentally different from Russia as far as corruption or trustworthiness goes when they were both part of the Soviet Union and very close until 2014 is dubious and not supported by facts.
> Nukes are an irrelevant issue that keeps getting brought up.
The Budapest Memorandum, in which Ukraine agrees to divest itself of nukes in exchange from formal guarantees of territorial integrity from Russia, is hardly irrelevant here.
It seems like it is, but this agreement is typically presented for two reasons:
* as a way to show that a country should never give up its nukes. But they were forced and incentivized to give them up.
* as a way of showing Russia won’t honor its agreements. But this is inconclusive. On one hand, Russia did invade Ukraine, but didn’t invade Kazakhstan or Belarus (other signatories which also gave up their nukes).
And the agreement is not an official treaty, is not legally binding and doesn’t have an enforcement mechanism.
At the end of the day, Russia will probably respect an official treaty if the incentives and disincentives are right. Much like China or the US IMO.
> But they were forced and incentivized to give them up.
Sure. Russia later reneged on the incentives by invading Ukraine (repeatedly!). Thus, relevant.
> But this is inconclusive. On one hand, Russia did invade Ukraine, but didn’t invade Kazakhstan or Belarus.
"What about all the murders I didn't do?" isn't a great defense.
> And the agreement is not an official treaty, is not legally binding and doesn’t have an enforcement mechanism.
Cool, then they can stop whining about the supposed NATO "agreement" not to expand, which was not an official treaty, not legally binding, and doesn't have an enforcement mechanism.
My point about territory is to point out one example, of many, that Russia will claim whatever it wants when it stands to benefit. This is because the OP was talking about trust, and I was giving reasons for disagreeing with their pov.
The nuclear stuff is also relevant because, again, nuclear disarmament was exchange for security (read: territory) guarantees. In this respect the issue of who can be trusted is clear.
Regarding your final point about both countries having corruption and being very close, sure. I don’t think I follow the point though. One country has invaded the other with an army after promising not to do so. That’s what is relevant here, not black markets or mafia or just a culture of cynicism and corruption. If Ukraine wanted to change and stop doing things the old way in 2014 then that’s good I guess.
I'm not sure reparations have a good track record of brokering any sort of lasting peace and de-escalation, see the treaty of versaille for Germany post wwI...leading into wwII..
Nothing except concrete military capability, defensible border positioning, and an ingrained culture of territorial defensive without offensive aspirations has a good track record for lasting peace.
Any sort of peace acceptable to the Ukrainians is going to leave Russia with a lingering casus belli, which only the above (and NATO membership) is going to prevent escalating back into war.
The myth of overly harsh measures imposed on Germany after WWI leading into WW2 doesn't make sense. If anything, the measures weren't harsh enough, since after WW2 Germany was denazified, partitioned and occupied for decades, which is much more extreme, but obviously worked.
.. but not financially penalized into poverty. Both Germany and Japan had help to rebuild civilian manufacturing and employment. Very much a "rehabilitation" approach.
I wonder why Russia gets a pass from the left and right on being pretty brutal colonial empire. Even in present day borders Russia is composed of literally hundreds of colonised nations that get exploited and brutalised for the benefit of Moscow.
pretty much everyone on the left too. Outside of Chechen wars I've never seen Russia criticised for it's colonial practices from prominent figures on the left.
Jeremy Corbyn has consistently criticised Putin's aggression since Georgia - far more consistently than anyone else on the Right or the Left in the UK.
This is for countries that gained independence from Russia not 100s of nations that are still part of it. Plus he parrots so many Russian talking points on stop arming Ukraine that it's not a very good look.
Are you equating the control that the USA exerts over countries like Holland, Germany, and France with the control that The Kremlin exerted over countries like Poland, Lithuania, and Georgia?
OK, I totally misread that. In that case, that was a while ago. I mean does Belgium turn a blind eye towards Russian massacres in Ukraine because of their history in Congo?
Belgium no longer holds the Congo. The US still holds this huge chunk of North America. It's easier to be moral when it's not in conflict with your own selfish interests.
Until recently, both Dems and Reps were happy to fund and expand NATO, which is basically and anti-russian expansion org. Now Republicans seem to have an issue with that though.
I just don't understand what you mean by "Russia has gotten a pass?"
Hmm Russia can stop invading other countries ... In reality all of Russian elite was living in the west prior to the war. Lavrov's daughter in US Lavrov's Mistress and their children in UK. Putin's daughter in Netherlands and other daughter in South Korea and so on. Medvedev's son in California etc.
No? Who is doing the killing in Ukraine right now? A lot of them don't look Slav to me at all. Russia has built the definition of an imperial army. Once I see the moscovites dying in droves for more territory (9 time zones is never enough), we can talk more.
The non-Slavs in the army are more likely to be picked up by the media because of racist attitudes, both in Russia and, apparently, in Ukraine. There's even a common slur for them, "бойові буряти"/"боевые буряты", meaning "combat Buryats".
What a lazy answer! for sure, it is colonial. During the imperial time, during soviet time and now in the east of Ukraine. In all periods, Russia tried to destroy the local population/settlements and tried to build Cossak/Russian defense lines.
>Since 2006, the Holodomor has been recognized by the European Parliament,[4][32] Ukraine[33] alongside 22 countries, as a genocide against the Ukrainian people carried out by the Soviet regime.[34]
You have to admit, a famine in the region’s foremost exporter of grain, whose main export of that year was grain, takes spectacular mismanagement and neglect. That’s Soviet industrialization for you. I have to admit the genocide part makes no sense to me, though—I’ve seen no evidence that it was in any way targeted at Ukrainians specifically, only that they constituted a huge portion of the agricultural population at the time.
You don’t have to look that hard to find actual displaced peoples—the way the Russian Empire burned down all of Ossetia, the way Stalin ejected most of the population of Chechnya after that, the way Crimean Tatars constituted the bulk of the population in the Crimean peninsula and then suddenly Russians and Ukrainians did for some reason—there’s plenty. (If you really want to get into the history, care to find some speakers of the North Slavic languages for me?) It’s that the example does not seem to be a good one.
it was collectivisation not industrialisation, there were droughts in Ukraine 3 years in a row, there was an epidemic, the kulaks were sabotaging farming
I meant industrialization as a general government direction, not as an official Party policy buzzword: the Soviet state just did not care about the agricultural population except as a potential source of workers for the industry. The droughts and the epidemic still did not stop the grain exports (again, the main source of income for the state before, during, and after the famine, even per the official statistics) or affect the food supply in the cities all that much. The amounts an agricultural worker could legally leave for themselves were below subsistence, for years both before and after the war—steal (“steal”), escape to the city, or die.
The last part is so much bullshit thst it isn’t even really worth considering. (Every sentence in the whole of official Soviet history that includes the word kulak is bullshit.)
You can't just say "Left" and "Right". That distinction has become rather meaningless.
While the Right as a whole is leaning stronger and stronger in at least silent support of people like Putin (Christian defender of the white race and all that), the Left does not have this problem. There is a small crew of commies and tankies that drool over Putin, but us left-leaning folk laugh at them as much as anyone.
They might not drool over Putin but they are the most effective people to push the stop arming Ukraine narrative. Also again I've pretty much never seen them criticise russia for being a colonial empire with pretty brutal practices towards the colonised nations (outside of Chechen wars). Compare the amount of criticism Israel gets to Russia from the left.
That's not a Left/Right problem. Everyone, and I mean everyone, fell for the "Russia is not an empire" schtick.
Right now the world is in a process of reevaluation, and academia is a huge part of this. Educational institutions have realized they have been teaching Russian history all wrong, and it SHOULD be taught through the prism of imperialism. It's kind of amazing, considering that even looking at the last 100 years, Russia has been on a rampage of conquering and subjugating nations from East to West.
Before anyone tries, please do not compare this to ill-fated American adventures. Last I checked, Vietnam and Iraq are still not part of the United States.
Can you point to at least one historical analysis which identifies Russia as a colonial empire?
Seeing people draw this parallel was surprising to me, as I associate colonialism with the European conquerors of the world: Portugal, Spain, France, Great Britain, The Netherlands and Germany.
Indeed I’ve gotten this list from a GEO Magazine special issue dedicated to colonialism, showing on a map where each of those countries had their colonies between ~1400 and 1915. OTOH Belgium isn’t directly mentioned, so perhaps the list is not exhaustive.
>Can you point to at least one historical analysis which identifies Russia as a colonial empire?
Is this even a debate? Do you need an analysis also showing that the UK was a colonial empire? The second bit is trivial, it was called the Russian Empire. The first bit is also trivial, they had colonies in North America, for example.
> I associate colonialism with the European conquerors of the world
Russia is (historically) a European country. It only has land in Asia because of imperialism and colonisation.
It’s not a debate, seems more like a fringe theory trying to muddy the waters by making Russian imperialism look like colonialism, because the latter probably sounds worse to the modern average citizen.
If you look at e.g. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonialism there’s a really long list of countries under British colonialism. Russia has such a short list, it’s no wonder it’s not considered a (former) colonial power.
Well Russia's list is longer than Belgium's on that page, so I don't really see your point, unless you wish to argue that Belgium also wasn't really a colonial power?
> Seeing people draw this parallel was surprising to me, as I associate colonialism with the European conquerors of the world: Portugal, Spain, France, Great Britain, The Netherlands and Germany.
Indigenous peoples living in Russia like Mansis are simply not known about, while everyone has heard of Incas, Apaches and Comanches and their fate. The actual Russian-Russia is pretty small and borders Eastern Europe. Most of the territory you see on maps has historically belonged to indigenous peoples and is still dominated by them in many regions outside of major cities, wouldn't surprise me if the majority of land area of Russia to this day had ethnic majority of non-Russians. Their culture and language has been suppressed for a long time to turn them into loyal Russians, the same way US and Canadian and many other governments destroyed traditional lifestyle, forced resettlement, forced indigenous children into state schools and so forth. The difference from historic colonialism is that it's still happening in present day, and on a scale that has not been seen elsewhere in a long time - by that, I mean the war in Ukraine, also colonial in nature in what motivates Russia, and how they disproportionally conscript ethnic minorities to fight and die for Russia.
Anglo-american histography is fairly self-centered on these topics, lots of focus on American slave trade and colonialism by Western Europe, but very little on what happened in the rest of the world. This feeds into perception that the colonial history of the Americas is unique, that only blacks have been slaves, that only western countries have been colonial, etc while we have a large country in Europe even in 2023 that wants to establish politic and economic control over a nation of 40 million people, exploit them in every way, and impose foreign language and culture on them. And it's been like this for centuries.
If you want to get started somewhere, then I'd avoid publications that explicitly set to prove or disprove colonialism. Instead, read a balanced history of Eastern Europe and Russia, especially from the perspective of smaller nations if you can, and make up your own mind. You may discover that the life of farmers in Latvia in early 19th century wasn't that much different from Antebellum South. Same overall story, different setting.
Some experts have defined russian colonialism as "internal colonialism", they didn't conquer and abuse overseas territories, but expanded by taking over their neighbours and then used the resources of the territories taken over. Opressed the original local population and gradually destroyed their culture and language and identity by trying to russify them. Russia does it whenever it gets a chance.
Putin vision is Soviet Union 2.0, it has been pretty clear in the last year and even before.
From the Kremlin:
"Above all, we should acknowledge that the collapse of the Soviet Union was a major geopolitical disaster of the century. As for the Russian nation, it became a genuine drama. Tens of millions of our co-citizens and co-patriots found themselves outside Russian territory. Moreover, the epidemic of disintegration infected Russia itself."
Tell me you don't know what a Commonwealth of Independent States is, without telling me.
Putin doesn't want a "new USSR". He wants a Commonwealth. If its good for Brits and Canucks and Aussies and Kiwi's, it'll work for the rest of the world too ..
Its the USA that doesn't want to see this commonwealth form and become economically viable as a trading partner with the EU, because not only would it indeed represent an economic bloc that would be overwhelming for the US' intelligence services to corrupt, and usurp .. as they are wont to do .. it'd also be a superpower that even China couldn't handle.
Which is why the USA is doing everything it can (Ukraine coup) to ensure this unity never happens.
For the same reasons the US invaded Iraq i guess, for their security as well as the security of the people in the Donbas since conflict sparked with the CIA led coup
I think it's important to acknowledge that this perspective forms a significant part of Russian internal justification for it's action. Significantly, this allows Russia to claim to be a victim in pretty much all interactions with the west.
I don't think Russia should have been able to dictate the terms of NATO enlargement, but I do think the way that we enlarged NATO, combined with the lackluster way that the west attempted to engage with Russia was a foreign policy failure.
The biggest driving force behind NATO enlargement was always Russia.
Who knew that if you threaten countries with war they will want to join a defensive alliance.
This is realpolitik, so there isn't any morality beyond expansion and acquisition. Can we stop pretending these are anything other than resource wars, combined with an excuse to throw money at the defence industries?
Russia looked at US actions in Iraq etc and apparently had an irrational attack of imperial atrocity envy, blended with greed over the mineral-rich areas of Eastern Ukraine.
Neither empire is wholesome and good, but the Russians are almost wholly crap at militarised colonialism, while the US is fairly competent at it.
However... Russia is much better at subversion and bribery. Given Jan 6 and the wholesale co-option of the far right of the Republican party - which is most of it - only someone very naive would believe that the US and NATO aren't in danger of being subverted from within. It almost happened in 2020 and it could still happen in 2024.
My suspicion is that Ukraine is part distraction, part attrition campaign against NATO, and part proxy war with China, with Russia as willing (because naively stupid) intermediary.
The real front is the internal politics of each NATO state.
Hungary is already lost, the UK is severely weakened by Brexit, Germany was compromised but is recovering, and the US has some very serious problems with infiltration and subversion.
We must never forget that the American people murdered 5% of Iraqs' population on the basis of utter lies and have not faced justice for this atrocious abuse.
The moral authority that Americans claim, to justify their nations' heinous crimes against humanity, simply doesn't exist. Americans AND Russians ought to be shunned for their nations' war crimes.
"Thus, the intense debate revolving around casualty figures is an important element in the discussion of whether the population supports such interventions or not. It is therefore not surprising that the media, and even parts of academia, be it ideologically motivated or guided by other interests, use starkly sanitized figures (see Chapter 3: “The Numbers War”) And this has been quite successful: In a 2007 poll, Americans estimated the number of killed Iraqis at less than 10,000.
However, should the number of Iraqis killed from the 2003 U.S. invasion until 2012 actually be around one million, as the analysis of the existing scientific studies presented in the present study suggests, this would represent 5% of the total population of Iraq – a number which additionally indicates the extent of the corresponding damage inflicted upon society and the infrastructure. "
“I believe the perception caused by civilian casualties is one of the most dangerous enemies we face.”
U.S. General Stanley A. McCrystal in his inaugural speech as ISAF Commander in June 2009.
Like I said, no one's claiming 2M. Even if we take the most aggressive estimate (out of those listed on Wikipedia) of 1M, that's not 5% of the population.
Maybe you should match your figures with those of the Physicians for Social Responsibility:
"However, should the number of Iraqis killed from the 2003 U.S. invasion until 2012 actually be around one million, as the analysis of the existing scientific studies presented in the present study suggests, this would represent 5% of the total population of Iraq .."
Of course Americans' aren't going to own up to the magnitude of this crime. But it should be noted that this report was issued in 2015 - and a lot more death has happened since then. 5% is a conservative estimate.
The estimate of 1 million casualties is from 2007. We had not yet even begun withdrawing troops, and things like The War in Iraq (Islamic State) wouldn't even start until 2013. And that war was directly caused by our actions.
There's also the question of "when" when talking about a percent. The population of Iraq in 2003 (when the war started) was around 26 million. Their exceptionally rapid population growth is ironic when talking about us killing off a large chunk of their population, but relevant nonetheless. You end up with this weird scenario where Iraqi lives are measured (for those using percentages) less meaningful each year that passes.
Ultimately using percents is probably just a bad idea, and it's not like it's necessary to contextualize here how killing whether hundreds of thousands of some low millions of people, primarily civilians, is a really awful thing to do, let alone in a war based entirely on fabricated evidence.
The population if Iraq is 43 million right now, I'm sure you can appreciate the fact that the Iraq war is not happening right now, but instead started roughly two decades ago when the population was considerably different.
You can skim https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_interference_in_the_20... for a wide range of items with varying levels of evidence. "Proof" comes down to whether you're willing to accept assertions - the ability to execute a search warrant on the Kremlin is... limited - and what level of interference counts.
The Republicans concluded Paul Manafort, for example, "represented a grave counterintelligence threat" and "created opportunities for Russian intelligence services to exert influence over, and acquire confidential information on, the Trump campaign" while acting as Trump's campaign manager. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2020/08/18/sena...
That article does not seem to have been updated given the recent massive trove of information provided by the Twitter files. [1] A group, "Hamilton 68", was a central source on the "Russian trolls" narrative. They were widely cited, frequently as an exclusive source, by media and congressmen alike. They had a secret list of 644 "Russian trolls" whom they surveilled and used to populate their dashboard on the latest trends in Russian disinformation.
The problem is that those were mostly just 644 seemingly random, primarily conservative, "real" Western individuals. For instance David Horowitz [2] was a "Russian troll." Others included individuals who had written books on the US constitution, a conservative news editor, and so on. So basically whatever conservative individuals were discussing was labeled as "Russian disinformation" which the media (and congress) then simply took at face value and repeated.
Incidentally Twitter also knew that the "Russian disinformation" stuff was, itself, largely disinformation. They were able to determine Hamilton's entire list by simply looking at their API calls. While there was lively internal debate about whether they should go public with this information or not, and they did push back in private, they ultimately chose to remain publicly silent - just as the mainstream media is now also doing, leaving me to link to rando sites in lieu of where these stories ought be.
The one thing I'm certain about is that reading the book, 20 years from now, about whatever's happening now - is going to be interesting.
I fully agree; that was poorly written on my part. I've changed my post to say, "Hamilton68 was a central source on the Russian trolls narrative." which is more in the spirit of what I meant. But I'd emphasize that these issues are not isolated. Hamilton 68 was treated as an authoritative source and was promoted by individuals such as Adam Schiff. Schiff was the chair of the House Intelligence Committee which has oversight over the entirety of the US Intelligence Community.
So any investigation carried out by our intelligence community can be well expected to have also taken Hamilton 68 as an authoritative source. It's something akin to the Fruit of the Poisonous Tree. A -> B -> C -> D. But when it turns out that A is invalid, suddenly so is everything else that used it. So that entire article needs to be rewritten from scratch with consideration of the sources and their relationship to data that has been shown to, itself, be genuine disinformation.
One other small thing I'd mention here is that I think the chances of this having only happened or applied to Twitter are very near zero. We simply don't have access to e.g. the FBI Files, or the Facebook files, or the NYTimes files. Which is part of the reason why I said I'm quite looking forward to reading the book about today, in 20 years!
Because I've read that 'book' [1] for the Iraq War. The evidence for the mobile weapons laboratories was completely fabricated - they were pictures of weather balloon trucks. The 'high level insider' testimony came from a taxi driver who was just randomly making stuff up, and most of the intelligence community knew was just a compulsive liar. Nonetheless, his assertions made their way into no less than 112 governmental reports from January 2000 to September 2001 - and would be used to justify the war.
And it just continues on endlessly. Every bit of evidence, no matter how flimsy or obviously false, made its way through the proper channels - so long as it supported the desired narrative. This is not something that can be dismissed as incompetence even if you hold our intelligence community to an abysmal standard. And I see no reason to think that this has changed.
The Bush White House manipulated intelligence to get the result they already wanted.
The Trump White House and Senate Republicans definitely didn't want "yep, Russian involvement" to be the conclusion of the 2016 investigations. Very different situation, and a lot more evidence from a lot more venues (including successful criminal convictions).
Read the previously linked article [1]. Powell was initially skeptical of the claims being made by the intelligence community. It was ultimately the CIA that worked to convince him that it was legitimate. And things like the war authorization (and subsequent bills) were generally approved with overwhelming bipartisan support.
I'm not implying that it was only the CIA, but rather that these sort of situations tend to defy simplistic explanations. It's a lot of different people with a lot of different motivations. And those motivations are often going to drive them to come to the conclusions that they want to come to, exactly as happens in literally every other large organization in existence.
The US influence in the world it's not just militarily. It's economic, cultural, technologic, and idealogical influence is unprecedented. The USSR had a exportable ideology, but current Russian ethno-nationalism is rather a negative influence than a positive one.
“China’s efforts to build a community of like-minded countries opposed to the West under the banner of the Global Security Initiative – which would also include Russia – undermines Estonia’s security.”
Did someone say Global Defense Initiative (GDI)? Someone over there has played C&C a bit too much. :D
But they got the sides mixed up. It's more like Nod. (Which is a name taken from to "The Land of Nod" in Genesis, which was located to the east of Eden).
264 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 302 ms ] thread> Russia believes that time is on its side. To keep the war machine going, Russia is ready [missing a 'to' here] raise the stakes. Russia seems to believe it can “bomb” Ukraine to the negotiating table.
Really they did a pretty good job. I could do better (as a native English speaker), but it would a lot of effort. My rough drafts (which is all you find here) are much worse.
In democratic world we should respect dialogue and avoid using rethoric of enemy.
https://www.arte.tv/en/videos/106708-000-A/panic-in-the-balt...
Video is in French, and has no subtitles.
(yt-dlp gets the VTT file, but it appears to be empty).
An interesting 2014 read on their inclusion re: national defence matters: https://icds.ee/wp-content/uploads/2014/Juhan_Kivirahk_-_Int...
While only roughly 300,000 to 450,000 of 1.3 million of Estonians have ethnic ties to Russia, 73% are near Estonia’s border with Russia:
https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/europe/et-peop...
This YouTube provides an animated history of Estonian borders:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=HBA0xDHZjko
However, it generally follows the pre-1917 borders of the Governorates of Estland and Livonia.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=352476
I was unable to find a map overlaying pre-1917 borders and current borders.
So the border is old but the ethnic borders are very new and based on very recent Russian colonisation.
https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Narva
Of note, “The status of Narva was resolved in a July 1917 referendum, when the district population, at that time roughly equally divided between ethnic Russians and Estonians, voted to attach itself to the newly autonomous and soon to be independent republic of Estonia.”
One could move quite freely by 1970-ish.
Except that you could not have permanent residence in Moscow and Leningrad.
this is a weird construct, we were not willingly part of soviet union, not not willingly former
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estonian_Soviet_Socialist_Repu...
Was the process of a joining the the USSR ever a willingly thing a country could choose to do or not to do?
AFAIK, the process was something more like Russian army invades your country and says "Congrats comrades, you are now liberated and part of the Soviet Union", rather than "Hey, would you like to have a democratic vote on joining our Soviet Union? No hard feelings if you don't want to, we can still be friends."
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1938_Austrian_Anschluss_refere...
The same "international community" lead by a number of imperialist and colonialist countries still at the time maintaining protectorates and colonies all around the world whose local populations fought with huge toil for their independece?
That would be like the pot recognizing and verifying the validity of the kettle's blackness...
OK, touché! True, most of Europe was a mess back then, with every country trying to establish an empire or defend itself from being invaded by one. There weren't many countries you could count on for an independent perspective. You had to be pro $SOME_EMPIRE and against $SOME_OTHER_EMPIRE. Unless you were Switzerland, there was no middle-ground option.
If you're looking to history - this event mirrors Kosovo, just with roles reversed. An ethnic minority, geographically isolated, within Serbia declare their independence. This is rejected by Russia and backed by the US who ensures forces are on the ready to "enforce" Kosovo's independence. The big difference is that the one remained relatively peaceful with no further largescale escalation. Ukraine, by contrast, was determined to retake Crimea and clearly had the full backing of the West. So, in many ways, this war started 9 years ago.
[1] - https://www.forbes.com/sites/kenrapoza/2015/03/20/one-year-a...
With the "minor" difference that Serbia was committing ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, while no such thing happened in Crimea.
> The big difference is that the one remained relatively peaceful with no further largescale escalation. Ukraine, by contrast, was determined to retake Crimea and clearly had the full backing of the West.
That's completely false. Crimean border has been more peaceful than Kosovo-Serbia border.
It should be unsurprising that the folks who stayed tend to be the folks who support the Russian annexation. The opinion of those who fled matters, too.
We can look at past populations though. [1] Ethnic Ukrainians have never been more than a sizable minority in Crimea. Their peak was 26.5% in 1970. And indeed there was a sharp drop in Ukrainians from 2001 to 2014 (going from 24% to 16%), though that was following a downward trend from the 1989 to 2001 census as well.
So if we take a high end estimate and say the real number was 25% Ukrainian, you'd still likely end up with a poll result of ~74% instead of 83%.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Crimea
I'm skeptical of any referendum of a large group of people that gets a 96.77% result. Mr. Rogers wouldn't poll that high.
It's unclear whether they're saying 96% of Tatar's supported Russia, or "only" 60%. I'd assume the latter for balance, but the writing sure does suggest the former. In either case it's the same story. The reason for the absurdly high poll numbers overall is that ethnic Ukrainians boycotted the referendum.
After they had forced their military bases on us, there were elections where only one candidate for each district was allowed and of course only candidates who supported the soviet union could be elected, it was a totally fake election. Then the new "parliament" voted to join the soviet union. So some stupid russians still say "but you joined voluntarily!!" and so on.
It was a process with people both greatly against it and enthustiastically for it in the local populations, does that count?
history is history, but although they werent "willingly" part of ussr, the fact of history is that many estonians (and latvians) pretty willingly welcomed the nazis
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_occupation_of_Estonia...
https://news.err.ee/1608873710/still-no-solutions-for-russia...
Russia won't let them renounce their citizenship overseas, and going to Russia to do it will get you drafted.
No. It's just the excuse that's trotted out.
If that excuse wasn't available, a difference excuse/fig-leaf would have been given or created.
Trying to get rid of all potential excuses is unlikely to work, they'll just get creative and manufacture something else instead.
Only to visit for up to 90 days, not to actually reside in either place. So it would be more like a stateless European getting an ESTA, which is hardly a replacement for actual citizenship in their home country.
> For its owners it's a decent value
An actual Estonian passport lets its owners work in the EU and gives them mobility across 181 countries; a Russian passport gives them access to 119. Estonian non-citizens can visit 46. Not that visa-free access to another country is the point of citizenship.
Visa free does not generally mean residence permit included. Still a pretty reasonable deal for someone who is not a citizen in Schengen.
> a Russian passport gives them access to 119
A Russian passport requires visa application to any of Schengen states. The queues for filing I believe are into months now.
> Not that visa-free access to another country is the point of citizenship.
Indeed, and people who can't be arsed to naturalize clearly don't see it either.
I do not think that this will really be a motivating factor. Schengen visa waiting times would be the least of a stateless person's concerns.
> Indeed, and people who can't be arsed to naturalize clearly don't see it either.
I am not sure if you are suggesting that non-citizens are refusing to naturalise because they would lose visa-free access to Russia and the Schengen area. Historically, the most commonly-cited barriers to Estonian naturalisation have been the difficulty of the citizenship test and of learning the language, according to the Estonian ministry of culture. The context of the thread was someone suggesting that naturalisation be made easier.
I also happen to think it's counter-productive. Where can I read more about this?
…about 125,000 people (most but not all of whom were Russian speakers) who failed the tests or refused to take them have become stateless, or “non-citizens”, who hold a grey passport. Tens of thousands have opted for the red Russian passports proposed by Moscow.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estonian_alien%27s_passport
Main requirement frequently mentioned preventing the citizenship is unwillingness to pass the language exam. Same or similar rules (understanding the language, accepting constitution, paying taxes, etc) apply in other countries, including Russia. One of the issues is that Estonia does not accept dual citizenship and Russian citizens are often not willing to give up their passport even when they have never lived there (this attitude has changed during the last year, however).
To make matters worse, some people (66k in JAN 2022) do not have citizenship, they however have a special status in Russia, making traveling there easier than with Estonian citizenship.
Citizenship by birth is, while not uncommon, far from the norm (especially in Europe).
X being any random number chosen by rolling a D20, apparently, with case specific modifiers depending on job, language, parents, marriage, etc.
It's the same situation here. Nobody can possibly trust Putin. He's utterly untrustworthy and any treaty would presumably just be breathing space and time for Russia to continue building up its forces for another invasion, just like Hitler with, for example, the Munich Agreement. The fact is that Russia has invaded Ukraine in an act of imperial conquest under the leadership of Putin, and as a result it's very difficult to negotiate with him.
So I think you are confusing things.
"I thought that the introduction of NATO accession of Ukraine and Georgia, discussed in 2008, was wrong. The countries did not have the necessary prerequisites for this, nor was it fully understood what the consequences of such a decision would have been, both with regard to Russia’s actions against Georgia and Ukraine, as well as NATO and its rules of assistance. And the Minsk Agreement of 2014 was an attempt to give Ukraine time.
Ukraine used this time to become stronger, as you can see today. The Ukraine of 2014/15 is not the Ukraine of today. An illustrative example was the battle for Debaltseve. At the beginning of 2015, Putin could easily have overrun them at that time. And I very much doubt that the NATO countries could have done as much then as they do today to help Ukraine."
Furthermore, Minsk agreement was about much more than just Donbas. Implementing it would mean puppetization of the whole Ukraine - read a pretty damning analysis here: https://www.chathamhouse.org/2020/05/minsk-conundrum-western...
All the bluster about "denazification and demilitarization" and helping the DNR/LPR aside, this war is entirely about NATO. It would make no difference were Putin replaced, in fact it may be worse since he is (surprisingly) one of the more moderate voices in Russia.
Both Sergey Lavror and Maria Zakharova, in particular, have changed their discourse to be quite a bit more hostile as time has gone by.
I think you mistake self preservation in the form of support for a war with the will to start one and continue it.
It’s a kleptocracy, most of them just want money. Putins circle is small and most elite had no idea what was going to happen.
I’m no fan of the Russian kleptocracy, but a peaceful one would save a lot of lives. Including a lot of Russian lives.
Also you’re incorrect in your assessment of most of the Russian elite thinking this war was a good idea, that’s just not true, or you’re making the mistake of taking statements by them at face value, which my Ukrainian/Russian extended family will be the first to tell you to be careful of.
No, this is almost not at all about NATO. This is about Ukraine drifting from Russian sphere of influence to the western sphere of influence. Russia would not allow Ukraine to join EU either, even if it promised to never enter NATO.
In short, this is about making Ukraine another Belarus.
Given Russia's long history of bloody invasions, I don't think this is something Americans can at all relate to. The American Civil War is small potatoes compared to some of the things that Russians (and other continental countries) have been through.
It makes for a very paranoid country.
This is something which most European countries can relate to, but they don't use it (anymore) to justify imperialism.
However, I hope you can understand why a major power like Russia might be suspicious.
Someone is eating the Russian propaganda here. Projection and all.
> However, I hope you can understand why a major power like Russia might be suspicious.
It can be as suspicious as it wants, within its borders.
You need to take a walk, and I'm out too.
And anyway, it's not a war. It's a Special Military Operation. How more plain can you get?
/s
Can you substantiate this? Please provide to specific examples.
The first and most obvious is this: https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/russia-programs/2017...
Then comes the withdrawal from various nuclear treaties, the first being this: https://carnegieendowment.org/2021/12/13/u.s.-exit-from-anti...
GWB's attempted placement of a missile shield in Poland (ostensibly to defend from Iran) really heated the waters, although Obama ultimately killed it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_missile_defense_...
Then Minsk failed, and Merkel, Hollande and Poroshenko's statements haven't helped at all. Merkel's is probably most important (Die Zeit has a paywall, so here is a PDF of the article): https://pdfhost.io/v/e0FRLvfzB_Angela_Merkel___Hatten_Sie_ge...
Most recently for the Russians is probably the seizing of their central bank's assets by the US and EU. I'm not sure how solid the legal rationale at the time was, but either way it happened: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/28/us/politics/us-sanctions-...
Neither side trusts the other. At all. So ultimately guns and blood will determine the result.
If Russia thinks a verbal assurance from the US SecState to a different country can bind NATO thirty years later as if it were a treaty, they're hopelessly naive. (They're not, of course. They know this is bullshit.)
Regardless of whether you think the Russians were hopelessly naive or full of shit, it is a promise broken. Remember, we're talking about negotiations, so their opinion matters too, regardless what you or I think about it.
None of which are empowered to individually and formally bind NATO to anything, let alone privately and verbally, and each to the Soviet Union, which hasn't existed for thirty years. "We're not gonna fuck with you while you're collapsing" was entirely reasonable and intentionally deescalatory at the time; pretending it's somehow a promise not to do anything while Russia moves into Georgia and Ukraine is silly.
The Budapest Memorandum, meanwhile, is an actual signed agreement by Russia.
Nope. It's a PR meme created for 2007 Munich Security Conference where Putin made his famous speech and needes justifications for imperialistic ambitions. Stunning economic growth before 2008 crisis allowed him to build up an army, and there he declared his vision. Nobody talked about such assurance before ca 2006-2007, and the 1997 founding act on mutual relations between NATO and Russia excplicitly says that signatories must "respect for sovereignty, independence and territorial integrity of all states and their inherent right to choose the means to ensure their own security, the inviolability of borders and peoples' right of self-determination as enshrined in the Helsinki Final Act and other OSCE documents"[1].
Even if we accept the premise that such assurance was given (which Gorbachev denied), then it was given to the USSR, which does not exist anymore. Former parts of that USSR themselves applied for NATO membership. Should their status be bound forever to a non-existing state?
Furthermore, this approach is based on disgusting colonial attitude that Russians are a some kind of master race that has the right to decide over everyone else, while ethnically they made up barely half of the population of the USSR. What about the other half? Do they not have the right to determine their future? Are they forever slaves of the ghost of the USSR?
[1] https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/official_texts_25468.htm
No, Russian diplomats were not naive. They knew full well that whatever is not on paper does not exist.
It's surreal that 30 years later, we act like poor Russian diplomats didn't know that some random utterances made during long meetings won't be set in stone as an official policy forever.
Those people making such promises were not authorized to make binding promises anyway (something which Russian diplomats were aware of). There's a reason why agreement drafts undergo extensive analysis, vetting and approval process.
Their conclusion is not really deferent to either side's argument. Russia had every reason to believe in what was repeatedly said and implied, while the US had a justification in going against previous promises as the geopolitical scene shifted quite dramatically from when those promises were made.
Beyond this I'd emphasize in that geopolitical relations it's not like there's any law that forces countries need to abide their promises, whether spoken or written. If somehow there were a secret agreement in which the US overtly and explicitly agreed to not expand eastward in conditions identical to what happened, so what? Call on the UN to pass a meaningless resolution which the US would just veto anyhow?
And so in international relations, the perceived trust of a nation is ultimately far more relevant than the formality of an agreement.
Other people have mentioned it bellow me, but see what Merkel herself ("accused" of being on Putin's side, funnily enough) had to say about the Minsk accords.
I assume having Russian equivalent of McCain, Nuland and CIA running around would provoke a more vigorous response
By that point, Yeltsin was universally hated for turning Russia back towards autocracy, for botched privatization, and the Chechen war. His rating rose from 6% to 53% in mere half a year before the elections, with the help of a massive campaign he organized using the stolen money. But the fact that the Clinton administration aligned with him and tried to "help" him with the massive NGO and media work (that's only the overt part) has been remembered by most who supported the democratic change.
Instead of Yeltsin, it could have been Nemtsov, who was truly popular during that time, but refused to run exactly because Clinton+Gore supported Yeltsin... Nemtsov, remember that name? US administration suddenly did, in 2015. Too bad they didn't before.
"Do nothing" was also Russians' response at the time (except for the brief investigation that was quickly stopped by the autocrat), but that was one of the turning points in the people's minds.
History truly rhymes.
Not just being punchy: if you accuse pro-democracy movements of being US-backed coups, then that's a low bar for association.
The US even tries to foist democracy where it's a terribly ineffective idea, from a US interests standpoint, see efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Afghanistan wouldn't be under Taliban control today, if the US had installed a dictator and given them a free hand.
Can we stop pretending these are anything other than resource wars, combined with an excuse to throw money at the defence industry?
Russia looked at US actions in Iraq etc and apparently had an irrational attack of atrocity envy, blended with greed over the mineral-rich areas of Eastern Ukraine.
Neither empire is wholesome and good, but the Russians are completely crap at militarised colonialism while the US is fairly competent at it.
However... Russia is much better at subversion and bribery. Given Jan 6 and the wholesale co-option of the far right of the Republican party - which is most of it - only someone very naive would believe that the US and NATO aren't in danger of being subverted from within.
My suspicion is that Ukraine is part distraction, part attrition campaign against NATO, and part proxy war with China, with Russia as willing (because naively stupid) intermediary.
The real front is the internal politics of each NATO state.
Hungary is already lost, the UK is severely weakened by Brexit, Germany was compromised but is recovering, and the US has some very serious problems with infiltration and subversion. Which aren't being taken seriously enough.
I doubt Russia wants any such thing, they just want their toy back in their pram and the good feeling that having Ukraine under their heel gave them, as well as any useful resources Ukraine might have - agricultural land, seaports, raw materials. Stuff like that.
They don't want to negotiate with anybody, they just want their stuff (back?) on their own terms and are willing to sacrifice as many Russians as it takes to get it.
The world has moved on from that kind of behaviour though, but lots of 60+ yr old Russians are living in a past they'll never get back to and are blithely ruining Russia's future to get there.
And to be clear here, "their stuff" is (in their eyes) everything that was once part of the Soviet Union. Most of it is currently out of reach, but not attacking Poland next is a tactical decision acknowledging EU/Nato firepower, it's not because "we don't see a reason to attack a neighbor".
It's also interesting to see how strongly the Baltic nations and Poland are pushing to support Ukraine, since they lived long enough under the Soviet heel and they definitely don't want to get back to that.
I have no idea what's up with Hungary though.
The more autocratic a country is the more it is sympathetic to Russia. Autocrats like that autocrats can take what they want.
I assume it's the same thing that's up with the German far right: they consider themselves in opposition to the EU / Berlin and the enemy of my enemy is my friend.
While that's also somewhat true for Poland, Poland likely calculates the risks differently based on their specific history with Russia. They don't want to become as progressive as Germany, but unlike a renewed Russian empire they don't see Western progressiveness as an existential threat to Polish independence.
IMO, another big difference is that they have both a direct border with Russia (Kaliningrad), and a larger border with Belarus - a country that is fine with Russia launch an invasion from their territory. When you're next to a country that is openly talking about reforming the USSR by force, and is actively in the process thereof, it can be pretty scary.
In contrast, Hungary is sufficiently far away from Russia that they can afford to focus more energy on more immediate rivals.
1. Leadership is autocratic / non-democratic and thus a natural ally. That's the easy bit, but why does the populous support Russia.
2. Poland and other eastern bloc countries are doing a lot better than Hungary, which makes common folks disaffected.
3. State control of the media is pretty strong, and it blames the west for their problems.
There's a similar narrative for Serbia, but historical reasons also play a big role. The politics and history of that region are "interesting".
> I doubt Russia wants any such thing, they just want their toy back in their pram and the good feeling that having Ukraine under their heel gave them, as well as any useful resources Ukraine might have - agricultural land, seaports, raw materials. Stuff like that.
In a technical sense, I can agree with you. The opening weeks of the war showed that Russia ideally wanted to do to Ukraine what the US did the Iraq in 1990-1991. If they had their druthers, they'd conquer the country without damaging any infrastructure. The only trouble is that Russia's military doesn't have that capability.
And Russia is perfectly willing to fall back on plan b: use artillery, drones, and missiles to level literally every building in the country as they try to conquer it 1 square meter at a time.
That sounds like a Russian Federatiom Boomer generation dragging the rest of the nation down with it to rack and ruin for a nostalgic kick. For those on the ground in the Russian Federation or corresponding closely with those on the ground, is support for the war really mostly stemming from that generation and do they possess the kind of sociopolitical leverage as Boomers in the US?
It sounds overly simplistic to me to say, "lots of 60+ yr old Russians" are driving the support for the war. I'd be more inclined to subscribe to a description of an elite that control the levers of power and the economy are the drivers, and the general population like in too many nation-states (even the US, since objectively most legislation is passed by and for the elite) is more or less powerless.
And the Russian leadership certainly is gerontocratic: https://meduza.io/en/feature/2022/01/31/the-old-guard
As for the social leverage, I don't think they have much on the national level. However, I feel the lower-rung govt staff is mostly composed of 50-something women, and these also dominate meetings of homeowner associations. The men are either hard at work or already dead, and the younger people are not numerous and don't have much rights.
Also it’s bonkers that someone thinks Ukraine is untrustworthy this situation. Didn’t they give up all their nuclear weapons in a signed treaty under the guarantee that Russia promised to respect their territorial integrity? Doesn’t Russia now posses territory that’s “historically” German or Japanese, and expects that territory to be respected as Russian, regardless of the history? Ukraine is Ukraine, and the thing preventing the situation from reaching a diplomatic ending, which again is how all wars end, is that Russia can’t bring itself to back down now, and everything else is just excuses from the land of fiction that only work when applied unilaterally.
You're going to need some reliable evidence for this and an explanation of what the solution actually was, as well as why the Ukranians aren't making more of this.
That's super, super, super unrealistic, as Russia has not indicated at any time they're willing to vacate Crimea.
Which is the absolute baseline for Russia to do.
Without that, anything Russia is claiming is really just a delaying tactic to let them prepare/re-equip for their next invasion wave.
Furthermore the US even had to help Russia itself with the dismantling and disposing of some weapons over the years. It was in nobody’s interest for yet another country to have nukes when poverty and corruption would have almost certainly led to “losing” them or losing them one way or another.
You’ve commented on the historical territory out of the blue, I don’t see the parent commenter mentioning that. Keep in my mind that Ukraine possesses territory they gained after WW2 as part of the Soviet Union and there’s no indication that they want to return it. Opening up these old territorial disputes is not a good idea.
In general trying to present Ukraine as fundamentally different from Russia as far as corruption or trustworthiness goes when they were both part of the Soviet Union and very close until 2014 is dubious and not supported by facts.
The Budapest Memorandum, in which Ukraine agrees to divest itself of nukes in exchange from formal guarantees of territorial integrity from Russia, is hardly irrelevant here.
* as a way to show that a country should never give up its nukes. But they were forced and incentivized to give them up.
* as a way of showing Russia won’t honor its agreements. But this is inconclusive. On one hand, Russia did invade Ukraine, but didn’t invade Kazakhstan or Belarus (other signatories which also gave up their nukes). And the agreement is not an official treaty, is not legally binding and doesn’t have an enforcement mechanism.
At the end of the day, Russia will probably respect an official treaty if the incentives and disincentives are right. Much like China or the US IMO.
Sure. Russia later reneged on the incentives by invading Ukraine (repeatedly!). Thus, relevant.
> But this is inconclusive. On one hand, Russia did invade Ukraine, but didn’t invade Kazakhstan or Belarus.
"What about all the murders I didn't do?" isn't a great defense.
> And the agreement is not an official treaty, is not legally binding and doesn’t have an enforcement mechanism.
Cool, then they can stop whining about the supposed NATO "agreement" not to expand, which was not an official treaty, not legally binding, and doesn't have an enforcement mechanism.
The nuclear stuff is also relevant because, again, nuclear disarmament was exchange for security (read: territory) guarantees. In this respect the issue of who can be trusted is clear.
Regarding your final point about both countries having corruption and being very close, sure. I don’t think I follow the point though. One country has invaded the other with an army after promising not to do so. That’s what is relevant here, not black markets or mafia or just a culture of cynicism and corruption. If Ukraine wanted to change and stop doing things the old way in 2014 then that’s good I guess.
Any sort of peace acceptable to the Ukrainians is going to leave Russia with a lingering casus belli, which only the above (and NATO membership) is going to prevent escalating back into war.
Can you give some examples of what you are talking about here, and in what countries?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Territorial_evolution_of_Russi...
Are you talking about the left and the right in the USA?
Who aside from modern US Republicans is giving them a pass?
https://www.rferl.org/a/ukraine-corbyn-interview-russia-ceas...
Until recently, both Dems and Reps were happy to fund and expand NATO, which is basically and anti-russian expansion org. Now Republicans seem to have an issue with that though.
I just don't understand what you mean by "Russia has gotten a pass?"
The goal of NATO is to defend members against invasion. Who tends to invade those nations? Russia. BTW, I am fully in support in NATO.
I think it's fair to say that NATO is an anti-Russian imperialist organization.
I see lots of such posts by my lefty friends with nary a mention of Russian culpability.
https://caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/its-not-okay-for-gro... https://www.afr.com/world/europe/chomsky-we-re-approaching-t...
What a lazy answer! for sure, it is colonial. During the imperial time, during soviet time and now in the east of Ukraine. In all periods, Russia tried to destroy the local population/settlements and tried to build Cossak/Russian defense lines.
Reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_imperialism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor
You don’t have to look that hard to find actual displaced peoples—the way the Russian Empire burned down all of Ossetia, the way Stalin ejected most of the population of Chechnya after that, the way Crimean Tatars constituted the bulk of the population in the Crimean peninsula and then suddenly Russians and Ukrainians did for some reason—there’s plenty. (If you really want to get into the history, care to find some speakers of the North Slavic languages for me?) It’s that the example does not seem to be a good one.
The last part is so much bullshit thst it isn’t even really worth considering. (Every sentence in the whole of official Soviet history that includes the word kulak is bullshit.)
While the Right as a whole is leaning stronger and stronger in at least silent support of people like Putin (Christian defender of the white race and all that), the Left does not have this problem. There is a small crew of commies and tankies that drool over Putin, but us left-leaning folk laugh at them as much as anyone.
Right now the world is in a process of reevaluation, and academia is a huge part of this. Educational institutions have realized they have been teaching Russian history all wrong, and it SHOULD be taught through the prism of imperialism. It's kind of amazing, considering that even looking at the last 100 years, Russia has been on a rampage of conquering and subjugating nations from East to West.
Before anyone tries, please do not compare this to ill-fated American adventures. Last I checked, Vietnam and Iraq are still not part of the United States.
Seeing people draw this parallel was surprising to me, as I associate colonialism with the European conquerors of the world: Portugal, Spain, France, Great Britain, The Netherlands and Germany.
Indeed I’ve gotten this list from a GEO Magazine special issue dedicated to colonialism, showing on a map where each of those countries had their colonies between ~1400 and 1915. OTOH Belgium isn’t directly mentioned, so perhaps the list is not exhaustive.
Is this even a debate? Do you need an analysis also showing that the UK was a colonial empire? The second bit is trivial, it was called the Russian Empire. The first bit is also trivial, they had colonies in North America, for example.
> I associate colonialism with the European conquerors of the world
Russia is (historically) a European country. It only has land in Asia because of imperialism and colonisation.
If you look at e.g. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonialism there’s a really long list of countries under British colonialism. Russia has such a short list, it’s no wonder it’s not considered a (former) colonial power.
Indigenous peoples living in Russia like Mansis are simply not known about, while everyone has heard of Incas, Apaches and Comanches and their fate. The actual Russian-Russia is pretty small and borders Eastern Europe. Most of the territory you see on maps has historically belonged to indigenous peoples and is still dominated by them in many regions outside of major cities, wouldn't surprise me if the majority of land area of Russia to this day had ethnic majority of non-Russians. Their culture and language has been suppressed for a long time to turn them into loyal Russians, the same way US and Canadian and many other governments destroyed traditional lifestyle, forced resettlement, forced indigenous children into state schools and so forth. The difference from historic colonialism is that it's still happening in present day, and on a scale that has not been seen elsewhere in a long time - by that, I mean the war in Ukraine, also colonial in nature in what motivates Russia, and how they disproportionally conscript ethnic minorities to fight and die for Russia.
Anglo-american histography is fairly self-centered on these topics, lots of focus on American slave trade and colonialism by Western Europe, but very little on what happened in the rest of the world. This feeds into perception that the colonial history of the Americas is unique, that only blacks have been slaves, that only western countries have been colonial, etc while we have a large country in Europe even in 2023 that wants to establish politic and economic control over a nation of 40 million people, exploit them in every way, and impose foreign language and culture on them. And it's been like this for centuries.
If you want to get started somewhere, then I'd avoid publications that explicitly set to prove or disprove colonialism. Instead, read a balanced history of Eastern Europe and Russia, especially from the perspective of smaller nations if you can, and make up your own mind. You may discover that the life of farmers in Latvia in early 19th century wasn't that much different from Antebellum South. Same overall story, different setting.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Empire
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Territorial_evolution_of_Russi...
Ok, i stopped at that line, that's when you know it's not a report but rather it's propaganda
That's sad coming from Estonia
From the Kremlin:
"Above all, we should acknowledge that the collapse of the Soviet Union was a major geopolitical disaster of the century. As for the Russian nation, it became a genuine drama. Tens of millions of our co-citizens and co-patriots found themselves outside Russian territory. Moreover, the epidemic of disintegration infected Russia itself."
Putin doesn't want a "new USSR". He wants a Commonwealth. If its good for Brits and Canucks and Aussies and Kiwi's, it'll work for the rest of the world too ..
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commonwealth_of_Independent_St...
Its the USA that doesn't want to see this commonwealth form and become economically viable as a trading partner with the EU, because not only would it indeed represent an economic bloc that would be overwhelming for the US' intelligence services to corrupt, and usurp .. as they are wont to do .. it'd also be a superpower that even China couldn't handle.
Which is why the USA is doing everything it can (Ukraine coup) to ensure this unity never happens.
They don't force anyone
> Putin is scared of old soviet union nations joining Europe
I don't think Russia is scared
They are worried Europe became an american military base with long range weaponry
https://www.thesoldiersproject.org/how-many-us-military-base...
> They're free to do so.
Nobody said the opposite
So why did they invade Ukraine then?
There is bad in both sides
https://jacobin.com/2022/02/maidan-protests-neo-nazis-russia...
https://www.unicef.org/press-releases/attacks-schools-quadru...
During the first months of the invasion when the Kremlin was searching for powerful symbolism, one of the symbols they tried to use was a Red Flag Granny: https://rg.ru/2022/04/12/babushka-s-krasnym-flagom-stala-sim....
They even installed some hastily-made monuments to her, which had to be removed just weeks later after the Granny apologised to the Ukrainian media.
Media Propaganda is not nearly equivalent to official state policy.
It gives another perspective that’s often ignored how US and European foreign policy has played part in shaping what Russia is today.
https://youtu.be/8X7Ng75e5gQ
I don't think Russia should have been able to dictate the terms of NATO enlargement, but I do think the way that we enlarged NATO, combined with the lackluster way that the west attempted to engage with Russia was a foreign policy failure.
Watch the video.
Russia looked at US actions in Iraq etc and apparently had an irrational attack of imperial atrocity envy, blended with greed over the mineral-rich areas of Eastern Ukraine.
Neither empire is wholesome and good, but the Russians are almost wholly crap at militarised colonialism, while the US is fairly competent at it.
However... Russia is much better at subversion and bribery. Given Jan 6 and the wholesale co-option of the far right of the Republican party - which is most of it - only someone very naive would believe that the US and NATO aren't in danger of being subverted from within. It almost happened in 2020 and it could still happen in 2024.
My suspicion is that Ukraine is part distraction, part attrition campaign against NATO, and part proxy war with China, with Russia as willing (because naively stupid) intermediary.
The real front is the internal politics of each NATO state.
Hungary is already lost, the UK is severely weakened by Brexit, Germany was compromised but is recovering, and the US has some very serious problems with infiltration and subversion.
Which are not being taken seriously enough.
Are they, actually? Vietnam, Afghanistan etc..
The moral authority that Americans claim, to justify their nations' heinous crimes against humanity, simply doesn't exist. Americans AND Russians ought to be shunned for their nations' war crimes.
But, you know, those doing all the healing of the victims, have been keeping track:
https://psr.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/body-count.pdf
"Thus, the intense debate revolving around casualty figures is an important element in the discussion of whether the population supports such interventions or not. It is therefore not surprising that the media, and even parts of academia, be it ideologically motivated or guided by other interests, use starkly sanitized figures (see Chapter 3: “The Numbers War”) And this has been quite successful: In a 2007 poll, Americans estimated the number of killed Iraqis at less than 10,000.
However, should the number of Iraqis killed from the 2003 U.S. invasion until 2012 actually be around one million, as the analysis of the existing scientific studies presented in the present study suggests, this would represent 5% of the total population of Iraq – a number which additionally indicates the extent of the corresponding damage inflicted upon society and the infrastructure. "
“I believe the perception caused by civilian casualties is one of the most dangerous enemies we face.” U.S. General Stanley A. McCrystal in his inaugural speech as ISAF Commander in June 2009.
"However, should the number of Iraqis killed from the 2003 U.S. invasion until 2012 actually be around one million, as the analysis of the existing scientific studies presented in the present study suggests, this would represent 5% of the total population of Iraq .."
Of course Americans' aren't going to own up to the magnitude of this crime. But it should be noted that this report was issued in 2015 - and a lot more death has happened since then. 5% is a conservative estimate.
There's also the question of "when" when talking about a percent. The population of Iraq in 2003 (when the war started) was around 26 million. Their exceptionally rapid population growth is ironic when talking about us killing off a large chunk of their population, but relevant nonetheless. You end up with this weird scenario where Iraqi lives are measured (for those using percentages) less meaningful each year that passes.
Ultimately using percents is probably just a bad idea, and it's not like it's necessary to contextualize here how killing whether hundreds of thousands of some low millions of people, primarily civilians, is a really awful thing to do, let alone in a war based entirely on fabricated evidence.
After Trump was cleared, I’ve started thinking that the US is just going through another Red Scare.
The Republicans concluded Paul Manafort, for example, "represented a grave counterintelligence threat" and "created opportunities for Russian intelligence services to exert influence over, and acquire confidential information on, the Trump campaign" while acting as Trump's campaign manager. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2020/08/18/sena...
The problem is that those were mostly just 644 seemingly random, primarily conservative, "real" Western individuals. For instance David Horowitz [2] was a "Russian troll." Others included individuals who had written books on the US constitution, a conservative news editor, and so on. So basically whatever conservative individuals were discussing was labeled as "Russian disinformation" which the media (and congress) then simply took at face value and repeated.
Incidentally Twitter also knew that the "Russian disinformation" stuff was, itself, largely disinformation. They were able to determine Hamilton's entire list by simply looking at their API calls. While there was lively internal debate about whether they should go public with this information or not, and they did push back in private, they ultimately chose to remain publicly silent - just as the mainstream media is now also doing, leaving me to link to rando sites in lieu of where these stories ought be.
The one thing I'm certain about is that reading the book, 20 years from now, about whatever's happening now - is going to be interesting.
[1] - https://www.racket.news/p/move-over-jayson-blair-meet-hamilt...
[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Horowitz
That is not backed up by even the overly breathless Twitter Files coverage.
Post #3: https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1619029780179075073
"Unlike #ReleaseTheMemo, this one is primarily being driven by data from Hamilton68."
The Wikipedia article covers substantially more involvement than Twitter bots.
So any investigation carried out by our intelligence community can be well expected to have also taken Hamilton 68 as an authoritative source. It's something akin to the Fruit of the Poisonous Tree. A -> B -> C -> D. But when it turns out that A is invalid, suddenly so is everything else that used it. So that entire article needs to be rewritten from scratch with consideration of the sources and their relationship to data that has been shown to, itself, be genuine disinformation.
One other small thing I'd mention here is that I think the chances of this having only happened or applied to Twitter are very near zero. We simply don't have access to e.g. the FBI Files, or the Facebook files, or the NYTimes files. Which is part of the reason why I said I'm quite looking forward to reading the book about today, in 20 years!
I don't know why you'd assume that if Twitter saw through it immediately (as evidenced by their discussions in that Twitter Files thread).
And it just continues on endlessly. Every bit of evidence, no matter how flimsy or obviously false, made its way through the proper channels - so long as it supported the desired narrative. This is not something that can be dismissed as incompetence even if you hold our intelligence community to an abysmal standard. And I see no reason to think that this has changed.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_weapons_laboratory
The Trump White House and Senate Republicans definitely didn't want "yep, Russian involvement" to be the conclusion of the 2016 investigations. Very different situation, and a lot more evidence from a lot more venues (including successful criminal convictions).
I'm not implying that it was only the CIA, but rather that these sort of situations tend to defy simplistic explanations. It's a lot of different people with a lot of different motivations. And those motivations are often going to drive them to come to the conclusions that they want to come to, exactly as happens in literally every other large organization in existence.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_weapons_laboratory
There's a real problem in spy-hunting that the people hunting the spies may themselves be compromised. Was a problem with the Cambridge four https://www.nationalcoldwarexhibition.org/schools-colleges/n...
Did someone say Global Defense Initiative (GDI)? Someone over there has played C&C a bit too much. :D
But they got the sides mixed up. It's more like Nod. (Which is a name taken from to "The Land of Nod" in Genesis, which was located to the east of Eden).
https://www.generalpavel.cz/