re: Latest Updates: Russia-Ukraine Conflict

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Hook, Line and Sinker. There are extremely gullible posters on here that think they know the reality of the world but are really sheep.

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And there are posters here that believe they are shepherds and know it all when reality is they are so rigid in their thinking that they are close minded in their thinking and they have it all figured out.

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In return, Ukraine received security assurances from the United States, Russia and Britain; compensation for the economic value of the highly-enriched uranium in the warheads


This is Europes war, not Joe Bidens. That was 30 years ago.

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Lol, didn’t I see the US right there?

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You are really gullible. You have zero clue about our own Government and CIA do you.

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And you are completely ignorant about the relevant details, so much so that you actually don't care about what the US's initial response was to Eastern European nations joining NATO.

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America is the greatest country in the history of this planet but our government has overthrown and undermined other countries for decades.

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This is the reality of geopolitics since man discovered farming. The world is an anarchic, violent place and geopolitics is its most cutthroat arena. If we remove people's emotions about the US's behavior, it has done what security states do, which is to maximize its wealth and security at the expense of other weaker states. Why exactly should it act differently?

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We pushed and pushed and pushed to get Putin to do something that makes him look like the aggressor.

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Again, this is an ahistorical view. The notion that NATO has forced Putin to be the aggressor is just not accurate and is based on a nonsensical idea.

Putin spoke in 2007 about a key aspect of US-Russia relations, the ABM Treaty signed in 1972. GWBII insisted that the US leave that agreement on December 13th, 2001, because in his view, the security landscape had changed, and the 'hostility that once led both our countries to keep thousands of nuclear weapons on hair-trigger alert' died with the death of the USSR. Again, there might be a prevailing event that could color Bush's view at the time, right?

Putin was newly ascended to the Presidency of Russia, and saw the withdrawal as an overt threat, despite the US's own security concerns which drove the withdrawal. Arguably, there was no justification for seeing it as a threat other than paranoia. Why did he see the withdrawal of a 1970s treaty as a threat? Or rather, he saw Russian security concerns as paramount, whereas the US saw their own security concerns as paramount. Should the US have acted so that their security was secondary to Russia's? In other words, the suggestions here are that the US should have acted timidly with respect to their own security just for Russia's sake, which is a nonsensical view.

Onto the NATO expansion question, because the Visegrad states in Central Europe first expressed interest in joining NATO in October of 1991 after the termination of the Warsaw Pact earlier in the year, during the process of the dissolution of the USSR. Why is it that no one questions why those countries expressed an interest immediately after the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact? The NATO response was guarded, but was pursued after Congress empowered Clinton in October of 1994. By the time of full ascension, Russian behavior internally with the Chechen War stirred up more interest in Eastern Europe for membership in NATO.

In the time between 1994 and 1999, NATO and Russia signed an agreement which promised that each would protect the territorial rights of sovereign nations. Indeed, any suggestion that the former Warsaw Pact states future security was dependent on how secure Russia felt would have only driven those states into NATO's arms even faster. Whatever hesitancy NATO showed has now been obliterated by this idea that NATO was specifically seeking to isolate Russia for the purpose of provoking Russia. It actually beggars belief and is a convenient post-hoc excuse to justify Russia's own paranoia.

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Where do we get the balls to judge them for that? Have you seen how much this administration has lied?

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Do you think there exists a world where politicians are truthful with their own citizens and with each other?

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Not if it ends there.

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That's the problem. It won't end there. You are hoping it ends there, but if you are Russia, acting in the interest of your own security and have now seen the West capitulate once again after you annexed another country's territory, all justified by your imaginary security concerns, how are you going to act in the future? You seem to be giving the Russians every benefit of the doubt but going out of your way to inculcate the US in things which are effectively the rules of geopolitics.

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We’re not good though.

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And Russia is? Come off it.

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I’m the one having the long term vision here.

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No, you are insisting on your point of view and aren't considering anything that might confound it.

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What if this goes on for years and the supply crisis gets even worse?

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What if this war ends and the supply crisis gets worse regardless, because Russia has discovered it can manipulate both wheat and oil in order to get what it wants? What then?

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