re: Latest Updates: Russia-Ukraine Conflict

quote:

---

This argument about the hypothetical peace negotiations that happened AFTER Russia invaded are the most ridiculous.

---

You are referring to the "hypothetical" Spring 2022 negotiations? The "hypothetical" negotiations held in multiple cities over many weeks? The "hypothetical" negotiations Russia quickly consented to after unexpectedly getting its arse kicked in the Kyiv campaign? The "hypothetical" negotiations addressed at the time in every major newspaper on the planet? The "hypothetical" negotiations which Boris Johnson scuttled, at least by his account as well as that of both Russia and Ukraine?

Some of you guys are so far descended down the rabbithole, I don't know how you're going to be able to clamber out.

quote:

---

Are nuclear bombers defensive weapons? ICBMs?

---

Certainly

quote:

---

Certainly

---

quote:

---

Are nuclear bombers defensive weapons?

---

"Defensive weapon" is a bit of an oxymoron but while any weapon can by definition be used in an offensive or defensive way nuclear weapons are possibly the only effective weapon that has only been used in an undeployed defensive posture for their entire 79-year history except for 2 times.

quote:

---

"Defensive weapon" is a bit of an oxymoron but while any weapon can by definition be used in an offensive or defensive way nuclear weapons are possibly the only effective weapon that has only been used in an undeployed defensive posture for their entire 79-year history except for 2 times.

---

Agreed. For bombers specifically I think there is an argument that they aren't defensive though, given response and delivery time in a defensive situation.

Off the top of my head they agreed upon:

-Ukraine gets EU membership

-Crimea would be under Russian control but would undergo some kind of "review" process after 15 years.

-Some Ukrainian demilitarization that Ukraine wasn't entirely opposed to because it included protections from the west.

quote:

---

Remarkably, however, the two sides continued to work around the clock on a treaty that Putin and Zelensky were supposed to sign during a summit to be held in the not-too-distant future.

The sides were actively exchanging drafts with each other and, it appears, beginning to share them with other parties. (In his February 2023 interview, Bennett reported seeing 17 or 18 working drafts of the agreement; Lukashenko also reported seeing at least one.) We have closely scrutinized two of these drafts, one that is dated April 12 and another dated April 15, which participants in the talks told us was the last one exchanged between the parties. They are broadly similar but contain important differences—and both show that the communiqué had not resolved some key issues.

First, whereas the communiqué and the April 12 draft made clear that guarantor states would decide independently whether to come to Kyiv’s aid in the event of an attack on Ukraine, in the April 15 draft, the Russians attempted to subvert this crucial article by insisting that such action would occur only “on the basis of a decision agreed to by all guarantor states”—giving the likely invader, Russia, a veto. According to a notation on the text, the Ukrainians rejected that amendment, insisting on the original formula, under which all the guarantors had an individual obligation to act and would not have to reach consensus before doing so.

Second, the drafts contain several articles that were added to the treaty at Russia’s insistence but were not part of the communiqué and related to matters that Ukraine refused to discuss. These require Ukraine to ban “fascism, Nazism, neo-Nazism, and aggressive nationalism”—and, to that end, to repeal six Ukrainian laws (fully or in part) that dealt, broadly, with contentious aspects of Soviet-era history, in particular the role of Ukrainian nationalists during World War II.

It is easy to see why Ukraine would resist letting Russia determine its policies on historical memory, particularly in the context of a treaty on security guarantees. And the Russians knew these provisions would make it more difficult for the Ukrainians to accept the rest of the treaty. They might, therefore, be seen as poison pills.

It is also possible, however, that the provisions were intended to allow Putin to save face. For example, by forcing Ukraine to repeal statutes that condemned the Soviet past and cast the Ukrainian nationalists who fought the Red Army during World War II as freedom fighters, the Kremlin could argue that it had achieved its stated goal of “denazification,” even though the original meaning of that phrase may well have been the replacement of Zelensky’s government.

In the end, it remains unclear whether these provisions would have been a deal-breaker. The lead Ukrainian negotiator, Arakhamia, later downplayed their importance. As he put it in a November 2023 interview on a Ukrainian television news program, Russia had “hoped until the last moment that they [could] squeeze us to sign such an agreement, that we [would] adopt neutrality. This was the biggest thing for them. They were ready to finish the war if we, like Finland [during the Cold War], adopted neutrality and undertook not to join NATO.”

---

quote:

---

The size and the structure of the Ukrainian military was also the subject of intense negotiation. As of April 15, the two sides remained quite far apart on the matter. The Ukrainians wanted a peacetime army of 250,000 people; the Russians insisted on a maximum of 85,000, considerably smaller than the standing army Ukraine had before the invasion in 2022. The Ukrainians wanted 800 tanks; the Russians would allow only 342. The difference between the range of missiles was even starker: 280 kilometers, or about 174 miles, (the Ukrainian position), and a mere 40 kilometers, or about 25 miles, (the Russian position).

The talks had deliberately skirted the question of borders and territory. Evidently, the idea was for Putin and Zelensky to decide on those issues at the planned summit. It is easy to imagine that Putin would have insisted on holding all the territory that his forces had already occupied. The question is whether Zelensky could have been convinced to agree to this land grab.

Despite these substantial disagreements, the April 15 draft suggests that the treaty would be signed within two weeks. Granted, that date might have shifted, but it shows that the two teams planned to move fast. “We were very close in mid-April 2022 to finalizing the war with a peace settlement,” one of the Ukrainian negotiators, Oleksandr Chalyi, recounted at a public appearance in December 2023. “[A] week after Putin started his aggression, he concluded he had made a huge mistake and tried to do everything possible to conclude an agreement with Ukraine.”

---

I don't know what to think when people act as if the West was just unnecessarily evil and mean to the U.S.S.R.

I mean, I've grown up around Leftists who never shut up about this, and Far-Leftists too young to remember the U.S.S.R. at all these days actually want Communism to come back, which is a mental problem they should get help for...

But now that people on the Right are picking that line of thinking up... frick, what the hell is going on?

And I will say that after Stalin the U.S.S.R. was doomed, because it could not sustain itself without just being ruthless and attempting to suqash the competition of the Capitalist system and halt innovation. Kruschev is a monster to us, but he tried to correct them from Stalin's insanity, and his successors largely had no real clue about what to do, especially as they could not keep up with the West on a technological level. By the time Gorbachev became their leader, and his thing was "we're only legitimate if people choose our system, so we have to prove to them that it is better," it was over...

Saying any of that in the 80s would've landed me on a watch list... now, I'm strangely to the right of a lot of the right in thinking all was fair in that struggle between Capitalism/Representational Democracy and Communism/Totalitarianism.

quote:

---

NATO never had been a serious threat to Russia militarily. Economically the NATO nations are, but not militarily.

---

The idea was to break Russia the way we broke Serbia and Ukraine.

quote:

---

This argument about the hypothetical peace negotiations that happened AFTER Russia invaded are the most ridiculous.

---

And the same idiots bring up the same fake-news Russian talking points every time:

"Ukraine could have just surrendered!" is all they ever really mean. Bunch of Commie bootlickers.