Honestly, I think if Russia is to be stopped, boots are needed. It surely is clear that Putin is going to drag this out until someone runs out of human beings to fight heedless to the cost to his own nation, and unfortunately, Russia isn't losing men fast enough that it's going to run out first.
Regions which it took itself. In exchange for other regions which it permitted and assisted Nazi seizure of.
Ah, so the Soviets presented that plan to... some diplomats that weren't empowered to decide geopolitical strategy. Then 1 week later they signed the treaty with the Nazis and went hard in that direction instead.
We might also note that many regions the USSR took over it promptly deported or murdered a substantial number of people. For instance, over a hundred thousand were deported from the Baltic States in 1940, many of whom were never heard of again. (Even more after the USSR reasserted control 1944-1945). It's assumed they were shipped to gulags and died there, largely unrecorded. Although maybe plenty were just slaughtered and buried, because the USSR also did that sort of thing. In terms of Ukraine, of course, it also famously managed to starve millions to death. Doesn't make the regime popular.
www.newsweek.com
united24media.com
Oh, but the thing is, they're also the police. It's the reason they're robbing the bank to begin with. Gotta stop the mob.
I think in my mind, the police force in this analogy are sitting at base with a massive, tooled up armed response team, sending texts to the bank robbers saying "Stop robbing the bank or we're going to cut off your unemployment benefits for a few years".
www.bbc.co.uk
Trump tends to spout whatever the last person who spoke to him said. So stick him in a room with Putin, he'll be parrotting Russian propaganda until he eventually gets stuck in a room with someone who counteracts it.Watch this end with Trump giving back Alaska and calling it a win.Vance and Lammy host Ukraine talks, as Zelensky warns against US-Russia summit without Kyiv
The talks come shortly after US President Trump announced he will meet Russia's President Putin in Alaska on Friday.
We all know Trump won't manage to make peace.
Of course he won't. He doesn't have the inclination (or the leverage, though that seems a closer question) to force the Ukrainian government to make peace on Russia's terms and Russia has, in its view, every reason to insist on its terms and no reason not to. Sanctions aren't living up to the fantastical expectations placed on them (apparently Russia is big and has lots of natural resources as well as plentiful foreign trade outside of the US sphere of influence) and US and European weapons have not yet and will not relieve the overwhelming stress on Ukraine's manpower (Ukraine is not actually fighting mindless orcs, contra the propaganda). Making peace requires agreement between the two principal participants; Zelensky now has additional incentive to continue the war, paralleled somewhat by Netanyahu in israel, in the fact that he won't have to face an election while the war continues. Russia has its war goals, which its political leadership and many of its people believe are required to secure the continued existence of Russia, European elites want NATO to remain relevant for some awful reason, and the political leadership of the United States doesn't want another Afghanistan pullout to be attributed to them. Ukraine still has blood to shed, and everyone whose opinion has any effect agrees that it will be shed.
No they don't. The Russian elite pursue this war for the glory of empire and not for the survival of the state. An independent Ukraine doesn't threaten Russia in any way. Not even a NATO aligned Ukraine would threaten Russia. The only thing a functioning and independent Ukraine might threaten is the barbaric system of robber barons looting the Russian state and public, but that's a problem the Kremlin can fix whenever it wants to by just being a real government instead of a gaggle of bandits.
Said reason being Russia's continued desire to do extreme harm to Europe in general, and many of their non NATO aligned neighbors in particular. I hope you'll excuse Poland and the Baltics for not wanting to be conquered, enslaved and slaughtered by Russia for a third time in recent history.
Its political leadership is not so monumentally idiotic as to believe this; Russia has never been attacked by NATO, and its existence has never once been seriously threatened from outside.
And Russia chose to reinforce its relevance. European countries outside of NATO have been repeatedly invaded, bombed, and threatened with destruction. A mutual defence pact appears to be the only thing that can dissuade imperial annexation.
Indistinguishable from the horseshit Netanyahu and Likud come out with to demonise resistance against an invader and occupying military power. Invade and occupy someone else's territory, and you cannot blame them for resisting the forces you've deployed to do so.
Russia would be monumentally idiotic to think as you do about this question.
NATO thus did very well to provoke those conflicts. Masterful manipulation of the circumstances. But for some reason you don't seem to have a problem with that part. "Russia is going to invade!" OK, will you engage them diplomatically since they've reached out about their security concerns regarding your actions? "Of course not! They must go kick rocks!" NATO wanting to be relevant is perfectly explanatory of NATO's behavior; a sincere desire to avoid war, on the other hand, doesn't explain NATO's actions at all; viewed through that lens, NATO actions are baffling.
Ukraine is well within its rights to defend itself (though that can come into tension with the self-determination of those within its claimed territories for some varieties of "defense"), even though the Zelensky government is not subject to any democratic check at this point. It is, however, silly to compare the situation of Ukraine to those resisting a European settler colonial state representing the interests of the West in Palestine. 'Israel' has no legitimacy to exist at all, to say nothing of imposing itself on the West Bank and Gaza. If something threatens its existence, good, it should go away; there should be no place for that racist endeavor. Comparing the situation of Ukraine to a deliberate ethnic cleansing that has been understood and planned for over a century (and which outpaced the civilian death toll in Ukraine within a few months after Operation Al-Aqsa Flood in a far smaller area with much smaller populations involved) is certainly a choice.
Nice one. You (and the Russian gov you uncritically parrot) still have yet to present a credible way in which Ukraine having independence threatens the very existence of Russia, without ever having attacked or even threatened it.
That is not what provoked the conflict.
It has never been "OK", but they are responding to US provocations and have not been given an alternative that makes sense other than sacrificing their own security for the sake of morality-- something that no reasonable state does by choice in the current international order, an international order which has been to a large extent determined by the United States. The fact that the United States imposed that dilemma on them without any justification is the root of the problem. It would be one thing if NATO were a good faith effort to prevent war, but it manifestly is not. It is beyond apparent that NATO did precisely what it would do if it wanted a war between Russia and Ukraine and it is dominated by hands down the most belligerent nation of the last 70 years.
My thoughts on this matter tend to echo the views of a wide variety of Western intellectuals who know a lot better about what they are talking about than you, from Noam Chomsky to George Kennan; people whose values and life experiences are all over the place (including direct participation from the US side of official US/Ukraine or US/Russian relations in some cases) but whose grasp of the facts are all fairly similar.
But those ''security concerns'' were illegitimate to begin with. They hinge under the deluded premise that Russia is a special little flower that deserves imperial recognition, and that the sovereignty of Ukraine and the wider European order should be outsourced to the Kremlin. Russia does not have the inherent right to decide Ukraine's future, its allies and its economy for them.
What provoked the conflict was Ukraine wanting to trade with Europe, and Russia forbidding it and forcing their puppet leader in Ukraine to self destruct. Every aspect of this conflict can be traced to an escalation by Russia.
But they simply aren't. Accepting that Russia's former nations are independent nations is not a provocation. Its Russia's insistent they still own our ought to own those country that is the provocation, and its exactly that behavior that forces those country to seek NATO protection.
