Head of NATO says Russia invaded Ukraine because of NATO expansionism
Head of NATO says Russia invaded Ukraine because of NATO expansionism
From the guy's own mouth.
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What he's saying is that Putin doesn't get to dictate which alliances sovereign nations can join.
Ahh yes, NATO, an alliance well known for respecting sovereignty. That's why they invade and bomb any third world nation with a sovereign project against US interests...
And how did these nations join NATO post cold war? Surely there was no manipulation of the sovereignty of Eastern European nations at that time right?
And do NATO countries have sovereignty themselves, or are they just US vassal states? Be honest here, because the answer is quite clear. It's gotten to the point that the US can bomb the gas pipelines of another NATO country (see nordstream) and nothing can be done about it. And every NATO country has to buy US weapons systems, engage in specific international training exercises, etc. Very sovereign.
Let's be clear, realpolitik is all there ever was, and all there ever will be in geopolitics. The "sovereignty" of every nation on the planet is subject to this. Unless you want to do the Turkey/Cuban missile crisis again. There's a reason Mexico can't join BRICS, there's a reason Cuba can't claim Guantanamo bay as theirs, etc.
Sovereign nations like Yugoslavia, Iraq, Libya, and Cuba, right?
... right?
Yes.
That's the same thing
Except that OP is trying to frame the invasion as justified when the reality is that Putin thought he could bully his neighbors. NATO predictably went "fuck off" and that somehow means bombing Ukrainian children was unavoidable.
If you are against bombing Ukrainian children, then you should probably be cheering on what Russia is doing, since it stopped exactly that.
https://www.hrw.org/news/2014/07/24/ukraine-unguided-rockets-killing-civilians
Address the point, coward.
Russia escalated. More people are dying now.
A fair number of bombings have been attributed to defective Ukrainian munitions...
And thats not even getting into all the non-defective ones
I don't see it like that - I see it like assigning any blame at all to NATO, which it does deserve, to some degree.
By deflecting blame from Russia.
Do you agree that Putin should drop dead?
Everyone who ever asked me shit like that was never interested in having a discussion, just in purity tests. What I think should happen to Putin has no bearing on what caused this. And FWIW this kind of mindless insistence on moral absolutism is why Tripoli went from the capital of the most stable country in Africa to an open-air slave market.
It's a litmus test for whether I want to engage with you at all.
Being able to state unequivocally that a murderous billionaire should drop dead is the absolute bare minimum for a socialist.
I have yet to get a straight answer from so-called socialists on Lemmy.
No it isn't, it's because you want to dictate the terms of the conversation, which, again, leaves zero room for any admittance that Putin isn't the only one who caused this situation.
USA is also responsible. Fucking obviously.
I live in Denmark. We're sending absurd amounts of military aid. The commie party supports this on the basis that Ukrainians have an indisputable right to defend themselves. I agree with that, but there's obviously room for discussing what exactly that implies in terms of support.
All billionaires should go jump off a bridge. Liberal politicians should take a trip to the Titanic, and I have a very nice wall I want to show the billionaire who bankrolled the Danish libertarian party.
I'd be more than happy to have a conversation about the conflict that isn't just parroting neoliberal talking points, but as I said, this is a litmus test. If you can't state unequivocally that Putin, a murderous billionaire, deserves to die, then you're not any kind of socialist I can recognize, and I'll have no further interest in talking with you.
"The background was that President Putin declared in the autumn of 2021, and actually sent a draft treaty that they wanted NATO to sign, to promise no more NATO enlargement. That was what he sent us. And was a pre-condition for not invade Ukraine. Of course we didn't sign that."
"Don't allow others to join your defense pact or we'll demonstrate why it's necessary in the first place."
Perfectly sane logic. Nothing strange.
Cuba had the same thing happen to them in the 60's.
Oh good you already understand why it's Bad Actually™ then
You mean that it's bad that the USA threatened to nuke Russia when Russia was putting missiles in Cuba, or when Russia invaded Ukraine when USA said they would put missiles in Ukraine? Was it bad the USA threatened nuclear war because Cuba wanted to defend itself from a belligerent neighbour? Russia backed off, should the US back off from Ukraine? Or "this is different".
Was it bad that Russia threatened nuclear way because Ukraine wanted to defend itself from a belligerent neighbour?
The USA doing bad things in the past doesn't make it alright for Russia to do the same bad shit.
It isn't a team sport. We aren't children. Both can, in fact, be wrong, and neither justifies the other.
So you're alright with the way the US treats Cuba then? The USA did make it very clear that they wouldn't tolerate Warsaw Pact expansionism near their borders, and Cuba could have just surrendered after the Bay of Pigs invasion to avoid all the negative consequences that have resulted from Cuba's decision to oppose the freedom loving USA.
Russia has made it very clear they don't want NATO expansionism near its borders.
Yeah and the US made it very clear that they didn't want USSR expansionism near their borders. Doesn't make what the US has done to Cuba alright, just like it doesn't make what Russia has done in Ukraine alright.
And Ukraine was already invaded…
Yes, in 2004 and 2014 by covert and "diplomatic" US forces.
This has never been about sovereignty and always about maintaining hegemonic imperialist control.
Seems you are referring to the Orange Revolution and the revolution of dignity.
If you claim these events are purely because of US influences, than you’ve missed a lot of Russian details.
People who participated in these openly claim they were taking orders from the US embassy.
Not only that, elected and career US officials were present and active in the events.
If you're trying to claim that these events were driven by "Russian interference," I have some hacked voting machines to sell you.
Remind me, which country annexed a huge chunk of Ukraine in 2014?
The US effectively did. There's no other explanation for why US elected and career officials were present in Ukraine during small and violent anti-government protests, and there's no other explanation for how and why the US state department chose the next leader of Ukraine after the democratically elected and widely supported President Yanukovych was forced to flee in fear for his life. Ukraine for all practical purposes lost its sovereignty in February 2014.
If you're talking about the small peninsula of Crimea, the residents of Crimea democratically chose to secede from Ukraine and rejoin Russia.
It's not easy, but it's very much worth taking some time to understand what sovereignty and democracy actually mean, both in theory and in practice.
No, the US effectively didn't. Russia actually did. It's truly incredible that you're promoting the results of a referendum held by an invading military force as legitimate and then telling me that I don't understand democracy. You can't have democracy at gunpoint. Would you be defending an American-run referendum to see if Basra wanted to join the USA in 2003? Because that is what you're doing right now.
So a few things.
If the election weren't legitimate, why do Crimeans still stand by the decision they supposedly made at gunpoint to this day? Why don't they remember there being Russian soldiers being present during the referendum? Why would Ukrainian citizens be welcomed into Crimeans communities now if this had simply been a nationalist land grab? Why didn't Ukraine invest in Crimean infrastructure and social services between 1991 and 2014? Why would Russia invest in that same infrastructure and social services post 2014? Why weren't Russian citizens allowed to vote in the referendum, only Ukrainians with Crimean residency?
https://www.mintpressnews.com/return-russia-crimea-story-referendum-lives-since/262247
Comparing this situation to the relationship between the US and Iraq/Basra is grotesque and intellectually dishonest so there's no point in discussing that further.
A couple things wrong with your comment:
a) you are deflecting because you can't answer
b) you are seriously comparing an outright unprovoked invasion from US into Iraq, with one where Russia is defending Russian-speaking people against a Nazi-un government that has been bombing them for 8 years.
c) even before the invasion, these people wanted to join up with Russia. They went all the way to Moscow multiple times to beg for Russia to intervene.
d) it is obvious you know next to nothing about Ukraine and its situation. You only know what the US state department has told you and you repeat the exact same talking points.
A) It's not deflection to limit a response to the parts most relevant to what I had actually asked.
B) I compared an unprovoked outright invasion to an unprovoked outright invasion. If you can annex land because there's a civil war there and the people speak the same language as you, you'd be in favour of America annexing Ireland during the Troubles. Or Britain annexing it, for that matter. Never mind whether or not you're fomenting the civil war in the first place.
C) I'm in favour of self-determination for people - hell, I want the place I live to leave the country hat it's currently part of - but getting invaded is not self-determination.
D) Fun fact but you do not need to parrot the US State Department to think that Russia invaded Ukraine. If I was as virulently pro-America as you seem to think I am I probably wouldn't be using a thing America did as a negative comparison, would I?
A) it is when you ignore every single point except the one you can twist
B) and you were wrong
C) yet you've been minimizing the Ukrainian coup orchestrated by the US, and denying the right of self-determination to people in the Donbass
D) you didn't use it as a negative at all. Nowhere in your comment do you condemn the Iraq war. In fact you are whitewashing it by implying that somehow the US should be praised for not doing ethnic cleansing (which they did, lest we forget the 1.5 million dead Iraqi)
Okay, I just want to focus on D for a moment because I genuinely can't work out how you could arrive at this conclusion. We can come back to the others afterwards. I was arguing that a referendum run by an invading army should not be considered legitimate and used a hypothetical one run by America in Basra as an example. I even specifically called the invasion "unprovoked" in my first response to you. Please explain to me how you think that this is me saying that the invasion of Iraq was praiseworthy.