Is there anyone here not from the US that would care to share what the general vibe is surrounding Ukraine joining NATO? I’d be curious to hear from an “outside” prospective.
Here in the US the general consensus seems to be “maybe, but NOT now.” People seem apprehensive about it starting WWIII. And Conservatives are frothing at the mouth about how Biden is going to get us all killed in a nuclear war (but that claim is often tossed around basically every election cycle. Trump also was supposedly going to get all of us nuked.)
The support to continue sending military aid to Ukraine is also wavering in the US. At least among the people. The politicians are still lock-step in line with their support. I’d imagine the people in Europe are still much more in support but I could be wrong?
I'm outside US, and the way people should think about it is this is a proxy WIII already.
US was all stressed out about a bunch of very empoverished Muslim countries using terrorist tactics. Well, we all got ourselves a mercenary, terrorist state with 1.5k active nukes, going around doing some business expansion.
Russian economic development policy is to wage war to take on resources. They're doing all over Africa, it just happen there's no white people there for the developed world to care about.
So, my point is, Russia will continue to wage wars as long as it's economically profitable, and if NATO make it unprofitable to wage war in Europe, Russia will have to double down in Africa.
The diplomatic agreement to end this may be pretty much around convincing Russia to leave Ukraine under some veiled concession that they can go crazy in Africa. (As long as they don't mess with Chinese interests in the region)
In Europe we all pretty much support Ukraine. “Peace” and stop war protests / parties are funded by Russia as part of their disinformation tactics
Of course, Ukraine can’t join NATO if it has contested territories (that works trigger article 5)
That’s what Russia hopes I think at this point. Will Ukraine give up some territories in some kind of treaty to join NATO with the remaining? I doubt it..