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Ukraine Forever


DireWolfSpirit

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13 minutes ago, ThinkerX said:

I am rather bizarrely reminded of my stint as a grand juror, listening to the evidence that landed people in legal trouble. In pretty much all of those cases, there was a 'tipping point' or 'decision point' where the accused could simply have walked away or chosen otherwise and escaped the whole mess.

Putin's invasion of Russia seems like a larger scale version of this. The decision to invade Ukraine was entirely his. He could just as easily have chosen to not invade Ukraine. Once made, though, that decision led directly to hundreds of thousands of people killed, sanctions that essentially crippled Russia, bringing misery to tens of millions, and exposing his military as a paper tiger. All entirely because of the hubris of a single individual. 

Yes. This was historically Putin's ace in the hole, that he always seemed to make decisions made on clear, unromanticised and steel-eyed assessment of Russia's capabilities. Chechnya, the brief Kosovo/Serbia intervention, Georgia, Crimea and Syria were all excellent examples of him maximising the use of political and military force at the greatest moment of decision whilst minimising his long-term exposure, on the understanding that Russia had enormous military capabilities but not the economic might to replenish those losses in a dragged-out war. That started slipping a bit in Syria, where he wanted to pull out all Russian involvement by around 2017-18, but Assad proved far more incompetent than he'd thought and he ended up propping up the regime and having to cut constant deals with Turkey and Israel not to have the whole thing blow up in his face. But still, the numbers of Russian forces involved were small and he could outsource the rough shit to Wagner.

The problem with Ukraine is that he seems to have not have the same detachment. Combined with increased paranoia, his remarkable personality change during the COVID pandemic and his farcically deluded grasp of history, and he's gone "all in" on Ukraine and, even when it is clear to everybody that Russia cannot achieve maximalist objectives and might need all its remaining strength to hold onto Crimea and the Donbas, he's still trying to achieve those aims without the capability to do so. There's analogies to Hitler around late 1944 confident he can fend off an increasingly well-supplied enemy with numbers on their side (locally at least) when any reasonable economic or military analysis will have concluded he was in an untenable position and he needed to find another solution stat.

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1 minute ago, Tywin et al. said:

Better to be part of that group than the one that cannot see that the only thing radical and violent here is Putin's invasion of a sovereign nation under made up pretexts which has lead to the deaths of tens of thousands of people and the financial destruction of so many more.

Fuck Putin and his government of soulless clowns who are where they are now because of their own making.

Okay cool, whatever. But what does that have to do with the people on here who lie and bullshit their way out of having a substantive debate about the best path to peace. 

I mean if the goal is to scream at me till I leave, it worked. Nothing substantive has come from any of this discussion, just Scot comparing the seizure of Donetsk to the liberation of Nazi territory and moving the goal post to Izyum when that didn't work. Or people who just shrug off the collapse of the Russian government and wish for the best instead of toning down their extreme rhetoric.   

And I don't want to deal with people who lie and say I support the Russian war effort. It's just casual propaganda, and well I guess I remember why I don't engage with people like this. 

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9 minutes ago, butterweedstrover said:

cool, whatever. But what does that have to do with the people on here who lie and bullshit their way out of having a substantive debate about the best path to peace. 

How many mass graves would feel comfortable having for peace right now?

9 minutes ago, butterweedstrover said:

liberation of Nazi territory

Well they’re both principally examples of countries taking their land back from fascists.

9 minutes ago, butterweedstrover said:

people who just shrug off the collapse of the Russian government and wish for the best instead of toning down their extreme rhetoric.   

 

“We can’t remove the Nazis from power do you know how destabilizing that’d be for Germany!”

“We can’t remove Mussolini from power how will Italy survive!??”

 

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4 minutes ago, butterweedstrover said:

Or people who just shrug off the collapse of the Russian government and wish for the best instead of toning down their extreme rhetoric.

Mayhaps if you tried to explain at all why ceding territory Putin illegally took in the first place would in any way precipitate the "collapse of the Russian government" you would get more of a response.  Or are you saying such a defeat would convince the Russians to finally oust the Putin regime?  Because if so, yeah, you're not going to find much agreement among reasonable and informed people.

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7 minutes ago, butterweedstrover said:

Or people who just shrug off the collapse of the Russian government and wish for the best instead of toning down their extreme rhetoric.

Said with a straight face, no doubt. 

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19 minutes ago, butterweedstrover said:

Okay cool, whatever. But what does that have to do with the people on here who lie and bullshit their way out of having a substantive debate about the best path to peace. 

The best path to peace was for Russia to never invade Ukraine in the first place. Now they're getting humiliated and won't leave, which again, would lead to peace if they did. Russia could end this tomorrow if they wanted to. It's not like Ukraine is going to retaliate and invade Russia in any significant way. 

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Or people who just shrug off the collapse of the Russian government and wish for the best instead of toning down their extreme rhetoric.   

The Russian government under Putin is incredibly corrupt and beyond repair so long as the house is not completely cleaned out. Russia will be an outcast to most of the world as long as the current government stands. A collapse will be hard now, but it's ultimately necessary for the long term benefit of the Russian people. Avoiding this reality will do you no good.

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3 hours ago, butterweedstrover said:

Russia has always been feudal. Putin didn't create the system. Crossing your fingers isn't enough to advocate destructive policy and hoping it turns out well. 

Where there private armies running around in the days of the USSR? And when the USSR collapsed, a bloodbath like the one you fear now didn't ensue. The state of present day Russia is Putin's fault. 

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11 minutes ago, Corvinus85 said:

Where there private armies running around in the days of the USSR? And when the USSR collapsed, a bloodbath like the one you fear now didn't ensue. The state of present day Russia is Putin's fault. 

I mean yeah, the 90s in Russia sucked. 
 

Things are better today, but the fundamental problems are still there.

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47 minutes ago, butterweedstrover said:

I mean yeah, the 90s in Russia sucked. 
 

Yes.

47 minutes ago, butterweedstrover said:

Things are better today

By plenty metrics it’s worse.

The population is much older. It’s become one of the top places in the world for HIV infections.

Socially they’ve gotten worse on women’s rights, race-relations(globally), and lgbt rights.

Al lot of The corporations who came to Russia in the 90s have fled it.

Putin has had decades to least make the country semi-functional. He’s failed. He shouldn’t have decades more.

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1 hour ago, butterweedstrover said:

I mean yeah, the 90s in Russia sucked. 
 

Things are better today, but the fundamental problems are still there.

So....Putin's current Russia that invades countries; assassinates, imprisons, and subjugates his people through a culture of fear; and insists this is his aim throughout the Soviet's former sphere of influence.  That's better than the "90s Russia?"  Which sucked?  And things are BETTER today?  Yeah, you have no fucking idea what you're talking about.  You keep on mentioning you don't like participating in politics threads.  You should go back to that.  Because, as is blatantly obvious to anyone with a brain, the Putin regime is not only manifestly worse for the entire world, but also especially for the Russian citizens in terms of all the "violence" you apparently abhor.

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8 hours ago, butterweedstrover said:

I've said from the beginning that people who advocate violence are the one's who celebrate the collapse of the Russian government.

But you're advocating violence. You're advocating for the violent seizure of Ukrainian territory to be recognised and accepted as an outcome. That acknowledges, rewards and yes, advocates violence as a solution.

8 hours ago, butterweedstrover said:

But it's no wonder it exists when people are pushing for a total Ukrainian battleground victory without potential for negotiations.

I feel no embarrassment about pushing for a total battleground victory over an illegal invasion. Yes, I'd like to see that. Would you not like to see it?

8 hours ago, butterweedstrover said:

 Using such excuses as "it is for them to decide" assumes the current regime in Kiev is an ethical custodian of these regions. 

Are you suggesting that Putin is a more ethical custodian of those regions? For all Ukraine's problems, it is not a dictatorship, and Putin's custody of those regions so far has seen reprisals, executions without trial, forced relocation and ethnic cleansing, press gangs, pillage, theft, corruption and abuse.

Is Russia under Putin an ethical custodian of those regions? The evidence is that it is not even an ethical custodian of Russia.

8 hours ago, butterweedstrover said:

Their only claim, international recognition, is not enough to warrant a military solution, because international recognition is flimsy at best. Serbia has international recognition of Kosovo. China has international recognition of Taiwan. Neither would be morally justified to retake either through force. 

The suggestion here would be that Russia isn't morally justified to take any part of Ukraine through force either, then? Yet that's what you're advocating should happen! 

It's a nonsense argument. Ukraine can't reclaim by force what Russia is allowed to take by force? This is some weak sauce.

8 hours ago, butterweedstrover said:

 My opinion does not "prioritize" a dictator over an elected regime

It clearly does. Attacking me for pointing this out does not constitute a refutation.

8 hours ago, butterweedstrover said:

But as a moderator

You keep bringing this up as if it's relevant. It's not. I'm not required to agree with you, or allow your statements to go unchallenged, because I happen to be a moderator.

You have a point of view, and you're freely expressing it at length and in detail. Nobody has slandered you: if you regard any comments about the implications of your position as slander, I can only point out that you have repeatedly said similar things to and about those arguing with you. You're being treated with as much respect as you're showing, and the discussion so far is within bounds. If you don't agree, please report posts so that another moderator can look at them. Otherwise, drop this 'you're a moderator' bit: it's cheap and pointless.

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8 hours ago, butterweedstrover said:

I actually linked you a second article. Try reading it this time. 

I read both. :) As I said previously, the first isn't saying what you thought it was saying and the second is saying the opposite.  That is why I wanted to see a quote from the second article that clearly says the shooters were from the protesting side.

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But I wonder how an article from the Atlantic Council which outright says the Ukrainian government is not investigating the massacre or prosecuting anyone involved can be read as confirmation Yanukovych shot protestors.

And now I would love a quote from the first article that says the "Ukrainian government is not investigating the massacre".  It just doesn't say that.  And yes, it is not confirming that Yanukovych ordered the shootings but nobody suggested it did.

I'd love to read the original posts you got those links from.  They were presumably in Russian, so not going to happen.  But I presume they contrasted how the media from the "West" was still calling for more investigations of Maidan (because it can't hide the "truth"), with all the Russian media speaking with one voice (as it has already been told the truth).  Thus, you believe the latter.

In summary, you are saying that while Russia is a corrupt place, it must be allowed to hold the territory it seized in Ukraine because failure would lead to the collapse of the Russian state.  And that must be avoided at all costs.

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1 hour ago, mormont said:
10 hours ago, butterweedstrover said:

But it's no wonder it exists when people are pushing for a total Ukrainian battleground victory without potential for negotiations.

I feel no embarrassment about pushing for a total battleground victory over an illegal invasion. Yes, I'd like to see that. Would you not like to see it?

I think it may be true to say most people hereabouts are pushing for a total Russian ceasefire and withdrawal from all, at least, pre-2022 Ukrainian territory, though preferably Crimea as well. I think Ukraine grinding out a total battlefield victory would be extremely devastating to both Ukraine and Russia. But I don't support the notion that Ukraine should simply lay down its arms and accept Russian occupation of its sovereign territory as the price for peace.

Russia cannot be allowed to come away with territorial gains from its actions in this war. Profiting from its aggression simply emboldens it to future similar endeavours. If the only way to achieve this is Ukraine grinding out a full military expulsion of Russia from all of its territory then so be it.

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2 hours ago, A Horse Named Stranger said:

Cheap and pointless? So like Florida. 

Hey!  If you're still intent on boring the entire forum with Florida jokes I can't stop you.  But this is one instance where it's a gator jump too far.  Even Florida isn't this inane.  That's the juxtaposition.

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