Redbrickbear said:

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sombear said:

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Redbrickbear said:

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sombear said:

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Redbrickbear said:

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whiterock said:

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Redbrickbear said:

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whiterock said:

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Redbrickbear said:

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whiterock said:

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alas, the Ukrainians do not agree that they are really down deep plain ol' Russians and have fought to be free of Russia every time they've had a chance.

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Of course not

But there are millions of people living within the borders of Ukraine....who are not Ukrainians

Its not surprising the most ethnically Ukrainian parts of the country want to align with the West....and the most ethnically Russian parts of the country want to align with Moscow

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if we accept that reasoning as material grounds for changing borders, the world will be engulfed in war.

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So borders are to be static forever?

When has that ever happened in human history? unchangeable borders

Not to mention the powers that be in DC have helped bring about border changes in a dozen or so countries since 1991

Kosovo, S. Sudan, East Timor, etc

["since 1990, at least 25 new independent countries recognized by the international community and have been founded with support from the United States, most of which proceeded along with enormous disputes and conflicts. Over the years, the international community has come to reach some consensus on opposing secession from an existing state as well as safeguarding territorial and sovereign integrity. At the same time, the United States has frequently used human rights as an excuse to support certain separatist movements in other countries and even to obstruct and undermine other states' anti-secession actions."

For many years, the United States has provided support to the separatist movements in Taiwan, Tibet, Xinjiang and Hong Kong. Supported the independence of Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Ukraine, George, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan (from the USSR), South Sudan (from Sudan), East Timor (from Indonesia), Namibia (from South Africa), Eritrea (from Ethiopia), Kosovo (from Serbia), and several other nations.]

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Great example of the internal contradiction in your argument = you SAY static borders are the problem, but in fact, it's the effort to change borders that cause wars.

The foundation stone of every state is to exercise sovereignty over its territory. Every state will go to war to defend its territory. Every time. The quickest, surest way to start a war is to try to move borders. And when that attempt to move borders is not an internal effort by a enclaved ethnic group but an outright invasion of one state to seize all/part of another state, war involves not just one state, but all states. The entire world lines up on one side or the other. Sure a few very poor countries halfway around the world from the zone of contention might not have strong feelings, but their allies/trading partners might, and that will impact their decision-making significantly.



You try to change a border, you always get a war.

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Then why has DC consistently supported secession movements and border changes for decades all over the world?

Would you consider this pro-war behavior?

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What secession movements/border changes?

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Kosovo from Serbia

East Timor from Indonesia

South Sudan from Sudan


Etc

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Pretty weak examples for your thesis. .

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No they are pretty accurate examples

Then you spend time defending them (which is fine….i support E. Timor and S.Sudan independence as well)

But their merits are not the point

DC has been a consistent supporter of border changes, secession moments, independence movements

White rock said this guarantees war

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Which of those examples you cited did NOT involve war?

whiterock said:

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Redbrickbear said:

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sombear said:

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Redbrickbear said:

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sombear said:

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Redbrickbear said:

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whiterock said:

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Redbrickbear said:

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whiterock said:

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Redbrickbear said:

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whiterock said:

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alas, the Ukrainians do not agree that they are really down deep plain ol' Russians and have fought to be free of Russia every time they've had a chance.

---

Of course not

But there are millions of people living within the borders of Ukraine....who are not Ukrainians

Its not surprising the most ethnically Ukrainian parts of the country want to align with the West....and the most ethnically Russian parts of the country want to align with Moscow

---

if we accept that reasoning as material grounds for changing borders, the world will be engulfed in war.

---

So borders are to be static forever?

When has that ever happened in human history? unchangeable borders

Not to mention the powers that be in DC have helped bring about border changes in a dozen or so countries since 1991

Kosovo, S. Sudan, East Timor, etc

["since 1990, at least 25 new independent countries recognized by the international community and have been founded with support from the United States, most of which proceeded along with enormous disputes and conflicts. Over the years, the international community has come to reach some consensus on opposing secession from an existing state as well as safeguarding territorial and sovereign integrity. At the same time, the United States has frequently used human rights as an excuse to support certain separatist movements in other countries and even to obstruct and undermine other states' anti-secession actions."

For many years, the United States has provided support to the separatist movements in Taiwan, Tibet, Xinjiang and Hong Kong. Supported the independence of Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Ukraine, George, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan (from the USSR), South Sudan (from Sudan), East Timor (from Indonesia), Namibia (from South Africa), Eritrea (from Ethiopia), Kosovo (from Serbia), and several other nations.]

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Great example of the internal contradiction in your argument = you SAY static borders are the problem, but in fact, it's the effort to change borders that cause wars.

The foundation stone of every state is to exercise sovereignty over its territory. Every state will go to war to defend its territory. Every time. The quickest, surest way to start a war is to try to move borders. And when that attempt to move borders is not an internal effort by a enclaved ethnic group but an outright invasion of one state to seize all/part of another state, war involves not just one state, but all states. The entire world lines up on one side or the other. Sure a few very poor countries halfway around the world from the zone of contention might not have strong feelings, but their allies/trading partners might, and that will impact their decision-making significantly.



You try to change a border, you always get a war.

---

Then why has DC consistently supported secession movements and border changes for decades all over the world?

Would you consider this pro-war behavior?

---

What secession movements/border changes?

---

Kosovo from Serbia

East Timor from Indonesia

South Sudan from Sudan


Etc

---

Pretty weak examples for your thesis. .

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No they are pretty accurate examples

Then you spend time defending them (which is fine….i support E. Timor and S.Sudan independence as well)

But their merits are not the point

DC has been a consistent supporter of border changes, secession moments, independence movements

White rock said this guarantees war

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Which of those examples you cited did NOT involve war?

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I didn't say Whiterock was wrong

But does that mean DC was promoting war by supporting secession movements and border changes?

historian said:

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I don't know how accurate this is but it certainly sparks some debate. Ukraine's kleptocracy is as corrupt as any.

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I'll answer it for you. It's pure, unadulterated BS. It's social media fiction just like the French Riviera mansion and the mega-yacht in Greece and so on and so on.

It didn't pass the smell test. But that does not mean that the Ukraine government is above board. It is extremely corrupt and not representative. And the US has sent them billions of dollars we don't have without any controls or audits. In short, it's a huge money laundering operation for our own corrupt government.

I don't think it's a coincidence that some of Biden's scandals involve shaky business dealings in Ukraine. Hunter's very real laptop loaded with lots of incriminating evidence and the "fake" impeachment of Trump for engaging in diplomacy are merely two examples. (The impeachment was real but entirely fraudulent. Pelosi & the other klepto fascists were covering up those crimes.)

historian said:

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It didn't pass the smell test. But that does not mean that the Ukraine government is above board. It is extremely corrupt and not representative. And the US has sent them billions of dollars we don't have without any controls or audits. In short, it's a huge money laundering operation for our own corrupt government.

I don't think it's a coincidence that some of Biden's scandals involve shaky business dealings in Ukraine. Hunter's very real laptop loaded with lots of incriminating evidence and the "fake" impeachment of Trump for engaging in diplomacy are merely two examples. (The impeachment was real but entirely fraudulent. Pelosi & the other klepto fascists were covering up those crimes.)

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Then let's see some evidence of this huge money laundering operation. The confirmed reports are of Ukraine cracking down on corruption and fraud.

So far, every salacious story has proven false.

I agree Trump's impeachment was a farse, but that had nothing to do corruption. It was about his silly phone call with Zelensky.

And Bidens had shaky business dealings with countless countries. Heck, I don't blame countries for trying to ingratiate themselves with key U.S. officials, including VPs and their families.

Putin is just as macho, impulsive and reckless as Trump.

And he will not allow it to appear that Trump is dominating him.

Especially after losing hundreds of thousands of troops and trillions of dollars.

Putin will have to be allowed the territory his men currently occupy and the promise that Ukraine will stay out of NATO.

If so it's a common sense solution that will save thousands of lives.

You're making excuses for one of the most corrupt politicians in history who took bribes for years.

The "Big Guy" would be proud of you… if his brain were still functioning.

historian said:

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You're making excuses for one of the most corrupt politicians in history who took bribes for years.

The "Big Guy" would be proud of you… if his brain were still functioning.

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No, I said I don't blame the folks on the other side. Hunter and Joe are slimeballs.

whiterock said:

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Sam Lowry said:

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whiterock said:

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Sam Lowry said:

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whiterock said:

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Doc Holliday said:

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whiterock said:

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Doc Holliday said:

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whiterock said:

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Doc Holliday said:

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whiterock said:

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Doc Holliday said:

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whiterock said:

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Your comment above reflects the faulty premise running thru the vast majority of isolationist arguments - that disengaging from world affairs will help fix our domestic problems. It's the opposite. Disengagement will make those problems worse. How many new bases do you want to build in Sweden, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria? Do you want to have to build a 600 ship navy again? Maintain a 3m soldier army again? How is letting China bully the rest of Asia going to benefit our economy? (and on and on....)

Cutting all foreign aid does not balance the budget.
Closing DOD and disbanding our military does not balance the budget.
DOING BOTH DOES NOT BALANCE OUR BUDGET.

Close down Dept of Education. States can handle the role just fine.
But if you want to make a really big impact = end the Green Energy nonsense, all $93T of it.

Repeat after me: We cannot balance our budget with a series of bad foreign policy decisions.

---

Again, that's not what I'm getting at. There's TWO wars. One domestic and one abroad.

DC is super supportive of war in Ukraine or war anywhere. They jump through the hoops for financial support, weapons etc. When it comes to putting American's first, they're silent. They don't have the same sense of urgency that they do with war. When we have major weather disasters, they'll let people die, especially if they have certain political views. They let millions of illegals in. They allow big pharma and healthcare to let us die in order for those groups to be insanely greedy.

If we keep the current status quo together for the next several decades, our country won't even be recognizable and the freedom you and I would fight for, won't even exist. That's what I'm getting at.

The people in favor of the war in Ukraine have to understand that if we don't win the war at home, then the war in Ukraine doesn't matter. I want you to be pissed off that they're enthusiastic about war in Ukraine and against American First.

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yes, it's exactly what you are getting at. You are (along with millions of others) suggesting a cause-effect relationship - that we are not responding adequately to disasters, or canceling opposing views, or tolerating illegal immigration, or mismanaging big pharma/healthcare to facilitate policies abroad because we are obsessed with foreign affairs. That is just not so. There is nothing about fixing any of those domestic issues which would require a single change in foreign policy. In fact stopping everything we're doing abroad, closing all the bases, shutting off all the aid, bringing our entire diplomatic corps home.....would not come remotely close to balancing the budget. Those problems you cited are easily fixable with good policy, which will require negligible expense (and in many cases save us money).

If we lose the war in Ukraine (i.e. let Russia have as much of it as it wants), we will in a worse position no matter how much improvement we make on those other things.

Don't take the false dilemma. BOTH Ukraine and the border (et al...) are important. We have to win on BOTH. Failure on either one is bad, and cannot be offset by victory on the other.

There is no number of bad foreign policy decisions which will balance our budget. In fact, each bad foreign policy decision will saddle us with ever greater future costs.

---

I'm not asking to change foreign policy to benefit domestic policy. I'm not stating a cause-effect relationship.

I'm asking to treat both equally and we're not.

It pisses me off that we send hundreds of billions in aid to Ukraine and simultaneously don't give a damn about hurricane victims. $5 billion for the border is too much, but hundreds of billions to Ukraine is urgent.

Surely that doesn't sit right with you guys?

What are your red lines?
Are you ok if this war proceeds for a decade or so?
Are you ok if it costs us a few trillion?
What end goal do you have in mind?

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Doesn't sit right with me at all, but when you pair the two things together in an argument, there is an implied "we have to stop doing X abroad so we can do Y at home." Certainly that is the construction of many who argue here and most of the arguments on the matter in the public square. Fact is, we have to do both.

The end is simple: stop Russia, up to and including causing a collapse of the current regime. We do have it in our power to do that. quite easily. Nato GDP dwarfs Russia. Zero chance Russia can last longer than Nato. Biden has simply been taking half-measures.

Why is that end so important? See sombear's comments above. Russia will always have the ability to rebuild armies and airforces, which makes them an existential threat if not robustly resisted. For centuries they have looked west and seen they need to modernize, but the corruption always wins. As a result, throughout the centuries, they have over and over and over demonstrated a lack of maturity to know their limits. Their move against Ukraine was a frickin' comedy of errors, from intelligence assessments, to operational planning, to strategic & tactical execution. But look what it's costing to stop them......

History is abundantly clear on this: Russia is a bully. If you don't knock them flat on their asses when they get out of line, they will keep coming.

---

You're correct that Biden took half-measures. We don't even have any signed military data sharing agreements with Ukraine, No geospatial data, nothing. The same clowns that prolonged war in Afghanistan/Iraq and spent damn near $8 trillion doing so are in charge of this war. That leads me to believe they want to make this a prolonged proxy war for as long as possible. After personally visiting NATO in Brussels and seeing CNN on every TV in their building...I think they're also clowns.
US and Western intel liaison with Ukraine is robust. We helped Ukraine literally rebuilt its agencies from scratch to rid them of Russian infiltration. And, of course, we trained trained trained, in classical FI/CI operations as well as paramilitary operations. Had it not been for all this "covert" investment going back to 2015-2016 timeframe, the Russian plan for a 72-hour operation to take down Ukraine would almost certainly have been successful.

I don't trust them. Our intelligence community and military leaders have largely claimed that Trump is a Russian asset as well. I don't know how you feel good about this war considering those people are in charge.
The Russian asset meme has run its course. You will hear some of the die-hards on the left still parrot it because they believe it, but it's clearly not an election winner so it will die a natural death.

This is what DC believes. This is the belief of the military industrial complex, national security, NATO and DC.

The only explanation for today’s appalling performance by @realDonaldTrump is the Russians have high value compromising intel on POTUS. Something that would have been discovered during any serviceman’s background investigation. @realDonaldTrump is unfit to command our troops.

— Major General (ret) Paul Eaton (@PaulDEaton52) July 16, 2018

Trump will deliver peace either through major aggression or pulling funds. Our leaders very clearly don't want that. How do you reconcile this?
That is pure projection by his political opponents. He and his team are making all the right statements and, as I predicted, Trump is not going to pull funds. Has very clearly signaled such to the Ukrainians.

---

Trump has, technically, already escalated - he's called for increasing NATO defense spending to 5% of GDP. The Poles have already announced they will do so. There's also strategic escalation ongoing, and you can take it to the bank Trump will continue it (i.e. he flirted with it in his admin) - putting permanent Nato military installations in former WP countries. The Romanians have already approved building a major NATO joint base (Ramstein equivalent) at an existing Romania air base = 10k troops & squadrons of aircraft. In 2027, A German brigade will be stationed in Lithuania, to guard the Suwalki Gap. Also public statements about NATO bases in Finland.

That is a fair price Russia pays for its aggression. We could always stop construction of the bases, or defer the deployment of Nato troops to the Baltics, or etc.......in exchange for Russian withdrawal from Ukraine.

The first faulty premise to sweep from analysis is that Nato actions provoked the war. Such is pure poppycock. Russian imperialism, an effort to rebuild something similar to the Ussr/Warsaw Pact footprint, is 100% the cause of the Russo-Ukraine War. Russia thought they could take Ukraine quickly and without consequence. Now, they are caught in a trap from which their current regime cannot escape. they cannot win, and they cannot withdraw. We should threaten to escalate, and then do so incrementally to ratchet up the pressure on Russia.

Opponents of policies supporting Ukraine are hopelessly out of touch with realities........

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I wish people understood what a screwed up place Ukraine has been for a long time. I've seen videos of Ukrainian soldiers committing war crimes. People say "what about Russia?". We're not funding Russia.
War crimes happen in wars. The victor gets to sort out what is/isn't a war crime.

With these huge sums of money we're giving to Ukraine, why should we tolerate their corruption and sin?
The purpose of our aid to Ukraine is not to rid it of corruption. It's to rid it of Russians. Why did we did not impose any conditions on Stalin to modernize, liberalize, economize, etc.... Because the purpose of our aid to them was to degrade the German war machine fighting on two fronts. We didn't care what Stalin believed or did to his own people, as long as he organized them to go kill Germans.
Why have we rejected an audit of aid to Ukraine? Do you deny that the west is completely without corruption here?
Wherever there is government spending, there is corruption. And you do audit and such to minimize it. What you do not do is determine that a Russian invasion of Ukraine is a threat to Nato (which it obviously is) but not respond because corruption might break out. It's like refusing to drive your car to avoid the risk of getting a flat tire.

If Ukraine is successful, I want Zelensky removed from power permanently as opposition leaders were murdered by his regime. People who opposed the war were kidnapped by militias and tortured. Its not a surprise to me that over 650K men left Ukraine when the war began.
Russian propaganda is designed to generate hyperbole like that.
Those 650k men you referred to did not leave Ukraine because of an oppressive Zelensky government. They left to avoid a repressive Russian government taking over control of Ukraine, of having to fight a hopeless battle against what at the time was seen as an unstoppable Russian Army.
Yes, Ukraine did a lot of work to root out Russian sympathizers throughout their government. They literally rebuilt their intel agencies from scratch. They had a Russian church hierarchy that was a veritable 5th column.

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The idea that Ukraine is comparable to Russia on any of those yardsticks is highly suspect. War is a messy thing. You cannot be effective without stepping on toes, nicking fingers with knives, etc.... And there are only two ways to fix that:
1) Win, so you can sort it all out when it's over.
2) Lose, so your opponent can sort it all out when it's over.

If we don't help Ukraine resist pressure from Russia, Russian will use Ukraine to ramp up pressure on Nato. So pick the problem you want to deal with - Ukrainian corruption, or having a brutal, nuclear capable Russian army with hundreds of miles of new frontage on the Polish, Slovakian, Ukrainian, and Romanian borders, +600mi closer to Nato troops. And for that price, there still will be corruption in Ukraine, given that Russia is corrupt by orders of magnitude worse than Ukraine.

In Russian doctrine, use of tactical nukes is a battlefield decision. Do really want a corrupt Russian Army Colonel with tactical nukes at his disposal to be 600mi closer to our men & women in uniform? Is that really worse than a Zelensky regime skimming a little off of the war effort?

Choose your poison carefully.

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No. A nuclear capable Russia 600 miles closer to NATO is what you want if you support NATO expansion.
I have not endorsed Nato membership for Ukraine. The list of reasons for that is not short, and includes statutory prohibitions - territorial disputes, democratic processes, etc......

What the Russians and the Ukraine war critics have always wanted was a buffer zone.
LOL you always spin Nato support for Ukraine as an effort to move Nato borders 600mi eastward, despite Ukraine's ineligibility for membership, then ignore that it is RUssia who actually went to war to move its borders 600mi westward.

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Russia doesn't want Ukraine to be a border zone. Russia wants Ukraine to be Russian.

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Of course you have endorsed NATO membership, just not right away.
Refusing to rule it out forever, wanting to watch & wait for decades, is not an endorsement of membership, Vlad, no matter how much you need it to be so. It's a very pragmatic middle-ground position to take on the matter.

You want to build up a military, install US bases, and otherwise make them a de facto member before making them a de jure member.
Nope. Not in Ukraine. I'm fine with building bases in former WP countries, though. We were wise not to do so in order to not provoke Russia. But now that Russia has returned to its old ways, we are wise to move forward with bases in Romania and Poland and Finland - prudent responses to Russian provocations. (it's Russia that broke the status quo, not the other way around).

That's what we were doing, and it's what one would expect.
Uh, no, we are not building Nato bases in Ukraine.

The statutory restrictions are a red herring, as I'm sure you know. We've made exceptions before (see Germany) and could do so again.
Sigh - false equivalence. At the time of Germany reunification, East Germany did not have Russian armies on its soil engaged in a hot war to annex German territory.

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Dude. Nato membership for Ukraine at this moment means Nato is stepping directly into a hot war.
That is just not going to happen.

You've got so many busted-up strawmen on the floor you can hardly stand.

---

Not talking about reunification. I'm talking about the end of WW2, which would be an analogous situation if NATO membership is part of a settlement in Ukraine. It won't be, but the fact we're talking about it demonstrates the reasons for the Russian invasion. Framing it as a 1st Amendment issue is comical.

We don't have US bases there yet. It starts with NATO troops training Ukrainian troops, integrating their forces with our forces, their arms and equipment with our arms and equipment, etc. As you say, no serious leader would stand by and wait for it to happen.

Sam Lowry said:

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whiterock said:

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Sam Lowry said:

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whiterock said:

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Sam Lowry said:

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whiterock said:

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Doc Holliday said:

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whiterock said:

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Doc Holliday said:

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whiterock said:

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Doc Holliday said:

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whiterock said:

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Doc Holliday said:

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whiterock said:

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Your comment above reflects the faulty premise running thru the vast majority of isolationist arguments - that disengaging from world affairs will help fix our domestic problems. It's the opposite. Disengagement will make those problems worse. How many new bases do you want to build in Sweden, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria? Do you want to have to build a 600 ship navy again? Maintain a 3m soldier army again? How is letting China bully the rest of Asia going to benefit our economy? (and on and on....)

Cutting all foreign aid does not balance the budget.
Closing DOD and disbanding our military does not balance the budget.
DOING BOTH DOES NOT BALANCE OUR BUDGET.

Close down Dept of Education. States can handle the role just fine.
But if you want to make a really big impact = end the Green Energy nonsense, all $93T of it.

Repeat after me: We cannot balance our budget with a series of bad foreign policy decisions.

---

Again, that's not what I'm getting at. There's TWO wars. One domestic and one abroad.

DC is super supportive of war in Ukraine or war anywhere. They jump through the hoops for financial support, weapons etc. When it comes to putting American's first, they're silent. They don't have the same sense of urgency that they do with war. When we have major weather disasters, they'll let people die, especially if they have certain political views. They let millions of illegals in. They allow big pharma and healthcare to let us die in order for those groups to be insanely greedy.

If we keep the current status quo together for the next several decades, our country won't even be recognizable and the freedom you and I would fight for, won't even exist. That's what I'm getting at.

The people in favor of the war in Ukraine have to understand that if we don't win the war at home, then the war in Ukraine doesn't matter. I want you to be pissed off that they're enthusiastic about war in Ukraine and against American First.

---

yes, it's exactly what you are getting at. You are (along with millions of others) suggesting a cause-effect relationship - that we are not responding adequately to disasters, or canceling opposing views, or tolerating illegal immigration, or mismanaging big pharma/healthcare to facilitate policies abroad because we are obsessed with foreign affairs. That is just not so. There is nothing about fixing any of those domestic issues which would require a single change in foreign policy. In fact stopping everything we're doing abroad, closing all the bases, shutting off all the aid, bringing our entire diplomatic corps home.....would not come remotely close to balancing the budget. Those problems you cited are easily fixable with good policy, which will require negligible expense (and in many cases save us money).

If we lose the war in Ukraine (i.e. let Russia have as much of it as it wants), we will in a worse position no matter how much improvement we make on those other things.

Don't take the false dilemma. BOTH Ukraine and the border (et al...) are important. We have to win on BOTH. Failure on either one is bad, and cannot be offset by victory on the other.

There is no number of bad foreign policy decisions which will balance our budget. In fact, each bad foreign policy decision will saddle us with ever greater future costs.

---

I'm not asking to change foreign policy to benefit domestic policy. I'm not stating a cause-effect relationship.

I'm asking to treat both equally and we're not.

It pisses me off that we send hundreds of billions in aid to Ukraine and simultaneously don't give a damn about hurricane victims. $5 billion for the border is too much, but hundreds of billions to Ukraine is urgent.

Surely that doesn't sit right with you guys?

What are your red lines?
Are you ok if this war proceeds for a decade or so?
Are you ok if it costs us a few trillion?
What end goal do you have in mind?

---

Doesn't sit right with me at all, but when you pair the two things together in an argument, there is an implied "we have to stop doing X abroad so we can do Y at home." Certainly that is the construction of many who argue here and most of the arguments on the matter in the public square. Fact is, we have to do both.

The end is simple: stop Russia, up to and including causing a collapse of the current regime. We do have it in our power to do that. quite easily. Nato GDP dwarfs Russia. Zero chance Russia can last longer than Nato. Biden has simply been taking half-measures.

Why is that end so important? See sombear's comments above. Russia will always have the ability to rebuild armies and airforces, which makes them an existential threat if not robustly resisted. For centuries they have looked west and seen they need to modernize, but the corruption always wins. As a result, throughout the centuries, they have over and over and over demonstrated a lack of maturity to know their limits. Their move against Ukraine was a frickin' comedy of errors, from intelligence assessments, to operational planning, to strategic & tactical execution. But look what it's costing to stop them......

History is abundantly clear on this: Russia is a bully. If you don't knock them flat on their asses when they get out of line, they will keep coming.

---

You're correct that Biden took half-measures. We don't even have any signed military data sharing agreements with Ukraine, No geospatial data, nothing. The same clowns that prolonged war in Afghanistan/Iraq and spent damn near $8 trillion doing so are in charge of this war. That leads me to believe they want to make this a prolonged proxy war for as long as possible. After personally visiting NATO in Brussels and seeing CNN on every TV in their building...I think they're also clowns.
US and Western intel liaison with Ukraine is robust. We helped Ukraine literally rebuilt its agencies from scratch to rid them of Russian infiltration. And, of course, we trained trained trained, in classical FI/CI operations as well as paramilitary operations. Had it not been for all this "covert" investment going back to 2015-2016 timeframe, the Russian plan for a 72-hour operation to take down Ukraine would almost certainly have been successful.

I don't trust them. Our intelligence community and military leaders have largely claimed that Trump is a Russian asset as well. I don't know how you feel good about this war considering those people are in charge.
The Russian asset meme has run its course. You will hear some of the die-hards on the left still parrot it because they believe it, but it's clearly not an election winner so it will die a natural death.

This is what DC believes. This is the belief of the military industrial complex, national security, NATO and DC.

The only explanation for today’s appalling performance by @realDonaldTrump is the Russians have high value compromising intel on POTUS. Something that would have been discovered during any serviceman’s background investigation. @realDonaldTrump is unfit to command our troops.

— Major General (ret) Paul Eaton (@PaulDEaton52) July 16, 2018

Trump will deliver peace either through major aggression or pulling funds. Our leaders very clearly don't want that. How do you reconcile this?
That is pure projection by his political opponents. He and his team are making all the right statements and, as I predicted, Trump is not going to pull funds. Has very clearly signaled such to the Ukrainians.

---

Trump has, technically, already escalated - he's called for increasing NATO defense spending to 5% of GDP. The Poles have already announced they will do so. There's also strategic escalation ongoing, and you can take it to the bank Trump will continue it (i.e. he flirted with it in his admin) - putting permanent Nato military installations in former WP countries. The Romanians have already approved building a major NATO joint base (Ramstein equivalent) at an existing Romania air base = 10k troops & squadrons of aircraft. In 2027, A German brigade will be stationed in Lithuania, to guard the Suwalki Gap. Also public statements about NATO bases in Finland.

That is a fair price Russia pays for its aggression. We could always stop construction of the bases, or defer the deployment of Nato troops to the Baltics, or etc.......in exchange for Russian withdrawal from Ukraine.

The first faulty premise to sweep from analysis is that Nato actions provoked the war. Such is pure poppycock. Russian imperialism, an effort to rebuild something similar to the Ussr/Warsaw Pact footprint, is 100% the cause of the Russo-Ukraine War. Russia thought they could take Ukraine quickly and without consequence. Now, they are caught in a trap from which their current regime cannot escape. they cannot win, and they cannot withdraw. We should threaten to escalate, and then do so incrementally to ratchet up the pressure on Russia.

Opponents of policies supporting Ukraine are hopelessly out of touch with realities........

---

I wish people understood what a screwed up place Ukraine has been for a long time. I've seen videos of Ukrainian soldiers committing war crimes. People say "what about Russia?". We're not funding Russia.
War crimes happen in wars. The victor gets to sort out what is/isn't a war crime.

With these huge sums of money we're giving to Ukraine, why should we tolerate their corruption and sin?
The purpose of our aid to Ukraine is not to rid it of corruption. It's to rid it of Russians. Why did we did not impose any conditions on Stalin to modernize, liberalize, economize, etc.... Because the purpose of our aid to them was to degrade the German war machine fighting on two fronts. We didn't care what Stalin believed or did to his own people, as long as he organized them to go kill Germans.
Why have we rejected an audit of aid to Ukraine? Do you deny that the west is completely without corruption here?
Wherever there is government spending, there is corruption. And you do audit and such to minimize it. What you do not do is determine that a Russian invasion of Ukraine is a threat to Nato (which it obviously is) but not respond because corruption might break out. It's like refusing to drive your car to avoid the risk of getting a flat tire.

If Ukraine is successful, I want Zelensky removed from power permanently as opposition leaders were murdered by his regime. People who opposed the war were kidnapped by militias and tortured. Its not a surprise to me that over 650K men left Ukraine when the war began.
Russian propaganda is designed to generate hyperbole like that.
Those 650k men you referred to did not leave Ukraine because of an oppressive Zelensky government. They left to avoid a repressive Russian government taking over control of Ukraine, of having to fight a hopeless battle against what at the time was seen as an unstoppable Russian Army.
Yes, Ukraine did a lot of work to root out Russian sympathizers throughout their government. They literally rebuilt their intel agencies from scratch. They had a Russian church hierarchy that was a veritable 5th column.

---

The idea that Ukraine is comparable to Russia on any of those yardsticks is highly suspect. War is a messy thing. You cannot be effective without stepping on toes, nicking fingers with knives, etc.... And there are only two ways to fix that:
1) Win, so you can sort it all out when it's over.
2) Lose, so your opponent can sort it all out when it's over.

If we don't help Ukraine resist pressure from Russia, Russian will use Ukraine to ramp up pressure on Nato. So pick the problem you want to deal with - Ukrainian corruption, or having a brutal, nuclear capable Russian army with hundreds of miles of new frontage on the Polish, Slovakian, Ukrainian, and Romanian borders, +600mi closer to Nato troops. And for that price, there still will be corruption in Ukraine, given that Russia is corrupt by orders of magnitude worse than Ukraine.

In Russian doctrine, use of tactical nukes is a battlefield decision. Do really want a corrupt Russian Army Colonel with tactical nukes at his disposal to be 600mi closer to our men & women in uniform? Is that really worse than a Zelensky regime skimming a little off of the war effort?

Choose your poison carefully.

---

No. A nuclear capable Russia 600 miles closer to NATO is what you want if you support NATO expansion.
I have not endorsed Nato membership for Ukraine. The list of reasons for that is not short, and includes statutory prohibitions - territorial disputes, democratic processes, etc......

What the Russians and the Ukraine war critics have always wanted was a buffer zone.
LOL you always spin Nato support for Ukraine as an effort to move Nato borders 600mi eastward, despite Ukraine's ineligibility for membership, then ignore that it is RUssia who actually went to war to move its borders 600mi westward.

---

Russia doesn't want Ukraine to be a border zone. Russia wants Ukraine to be Russian.

---

Of course you have endorsed NATO membership, just not right away.
Refusing to rule it out forever, wanting to watch & wait for decades, is not an endorsement of membership, Vlad, no matter how much you need it to be so. It's a very pragmatic middle-ground position to take on the matter.

You want to build up a military, install US bases, and otherwise make them a de facto member before making them a de jure member.
Nope. Not in Ukraine. I'm fine with building bases in former WP countries, though. We were wise not to do so in order to not provoke Russia. But now that Russia has returned to its old ways, we are wise to move forward with bases in Romania and Poland and Finland - prudent responses to Russian provocations. (it's Russia that broke the status quo, not the other way around).

That's what we were doing, and it's what one would expect.
Uh, no, we are not building Nato bases in Ukraine.

The statutory restrictions are a red herring, as I'm sure you know. We've made exceptions before (see Germany) and could do so again.
Sigh - false equivalence. At the time of Germany reunification, East Germany did not have Russian armies on its soil engaged in a hot war to annex German territory.

---

Dude. Nato membership for Ukraine at this moment means Nato is stepping directly into a hot war.
That is just not going to happen.

You've got so many busted-up strawmen on the floor you can hardly stand.

---

Not talking about reunification. I'm talking the end of WW2, which would be an analogous situation if NATO membership is part of a settlement in Ukraine. It won't be, but the fact we're talking about it demonstrates the reasons for the Russian invasion. Framing it as a 1st Amendment issue is comical.

We don't have US bases there yet. It starts with NATO troops training Ukrainian troops, integrating their forces with our forces, their arms and equipment with our arms and equipment, etc. As you say, no serious leader would stand by and wait for it to happen.

---

You mean like Russia's military working with and supplying Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, and others?

sombear said:

---

Okay, for those with a purposefully very short attention span, here's the "deal" that Russia had for Ukraine before the February 24 invasion:

- Ukraine ceases to exist as a sovereign independent nation (because it's "not a real country")
- Ukraine's popularly elected leadership…

— Illia Ponomarenko 🇺🇦 (@IAPonomarenko) January 24, 2025

---

This is a shockingly distorted history even by Ukrainian PR standards. Not a single one of those pre-war demands is accurate.

It is true that Zelensky was elected with a mandate to settle with the Russians, but his failure had nothing to do with Putin refusing to negotiate. It had to do with Zelensky's corrupt benefactors and the neo-Nazis who threatened to hang him from the highest tree in Kiev if he ever made a deal.

sombear said:

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Sam Lowry said:

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whiterock said:

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Sam Lowry said:

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whiterock said:

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Sam Lowry said:

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whiterock said:

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Doc Holliday said:

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whiterock said:

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Doc Holliday said:

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whiterock said:

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Doc Holliday said:

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whiterock said:

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Doc Holliday said:

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whiterock said:

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Your comment above reflects the faulty premise running thru the vast majority of isolationist arguments - that disengaging from world affairs will help fix our domestic problems. It's the opposite. Disengagement will make those problems worse. How many new bases do you want to build in Sweden, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria? Do you want to have to build a 600 ship navy again? Maintain a 3m soldier army again? How is letting China bully the rest of Asia going to benefit our economy? (and on and on....)

Cutting all foreign aid does not balance the budget.
Closing DOD and disbanding our military does not balance the budget.
DOING BOTH DOES NOT BALANCE OUR BUDGET.

Close down Dept of Education. States can handle the role just fine.
But if you want to make a really big impact = end the Green Energy nonsense, all $93T of it.

Repeat after me: We cannot balance our budget with a series of bad foreign policy decisions.

---

Again, that's not what I'm getting at. There's TWO wars. One domestic and one abroad.

DC is super supportive of war in Ukraine or war anywhere. They jump through the hoops for financial support, weapons etc. When it comes to putting American's first, they're silent. They don't have the same sense of urgency that they do with war. When we have major weather disasters, they'll let people die, especially if they have certain political views. They let millions of illegals in. They allow big pharma and healthcare to let us die in order for those groups to be insanely greedy.

If we keep the current status quo together for the next several decades, our country won't even be recognizable and the freedom you and I would fight for, won't even exist. That's what I'm getting at.

The people in favor of the war in Ukraine have to understand that if we don't win the war at home, then the war in Ukraine doesn't matter. I want you to be pissed off that they're enthusiastic about war in Ukraine and against American First.

---

yes, it's exactly what you are getting at. You are (along with millions of others) suggesting a cause-effect relationship - that we are not responding adequately to disasters, or canceling opposing views, or tolerating illegal immigration, or mismanaging big pharma/healthcare to facilitate policies abroad because we are obsessed with foreign affairs. That is just not so. There is nothing about fixing any of those domestic issues which would require a single change in foreign policy. In fact stopping everything we're doing abroad, closing all the bases, shutting off all the aid, bringing our entire diplomatic corps home.....would not come remotely close to balancing the budget. Those problems you cited are easily fixable with good policy, which will require negligible expense (and in many cases save us money).

If we lose the war in Ukraine (i.e. let Russia have as much of it as it wants), we will in a worse position no matter how much improvement we make on those other things.

Don't take the false dilemma. BOTH Ukraine and the border (et al...) are important. We have to win on BOTH. Failure on either one is bad, and cannot be offset by victory on the other.

There is no number of bad foreign policy decisions which will balance our budget. In fact, each bad foreign policy decision will saddle us with ever greater future costs.

---

I'm not asking to change foreign policy to benefit domestic policy. I'm not stating a cause-effect relationship.

I'm asking to treat both equally and we're not.

It pisses me off that we send hundreds of billions in aid to Ukraine and simultaneously don't give a damn about hurricane victims. $5 billion for the border is too much, but hundreds of billions to Ukraine is urgent.

Surely that doesn't sit right with you guys?

What are your red lines?
Are you ok if this war proceeds for a decade or so?
Are you ok if it costs us a few trillion?
What end goal do you have in mind?

---

Doesn't sit right with me at all, but when you pair the two things together in an argument, there is an implied "we have to stop doing X abroad so we can do Y at home." Certainly that is the construction of many who argue here and most of the arguments on the matter in the public square. Fact is, we have to do both.

The end is simple: stop Russia, up to and including causing a collapse of the current regime. We do have it in our power to do that. quite easily. Nato GDP dwarfs Russia. Zero chance Russia can last longer than Nato. Biden has simply been taking half-measures.

Why is that end so important? See sombear's comments above. Russia will always have the ability to rebuild armies and airforces, which makes them an existential threat if not robustly resisted. For centuries they have looked west and seen they need to modernize, but the corruption always wins. As a result, throughout the centuries, they have over and over and over demonstrated a lack of maturity to know their limits. Their move against Ukraine was a frickin' comedy of errors, from intelligence assessments, to operational planning, to strategic & tactical execution. But look what it's costing to stop them......

History is abundantly clear on this: Russia is a bully. If you don't knock them flat on their asses when they get out of line, they will keep coming.

---

You're correct that Biden took half-measures. We don't even have any signed military data sharing agreements with Ukraine, No geospatial data, nothing. The same clowns that prolonged war in Afghanistan/Iraq and spent damn near $8 trillion doing so are in charge of this war. That leads me to believe they want to make this a prolonged proxy war for as long as possible. After personally visiting NATO in Brussels and seeing CNN on every TV in their building...I think they're also clowns.
US and Western intel liaison with Ukraine is robust. We helped Ukraine literally rebuilt its agencies from scratch to rid them of Russian infiltration. And, of course, we trained trained trained, in classical FI/CI operations as well as paramilitary operations. Had it not been for all this "covert" investment going back to 2015-2016 timeframe, the Russian plan for a 72-hour operation to take down Ukraine would almost certainly have been successful.

I don't trust them. Our intelligence community and military leaders have largely claimed that Trump is a Russian asset as well. I don't know how you feel good about this war considering those people are in charge.
The Russian asset meme has run its course. You will hear some of the die-hards on the left still parrot it because they believe it, but it's clearly not an election winner so it will die a natural death.

This is what DC believes. This is the belief of the military industrial complex, national security, NATO and DC.

The only explanation for today’s appalling performance by @realDonaldTrump is the Russians have high value compromising intel on POTUS. Something that would have been discovered during any serviceman’s background investigation. @realDonaldTrump is unfit to command our troops.

— Major General (ret) Paul Eaton (@PaulDEaton52) July 16, 2018

Trump will deliver peace either through major aggression or pulling funds. Our leaders very clearly don't want that. How do you reconcile this?
That is pure projection by his political opponents. He and his team are making all the right statements and, as I predicted, Trump is not going to pull funds. Has very clearly signaled such to the Ukrainians.

---

Trump has, technically, already escalated - he's called for increasing NATO defense spending to 5% of GDP. The Poles have already announced they will do so. There's also strategic escalation ongoing, and you can take it to the bank Trump will continue it (i.e. he flirted with it in his admin) - putting permanent Nato military installations in former WP countries. The Romanians have already approved building a major NATO joint base (Ramstein equivalent) at an existing Romania air base = 10k troops & squadrons of aircraft. In 2027, A German brigade will be stationed in Lithuania, to guard the Suwalki Gap. Also public statements about NATO bases in Finland.

That is a fair price Russia pays for its aggression. We could always stop construction of the bases, or defer the deployment of Nato troops to the Baltics, or etc.......in exchange for Russian withdrawal from Ukraine.

The first faulty premise to sweep from analysis is that Nato actions provoked the war. Such is pure poppycock. Russian imperialism, an effort to rebuild something similar to the Ussr/Warsaw Pact footprint, is 100% the cause of the Russo-Ukraine War. Russia thought they could take Ukraine quickly and without consequence. Now, they are caught in a trap from which their current regime cannot escape. they cannot win, and they cannot withdraw. We should threaten to escalate, and then do so incrementally to ratchet up the pressure on Russia.

Opponents of policies supporting Ukraine are hopelessly out of touch with realities........

---

I wish people understood what a screwed up place Ukraine has been for a long time. I've seen videos of Ukrainian soldiers committing war crimes. People say "what about Russia?". We're not funding Russia.
War crimes happen in wars. The victor gets to sort out what is/isn't a war crime.

With these huge sums of money we're giving to Ukraine, why should we tolerate their corruption and sin?
The purpose of our aid to Ukraine is not to rid it of corruption. It's to rid it of Russians. Why did we did not impose any conditions on Stalin to modernize, liberalize, economize, etc.... Because the purpose of our aid to them was to degrade the German war machine fighting on two fronts. We didn't care what Stalin believed or did to his own people, as long as he organized them to go kill Germans.
Why have we rejected an audit of aid to Ukraine? Do you deny that the west is completely without corruption here?
Wherever there is government spending, there is corruption. And you do audit and such to minimize it. What you do not do is determine that a Russian invasion of Ukraine is a threat to Nato (which it obviously is) but not respond because corruption might break out. It's like refusing to drive your car to avoid the risk of getting a flat tire.

If Ukraine is successful, I want Zelensky removed from power permanently as opposition leaders were murdered by his regime. People who opposed the war were kidnapped by militias and tortured. Its not a surprise to me that over 650K men left Ukraine when the war began.
Russian propaganda is designed to generate hyperbole like that.
Those 650k men you referred to did not leave Ukraine because of an oppressive Zelensky government. They left to avoid a repressive Russian government taking over control of Ukraine, of having to fight a hopeless battle against what at the time was seen as an unstoppable Russian Army.
Yes, Ukraine did a lot of work to root out Russian sympathizers throughout their government. They literally rebuilt their intel agencies from scratch. They had a Russian church hierarchy that was a veritable 5th column.

---

The idea that Ukraine is comparable to Russia on any of those yardsticks is highly suspect. War is a messy thing. You cannot be effective without stepping on toes, nicking fingers with knives, etc.... And there are only two ways to fix that:
1) Win, so you can sort it all out when it's over.
2) Lose, so your opponent can sort it all out when it's over.

If we don't help Ukraine resist pressure from Russia, Russian will use Ukraine to ramp up pressure on Nato. So pick the problem you want to deal with - Ukrainian corruption, or having a brutal, nuclear capable Russian army with hundreds of miles of new frontage on the Polish, Slovakian, Ukrainian, and Romanian borders, +600mi closer to Nato troops. And for that price, there still will be corruption in Ukraine, given that Russia is corrupt by orders of magnitude worse than Ukraine.

In Russian doctrine, use of tactical nukes is a battlefield decision. Do really want a corrupt Russian Army Colonel with tactical nukes at his disposal to be 600mi closer to our men & women in uniform? Is that really worse than a Zelensky regime skimming a little off of the war effort?

Choose your poison carefully.

---

No. A nuclear capable Russia 600 miles closer to NATO is what you want if you support NATO expansion.
I have not endorsed Nato membership for Ukraine. The list of reasons for that is not short, and includes statutory prohibitions - territorial disputes, democratic processes, etc......

What the Russians and the Ukraine war critics have always wanted was a buffer zone.
LOL you always spin Nato support for Ukraine as an effort to move Nato borders 600mi eastward, despite Ukraine's ineligibility for membership, then ignore that it is RUssia who actually went to war to move its borders 600mi westward.

---

Russia doesn't want Ukraine to be a border zone. Russia wants Ukraine to be Russian.

---

Of course you have endorsed NATO membership, just not right away.
Refusing to rule it out forever, wanting to watch & wait for decades, is not an endorsement of membership, Vlad, no matter how much you need it to be so. It's a very pragmatic middle-ground position to take on the matter.

You want to build up a military, install US bases, and otherwise make them a de facto member before making them a de jure member.
Nope. Not in Ukraine. I'm fine with building bases in former WP countries, though. We were wise not to do so in order to not provoke Russia. But now that Russia has returned to its old ways, we are wise to move forward with bases in Romania and Poland and Finland - prudent responses to Russian provocations. (it's Russia that broke the status quo, not the other way around).

That's what we were doing, and it's what one would expect.
Uh, no, we are not building Nato bases in Ukraine.

The statutory restrictions are a red herring, as I'm sure you know. We've made exceptions before (see Germany) and could do so again.
Sigh - false equivalence. At the time of Germany reunification, East Germany did not have Russian armies on its soil engaged in a hot war to annex German territory.

---

Dude. Nato membership for Ukraine at this moment means Nato is stepping directly into a hot war.
That is just not going to happen.

You've got so many busted-up strawmen on the floor you can hardly stand.

---

Not talking about reunification. I'm talking the end of WW2, which would be an analogous situation if NATO membership is part of a settlement in Ukraine. It won't be, but the fact we're talking about it demonstrates the reasons for the Russian invasion. Framing it as a 1st Amendment issue is comical.

We don't have US bases there yet. It starts with NATO troops training Ukrainian troops, integrating their forces with our forces, their arms and equipment with our arms and equipment, etc. As you say, no serious leader would stand by and wait for it to happen.

---

You mean like Russia's military working with and supplying Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, and others?

---

There's a huge difference. See if you can spot it.

Sam Lowry said:

---

sombear said:

---

Okay, for those with a purposefully very short attention span, here's the "deal" that Russia had for Ukraine before the February 24 invasion:

- Ukraine ceases to exist as a sovereign independent nation (because it's "not a real country")
- Ukraine's popularly elected leadership…

— Illia Ponomarenko 🇺🇦 (@IAPonomarenko) January 24, 2025

---

This is a shockingly distorted history even by Ukrainian PR standards. Not a single one of those pre-war demands is accurate.

It is true that Zelensky was elected with a mandate to settle with the Russians, but his failure had nothing to do with Putin refusing to negotiate. It had to do with Zelensky's corrupt benefactors and the neo-Nazis who threatened to hang him from the highest tree in Kyiv if he ever made a deal.

---

Not really, but you're used to crapping out shockingly, absurdly, and disgusting distortions of history, as seen above and almost every post. Russian cuck gonna cuck.

sombear said:

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Sam Lowry said:

---

whiterock said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

whiterock said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

whiterock said:

---

Doc Holliday said:

---

whiterock said:

---

Doc Holliday said:

---

whiterock said:

---

Doc Holliday said:

---

whiterock said:

---

Doc Holliday said:

---

whiterock said:

---

Your comment above reflects the faulty premise running thru the vast majority of isolationist arguments - that disengaging from world affairs will help fix our domestic problems. It's the opposite. Disengagement will make those problems worse. How many new bases do you want to build in Sweden, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria? Do you want to have to build a 600 ship navy again? Maintain a 3m soldier army again? How is letting China bully the rest of Asia going to benefit our economy? (and on and on....)

Cutting all foreign aid does not balance the budget.
Closing DOD and disbanding our military does not balance the budget.
DOING BOTH DOES NOT BALANCE OUR BUDGET.

Close down Dept of Education. States can handle the role just fine.
But if you want to make a really big impact = end the Green Energy nonsense, all $93T of it.

Repeat after me: We cannot balance our budget with a series of bad foreign policy decisions.

---

Again, that's not what I'm getting at. There's TWO wars. One domestic and one abroad.

DC is super supportive of war in Ukraine or war anywhere. They jump through the hoops for financial support, weapons etc. When it comes to putting American's first, they're silent. They don't have the same sense of urgency that they do with war. When we have major weather disasters, they'll let people die, especially if they have certain political views. They let millions of illegals in. They allow big pharma and healthcare to let us die in order for those groups to be insanely greedy.

If we keep the current status quo together for the next several decades, our country won't even be recognizable and the freedom you and I would fight for, won't even exist. That's what I'm getting at.

The people in favor of the war in Ukraine have to understand that if we don't win the war at home, then the war in Ukraine doesn't matter. I want you to be pissed off that they're enthusiastic about war in Ukraine and against American First.

---

yes, it's exactly what you are getting at. You are (along with millions of others) suggesting a cause-effect relationship - that we are not responding adequately to disasters, or canceling opposing views, or tolerating illegal immigration, or mismanaging big pharma/healthcare to facilitate policies abroad because we are obsessed with foreign affairs. That is just not so. There is nothing about fixing any of those domestic issues which would require a single change in foreign policy. In fact stopping everything we're doing abroad, closing all the bases, shutting off all the aid, bringing our entire diplomatic corps home.....would not come remotely close to balancing the budget. Those problems you cited are easily fixable with good policy, which will require negligible expense (and in many cases save us money).

If we lose the war in Ukraine (i.e. let Russia have as much of it as it wants), we will in a worse position no matter how much improvement we make on those other things.

Don't take the false dilemma. BOTH Ukraine and the border (et al...) are important. We have to win on BOTH. Failure on either one is bad, and cannot be offset by victory on the other.

There is no number of bad foreign policy decisions which will balance our budget. In fact, each bad foreign policy decision will saddle us with ever greater future costs.

---

I'm not asking to change foreign policy to benefit domestic policy. I'm not stating a cause-effect relationship.

I'm asking to treat both equally and we're not.

It pisses me off that we send hundreds of billions in aid to Ukraine and simultaneously don't give a damn about hurricane victims. $5 billion for the border is too much, but hundreds of billions to Ukraine is urgent.

Surely that doesn't sit right with you guys?

What are your red lines?
Are you ok if this war proceeds for a decade or so?
Are you ok if it costs us a few trillion?
What end goal do you have in mind?

---

Doesn't sit right with me at all, but when you pair the two things together in an argument, there is an implied "we have to stop doing X abroad so we can do Y at home." Certainly that is the construction of many who argue here and most of the arguments on the matter in the public square. Fact is, we have to do both.

The end is simple: stop Russia, up to and including causing a collapse of the current regime. We do have it in our power to do that. quite easily. Nato GDP dwarfs Russia. Zero chance Russia can last longer than Nato. Biden has simply been taking half-measures.

Why is that end so important? See sombear's comments above. Russia will always have the ability to rebuild armies and airforces, which makes them an existential threat if not robustly resisted. For centuries they have looked west and seen they need to modernize, but the corruption always wins. As a result, throughout the centuries, they have over and over and over demonstrated a lack of maturity to know their limits. Their move against Ukraine was a frickin' comedy of errors, from intelligence assessments, to operational planning, to strategic & tactical execution. But look what it's costing to stop them......

History is abundantly clear on this: Russia is a bully. If you don't knock them flat on their asses when they get out of line, they will keep coming.

---

You're correct that Biden took half-measures. We don't even have any signed military data sharing agreements with Ukraine, No geospatial data, nothing. The same clowns that prolonged war in Afghanistan/Iraq and spent damn near $8 trillion doing so are in charge of this war. That leads me to believe they want to make this a prolonged proxy war for as long as possible. After personally visiting NATO in Brussels and seeing CNN on every TV in their building...I think they're also clowns.
US and Western intel liaison with Ukraine is robust. We helped Ukraine literally rebuilt its agencies from scratch to rid them of Russian infiltration. And, of course, we trained trained trained, in classical FI/CI operations as well as paramilitary operations. Had it not been for all this "covert" investment going back to 2015-2016 timeframe, the Russian plan for a 72-hour operation to take down Ukraine would almost certainly have been successful.

I don't trust them. Our intelligence community and military leaders have largely claimed that Trump is a Russian asset as well. I don't know how you feel good about this war considering those people are in charge.
The Russian asset meme has run its course. You will hear some of the die-hards on the left still parrot it because they believe it, but it's clearly not an election winner so it will die a natural death.

This is what DC believes. This is the belief of the military industrial complex, national security, NATO and DC.

The only explanation for today’s appalling performance by @realDonaldTrump is the Russians have high value compromising intel on POTUS. Something that would have been discovered during any serviceman’s background investigation. @realDonaldTrump is unfit to command our troops.

— Major General (ret) Paul Eaton (@PaulDEaton52) July 16, 2018

Trump will deliver peace either through major aggression or pulling funds. Our leaders very clearly don't want that. How do you reconcile this?
That is pure projection by his political opponents. He and his team are making all the right statements and, as I predicted, Trump is not going to pull funds. Has very clearly signaled such to the Ukrainians.

---

Trump has, technically, already escalated - he's called for increasing NATO defense spending to 5% of GDP. The Poles have already announced they will do so. There's also strategic escalation ongoing, and you can take it to the bank Trump will continue it (i.e. he flirted with it in his admin) - putting permanent Nato military installations in former WP countries. The Romanians have already approved building a major NATO joint base (Ramstein equivalent) at an existing Romania air base = 10k troops & squadrons of aircraft. In 2027, A German brigade will be stationed in Lithuania, to guard the Suwalki Gap. Also public statements about NATO bases in Finland.

That is a fair price Russia pays for its aggression. We could always stop construction of the bases, or defer the deployment of Nato troops to the Baltics, or etc.......in exchange for Russian withdrawal from Ukraine.

The first faulty premise to sweep from analysis is that Nato actions provoked the war. Such is pure poppycock. Russian imperialism, an effort to rebuild something similar to the Ussr/Warsaw Pact footprint, is 100% the cause of the Russo-Ukraine War. Russia thought they could take Ukraine quickly and without consequence. Now, they are caught in a trap from which their current regime cannot escape. they cannot win, and they cannot withdraw. We should threaten to escalate, and then do so incrementally to ratchet up the pressure on Russia.

Opponents of policies supporting Ukraine are hopelessly out of touch with realities........

---

I wish people understood what a screwed up place Ukraine has been for a long time. I've seen videos of Ukrainian soldiers committing war crimes. People say "what about Russia?". We're not funding Russia.
War crimes happen in wars. The victor gets to sort out what is/isn't a war crime.

With these huge sums of money we're giving to Ukraine, why should we tolerate their corruption and sin?
The purpose of our aid to Ukraine is not to rid it of corruption. It's to rid it of Russians. Why did we did not impose any conditions on Stalin to modernize, liberalize, economize, etc.... Because the purpose of our aid to them was to degrade the German war machine fighting on two fronts. We didn't care what Stalin believed or did to his own people, as long as he organized them to go kill Germans.
Why have we rejected an audit of aid to Ukraine? Do you deny that the west is completely without corruption here?
Wherever there is government spending, there is corruption. And you do audit and such to minimize it. What you do not do is determine that a Russian invasion of Ukraine is a threat to Nato (which it obviously is) but not respond because corruption might break out. It's like refusing to drive your car to avoid the risk of getting a flat tire.

If Ukraine is successful, I want Zelensky removed from power permanently as opposition leaders were murdered by his regime. People who opposed the war were kidnapped by militias and tortured. Its not a surprise to me that over 650K men left Ukraine when the war began.
Russian propaganda is designed to generate hyperbole like that.
Those 650k men you referred to did not leave Ukraine because of an oppressive Zelensky government. They left to avoid a repressive Russian government taking over control of Ukraine, of having to fight a hopeless battle against what at the time was seen as an unstoppable Russian Army.
Yes, Ukraine did a lot of work to root out Russian sympathizers throughout their government. They literally rebuilt their intel agencies from scratch. They had a Russian church hierarchy that was a veritable 5th column.

---

The idea that Ukraine is comparable to Russia on any of those yardsticks is highly suspect. War is a messy thing. You cannot be effective without stepping on toes, nicking fingers with knives, etc.... And there are only two ways to fix that:
1) Win, so you can sort it all out when it's over.
2) Lose, so your opponent can sort it all out when it's over.

If we don't help Ukraine resist pressure from Russia, Russian will use Ukraine to ramp up pressure on Nato. So pick the problem you want to deal with - Ukrainian corruption, or having a brutal, nuclear capable Russian army with hundreds of miles of new frontage on the Polish, Slovakian, Ukrainian, and Romanian borders, +600mi closer to Nato troops. And for that price, there still will be corruption in Ukraine, given that Russia is corrupt by orders of magnitude worse than Ukraine.

In Russian doctrine, use of tactical nukes is a battlefield decision. Do really want a corrupt Russian Army Colonel with tactical nukes at his disposal to be 600mi closer to our men & women in uniform? Is that really worse than a Zelensky regime skimming a little off of the war effort?

Choose your poison carefully.

---

No. A nuclear capable Russia 600 miles closer to NATO is what you want if you support NATO expansion.
I have not endorsed Nato membership for Ukraine. The list of reasons for that is not short, and includes statutory prohibitions - territorial disputes, democratic processes, etc......

What the Russians and the Ukraine war critics have always wanted was a buffer zone.
LOL you always spin Nato support for Ukraine as an effort to move Nato borders 600mi eastward, despite Ukraine's ineligibility for membership, then ignore that it is RUssia who actually went to war to move its borders 600mi westward.

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Russia doesn't want Ukraine to be a border zone. Russia wants Ukraine to be Russian.

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Of course you have endorsed NATO membership, just not right away.
Refusing to rule it out forever, wanting to watch & wait for decades, is not an endorsement of membership, Vlad, no matter how much you need it to be so. It's a very pragmatic middle-ground position to take on the matter.

You want to build up a military, install US bases, and otherwise make them a de facto member before making them a de jure member.
Nope. Not in Ukraine. I'm fine with building bases in former WP countries, though. We were wise not to do so in order to not provoke Russia. But now that Russia has returned to its old ways, we are wise to move forward with bases in Romania and Poland and Finland - prudent responses to Russian provocations. (it's Russia that broke the status quo, not the other way around).

That's what we were doing, and it's what one would expect.
Uh, no, we are not building Nato bases in Ukraine.

The statutory restrictions are a red herring, as I'm sure you know. We've made exceptions before (see Germany) and could do so again.
Sigh - false equivalence. At the time of Germany reunification, East Germany did not have Russian armies on its soil engaged in a hot war to annex German territory.

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Dude. Nato membership for Ukraine at this moment means Nato is stepping directly into a hot war.
That is just not going to happen.

You've got so many busted-up strawmen on the floor you can hardly stand.

---

Not talking about reunification. I'm talking the end of WW2, which would be an analogous situation if NATO membership is part of a settlement in Ukraine. It won't be, but the fact we're talking about it demonstrates the reasons for the Russian invasion. Framing it as a 1st Amendment issue is comical.

We don't have US bases there yet. It starts with NATO troops training Ukrainian troops, integrating their forces with our forces, their arms and equipment with our arms and equipment, etc. As you say, no serious leader would stand by and wait for it to happen.

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You mean like Russia's military working with and supplying Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, and others?

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Them being in our sphere of influence is a massive provocation and totally unacceptable.

Putin (and Lavrov) saying some very encouraging things about Ukraine and Trump in the last couple of days.

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/in-an-interview-putin-echoes-trumps-claim-that-conflict-in-ukraine-could-have-been-avoided-had-he-been-in-office

State Department suspends all foreign aid, including military aid to Ukraine. It's unclear what the Defense Department is doing or will do.

Quote:

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Secretary of State Marco Rubio halted spending Friday on most existing foreign aid grants for 90 days. The order, which shocked State Department officials, appears to apply to funding for military assistance to Ukraine.

Rubio's guidance, issued to all diplomatic and consular posts, requires department staffers to issue "stop-work orders" on nearly all "existing foreign assistance awards," according to the document, which was obtained by POLITICO. It is effective immediately.

It appears to go further than President Donald Trump's recent executive order, which instructed the department to pause foreign aid grants for 90 days pending review by the secretary. It had not been clear from the president's order if it would affect already appropriated funds or Ukraine aid.

The new guidance means no further actions will be taken to disperse aid funding to programs already approved by the U.S. government, according to three current and two former officials familiar with the new guidance.

The order shocked some department officials for its sweeping mandate. "State just totally went nuclear on foreign assistance," said another State Department official.

One current State Department official, plus two former Biden administration officials, said the pause appears to stop aid to key allies such as Ukraine, Jordan and Taiwan. They, and others, were granted anonymity to discuss sensitive internal government documents.

https://www.politico.com/news/2025/01/24/state-department-foreign-aid-pause-00200510

---

Sam Lowry said:

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sombear said:

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Okay, for those with a purposefully very short attention span, here's the "deal" that Russia had for Ukraine before the February 24 invasion:

- Ukraine ceases to exist as a sovereign independent nation (because it's "not a real country")
- Ukraine's popularly elected leadership…

— Illia Ponomarenko 🇺🇦 (@IAPonomarenko) January 24, 2025

---

This is a shockingly distorted history even by Ukrainian PR standards. Not a single one of those pre-war demands is accurate.

It is true that Zelensky was elected with a mandate to settle with the Russians, but his failure had nothing to do with Putin refusing to negotiate. It had to do with Zelensky's corrupt benefactors and the neo-Nazis who threatened to hang him from the highest tree in Kiev if he ever made a deal.

---

What specifically is inaccurate?

Sure, the guy spices it up a bit, but everything in there can be found in actual proposals.

Sam Lowry said:

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sombear said:

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Sam Lowry said:

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whiterock said:

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Sam Lowry said:

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whiterock said:

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Sam Lowry said:

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whiterock said:

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Doc Holliday said:

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whiterock said:

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Doc Holliday said:

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whiterock said:

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Doc Holliday said:

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whiterock said:

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Doc Holliday said:

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whiterock said:

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Your comment above reflects the faulty premise running thru the vast majority of isolationist arguments - that disengaging from world affairs will help fix our domestic problems. It's the opposite. Disengagement will make those problems worse. How many new bases do you want to build in Sweden, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria? Do you want to have to build a 600 ship navy again? Maintain a 3m soldier army again? How is letting China bully the rest of Asia going to benefit our economy? (and on and on....)

Cutting all foreign aid does not balance the budget.
Closing DOD and disbanding our military does not balance the budget.
DOING BOTH DOES NOT BALANCE OUR BUDGET.

Close down Dept of Education. States can handle the role just fine.
But if you want to make a really big impact = end the Green Energy nonsense, all $93T of it.

Repeat after me: We cannot balance our budget with a series of bad foreign policy decisions.

---

Again, that's not what I'm getting at. There's TWO wars. One domestic and one abroad.

DC is super supportive of war in Ukraine or war anywhere. They jump through the hoops for financial support, weapons etc. When it comes to putting American's first, they're silent. They don't have the same sense of urgency that they do with war. When we have major weather disasters, they'll let people die, especially if they have certain political views. They let millions of illegals in. They allow big pharma and healthcare to let us die in order for those groups to be insanely greedy.

If we keep the current status quo together for the next several decades, our country won't even be recognizable and the freedom you and I would fight for, won't even exist. That's what I'm getting at.

The people in favor of the war in Ukraine have to understand that if we don't win the war at home, then the war in Ukraine doesn't matter. I want you to be pissed off that they're enthusiastic about war in Ukraine and against American First.

---

yes, it's exactly what you are getting at. You are (along with millions of others) suggesting a cause-effect relationship - that we are not responding adequately to disasters, or canceling opposing views, or tolerating illegal immigration, or mismanaging big pharma/healthcare to facilitate policies abroad because we are obsessed with foreign affairs. That is just not so. There is nothing about fixing any of those domestic issues which would require a single change in foreign policy. In fact stopping everything we're doing abroad, closing all the bases, shutting off all the aid, bringing our entire diplomatic corps home.....would not come remotely close to balancing the budget. Those problems you cited are easily fixable with good policy, which will require negligible expense (and in many cases save us money).

If we lose the war in Ukraine (i.e. let Russia have as much of it as it wants), we will in a worse position no matter how much improvement we make on those other things.

Don't take the false dilemma. BOTH Ukraine and the border (et al...) are important. We have to win on BOTH. Failure on either one is bad, and cannot be offset by victory on the other.

There is no number of bad foreign policy decisions which will balance our budget. In fact, each bad foreign policy decision will saddle us with ever greater future costs.

---

I'm not asking to change foreign policy to benefit domestic policy. I'm not stating a cause-effect relationship.

I'm asking to treat both equally and we're not.

It pisses me off that we send hundreds of billions in aid to Ukraine and simultaneously don't give a damn about hurricane victims. $5 billion for the border is too much, but hundreds of billions to Ukraine is urgent.

Surely that doesn't sit right with you guys?

What are your red lines?
Are you ok if this war proceeds for a decade or so?
Are you ok if it costs us a few trillion?
What end goal do you have in mind?

---

Doesn't sit right with me at all, but when you pair the two things together in an argument, there is an implied "we have to stop doing X abroad so we can do Y at home." Certainly that is the construction of many who argue here and most of the arguments on the matter in the public square. Fact is, we have to do both.

The end is simple: stop Russia, up to and including causing a collapse of the current regime. We do have it in our power to do that. quite easily. Nato GDP dwarfs Russia. Zero chance Russia can last longer than Nato. Biden has simply been taking half-measures.

Why is that end so important? See sombear's comments above. Russia will always have the ability to rebuild armies and airforces, which makes them an existential threat if not robustly resisted. For centuries they have looked west and seen they need to modernize, but the corruption always wins. As a result, throughout the centuries, they have over and over and over demonstrated a lack of maturity to know their limits. Their move against Ukraine was a frickin' comedy of errors, from intelligence assessments, to operational planning, to strategic & tactical execution. But look what it's costing to stop them......

History is abundantly clear on this: Russia is a bully. If you don't knock them flat on their asses when they get out of line, they will keep coming.

---

You're correct that Biden took half-measures. We don't even have any signed military data sharing agreements with Ukraine, No geospatial data, nothing. The same clowns that prolonged war in Afghanistan/Iraq and spent damn near $8 trillion doing so are in charge of this war. That leads me to believe they want to make this a prolonged proxy war for as long as possible. After personally visiting NATO in Brussels and seeing CNN on every TV in their building...I think they're also clowns.
US and Western intel liaison with Ukraine is robust. We helped Ukraine literally rebuilt its agencies from scratch to rid them of Russian infiltration. And, of course, we trained trained trained, in classical FI/CI operations as well as paramilitary operations. Had it not been for all this "covert" investment going back to 2015-2016 timeframe, the Russian plan for a 72-hour operation to take down Ukraine would almost certainly have been successful.

I don't trust them. Our intelligence community and military leaders have largely claimed that Trump is a Russian asset as well. I don't know how you feel good about this war considering those people are in charge.
The Russian asset meme has run its course. You will hear some of the die-hards on the left still parrot it because they believe it, but it's clearly not an election winner so it will die a natural death.

This is what DC believes. This is the belief of the military industrial complex, national security, NATO and DC.

The only explanation for today’s appalling performance by @realDonaldTrump is the Russians have high value compromising intel on POTUS. Something that would have been discovered during any serviceman’s background investigation. @realDonaldTrump is unfit to command our troops.

— Major General (ret) Paul Eaton (@PaulDEaton52) July 16, 2018

Trump will deliver peace either through major aggression or pulling funds. Our leaders very clearly don't want that. How do you reconcile this?
That is pure projection by his political opponents. He and his team are making all the right statements and, as I predicted, Trump is not going to pull funds. Has very clearly signaled such to the Ukrainians.

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Trump has, technically, already escalated - he's called for increasing NATO defense spending to 5% of GDP. The Poles have already announced they will do so. There's also strategic escalation ongoing, and you can take it to the bank Trump will continue it (i.e. he flirted with it in his admin) - putting permanent Nato military installations in former WP countries. The Romanians have already approved building a major NATO joint base (Ramstein equivalent) at an existing Romania air base = 10k troops & squadrons of aircraft. In 2027, A German brigade will be stationed in Lithuania, to guard the Suwalki Gap. Also public statements about NATO bases in Finland.

That is a fair price Russia pays for its aggression. We could always stop construction of the bases, or defer the deployment of Nato troops to the Baltics, or etc.......in exchange for Russian withdrawal from Ukraine.

The first faulty premise to sweep from analysis is that Nato actions provoked the war. Such is pure poppycock. Russian imperialism, an effort to rebuild something similar to the Ussr/Warsaw Pact footprint, is 100% the cause of the Russo-Ukraine War. Russia thought they could take Ukraine quickly and without consequence. Now, they are caught in a trap from which their current regime cannot escape. they cannot win, and they cannot withdraw. We should threaten to escalate, and then do so incrementally to ratchet up the pressure on Russia.

Opponents of policies supporting Ukraine are hopelessly out of touch with realities........

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I wish people understood what a screwed up place Ukraine has been for a long time. I've seen videos of Ukrainian soldiers committing war crimes. People say "what about Russia?". We're not funding Russia.
War crimes happen in wars. The victor gets to sort out what is/isn't a war crime.

With these huge sums of money we're giving to Ukraine, why should we tolerate their corruption and sin?
The purpose of our aid to Ukraine is not to rid it of corruption. It's to rid it of Russians. Why did we did not impose any conditions on Stalin to modernize, liberalize, economize, etc.... Because the purpose of our aid to them was to degrade the German war machine fighting on two fronts. We didn't care what Stalin believed or did to his own people, as long as he organized them to go kill Germans.
Why have we rejected an audit of aid to Ukraine? Do you deny that the west is completely without corruption here?
Wherever there is government spending, there is corruption. And you do audit and such to minimize it. What you do not do is determine that a Russian invasion of Ukraine is a threat to Nato (which it obviously is) but not respond because corruption might break out. It's like refusing to drive your car to avoid the risk of getting a flat tire.

If Ukraine is successful, I want Zelensky removed from power permanently as opposition leaders were murdered by his regime. People who opposed the war were kidnapped by militias and tortured. Its not a surprise to me that over 650K men left Ukraine when the war began.
Russian propaganda is designed to generate hyperbole like that.
Those 650k men you referred to did not leave Ukraine because of an oppressive Zelensky government. They left to avoid a repressive Russian government taking over control of Ukraine, of having to fight a hopeless battle against what at the time was seen as an unstoppable Russian Army.
Yes, Ukraine did a lot of work to root out Russian sympathizers throughout their government. They literally rebuilt their intel agencies from scratch. They had a Russian church hierarchy that was a veritable 5th column.

---

The idea that Ukraine is comparable to Russia on any of those yardsticks is highly suspect. War is a messy thing. You cannot be effective without stepping on toes, nicking fingers with knives, etc.... And there are only two ways to fix that:
1) Win, so you can sort it all out when it's over.
2) Lose, so your opponent can sort it all out when it's over.

If we don't help Ukraine resist pressure from Russia, Russian will use Ukraine to ramp up pressure on Nato. So pick the problem you want to deal with - Ukrainian corruption, or having a brutal, nuclear capable Russian army with hundreds of miles of new frontage on the Polish, Slovakian, Ukrainian, and Romanian borders, +600mi closer to Nato troops. And for that price, there still will be corruption in Ukraine, given that Russia is corrupt by orders of magnitude worse than Ukraine.

In Russian doctrine, use of tactical nukes is a battlefield decision. Do really want a corrupt Russian Army Colonel with tactical nukes at his disposal to be 600mi closer to our men & women in uniform? Is that really worse than a Zelensky regime skimming a little off of the war effort?

Choose your poison carefully.

---

No. A nuclear capable Russia 600 miles closer to NATO is what you want if you support NATO expansion.
I have not endorsed Nato membership for Ukraine. The list of reasons for that is not short, and includes statutory prohibitions - territorial disputes, democratic processes, etc......

What the Russians and the Ukraine war critics have always wanted was a buffer zone.
LOL you always spin Nato support for Ukraine as an effort to move Nato borders 600mi eastward, despite Ukraine's ineligibility for membership, then ignore that it is RUssia who actually went to war to move its borders 600mi westward.

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Russia doesn't want Ukraine to be a border zone. Russia wants Ukraine to be Russian.

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Of course you have endorsed NATO membership, just not right away.
Refusing to rule it out forever, wanting to watch & wait for decades, is not an endorsement of membership, Vlad, no matter how much you need it to be so. It's a very pragmatic middle-ground position to take on the matter.

You want to build up a military, install US bases, and otherwise make them a de facto member before making them a de jure member.
Nope. Not in Ukraine. I'm fine with building bases in former WP countries, though. We were wise not to do so in order to not provoke Russia. But now that Russia has returned to its old ways, we are wise to move forward with bases in Romania and Poland and Finland - prudent responses to Russian provocations. (it's Russia that broke the status quo, not the other way around).

That's what we were doing, and it's what one would expect.
Uh, no, we are not building Nato bases in Ukraine.

The statutory restrictions are a red herring, as I'm sure you know. We've made exceptions before (see Germany) and could do so again.
Sigh - false equivalence. At the time of Germany reunification, East Germany did not have Russian armies on its soil engaged in a hot war to annex German territory.

---

Dude. Nato membership for Ukraine at this moment means Nato is stepping directly into a hot war.
That is just not going to happen.

You've got so many busted-up strawmen on the floor you can hardly stand.

---

Not talking about reunification. I'm talking the end of WW2, which would be an analogous situation if NATO membership is part of a settlement in Ukraine. It won't be, but the fact we're talking about it demonstrates the reasons for the Russian invasion. Framing it as a 1st Amendment issue is comical.

We don't have US bases there yet. It starts with NATO troops training Ukrainian troops, integrating their forces with our forces, their arms and equipment with our arms and equipment, etc. As you say, no serious leader would stand by and wait for it to happen.

---

You mean like Russia's military working with and supplying Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, and others?

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There's a huge difference. See if you can spot it.

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I'm guessing you're referring to the border, but I see no practical difference.

NATO already has allies, weapons, and bases on the border and nearby.

If the argument is that Ukraine puts Russia at risk of a ground invasion, then all of this debate is silly. Putin knows that won't happen.

At this very moment, Putin could get a no-NATO guarantee and part of Ukraine, but he won't do it.

The real difference is that Putin denies Ukraine as a country and Ukrainians as a people and has always wanted Ukraine. He can now spin and deflect, but he cannot do anything about his writings and public speeches.

sombear said:

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Sam Lowry said:

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sombear said:

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Okay, for those with a purposefully very short attention span, here's the "deal" that Russia had for Ukraine before the February 24 invasion:

- Ukraine ceases to exist as a sovereign independent nation (because it's "not a real country")
- Ukraine's popularly elected leadership…

— Illia Ponomarenko 🇺🇦 (@IAPonomarenko) January 24, 2025

---

This is a shockingly distorted history even by Ukrainian PR standards. Not a single one of those pre-war demands is accurate.

It is true that Zelensky was elected with a mandate to settle with the Russians, but his failure had nothing to do with Putin refusing to negotiate. It had to do with Zelensky's corrupt benefactors and the neo-Nazis who threatened to hang him from the highest tree in Kiev if he ever made a deal.

---

What specifically is inaccurate?

Sure, the guy spices it up a bit, but everything in there can be found in actual proposals.

---

Literally all of it. Ukraine ceasing to exist, exiling its government, replacing its president, completely dismantling its military, giving up its language and culture, breaking ties with the West, full Russian control of resources, concentration camps, mass graves, etc.

It's bizarre. Some of these things likely will happen now because of the war, but all Russia was demanding at the time was implementation of the Minsk Agreement and a pledge not to seek NATO membership.

Who's offering a no-NATO guarantee at the moment? The idea has been anathema from the beginning.

Borders matter. Invasion may be unlikely, but a leader who allows a massive threat to develop because he "knows" nothing will happen is asking to go down in history as a fool...or worse.

Perhaps more important, Putin knows how our regime change operations work. The goal is to topple Russia from within. The military is there to provide leverage, to destabilize, and to make the final push only if needed.

None of this is about Ukraine, either for us or for the Russians. Ukraine just happens to be the soft underbelly that we've decided to target.

sombear said:

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Sam Lowry said:

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sombear said:

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Sam Lowry said:

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whiterock said:

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Sam Lowry said:

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whiterock said:

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Sam Lowry said:

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whiterock said:

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Doc Holliday said:

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whiterock said:

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Doc Holliday said:

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whiterock said:

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Doc Holliday said:

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whiterock said:

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Doc Holliday said:

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whiterock said:

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Your comment above reflects the faulty premise running thru the vast majority of isolationist arguments - that disengaging from world affairs will help fix our domestic problems. It's the opposite. Disengagement will make those problems worse. How many new bases do you want to build in Sweden, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria? Do you want to have to build a 600 ship navy again? Maintain a 3m soldier army again? How is letting China bully the rest of Asia going to benefit our economy? (and on and on....)

Cutting all foreign aid does not balance the budget.
Closing DOD and disbanding our military does not balance the budget.
DOING BOTH DOES NOT BALANCE OUR BUDGET.

Close down Dept of Education. States can handle the role just fine.
But if you want to make a really big impact = end the Green Energy nonsense, all $93T of it.

Repeat after me: We cannot balance our budget with a series of bad foreign policy decisions.

---

Again, that's not what I'm getting at. There's TWO wars. One domestic and one abroad.

DC is super supportive of war in Ukraine or war anywhere. They jump through the hoops for financial support, weapons etc. When it comes to putting American's first, they're silent. They don't have the same sense of urgency that they do with war. When we have major weather disasters, they'll let people die, especially if they have certain political views. They let millions of illegals in. They allow big pharma and healthcare to let us die in order for those groups to be insanely greedy.

If we keep the current status quo together for the next several decades, our country won't even be recognizable and the freedom you and I would fight for, won't even exist. That's what I'm getting at.

The people in favor of the war in Ukraine have to understand that if we don't win the war at home, then the war in Ukraine doesn't matter. I want you to be pissed off that they're enthusiastic about war in Ukraine and against American First.

---

yes, it's exactly what you are getting at. You are (along with millions of others) suggesting a cause-effect relationship - that we are not responding adequately to disasters, or canceling opposing views, or tolerating illegal immigration, or mismanaging big pharma/healthcare to facilitate policies abroad because we are obsessed with foreign affairs. That is just not so. There is nothing about fixing any of those domestic issues which would require a single change in foreign policy. In fact stopping everything we're doing abroad, closing all the bases, shutting off all the aid, bringing our entire diplomatic corps home.....would not come remotely close to balancing the budget. Those problems you cited are easily fixable with good policy, which will require negligible expense (and in many cases save us money).

If we lose the war in Ukraine (i.e. let Russia have as much of it as it wants), we will in a worse position no matter how much improvement we make on those other things.

Don't take the false dilemma. BOTH Ukraine and the border (et al...) are important. We have to win on BOTH. Failure on either one is bad, and cannot be offset by victory on the other.

There is no number of bad foreign policy decisions which will balance our budget. In fact, each bad foreign policy decision will saddle us with ever greater future costs.

---

I'm not asking to change foreign policy to benefit domestic policy. I'm not stating a cause-effect relationship.

I'm asking to treat both equally and we're not.

It pisses me off that we send hundreds of billions in aid to Ukraine and simultaneously don't give a damn about hurricane victims. $5 billion for the border is too much, but hundreds of billions to Ukraine is urgent.

Surely that doesn't sit right with you guys?

What are your red lines?
Are you ok if this war proceeds for a decade or so?
Are you ok if it costs us a few trillion?
What end goal do you have in mind?

---

Doesn't sit right with me at all, but when you pair the two things together in an argument, there is an implied "we have to stop doing X abroad so we can do Y at home." Certainly that is the construction of many who argue here and most of the arguments on the matter in the public square. Fact is, we have to do both.

The end is simple: stop Russia, up to and including causing a collapse of the current regime. We do have it in our power to do that. quite easily. Nato GDP dwarfs Russia. Zero chance Russia can last longer than Nato. Biden has simply been taking half-measures.

Why is that end so important? See sombear's comments above. Russia will always have the ability to rebuild armies and airforces, which makes them an existential threat if not robustly resisted. For centuries they have looked west and seen they need to modernize, but the corruption always wins. As a result, throughout the centuries, they have over and over and over demonstrated a lack of maturity to know their limits. Their move against Ukraine was a frickin' comedy of errors, from intelligence assessments, to operational planning, to strategic & tactical execution. But look what it's costing to stop them......

History is abundantly clear on this: Russia is a bully. If you don't knock them flat on their asses when they get out of line, they will keep coming.

---

You're correct that Biden took half-measures. We don't even have any signed military data sharing agreements with Ukraine, No geospatial data, nothing. The same clowns that prolonged war in Afghanistan/Iraq and spent damn near $8 trillion doing so are in charge of this war. That leads me to believe they want to make this a prolonged proxy war for as long as possible. After personally visiting NATO in Brussels and seeing CNN on every TV in their building...I think they're also clowns.
US and Western intel liaison with Ukraine is robust. We helped Ukraine literally rebuilt its agencies from scratch to rid them of Russian infiltration. And, of course, we trained trained trained, in classical FI/CI operations as well as paramilitary operations. Had it not been for all this "covert" investment going back to 2015-2016 timeframe, the Russian plan for a 72-hour operation to take down Ukraine would almost certainly have been successful.

I don't trust them. Our intelligence community and military leaders have largely claimed that Trump is a Russian asset as well. I don't know how you feel good about this war considering those people are in charge.
The Russian asset meme has run its course. You will hear some of the die-hards on the left still parrot it because they believe it, but it's clearly not an election winner so it will die a natural death.

This is what DC believes. This is the belief of the military industrial complex, national security, NATO and DC.

The only explanation for today’s appalling performance by @realDonaldTrump is the Russians have high value compromising intel on POTUS. Something that would have been discovered during any serviceman’s background investigation. @realDonaldTrump is unfit to command our troops.

— Major General (ret) Paul Eaton (@PaulDEaton52) July 16, 2018

Trump will deliver peace either through major aggression or pulling funds. Our leaders very clearly don't want that. How do you reconcile this?
That is pure projection by his political opponents. He and his team are making all the right statements and, as I predicted, Trump is not going to pull funds. Has very clearly signaled such to the Ukrainians.

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Trump has, technically, already escalated - he's called for increasing NATO defense spending to 5% of GDP. The Poles have already announced they will do so. There's also strategic escalation ongoing, and you can take it to the bank Trump will continue it (i.e. he flirted with it in his admin) - putting permanent Nato military installations in former WP countries. The Romanians have already approved building a major NATO joint base (Ramstein equivalent) at an existing Romania air base = 10k troops & squadrons of aircraft. In 2027, A German brigade will be stationed in Lithuania, to guard the Suwalki Gap. Also public statements about NATO bases in Finland.

That is a fair price Russia pays for its aggression. We could always stop construction of the bases, or defer the deployment of Nato troops to the Baltics, or etc.......in exchange for Russian withdrawal from Ukraine.

The first faulty premise to sweep from analysis is that Nato actions provoked the war. Such is pure poppycock. Russian imperialism, an effort to rebuild something similar to the Ussr/Warsaw Pact footprint, is 100% the cause of the Russo-Ukraine War. Russia thought they could take Ukraine quickly and without consequence. Now, they are caught in a trap from which their current regime cannot escape. they cannot win, and they cannot withdraw. We should threaten to escalate, and then do so incrementally to ratchet up the pressure on Russia.

Opponents of policies supporting Ukraine are hopelessly out of touch with realities........

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I wish people understood what a screwed up place Ukraine has been for a long time. I've seen videos of Ukrainian soldiers committing war crimes. People say "what about Russia?". We're not funding Russia.
War crimes happen in wars. The victor gets to sort out what is/isn't a war crime.

With these huge sums of money we're giving to Ukraine, why should we tolerate their corruption and sin?
The purpose of our aid to Ukraine is not to rid it of corruption. It's to rid it of Russians. Why did we did not impose any conditions on Stalin to modernize, liberalize, economize, etc.... Because the purpose of our aid to them was to degrade the German war machine fighting on two fronts. We didn't care what Stalin believed or did to his own people, as long as he organized them to go kill Germans.
Why have we rejected an audit of aid to Ukraine? Do you deny that the west is completely without corruption here?
Wherever there is government spending, there is corruption. And you do audit and such to minimize it. What you do not do is determine that a Russian invasion of Ukraine is a threat to Nato (which it obviously is) but not respond because corruption might break out. It's like refusing to drive your car to avoid the risk of getting a flat tire.

If Ukraine is successful, I want Zelensky removed from power permanently as opposition leaders were murdered by his regime. People who opposed the war were kidnapped by militias and tortured. Its not a surprise to me that over 650K men left Ukraine when the war began.
Russian propaganda is designed to generate hyperbole like that.
Those 650k men you referred to did not leave Ukraine because of an oppressive Zelensky government. They left to avoid a repressive Russian government taking over control of Ukraine, of having to fight a hopeless battle against what at the time was seen as an unstoppable Russian Army.
Yes, Ukraine did a lot of work to root out Russian sympathizers throughout their government. They literally rebuilt their intel agencies from scratch. They had a Russian church hierarchy that was a veritable 5th column.

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The idea that Ukraine is comparable to Russia on any of those yardsticks is highly suspect. War is a messy thing. You cannot be effective without stepping on toes, nicking fingers with knives, etc.... And there are only two ways to fix that:
1) Win, so you can sort it all out when it's over.
2) Lose, so your opponent can sort it all out when it's over.

If we don't help Ukraine resist pressure from Russia, Russian will use Ukraine to ramp up pressure on Nato. So pick the problem you want to deal with - Ukrainian corruption, or having a brutal, nuclear capable Russian army with hundreds of miles of new frontage on the Polish, Slovakian, Ukrainian, and Romanian borders, +600mi closer to Nato troops. And for that price, there still will be corruption in Ukraine, given that Russia is corrupt by orders of magnitude worse than Ukraine.

In Russian doctrine, use of tactical nukes is a battlefield decision. Do really want a corrupt Russian Army Colonel with tactical nukes at his disposal to be 600mi closer to our men & women in uniform? Is that really worse than a Zelensky regime skimming a little off of the war effort?

Choose your poison carefully.

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No. A nuclear capable Russia 600 miles closer to NATO is what you want if you support NATO expansion.
I have not endorsed Nato membership for Ukraine. The list of reasons for that is not short, and includes statutory prohibitions - territorial disputes, democratic processes, etc......

What the Russians and the Ukraine war critics have always wanted was a buffer zone.
LOL you always spin Nato support for Ukraine as an effort to move Nato borders 600mi eastward, despite Ukraine's ineligibility for membership, then ignore that it is RUssia who actually went to war to move its borders 600mi westward.

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Russia doesn't want Ukraine to be a border zone. Russia wants Ukraine to be Russian.

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Of course you have endorsed NATO membership, just not right away.
Refusing to rule it out forever, wanting to watch & wait for decades, is not an endorsement of membership, Vlad, no matter how much you need it to be so. It's a very pragmatic middle-ground position to take on the matter.

You want to build up a military, install US bases, and otherwise make them a de facto member before making them a de jure member.
Nope. Not in Ukraine. I'm fine with building bases in former WP countries, though. We were wise not to do so in order to not provoke Russia. But now that Russia has returned to its old ways, we are wise to move forward with bases in Romania and Poland and Finland - prudent responses to Russian provocations. (it's Russia that broke the status quo, not the other way around).

That's what we were doing, and it's what one would expect.
Uh, no, we are not building Nato bases in Ukraine.

The statutory restrictions are a red herring, as I'm sure you know. We've made exceptions before (see Germany) and could do so again.
Sigh - false equivalence. At the time of Germany reunification, East Germany did not have Russian armies on its soil engaged in a hot war to annex German territory.

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Dude. Nato membership for Ukraine at this moment means Nato is stepping directly into a hot war.
That is just not going to happen.

You've got so many busted-up strawmen on the floor you can hardly stand.

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Not talking about reunification. I'm talking the end of WW2, which would be an analogous situation if NATO membership is part of a settlement in Ukraine. It won't be, but the fact we're talking about it demonstrates the reasons for the Russian invasion. Framing it as a 1st Amendment issue is comical.

We don't have US bases there yet. It starts with NATO troops training Ukrainian troops, integrating their forces with our forces, their arms and equipment with our arms and equipment, etc. As you say, no serious leader would stand by and wait for it to happen.

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You mean like Russia's military working with and supplying Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, and others?

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There's a huge difference. See if you can spot it.

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I'm guessing you're referring to the border, but I see no practical difference.

NATO already has allies, weapons, and bases on the border and nearby.

If the argument is that Ukraine puts Russia at risk of a ground invasion, then all of this debate is silly. Putin knows that won't happen.

At this very moment, Putin could get a no-NATO guarantee and part of Ukraine, but he won't do it.

The real difference is that Putin denies Ukraine as a country and Ukrainians as a people and has always wanted Ukraine. He can now spin and deflect, but he cannot do anything about his writings and public speeches.

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100% correct.

Sam Lowry said:

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sombear said:

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Sam Lowry said:

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sombear said:

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Okay, for those with a purposefully very short attention span, here's the "deal" that Russia had for Ukraine before the February 24 invasion:

- Ukraine ceases to exist as a sovereign independent nation (because it's "not a real country")
- Ukraine's popularly elected leadership…

— Illia Ponomarenko 🇺🇦 (@IAPonomarenko) January 24, 2025

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This is a shockingly distorted history even by Ukrainian PR standards. Not a single one of those pre-war demands is accurate.

It is true that Zelensky was elected with a mandate to settle with the Russians, but his failure had nothing to do with Putin refusing to negotiate. It had to do with Zelensky's corrupt benefactors and the neo-Nazis who threatened to hang him from the highest tree in Kiev if he ever made a deal.

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What specifically is inaccurate?

Sure, the guy spices it up a bit, but everything in there can be found in actual proposals.

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Literally all of it. Ukraine ceasing to exist, exiling its government, replacing its president, completely dismantling its military, giving up its language and culture, breaking ties with the West, full Russian control of resources, concentration camps, mass graves, etc.

It's bizarre. Some of these things likely will happen now because of the war, but all Russia was demanding at the time was implementation of the Minsk Agreement and a pledge not to seek NATO membership.

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I guess we can quibble over characterizations, but all of these were in the actual proposals before talks broke down:

Regime change
Russia stays in the east
Major reduction in military
Major reduction in weapons
Laundry list of prohibited weapons
No western military training
"De-Nazification"
Ban "fascism"
Ban "aggressive nationalism."
Revise history taught in schools, making it more pro-Russia
Russian national language
Russia right to review/approve even non-military relationships/agreements with other countries.
Mandatory energy/mining agreements

sombear said:

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Sam Lowry said:

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sombear said:

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Sam Lowry said:

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sombear said:

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Okay, for those with a purposefully very short attention span, here's the "deal" that Russia had for Ukraine before the February 24 invasion:

- Ukraine ceases to exist as a sovereign independent nation (because it's "not a real country")
- Ukraine's popularly elected leadership…

— Illia Ponomarenko 🇺🇦 (@IAPonomarenko) January 24, 2025

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This is a shockingly distorted history even by Ukrainian PR standards. Not a single one of those pre-war demands is accurate.

It is true that Zelensky was elected with a mandate to settle with the Russians, but his failure had nothing to do with Putin refusing to negotiate. It had to do with Zelensky's corrupt benefactors and the neo-Nazis who threatened to hang him from the highest tree in Kiev if he ever made a deal.

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What specifically is inaccurate?

Sure, the guy spices it up a bit, but everything in there can be found in actual proposals.

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Literally all of it. Ukraine ceasing to exist, exiling its government, replacing its president, completely dismantling its military, giving up its language and culture, breaking ties with the West, full Russian control of resources, concentration camps, mass graves, etc.

It's bizarre. Some of these things likely will happen now because of the war, but all Russia was demanding at the time was implementation of the Minsk Agreement and a pledge not to seek NATO membership.

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"De-Nazification"
Ban "fascism"
Ban "aggressive nationalism."
Revise history taught in schools…

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Sounds like the kind of things our own government has been pushing and demanding on the domestic and international stage before Trump.

sombear said:

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Sam Lowry said:

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sombear said:

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Sam Lowry said:

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sombear said:

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Okay, for those with a purposefully very short attention span, here's the "deal" that Russia had for Ukraine before the February 24 invasion:

- Ukraine ceases to exist as a sovereign independent nation (because it's "not a real country")
- Ukraine's popularly elected leadership…

— Illia Ponomarenko 🇺🇦 (@IAPonomarenko) January 24, 2025

---

This is a shockingly distorted history even by Ukrainian PR standards. Not a single one of those pre-war demands is accurate.

It is true that Zelensky was elected with a mandate to settle with the Russians, but his failure had nothing to do with Putin refusing to negotiate. It had to do with Zelensky's corrupt benefactors and the neo-Nazis who threatened to hang him from the highest tree in Kiev if he ever made a deal.

---

What specifically is inaccurate?

Sure, the guy spices it up a bit, but everything in there can be found in actual proposals.

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Literally all of it. Ukraine ceasing to exist, exiling its government, replacing its president, completely dismantling its military, giving up its language and culture, breaking ties with the West, full Russian control of resources, concentration camps, mass graves, etc.

It's bizarre. Some of these things likely will happen now because of the war, but all Russia was demanding at the time was implementation of the Minsk Agreement and a pledge not to seek NATO membership.

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I guess we can quibble over characterizations, but all of these were in the actual proposals before talks broke down:

Regime change
Russia stays in the east
Major reduction in military
Major reduction in weapons
Laundry list of prohibited weapons
No western military training
"De-Nazification"
Ban "fascism"
Ban "aggressive nationalism."
Revise history taught in schools, making it more pro-Russia
Russian national language
Russia right to review/approve even non-military relationships/agreements with other countries.
Mandatory energy/mining agreements

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No, they were not. The Minsk proposals called for withdrawal of all forces from the east and limited autonomy for Donetsk and Luhansk. Only later did the demand change to independence for the two oblasts, with the presence of Russian forces to be negotiated. Never was there any talk of annexation or of regime change in Kiev.

Russian would have been an official language, not the official language. Ukraine would have ended discrimination and quotas against the Russian language in media. There were needed prohibitions on activities contrary to Ukraine's neutrality, including Western military training. There were also prohibitions on Nazi organizations and propaganda. Call it an affront to free speech, but Germany does the same thing (and their Nazi problem is nowhere near as bad as Ukraine's). Ukraine would have pledged to "refrain from using its own territory or the territories of other states to harm the sovereignty, independence, and integrity of other states," the major concern on the part of the Russians which I referred to earlier.

Now that the Democrats and Neocons have lost another war in Ukraine, the spin will start. Its unfortunate that an entire generation of Ukrainians had to die in service of the greed of western Oligarchs and Government-Americans.

Realitybites said:

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Now that the Democrats and Neocons have lost another war in Ukraine, the spin will start. Its unfortunate that an entire generation of Ukrainians had to die in service of the greed of western Oligarchs and Government-Americans.

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LMAO. Keep bending over for Putin.

Realitybites said:

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Now that the Democrats and Neocons have lost another war in...

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There are never any consequences for the disastrous foreign policies they advocate for

Maybe this time under Trump some heads will roll among the political generals over at the Pentagon.

In the disasters in Iraq and Afghanistan they all ended up with promotions last time

Redbrickbear said:

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sombear said:

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Sam Lowry said:

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whiterock said:

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Sam Lowry said:

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whiterock said:

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Sam Lowry said:

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whiterock said:

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Doc Holliday said:

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whiterock said:

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Doc Holliday said:

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whiterock said:

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Doc Holliday said:

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whiterock said:

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Doc Holliday said:

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whiterock said:

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Your comment above reflects the faulty premise running thru the vast majority of isolationist arguments - that disengaging from world affairs will help fix our domestic problems. It's the opposite. Disengagement will make those problems worse. How many new bases do you want to build in Sweden, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria? Do you want to have to build a 600 ship navy again? Maintain a 3m soldier army again? How is letting China bully the rest of Asia going to benefit our economy? (and on and on....)

Cutting all foreign aid does not balance the budget.
Closing DOD and disbanding our military does not balance the budget.
DOING BOTH DOES NOT BALANCE OUR BUDGET.

Close down Dept of Education. States can handle the role just fine.
But if you want to make a really big impact = end the Green Energy nonsense, all $93T of it.

Repeat after me: We cannot balance our budget with a series of bad foreign policy decisions.

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Again, that's not what I'm getting at. There's TWO wars. One domestic and one abroad.

DC is super supportive of war in Ukraine or war anywhere. They jump through the hoops for financial support, weapons etc. When it comes to putting American's first, they're silent. They don't have the same sense of urgency that they do with war. When we have major weather disasters, they'll let people die, especially if they have certain political views. They let millions of illegals in. They allow big pharma and healthcare to let us die in order for those groups to be insanely greedy.

If we keep the current status quo together for the next several decades, our country won't even be recognizable and the freedom you and I would fight for, won't even exist. That's what I'm getting at.

The people in favor of the war in Ukraine have to understand that if we don't win the war at home, then the war in Ukraine doesn't matter. I want you to be pissed off that they're enthusiastic about war in Ukraine and against American First.

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yes, it's exactly what you are getting at. You are (along with millions of others) suggesting a cause-effect relationship - that we are not responding adequately to disasters, or canceling opposing views, or tolerating illegal immigration, or mismanaging big pharma/healthcare to facilitate policies abroad because we are obsessed with foreign affairs. That is just not so. There is nothing about fixing any of those domestic issues which would require a single change in foreign policy. In fact stopping everything we're doing abroad, closing all the bases, shutting off all the aid, bringing our entire diplomatic corps home.....would not come remotely close to balancing the budget. Those problems you cited are easily fixable with good policy, which will require negligible expense (and in many cases save us money).

If we lose the war in Ukraine (i.e. let Russia have as much of it as it wants), we will in a worse position no matter how much improvement we make on those other things.

Don't take the false dilemma. BOTH Ukraine and the border (et al...) are important. We have to win on BOTH. Failure on either one is bad, and cannot be offset by victory on the other.

There is no number of bad foreign policy decisions which will balance our budget. In fact, each bad foreign policy decision will saddle us with ever greater future costs.

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I'm not asking to change foreign policy to benefit domestic policy. I'm not stating a cause-effect relationship.

I'm asking to treat both equally and we're not.

It pisses me off that we send hundreds of billions in aid to Ukraine and simultaneously don't give a damn about hurricane victims. $5 billion for the border is too much, but hundreds of billions to Ukraine is urgent.

Surely that doesn't sit right with you guys?

What are your red lines?
Are you ok if this war proceeds for a decade or so?
Are you ok if it costs us a few trillion?
What end goal do you have in mind?

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Doesn't sit right with me at all, but when you pair the two things together in an argument, there is an implied "we have to stop doing X abroad so we can do Y at home." Certainly that is the construction of many who argue here and most of the arguments on the matter in the public square. Fact is, we have to do both.

The end is simple: stop Russia, up to and including causing a collapse of the current regime. We do have it in our power to do that. quite easily. Nato GDP dwarfs Russia. Zero chance Russia can last longer than Nato. Biden has simply been taking half-measures.

Why is that end so important? See sombear's comments above. Russia will always have the ability to rebuild armies and airforces, which makes them an existential threat if not robustly resisted. For centuries they have looked west and seen they need to modernize, but the corruption always wins. As a result, throughout the centuries, they have over and over and over demonstrated a lack of maturity to know their limits. Their move against Ukraine was a frickin' comedy of errors, from intelligence assessments, to operational planning, to strategic & tactical execution. But look what it's costing to stop them......

History is abundantly clear on this: Russia is a bully. If you don't knock them flat on their asses when they get out of line, they will keep coming.

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You're correct that Biden took half-measures. We don't even have any signed military data sharing agreements with Ukraine, No geospatial data, nothing. The same clowns that prolonged war in Afghanistan/Iraq and spent damn near $8 trillion doing so are in charge of this war. That leads me to believe they want to make this a prolonged proxy war for as long as possible. After personally visiting NATO in Brussels and seeing CNN on every TV in their building...I think they're also clowns.
US and Western intel liaison with Ukraine is robust. We helped Ukraine literally rebuilt its agencies from scratch to rid them of Russian infiltration. And, of course, we trained trained trained, in classical FI/CI operations as well as paramilitary operations. Had it not been for all this "covert" investment going back to 2015-2016 timeframe, the Russian plan for a 72-hour operation to take down Ukraine would almost certainly have been successful.

I don't trust them. Our intelligence community and military leaders have largely claimed that Trump is a Russian asset as well. I don't know how you feel good about this war considering those people are in charge.
The Russian asset meme has run its course. You will hear some of the die-hards on the left still parrot it because they believe it, but it's clearly not an election winner so it will die a natural death.

This is what DC believes. This is the belief of the military industrial complex, national security, NATO and DC.

The only explanation for today’s appalling performance by @realDonaldTrump is the Russians have high value compromising intel on POTUS. Something that would have been discovered during any serviceman’s background investigation. @realDonaldTrump is unfit to command our troops.

— Major General (ret) Paul Eaton (@PaulDEaton52) July 16, 2018

Trump will deliver peace either through major aggression or pulling funds. Our leaders very clearly don't want that. How do you reconcile this?
That is pure projection by his political opponents. He and his team are making all the right statements and, as I predicted, Trump is not going to pull funds. Has very clearly signaled such to the Ukrainians.

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Trump has, technically, already escalated - he's called for increasing NATO defense spending to 5% of GDP. The Poles have already announced they will do so. There's also strategic escalation ongoing, and you can take it to the bank Trump will continue it (i.e. he flirted with it in his admin) - putting permanent Nato military installations in former WP countries. The Romanians have already approved building a major NATO joint base (Ramstein equivalent) at an existing Romania air base = 10k troops & squadrons of aircraft. In 2027, A German brigade will be stationed in Lithuania, to guard the Suwalki Gap. Also public statements about NATO bases in Finland.

That is a fair price Russia pays for its aggression. We could always stop construction of the bases, or defer the deployment of Nato troops to the Baltics, or etc.......in exchange for Russian withdrawal from Ukraine.

The first faulty premise to sweep from analysis is that Nato actions provoked the war. Such is pure poppycock. Russian imperialism, an effort to rebuild something similar to the Ussr/Warsaw Pact footprint, is 100% the cause of the Russo-Ukraine War. Russia thought they could take Ukraine quickly and without consequence. Now, they are caught in a trap from which their current regime cannot escape. they cannot win, and they cannot withdraw. We should threaten to escalate, and then do so incrementally to ratchet up the pressure on Russia.

Opponents of policies supporting Ukraine are hopelessly out of touch with realities........

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I wish people understood what a screwed up place Ukraine has been for a long time. I've seen videos of Ukrainian soldiers committing war crimes. People say "what about Russia?". We're not funding Russia.
War crimes happen in wars. The victor gets to sort out what is/isn't a war crime.

With these huge sums of money we're giving to Ukraine, why should we tolerate their corruption and sin?
The purpose of our aid to Ukraine is not to rid it of corruption. It's to rid it of Russians. Why did we did not impose any conditions on Stalin to modernize, liberalize, economize, etc.... Because the purpose of our aid to them was to degrade the German war machine fighting on two fronts. We didn't care what Stalin believed or did to his own people, as long as he organized them to go kill Germans.
Why have we rejected an audit of aid to Ukraine? Do you deny that the west is completely without corruption here?
Wherever there is government spending, there is corruption. And you do audit and such to minimize it. What you do not do is determine that a Russian invasion of Ukraine is a threat to Nato (which it obviously is) but not respond because corruption might break out. It's like refusing to drive your car to avoid the risk of getting a flat tire.

If Ukraine is successful, I want Zelensky removed from power permanently as opposition leaders were murdered by his regime. People who opposed the war were kidnapped by militias and tortured. Its not a surprise to me that over 650K men left Ukraine when the war began.
Russian propaganda is designed to generate hyperbole like that.
Those 650k men you referred to did not leave Ukraine because of an oppressive Zelensky government. They left to avoid a repressive Russian government taking over control of Ukraine, of having to fight a hopeless battle against what at the time was seen as an unstoppable Russian Army.
Yes, Ukraine did a lot of work to root out Russian sympathizers throughout their government. They literally rebuilt their intel agencies from scratch. They had a Russian church hierarchy that was a veritable 5th column.

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The idea that Ukraine is comparable to Russia on any of those yardsticks is highly suspect. War is a messy thing. You cannot be effective without stepping on toes, nicking fingers with knives, etc.... And there are only two ways to fix that:
1) Win, so you can sort it all out when it's over.
2) Lose, so your opponent can sort it all out when it's over.

If we don't help Ukraine resist pressure from Russia, Russian will use Ukraine to ramp up pressure on Nato. So pick the problem you want to deal with - Ukrainian corruption, or having a brutal, nuclear capable Russian army with hundreds of miles of new frontage on the Polish, Slovakian, Ukrainian, and Romanian borders, +600mi closer to Nato troops. And for that price, there still will be corruption in Ukraine, given that Russia is corrupt by orders of magnitude worse than Ukraine.

In Russian doctrine, use of tactical nukes is a battlefield decision. Do really want a corrupt Russian Army Colonel with tactical nukes at his disposal to be 600mi closer to our men & women in uniform? Is that really worse than a Zelensky regime skimming a little off of the war effort?

Choose your poison carefully.

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No. A nuclear capable Russia 600 miles closer to NATO is what you want if you support NATO expansion.
I have not endorsed Nato membership for Ukraine. The list of reasons for that is not short, and includes statutory prohibitions - territorial disputes, democratic processes, etc......

What the Russians and the Ukraine war critics have always wanted was a buffer zone.
LOL you always spin Nato support for Ukraine as an effort to move Nato borders 600mi eastward, despite Ukraine's ineligibility for membership, then ignore that it is RUssia who actually went to war to move its borders 600mi westward.

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Russia doesn't want Ukraine to be a border zone. Russia wants Ukraine to be Russian.

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Of course you have endorsed NATO membership, just not right away.
Refusing to rule it out forever, wanting to watch & wait for decades, is not an endorsement of membership, Vlad, no matter how much you need it to be so. It's a very pragmatic middle-ground position to take on the matter.

You want to build up a military, install US bases, and otherwise make them a de facto member before making them a de jure member.
Nope. Not in Ukraine. I'm fine with building bases in former WP countries, though. We were wise not to do so in order to not provoke Russia. But now that Russia has returned to its old ways, we are wise to move forward with bases in Romania and Poland and Finland - prudent responses to Russian provocations. (it's Russia that broke the status quo, not the other way around).

That's what we were doing, and it's what one would expect.
Uh, no, we are not building Nato bases in Ukraine.

The statutory restrictions are a red herring, as I'm sure you know. We've made exceptions before (see Germany) and could do so again.
Sigh - false equivalence. At the time of Germany reunification, East Germany did not have Russian armies on its soil engaged in a hot war to annex German territory.

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Dude. Nato membership for Ukraine at this moment means Nato is stepping directly into a hot war.
That is just not going to happen.

You've got so many busted-up strawmen on the floor you can hardly stand.

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Not talking about reunification. I'm talking the end of WW2, which would be an analogous situation if NATO membership is part of a settlement in Ukraine. It won't be, but the fact we're talking about it demonstrates the reasons for the Russian invasion. Framing it as a 1st Amendment issue is comical.

We don't have US bases there yet. It starts with NATO troops training Ukrainian troops, integrating their forces with our forces, their arms and equipment with our arms and equipment, etc. As you say, no serious leader would stand by and wait for it to happen.

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You mean like Russia's military working with and supplying Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, and others?

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Them being in our sphere of influence is a massive provocation and totally unacceptable.

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I disagree, but regardless, it's been happening for 75 years.

sombear said:

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Redbrickbear said:

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sombear said:

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Sam Lowry said:

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whiterock said:

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Sam Lowry said:

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whiterock said:

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Sam Lowry said:

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whiterock said:

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Doc Holliday said:

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whiterock said:

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Doc Holliday said:

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whiterock said:

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Doc Holliday said:

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whiterock said:

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Doc Holliday said:

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whiterock said:

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Your comment above reflects the faulty premise running thru the vast majority of isolationist arguments - that disengaging from world affairs will help fix our domestic problems. It's the opposite. Disengagement will make those problems worse. How many new bases do you want to build in Sweden, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria? Do you want to have to build a 600 ship navy again? Maintain a 3m soldier army again? How is letting China bully the rest of Asia going to benefit our economy? (and on and on....)

Cutting all foreign aid does not balance the budget.
Closing DOD and disbanding our military does not balance the budget.
DOING BOTH DOES NOT BALANCE OUR BUDGET.

Close down Dept of Education. States can handle the role just fine.
But if you want to make a really big impact = end the Green Energy nonsense, all $93T of it.

Repeat after me: We cannot balance our budget with a series of bad foreign policy decisions.

---

Again, that's not what I'm getting at. There's TWO wars. One domestic and one abroad.

DC is super supportive of war in Ukraine or war anywhere. They jump through the hoops for financial support, weapons etc. When it comes to putting American's first, they're silent. They don't have the same sense of urgency that they do with war. When we have major weather disasters, they'll let people die, especially if they have certain political views. They let millions of illegals in. They allow big pharma and healthcare to let us die in order for those groups to be insanely greedy.

If we keep the current status quo together for the next several decades, our country won't even be recognizable and the freedom you and I would fight for, won't even exist. That's what I'm getting at.

The people in favor of the war in Ukraine have to understand that if we don't win the war at home, then the war in Ukraine doesn't matter. I want you to be pissed off that they're enthusiastic about war in Ukraine and against American First.

---

yes, it's exactly what you are getting at. You are (along with millions of others) suggesting a cause-effect relationship - that we are not responding adequately to disasters, or canceling opposing views, or tolerating illegal immigration, or mismanaging big pharma/healthcare to facilitate policies abroad because we are obsessed with foreign affairs. That is just not so. There is nothing about fixing any of those domestic issues which would require a single change in foreign policy. In fact stopping everything we're doing abroad, closing all the bases, shutting off all the aid, bringing our entire diplomatic corps home.....would not come remotely close to balancing the budget. Those problems you cited are easily fixable with good policy, which will require negligible expense (and in many cases save us money).

If we lose the war in Ukraine (i.e. let Russia have as much of it as it wants), we will in a worse position no matter how much improvement we make on those other things.

Don't take the false dilemma. BOTH Ukraine and the border (et al...) are important. We have to win on BOTH. Failure on either one is bad, and cannot be offset by victory on the other.

There is no number of bad foreign policy decisions which will balance our budget. In fact, each bad foreign policy decision will saddle us with ever greater future costs.

---

I'm not asking to change foreign policy to benefit domestic policy. I'm not stating a cause-effect relationship.

I'm asking to treat both equally and we're not.

It pisses me off that we send hundreds of billions in aid to Ukraine and simultaneously don't give a damn about hurricane victims. $5 billion for the border is too much, but hundreds of billions to Ukraine is urgent.

Surely that doesn't sit right with you guys?

What are your red lines?
Are you ok if this war proceeds for a decade or so?
Are you ok if it costs us a few trillion?
What end goal do you have in mind?

---

Doesn't sit right with me at all, but when you pair the two things together in an argument, there is an implied "we have to stop doing X abroad so we can do Y at home." Certainly that is the construction of many who argue here and most of the arguments on the matter in the public square. Fact is, we have to do both.

The end is simple: stop Russia, up to and including causing a collapse of the current regime. We do have it in our power to do that. quite easily. Nato GDP dwarfs Russia. Zero chance Russia can last longer than Nato. Biden has simply been taking half-measures.

Why is that end so important? See sombear's comments above. Russia will always have the ability to rebuild armies and airforces, which makes them an existential threat if not robustly resisted. For centuries they have looked west and seen they need to modernize, but the corruption always wins. As a result, throughout the centuries, they have over and over and over demonstrated a lack of maturity to know their limits. Their move against Ukraine was a frickin' comedy of errors, from intelligence assessments, to operational planning, to strategic & tactical execution. But look what it's costing to stop them......

History is abundantly clear on this: Russia is a bully. If you don't knock them flat on their asses when they get out of line, they will keep coming.

---

You're correct that Biden took half-measures. We don't even have any signed military data sharing agreements with Ukraine, No geospatial data, nothing. The same clowns that prolonged war in Afghanistan/Iraq and spent damn near $8 trillion doing so are in charge of this war. That leads me to believe they want to make this a prolonged proxy war for as long as possible. After personally visiting NATO in Brussels and seeing CNN on every TV in their building...I think they're also clowns.
US and Western intel liaison with Ukraine is robust. We helped Ukraine literally rebuilt its agencies from scratch to rid them of Russian infiltration. And, of course, we trained trained trained, in classical FI/CI operations as well as paramilitary operations. Had it not been for all this "covert" investment going back to 2015-2016 timeframe, the Russian plan for a 72-hour operation to take down Ukraine would almost certainly have been successful.

I don't trust them. Our intelligence community and military leaders have largely claimed that Trump is a Russian asset as well. I don't know how you feel good about this war considering those people are in charge.
The Russian asset meme has run its course. You will hear some of the die-hards on the left still parrot it because they believe it, but it's clearly not an election winner so it will die a natural death.

This is what DC believes. This is the belief of the military industrial complex, national security, NATO and DC.

The only explanation for today’s appalling performance by @realDonaldTrump is the Russians have high value compromising intel on POTUS. Something that would have been discovered during any serviceman’s background investigation. @realDonaldTrump is unfit to command our troops.

— Major General (ret) Paul Eaton (@PaulDEaton52) July 16, 2018

Trump will deliver peace either through major aggression or pulling funds. Our leaders very clearly don't want that. How do you reconcile this?
That is pure projection by his political opponents. He and his team are making all the right statements and, as I predicted, Trump is not going to pull funds. Has very clearly signaled such to the Ukrainians.

---

Trump has, technically, already escalated - he's called for increasing NATO defense spending to 5% of GDP. The Poles have already announced they will do so. There's also strategic escalation ongoing, and you can take it to the bank Trump will continue it (i.e. he flirted with it in his admin) - putting permanent Nato military installations in former WP countries. The Romanians have already approved building a major NATO joint base (Ramstein equivalent) at an existing Romania air base = 10k troops & squadrons of aircraft. In 2027, A German brigade will be stationed in Lithuania, to guard the Suwalki Gap. Also public statements about NATO bases in Finland.

That is a fair price Russia pays for its aggression. We could always stop construction of the bases, or defer the deployment of Nato troops to the Baltics, or etc.......in exchange for Russian withdrawal from Ukraine.

The first faulty premise to sweep from analysis is that Nato actions provoked the war. Such is pure poppycock. Russian imperialism, an effort to rebuild something similar to the Ussr/Warsaw Pact footprint, is 100% the cause of the Russo-Ukraine War. Russia thought they could take Ukraine quickly and without consequence. Now, they are caught in a trap from which their current regime cannot escape. they cannot win, and they cannot withdraw. We should threaten to escalate, and then do so incrementally to ratchet up the pressure on Russia.

Opponents of policies supporting Ukraine are hopelessly out of touch with realities........

---

I wish people understood what a screwed up place Ukraine has been for a long time. I've seen videos of Ukrainian soldiers committing war crimes. People say "what about Russia?". We're not funding Russia.
War crimes happen in wars. The victor gets to sort out what is/isn't a war crime.

With these huge sums of money we're giving to Ukraine, why should we tolerate their corruption and sin?
The purpose of our aid to Ukraine is not to rid it of corruption. It's to rid it of Russians. Why did we did not impose any conditions on Stalin to modernize, liberalize, economize, etc.... Because the purpose of our aid to them was to degrade the German war machine fighting on two fronts. We didn't care what Stalin believed or did to his own people, as long as he organized them to go kill Germans.
Why have we rejected an audit of aid to Ukraine? Do you deny that the west is completely without corruption here?
Wherever there is government spending, there is corruption. And you do audit and such to minimize it. What you do not do is determine that a Russian invasion of Ukraine is a threat to Nato (which it obviously is) but not respond because corruption might break out. It's like refusing to drive your car to avoid the risk of getting a flat tire.

If Ukraine is successful, I want Zelensky removed from power permanently as opposition leaders were murdered by his regime. People who opposed the war were kidnapped by militias and tortured. Its not a surprise to me that over 650K men left Ukraine when the war began.
Russian propaganda is designed to generate hyperbole like that.
Those 650k men you referred to did not leave Ukraine because of an oppressive Zelensky government. They left to avoid a repressive Russian government taking over control of Ukraine, of having to fight a hopeless battle against what at the time was seen as an unstoppable Russian Army.
Yes, Ukraine did a lot of work to root out Russian sympathizers throughout their government. They literally rebuilt their intel agencies from scratch. They had a Russian church hierarchy that was a veritable 5th column.

---

The idea that Ukraine is comparable to Russia on any of those yardsticks is highly suspect. War is a messy thing. You cannot be effective without stepping on toes, nicking fingers with knives, etc.... And there are only two ways to fix that:
1) Win, so you can sort it all out when it's over.
2) Lose, so your opponent can sort it all out when it's over.

If we don't help Ukraine resist pressure from Russia, Russian will use Ukraine to ramp up pressure on Nato. So pick the problem you want to deal with - Ukrainian corruption, or having a brutal, nuclear capable Russian army with hundreds of miles of new frontage on the Polish, Slovakian, Ukrainian, and Romanian borders, +600mi closer to Nato troops. And for that price, there still will be corruption in Ukraine, given that Russia is corrupt by orders of magnitude worse than Ukraine.

In Russian doctrine, use of tactical nukes is a battlefield decision. Do really want a corrupt Russian Army Colonel with tactical nukes at his disposal to be 600mi closer to our men & women in uniform? Is that really worse than a Zelensky regime skimming a little off of the war effort?

Choose your poison carefully.

---

No. A nuclear capable Russia 600 miles closer to NATO is what you want if you support NATO expansion.
I have not endorsed Nato membership for Ukraine. The list of reasons for that is not short, and includes statutory prohibitions - territorial disputes, democratic processes, etc......

What the Russians and the Ukraine war critics have always wanted was a buffer zone.
LOL you always spin Nato support for Ukraine as an effort to move Nato borders 600mi eastward, despite Ukraine's ineligibility for membership, then ignore that it is RUssia who actually went to war to move its borders 600mi westward.

---

Russia doesn't want Ukraine to be a border zone. Russia wants Ukraine to be Russian.

---

Of course you have endorsed NATO membership, just not right away.
Refusing to rule it out forever, wanting to watch & wait for decades, is not an endorsement of membership, Vlad, no matter how much you need it to be so. It's a very pragmatic middle-ground position to take on the matter.

You want to build up a military, install US bases, and otherwise make them a de facto member before making them a de jure member.
Nope. Not in Ukraine. I'm fine with building bases in former WP countries, though. We were wise not to do so in order to not provoke Russia. But now that Russia has returned to its old ways, we are wise to move forward with bases in Romania and Poland and Finland - prudent responses to Russian provocations. (it's Russia that broke the status quo, not the other way around).

That's what we were doing, and it's what one would expect.
Uh, no, we are not building Nato bases in Ukraine.

The statutory restrictions are a red herring, as I'm sure you know. We've made exceptions before (see Germany) and could do so again.
Sigh - false equivalence. At the time of Germany reunification, East Germany did not have Russian armies on its soil engaged in a hot war to annex German territory.

---

Dude. Nato membership for Ukraine at this moment means Nato is stepping directly into a hot war.
That is just not going to happen.

You've got so many busted-up strawmen on the floor you can hardly stand.

---

Not talking about reunification. I'm talking the end of WW2, which would be an analogous situation if NATO membership is part of a settlement in Ukraine. It won't be, but the fact we're talking about it demonstrates the reasons for the Russian invasion. Framing it as a 1st Amendment issue is comical.

We don't have US bases there yet. It starts with NATO troops training Ukrainian troops, integrating their forces with our forces, their arms and equipment with our arms and equipment, etc. As you say, no serious leader would stand by and wait for it to happen.

---

You mean like Russia's military working with and supplying Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, and others?

---

Them being in our sphere of influence is a massive provocation and totally unacceptable.

---

I disagree, but regardless.

---

You think they should be in our sphere of influence?

Redbrickbear said:

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sombear said:

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Redbrickbear said:

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sombear said:

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Sam Lowry said:

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whiterock said:

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Sam Lowry said:

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whiterock said:

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Sam Lowry said:

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whiterock said:

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Doc Holliday said:

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whiterock said:

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Doc Holliday said:

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whiterock said:

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Doc Holliday said:

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whiterock said:

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Doc Holliday said:

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whiterock said:

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Your comment above reflects the faulty premise running thru the vast majority of isolationist arguments - that disengaging from world affairs will help fix our domestic problems. It's the opposite. Disengagement will make those problems worse. How many new bases do you want to build in Sweden, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria? Do you want to have to build a 600 ship navy again? Maintain a 3m soldier army again? How is letting China bully the rest of Asia going to benefit our economy? (and on and on....)

Cutting all foreign aid does not balance the budget.
Closing DOD and disbanding our military does not balance the budget.
DOING BOTH DOES NOT BALANCE OUR BUDGET.

Close down Dept of Education. States can handle the role just fine.
But if you want to make a really big impact = end the Green Energy nonsense, all $93T of it.

Repeat after me: We cannot balance our budget with a series of bad foreign policy decisions.

---

Again, that's not what I'm getting at. There's TWO wars. One domestic and one abroad.

DC is super supportive of war in Ukraine or war anywhere. They jump through the hoops for financial support, weapons etc. When it comes to putting American's first, they're silent. They don't have the same sense of urgency that they do with war. When we have major weather disasters, they'll let people die, especially if they have certain political views. They let millions of illegals in. They allow big pharma and healthcare to let us die in order for those groups to be insanely greedy.

If we keep the current status quo together for the next several decades, our country won't even be recognizable and the freedom you and I would fight for, won't even exist. That's what I'm getting at.

The people in favor of the war in Ukraine have to understand that if we don't win the war at home, then the war in Ukraine doesn't matter. I want you to be pissed off that they're enthusiastic about war in Ukraine and against American First.

---

yes, it's exactly what you are getting at. You are (along with millions of others) suggesting a cause-effect relationship - that we are not responding adequately to disasters, or canceling opposing views, or tolerating illegal immigration, or mismanaging big pharma/healthcare to facilitate policies abroad because we are obsessed with foreign affairs. That is just not so. There is nothing about fixing any of those domestic issues which would require a single change in foreign policy. In fact stopping everything we're doing abroad, closing all the bases, shutting off all the aid, bringing our entire diplomatic corps home.....would not come remotely close to balancing the budget. Those problems you cited are easily fixable with good policy, which will require negligible expense (and in many cases save us money).

If we lose the war in Ukraine (i.e. let Russia have as much of it as it wants), we will in a worse position no matter how much improvement we make on those other things.

Don't take the false dilemma. BOTH Ukraine and the border (et al...) are important. We have to win on BOTH. Failure on either one is bad, and cannot be offset by victory on the other.

There is no number of bad foreign policy decisions which will balance our budget. In fact, each bad foreign policy decision will saddle us with ever greater future costs.

---

I'm not asking to change foreign policy to benefit domestic policy. I'm not stating a cause-effect relationship.

I'm asking to treat both equally and we're not.

It pisses me off that we send hundreds of billions in aid to Ukraine and simultaneously don't give a damn about hurricane victims. $5 billion for the border is too much, but hundreds of billions to Ukraine is urgent.

Surely that doesn't sit right with you guys?

What are your red lines?
Are you ok if this war proceeds for a decade or so?
Are you ok if it costs us a few trillion?
What end goal do you have in mind?

---

Doesn't sit right with me at all, but when you pair the two things together in an argument, there is an implied "we have to stop doing X abroad so we can do Y at home." Certainly that is the construction of many who argue here and most of the arguments on the matter in the public square. Fact is, we have to do both.

The end is simple: stop Russia, up to and including causing a collapse of the current regime. We do have it in our power to do that. quite easily. Nato GDP dwarfs Russia. Zero chance Russia can last longer than Nato. Biden has simply been taking half-measures.

Why is that end so important? See sombear's comments above. Russia will always have the ability to rebuild armies and airforces, which makes them an existential threat if not robustly resisted. For centuries they have looked west and seen they need to modernize, but the corruption always wins. As a result, throughout the centuries, they have over and over and over demonstrated a lack of maturity to know their limits. Their move against Ukraine was a frickin' comedy of errors, from intelligence assessments, to operational planning, to strategic & tactical execution. But look what it's costing to stop them......

History is abundantly clear on this: Russia is a bully. If you don't knock them flat on their asses when they get out of line, they will keep coming.

---

You're correct that Biden took half-measures. We don't even have any signed military data sharing agreements with Ukraine, No geospatial data, nothing. The same clowns that prolonged war in Afghanistan/Iraq and spent damn near $8 trillion doing so are in charge of this war. That leads me to believe they want to make this a prolonged proxy war for as long as possible. After personally visiting NATO in Brussels and seeing CNN on every TV in their building...I think they're also clowns.
US and Western intel liaison with Ukraine is robust. We helped Ukraine literally rebuilt its agencies from scratch to rid them of Russian infiltration. And, of course, we trained trained trained, in classical FI/CI operations as well as paramilitary operations. Had it not been for all this "covert" investment going back to 2015-2016 timeframe, the Russian plan for a 72-hour operation to take down Ukraine would almost certainly have been successful.

I don't trust them. Our intelligence community and military leaders have largely claimed that Trump is a Russian asset as well. I don't know how you feel good about this war considering those people are in charge.
The Russian asset meme has run its course. You will hear some of the die-hards on the left still parrot it because they believe it, but it's clearly not an election winner so it will die a natural death.

This is what DC believes. This is the belief of the military industrial complex, national security, NATO and DC.

The only explanation for today’s appalling performance by @realDonaldTrump is the Russians have high value compromising intel on POTUS. Something that would have been discovered during any serviceman’s background investigation. @realDonaldTrump is unfit to command our troops.

— Major General (ret) Paul Eaton (@PaulDEaton52) July 16, 2018

Trump will deliver peace either through major aggression or pulling funds. Our leaders very clearly don't want that. How do you reconcile this?
That is pure projection by his political opponents. He and his team are making all the right statements and, as I predicted, Trump is not going to pull funds. Has very clearly signaled such to the Ukrainians.

---

Trump has, technically, already escalated - he's called for increasing NATO defense spending to 5% of GDP. The Poles have already announced they will do so. There's also strategic escalation ongoing, and you can take it to the bank Trump will continue it (i.e. he flirted with it in his admin) - putting permanent Nato military installations in former WP countries. The Romanians have already approved building a major NATO joint base (Ramstein equivalent) at an existing Romania air base = 10k troops & squadrons of aircraft. In 2027, A German brigade will be stationed in Lithuania, to guard the Suwalki Gap. Also public statements about NATO bases in Finland.

That is a fair price Russia pays for its aggression. We could always stop construction of the bases, or defer the deployment of Nato troops to the Baltics, or etc.......in exchange for Russian withdrawal from Ukraine.

The first faulty premise to sweep from analysis is that Nato actions provoked the war. Such is pure poppycock. Russian imperialism, an effort to rebuild something similar to the Ussr/Warsaw Pact footprint, is 100% the cause of the Russo-Ukraine War. Russia thought they could take Ukraine quickly and without consequence. Now, they are caught in a trap from which their current regime cannot escape. they cannot win, and they cannot withdraw. We should threaten to escalate, and then do so incrementally to ratchet up the pressure on Russia.

Opponents of policies supporting Ukraine are hopelessly out of touch with realities........

---

I wish people understood what a screwed up place Ukraine has been for a long time. I've seen videos of Ukrainian soldiers committing war crimes. People say "what about Russia?". We're not funding Russia.
War crimes happen in wars. The victor gets to sort out what is/isn't a war crime.

With these huge sums of money we're giving to Ukraine, why should we tolerate their corruption and sin?
The purpose of our aid to Ukraine is not to rid it of corruption. It's to rid it of Russians. Why did we did not impose any conditions on Stalin to modernize, liberalize, economize, etc.... Because the purpose of our aid to them was to degrade the German war machine fighting on two fronts. We didn't care what Stalin believed or did to his own people, as long as he organized them to go kill Germans.
Why have we rejected an audit of aid to Ukraine? Do you deny that the west is completely without corruption here?
Wherever there is government spending, there is corruption. And you do audit and such to minimize it. What you do not do is determine that a Russian invasion of Ukraine is a threat to Nato (which it obviously is) but not respond because corruption might break out. It's like refusing to drive your car to avoid the risk of getting a flat tire.

If Ukraine is successful, I want Zelensky removed from power permanently as opposition leaders were murdered by his regime. People who opposed the war were kidnapped by militias and tortured. Its not a surprise to me that over 650K men left Ukraine when the war began.
Russian propaganda is designed to generate hyperbole like that.
Those 650k men you referred to did not leave Ukraine because of an oppressive Zelensky government. They left to avoid a repressive Russian government taking over control of Ukraine, of having to fight a hopeless battle against what at the time was seen as an unstoppable Russian Army.
Yes, Ukraine did a lot of work to root out Russian sympathizers throughout their government. They literally rebuilt their intel agencies from scratch. They had a Russian church hierarchy that was a veritable 5th column.

---

The idea that Ukraine is comparable to Russia on any of those yardsticks is highly suspect. War is a messy thing. You cannot be effective without stepping on toes, nicking fingers with knives, etc.... And there are only two ways to fix that:
1) Win, so you can sort it all out when it's over.
2) Lose, so your opponent can sort it all out when it's over.

If we don't help Ukraine resist pressure from Russia, Russian will use Ukraine to ramp up pressure on Nato. So pick the problem you want to deal with - Ukrainian corruption, or having a brutal, nuclear capable Russian army with hundreds of miles of new frontage on the Polish, Slovakian, Ukrainian, and Romanian borders, +600mi closer to Nato troops. And for that price, there still will be corruption in Ukraine, given that Russia is corrupt by orders of magnitude worse than Ukraine.

In Russian doctrine, use of tactical nukes is a battlefield decision. Do really want a corrupt Russian Army Colonel with tactical nukes at his disposal to be 600mi closer to our men & women in uniform? Is that really worse than a Zelensky regime skimming a little off of the war effort?

Choose your poison carefully.

---

No. A nuclear capable Russia 600 miles closer to NATO is what you want if you support NATO expansion.
I have not endorsed Nato membership for Ukraine. The list of reasons for that is not short, and includes statutory prohibitions - territorial disputes, democratic processes, etc......

What the Russians and the Ukraine war critics have always wanted was a buffer zone.
LOL you always spin Nato support for Ukraine as an effort to move Nato borders 600mi eastward, despite Ukraine's ineligibility for membership, then ignore that it is RUssia who actually went to war to move its borders 600mi westward.

---

Russia doesn't want Ukraine to be a border zone. Russia wants Ukraine to be Russian.

---

Of course you have endorsed NATO membership, just not right away.
Refusing to rule it out forever, wanting to watch & wait for decades, is not an endorsement of membership, Vlad, no matter how much you need it to be so. It's a very pragmatic middle-ground position to take on the matter.

You want to build up a military, install US bases, and otherwise make them a de facto member before making them a de jure member.
Nope. Not in Ukraine. I'm fine with building bases in former WP countries, though. We were wise not to do so in order to not provoke Russia. But now that Russia has returned to its old ways, we are wise to move forward with bases in Romania and Poland and Finland - prudent responses to Russian provocations. (it's Russia that broke the status quo, not the other way around).

That's what we were doing, and it's what one would expect.
Uh, no, we are not building Nato bases in Ukraine.

The statutory restrictions are a red herring, as I'm sure you know. We've made exceptions before (see Germany) and could do so again.
Sigh - false equivalence. At the time of Germany reunification, East Germany did not have Russian armies on its soil engaged in a hot war to annex German territory.

---

Dude. Nato membership for Ukraine at this moment means Nato is stepping directly into a hot war.
That is just not going to happen.

You've got so many busted-up strawmen on the floor you can hardly stand.

---

Not talking about reunification. I'm talking the end of WW2, which would be an analogous situation if NATO membership is part of a settlement in Ukraine. It won't be, but the fact we're talking about it demonstrates the reasons for the Russian invasion. Framing it as a 1st Amendment issue is comical.

We don't have US bases there yet. It starts with NATO troops training Ukrainian troops, integrating their forces with our forces, their arms and equipment with our arms and equipment, etc. As you say, no serious leader would stand by and wait for it to happen.

---

You mean like Russia's military working with and supplying Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, and others?

---

Them being in our sphere of influence is a massive provocation and totally unacceptable.

---

I disagree, but regardless.

---

You think they should be in our sphere of influence?

---

Well I don't want them here, but they're free to be here and their allies are free to take them. May the best man win. Freedom and liberty will win out.

sombear said:

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Redbrickbear said:

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sombear said:

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Redbrickbear said:

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sombear said:

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Sam Lowry said:

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whiterock said:

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Sam Lowry said:

---

whiterock said:

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Sam Lowry said:

---

whiterock said:

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Doc Holliday said:

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whiterock said:

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Doc Holliday said:

---

whiterock said:

---

Doc Holliday said:

---

whiterock said:

---

Doc Holliday said:

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whiterock said:

---

Your comment above reflects the faulty premise running thru the vast majority of isolationist arguments - that disengaging from world affairs will help fix our domestic problems. It's the opposite. Disengagement will make those problems worse. How many new bases do you want to build in Sweden, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria? Do you want to have to build a 600 ship navy again? Maintain a 3m soldier army again? How is letting China bully the rest of Asia going to benefit our economy? (and on and on....)

Cutting all foreign aid does not balance the budget.
Closing DOD and disbanding our military does not balance the budget.
DOING BOTH DOES NOT BALANCE OUR BUDGET.

Close down Dept of Education. States can handle the role just fine.
But if you want to make a really big impact = end the Green Energy nonsense, all $93T of it.

Repeat after me: We cannot balance our budget with a series of bad foreign policy decisions.

---

Again, that's not what I'm getting at. There's TWO wars. One domestic and one abroad.

DC is super supportive of war in Ukraine or war anywhere. They jump through the hoops for financial support, weapons etc. When it comes to putting American's first, they're silent. They don't have the same sense of urgency that they do with war. When we have major weather disasters, they'll let people die, especially if they have certain political views. They let millions of illegals in. They allow big pharma and healthcare to let us die in order for those groups to be insanely greedy.

If we keep the current status quo together for the next several decades, our country won't even be recognizable and the freedom you and I would fight for, won't even exist. That's what I'm getting at.

The people in favor of the war in Ukraine have to understand that if we don't win the war at home, then the war in Ukraine doesn't matter. I want you to be pissed off that they're enthusiastic about war in Ukraine and against American First.

---

yes, it's exactly what you are getting at. You are (along with millions of others) suggesting a cause-effect relationship - that we are not responding adequately to disasters, or canceling opposing views, or tolerating illegal immigration, or mismanaging big pharma/healthcare to facilitate policies abroad because we are obsessed with foreign affairs. That is just not so. There is nothing about fixing any of those domestic issues which would require a single change in foreign policy. In fact stopping everything we're doing abroad, closing all the bases, shutting off all the aid, bringing our entire diplomatic corps home.....would not come remotely close to balancing the budget. Those problems you cited are easily fixable with good policy, which will require negligible expense (and in many cases save us money).

If we lose the war in Ukraine (i.e. let Russia have as much of it as it wants), we will in a worse position no matter how much improvement we make on those other things.

Don't take the false dilemma. BOTH Ukraine and the border (et al...) are important. We have to win on BOTH. Failure on either one is bad, and cannot be offset by victory on the other.

There is no number of bad foreign policy decisions which will balance our budget. In fact, each bad foreign policy decision will saddle us with ever greater future costs.

---

I'm not asking to change foreign policy to benefit domestic policy. I'm not stating a cause-effect relationship.

I'm asking to treat both equally and we're not.

It pisses me off that we send hundreds of billions in aid to Ukraine and simultaneously don't give a damn about hurricane victims. $5 billion for the border is too much, but hundreds of billions to Ukraine is urgent.

Surely that doesn't sit right with you guys?

What are your red lines?
Are you ok if this war proceeds for a decade or so?
Are you ok if it costs us a few trillion?
What end goal do you have in mind?

---

Doesn't sit right with me at all, but when you pair the two things together in an argument, there is an implied "we have to stop doing X abroad so we can do Y at home." Certainly that is the construction of many who argue here and most of the arguments on the matter in the public square. Fact is, we have to do both.

The end is simple: stop Russia, up to and including causing a collapse of the current regime. We do have it in our power to do that. quite easily. Nato GDP dwarfs Russia. Zero chance Russia can last longer than Nato. Biden has simply been taking half-measures.

Why is that end so important? See sombear's comments above. Russia will always have the ability to rebuild armies and airforces, which makes them an existential threat if not robustly resisted. For centuries they have looked west and seen they need to modernize, but the corruption always wins. As a result, throughout the centuries, they have over and over and over demonstrated a lack of maturity to know their limits. Their move against Ukraine was a frickin' comedy of errors, from intelligence assessments, to operational planning, to strategic & tactical execution. But look what it's costing to stop them......

History is abundantly clear on this: Russia is a bully. If you don't knock them flat on their asses when they get out of line, they will keep coming.

---

You're correct that Biden took half-measures. We don't even have any signed military data sharing agreements with Ukraine, No geospatial data, nothing. The same clowns that prolonged war in Afghanistan/Iraq and spent damn near $8 trillion doing so are in charge of this war. That leads me to believe they want to make this a prolonged proxy war for as long as possible. After personally visiting NATO in Brussels and seeing CNN on every TV in their building...I think they're also clowns.
US and Western intel liaison with Ukraine is robust. We helped Ukraine literally rebuilt its agencies from scratch to rid them of Russian infiltration. And, of course, we trained trained trained, in classical FI/CI operations as well as paramilitary operations. Had it not been for all this "covert" investment going back to 2015-2016 timeframe, the Russian plan for a 72-hour operation to take down Ukraine would almost certainly have been successful.

I don't trust them. Our intelligence community and military leaders have largely claimed that Trump is a Russian asset as well. I don't know how you feel good about this war considering those people are in charge.
The Russian asset meme has run its course. You will hear some of the die-hards on the left still parrot it because they believe it, but it's clearly not an election winner so it will die a natural death.

This is what DC believes. This is the belief of the military industrial complex, national security, NATO and DC.

The only explanation for today’s appalling performance by @realDonaldTrump is the Russians have high value compromising intel on POTUS. Something that would have been discovered during any serviceman’s background investigation. @realDonaldTrump is unfit to command our troops.

— Major General (ret) Paul Eaton (@PaulDEaton52) July 16, 2018

Trump will deliver peace either through major aggression or pulling funds. Our leaders very clearly don't want that. How do you reconcile this?
That is pure projection by his political opponents. He and his team are making all the right statements and, as I predicted, Trump is not going to pull funds. Has very clearly signaled such to the Ukrainians.

---

Trump has, technically, already escalated - he's called for increasing NATO defense spending to 5% of GDP. The Poles have already announced they will do so. There's also strategic escalation ongoing, and you can take it to the bank Trump will continue it (i.e. he flirted with it in his admin) - putting permanent Nato military installations in former WP countries. The Romanians have already approved building a major NATO joint base (Ramstein equivalent) at an existing Romania air base = 10k troops & squadrons of aircraft. In 2027, A German brigade will be stationed in Lithuania, to guard the Suwalki Gap. Also public statements about NATO bases in Finland.

That is a fair price Russia pays for its aggression. We could always stop construction of the bases, or defer the deployment of Nato troops to the Baltics, or etc.......in exchange for Russian withdrawal from Ukraine.

The first faulty premise to sweep from analysis is that Nato actions provoked the war. Such is pure poppycock. Russian imperialism, an effort to rebuild something similar to the Ussr/Warsaw Pact footprint, is 100% the cause of the Russo-Ukraine War. Russia thought they could take Ukraine quickly and without consequence. Now, they are caught in a trap from which their current regime cannot escape. they cannot win, and they cannot withdraw. We should threaten to escalate, and then do so incrementally to ratchet up the pressure on Russia.

Opponents of policies supporting Ukraine are hopelessly out of touch with realities........

---

I wish people understood what a screwed up place Ukraine has been for a long time. I've seen videos of Ukrainian soldiers committing war crimes. People say "what about Russia?". We're not funding Russia.
War crimes happen in wars. The victor gets to sort out what is/isn't a war crime.

With these huge sums of money we're giving to Ukraine, why should we tolerate their corruption and sin?
The purpose of our aid to Ukraine is not to rid it of corruption. It's to rid it of Russians. Why did we did not impose any conditions on Stalin to modernize, liberalize, economize, etc.... Because the purpose of our aid to them was to degrade the German war machine fighting on two fronts. We didn't care what Stalin believed or did to his own people, as long as he organized them to go kill Germans.
Why have we rejected an audit of aid to Ukraine? Do you deny that the west is completely without corruption here?
Wherever there is government spending, there is corruption. And you do audit and such to minimize it. What you do not do is determine that a Russian invasion of Ukraine is a threat to Nato (which it obviously is) but not respond because corruption might break out. It's like refusing to drive your car to avoid the risk of getting a flat tire.

If Ukraine is successful, I want Zelensky removed from power permanently as opposition leaders were murdered by his regime. People who opposed the war were kidnapped by militias and tortured. Its not a surprise to me that over 650K men left Ukraine when the war began.
Russian propaganda is designed to generate hyperbole like that.
Those 650k men you referred to did not leave Ukraine because of an oppressive Zelensky government. They left to avoid a repressive Russian government taking over control of Ukraine, of having to fight a hopeless battle against what at the time was seen as an unstoppable Russian Army.
Yes, Ukraine did a lot of work to root out Russian sympathizers throughout their government. They literally rebuilt their intel agencies from scratch. They had a Russian church hierarchy that was a veritable 5th column.

---

The idea that Ukraine is comparable to Russia on any of those yardsticks is highly suspect. War is a messy thing. You cannot be effective without stepping on toes, nicking fingers with knives, etc.... And there are only two ways to fix that:
1) Win, so you can sort it all out when it's over.
2) Lose, so your opponent can sort it all out when it's over.

If we don't help Ukraine resist pressure from Russia, Russian will use Ukraine to ramp up pressure on Nato. So pick the problem you want to deal with - Ukrainian corruption, or having a brutal, nuclear capable Russian army with hundreds of miles of new frontage on the Polish, Slovakian, Ukrainian, and Romanian borders, +600mi closer to Nato troops. And for that price, there still will be corruption in Ukraine, given that Russia is corrupt by orders of magnitude worse than Ukraine.

In Russian doctrine, use of tactical nukes is a battlefield decision. Do really want a corrupt Russian Army Colonel with tactical nukes at his disposal to be 600mi closer to our men & women in uniform? Is that really worse than a Zelensky regime skimming a little off of the war effort?

Choose your poison carefully.

---

No. A nuclear capable Russia 600 miles closer to NATO is what you want if you support NATO expansion.
I have not endorsed Nato membership for Ukraine. The list of reasons for that is not short, and includes statutory prohibitions - territorial disputes, democratic processes, etc......

What the Russians and the Ukraine war critics have always wanted was a buffer zone.
LOL you always spin Nato support for Ukraine as an effort to move Nato borders 600mi eastward, despite Ukraine's ineligibility for membership, then ignore that it is RUssia who actually went to war to move its borders 600mi westward.

---

Russia doesn't want Ukraine to be a border zone. Russia wants Ukraine to be Russian.

---

Of course you have endorsed NATO membership, just not right away.
Refusing to rule it out forever, wanting to watch & wait for decades, is not an endorsement of membership, Vlad, no matter how much you need it to be so. It's a very pragmatic middle-ground position to take on the matter.

You want to build up a military, install US bases, and otherwise make them a de facto member before making them a de jure member.
Nope. Not in Ukraine. I'm fine with building bases in former WP countries, though. We were wise not to do so in order to not provoke Russia. But now that Russia has returned to its old ways, we are wise to move forward with bases in Romania and Poland and Finland - prudent responses to Russian provocations. (it's Russia that broke the status quo, not the other way around).

That's what we were doing, and it's what one would expect.
Uh, no, we are not building Nato bases in Ukraine.

The statutory restrictions are a red herring, as I'm sure you know. We've made exceptions before (see Germany) and could do so again.
Sigh - false equivalence. At the time of Germany reunification, East Germany did not have Russian armies on its soil engaged in a hot war to annex German territory.

---

Dude. Nato membership for Ukraine at this moment means Nato is stepping directly into a hot war.
That is just not going to happen.

You've got so many busted-up strawmen on the floor you can hardly stand.

---

Not talking about reunification. I'm talking the end of WW2, which would be an analogous situation if NATO membership is part of a settlement in Ukraine. It won't be, but the fact we're talking about it demonstrates the reasons for the Russian invasion. Framing it as a 1st Amendment issue is comical.

We don't have US bases there yet. It starts with NATO troops training Ukrainian troops, integrating their forces with our forces, their arms and equipment with our arms and equipment, etc. As you say, no serious leader would stand by and wait for it to happen.

---

You mean like Russia's military working with and supplying Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, and others?

---

Them being in our sphere of influence is a massive provocation and totally unacceptable.

---

I disagree, but regardless.

---

You think they should be in our sphere of influence?

---

Freedom and liberty will win out.

---

Like it did in Cuba, n. Korea, China, Iran, Afghanistan, etc……

Redbrickbear said:

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sombear said:

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Redbrickbear said:

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sombear said:

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Redbrickbear said:

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sombear said:

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Sam Lowry said:

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whiterock said:

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Sam Lowry said:

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whiterock said:

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Sam Lowry said:

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whiterock said:

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Doc Holliday said:

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whiterock said:

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Doc Holliday said:

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whiterock said:

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Doc Holliday said:

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whiterock said:

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Doc Holliday said:

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whiterock said:

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Your comment above reflects the faulty premise running thru the vast majority of isolationist arguments - that disengaging from world affairs will help fix our domestic problems. It's the opposite. Disengagement will make those problems worse. How many new bases do you want to build in Sweden, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria? Do you want to have to build a 600 ship navy again? Maintain a 3m soldier army again? How is letting China bully the rest of Asia going to benefit our economy? (and on and on....)

Cutting all foreign aid does not balance the budget.
Closing DOD and disbanding our military does not balance the budget.
DOING BOTH DOES NOT BALANCE OUR BUDGET.

Close down Dept of Education. States can handle the role just fine.
But if you want to make a really big impact = end the Green Energy nonsense, all $93T of it.

Repeat after me: We cannot balance our budget with a series of bad foreign policy decisions.

---

Again, that's not what I'm getting at. There's TWO wars. One domestic and one abroad.

DC is super supportive of war in Ukraine or war anywhere. They jump through the hoops for financial support, weapons etc. When it comes to putting American's first, they're silent. They don't have the same sense of urgency that they do with war. When we have major weather disasters, they'll let people die, especially if they have certain political views. They let millions of illegals in. They allow big pharma and healthcare to let us die in order for those groups to be insanely greedy.

If we keep the current status quo together for the next several decades, our country won't even be recognizable and the freedom you and I would fight for, won't even exist. That's what I'm getting at.

The people in favor of the war in Ukraine have to understand that if we don't win the war at home, then the war in Ukraine doesn't matter. I want you to be pissed off that they're enthusiastic about war in Ukraine and against American First.

---

yes, it's exactly what you are getting at. You are (along with millions of others) suggesting a cause-effect relationship - that we are not responding adequately to disasters, or canceling opposing views, or tolerating illegal immigration, or mismanaging big pharma/healthcare to facilitate policies abroad because we are obsessed with foreign affairs. That is just not so. There is nothing about fixing any of those domestic issues which would require a single change in foreign policy. In fact stopping everything we're doing abroad, closing all the bases, shutting off all the aid, bringing our entire diplomatic corps home.....would not come remotely close to balancing the budget. Those problems you cited are easily fixable with good policy, which will require negligible expense (and in many cases save us money).

If we lose the war in Ukraine (i.e. let Russia have as much of it as it wants), we will in a worse position no matter how much improvement we make on those other things.

Don't take the false dilemma. BOTH Ukraine and the border (et al...) are important. We have to win on BOTH. Failure on either one is bad, and cannot be offset by victory on the other.

There is no number of bad foreign policy decisions which will balance our budget. In fact, each bad foreign policy decision will saddle us with ever greater future costs.

---

I'm not asking to change foreign policy to benefit domestic policy. I'm not stating a cause-effect relationship.

I'm asking to treat both equally and we're not.

It pisses me off that we send hundreds of billions in aid to Ukraine and simultaneously don't give a damn about hurricane victims. $5 billion for the border is too much, but hundreds of billions to Ukraine is urgent.

Surely that doesn't sit right with you guys?

What are your red lines?
Are you ok if this war proceeds for a decade or so?
Are you ok if it costs us a few trillion?
What end goal do you have in mind?

---

Doesn't sit right with me at all, but when you pair the two things together in an argument, there is an implied "we have to stop doing X abroad so we can do Y at home." Certainly that is the construction of many who argue here and most of the arguments on the matter in the public square. Fact is, we have to do both.

The end is simple: stop Russia, up to and including causing a collapse of the current regime. We do have it in our power to do that. quite easily. Nato GDP dwarfs Russia. Zero chance Russia can last longer than Nato. Biden has simply been taking half-measures.

Why is that end so important? See sombear's comments above. Russia will always have the ability to rebuild armies and airforces, which makes them an existential threat if not robustly resisted. For centuries they have looked west and seen they need to modernize, but the corruption always wins. As a result, throughout the centuries, they have over and over and over demonstrated a lack of maturity to know their limits. Their move against Ukraine was a frickin' comedy of errors, from intelligence assessments, to operational planning, to strategic & tactical execution. But look what it's costing to stop them......

History is abundantly clear on this: Russia is a bully. If you don't knock them flat on their asses when they get out of line, they will keep coming.

---

You're correct that Biden took half-measures. We don't even have any signed military data sharing agreements with Ukraine, No geospatial data, nothing. The same clowns that prolonged war in Afghanistan/Iraq and spent damn near $8 trillion doing so are in charge of this war. That leads me to believe they want to make this a prolonged proxy war for as long as possible. After personally visiting NATO in Brussels and seeing CNN on every TV in their building...I think they're also clowns.
US and Western intel liaison with Ukraine is robust. We helped Ukraine literally rebuilt its agencies from scratch to rid them of Russian infiltration. And, of course, we trained trained trained, in classical FI/CI operations as well as paramilitary operations. Had it not been for all this "covert" investment going back to 2015-2016 timeframe, the Russian plan for a 72-hour operation to take down Ukraine would almost certainly have been successful.

I don't trust them. Our intelligence community and military leaders have largely claimed that Trump is a Russian asset as well. I don't know how you feel good about this war considering those people are in charge.
The Russian asset meme has run its course. You will hear some of the die-hards on the left still parrot it because they believe it, but it's clearly not an election winner so it will die a natural death.

This is what DC believes. This is the belief of the military industrial complex, national security, NATO and DC.

The only explanation for today’s appalling performance by @realDonaldTrump is the Russians have high value compromising intel on POTUS. Something that would have been discovered during any serviceman’s background investigation. @realDonaldTrump is unfit to command our troops.

— Major General (ret) Paul Eaton (@PaulDEaton52) July 16, 2018

Trump will deliver peace either through major aggression or pulling funds. Our leaders very clearly don't want that. How do you reconcile this?
That is pure projection by his political opponents. He and his team are making all the right statements and, as I predicted, Trump is not going to pull funds. Has very clearly signaled such to the Ukrainians.

---

Trump has, technically, already escalated - he's called for increasing NATO defense spending to 5% of GDP. The Poles have already announced they will do so. There's also strategic escalation ongoing, and you can take it to the bank Trump will continue it (i.e. he flirted with it in his admin) - putting permanent Nato military installations in former WP countries. The Romanians have already approved building a major NATO joint base (Ramstein equivalent) at an existing Romania air base = 10k troops & squadrons of aircraft. In 2027, A German brigade will be stationed in Lithuania, to guard the Suwalki Gap. Also public statements about NATO bases in Finland.

That is a fair price Russia pays for its aggression. We could always stop construction of the bases, or defer the deployment of Nato troops to the Baltics, or etc.......in exchange for Russian withdrawal from Ukraine.

The first faulty premise to sweep from analysis is that Nato actions provoked the war. Such is pure poppycock. Russian imperialism, an effort to rebuild something similar to the Ussr/Warsaw Pact footprint, is 100% the cause of the Russo-Ukraine War. Russia thought they could take Ukraine quickly and without consequence. Now, they are caught in a trap from which their current regime cannot escape. they cannot win, and they cannot withdraw. We should threaten to escalate, and then do so incrementally to ratchet up the pressure on Russia.

Opponents of policies supporting Ukraine are hopelessly out of touch with realities........

---

I wish people understood what a screwed up place Ukraine has been for a long time. I've seen videos of Ukrainian soldiers committing war crimes. People say "what about Russia?". We're not funding Russia.
War crimes happen in wars. The victor gets to sort out what is/isn't a war crime.

With these huge sums of money we're giving to Ukraine, why should we tolerate their corruption and sin?
The purpose of our aid to Ukraine is not to rid it of corruption. It's to rid it of Russians. Why did we did not impose any conditions on Stalin to modernize, liberalize, economize, etc.... Because the purpose of our aid to them was to degrade the German war machine fighting on two fronts. We didn't care what Stalin believed or did to his own people, as long as he organized them to go kill Germans.
Why have we rejected an audit of aid to Ukraine? Do you deny that the west is completely without corruption here?
Wherever there is government spending, there is corruption. And you do audit and such to minimize it. What you do not do is determine that a Russian invasion of Ukraine is a threat to Nato (which it obviously is) but not respond because corruption might break out. It's like refusing to drive your car to avoid the risk of getting a flat tire.

If Ukraine is successful, I want Zelensky removed from power permanently as opposition leaders were murdered by his regime. People who opposed the war were kidnapped by militias and tortured. Its not a surprise to me that over 650K men left Ukraine when the war began.
Russian propaganda is designed to generate hyperbole like that.
Those 650k men you referred to did not leave Ukraine because of an oppressive Zelensky government. They left to avoid a repressive Russian government taking over control of Ukraine, of having to fight a hopeless battle against what at the time was seen as an unstoppable Russian Army.
Yes, Ukraine did a lot of work to root out Russian sympathizers throughout their government. They literally rebuilt their intel agencies from scratch. They had a Russian church hierarchy that was a veritable 5th column.

---

The idea that Ukraine is comparable to Russia on any of those yardsticks is highly suspect. War is a messy thing. You cannot be effective without stepping on toes, nicking fingers with knives, etc.... And there are only two ways to fix that:
1) Win, so you can sort it all out when it's over.
2) Lose, so your opponent can sort it all out when it's over.

If we don't help Ukraine resist pressure from Russia, Russian will use Ukraine to ramp up pressure on Nato. So pick the problem you want to deal with - Ukrainian corruption, or having a brutal, nuclear capable Russian army with hundreds of miles of new frontage on the Polish, Slovakian, Ukrainian, and Romanian borders, +600mi closer to Nato troops. And for that price, there still will be corruption in Ukraine, given that Russia is corrupt by orders of magnitude worse than Ukraine.

In Russian doctrine, use of tactical nukes is a battlefield decision. Do really want a corrupt Russian Army Colonel with tactical nukes at his disposal to be 600mi closer to our men & women in uniform? Is that really worse than a Zelensky regime skimming a little off of the war effort?

Choose your poison carefully.

---

No. A nuclear capable Russia 600 miles closer to NATO is what you want if you support NATO expansion.
I have not endorsed Nato membership for Ukraine. The list of reasons for that is not short, and includes statutory prohibitions - territorial disputes, democratic processes, etc......

What the Russians and the Ukraine war critics have always wanted was a buffer zone.
LOL you always spin Nato support for Ukraine as an effort to move Nato borders 600mi eastward, despite Ukraine's ineligibility for membership, then ignore that it is RUssia who actually went to war to move its borders 600mi westward.

---

Russia doesn't want Ukraine to be a border zone. Russia wants Ukraine to be Russian.

---

Of course you have endorsed NATO membership, just not right away.
Refusing to rule it out forever, wanting to watch & wait for decades, is not an endorsement of membership, Vlad, no matter how much you need it to be so. It's a very pragmatic middle-ground position to take on the matter.

You want to build up a military, install US bases, and otherwise make them a de facto member before making them a de jure member.
Nope. Not in Ukraine. I'm fine with building bases in former WP countries, though. We were wise not to do so in order to not provoke Russia. But now that Russia has returned to its old ways, we are wise to move forward with bases in Romania and Poland and Finland - prudent responses to Russian provocations. (it's Russia that broke the status quo, not the other way around).

That's what we were doing, and it's what one would expect.
Uh, no, we are not building Nato bases in Ukraine.

The statutory restrictions are a red herring, as I'm sure you know. We've made exceptions before (see Germany) and could do so again.
Sigh - false equivalence. At the time of Germany reunification, East Germany did not have Russian armies on its soil engaged in a hot war to annex German territory.

---

Dude. Nato membership for Ukraine at this moment means Nato is stepping directly into a hot war.
That is just not going to happen.

You've got so many busted-up strawmen on the floor you can hardly stand.

---

Not talking about reunification. I'm talking the end of WW2, which would be an analogous situation if NATO membership is part of a settlement in Ukraine. It won't be, but the fact we're talking about it demonstrates the reasons for the Russian invasion. Framing it as a 1st Amendment issue is comical.

We don't have US bases there yet. It starts with NATO troops training Ukrainian troops, integrating their forces with our forces, their arms and equipment with our arms and equipment, etc. As you say, no serious leader would stand by and wait for it to happen.

---

You mean like Russia's military working with and supplying Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, and others?

---

Them being in our sphere of influence is a massive provocation and totally unacceptable.

---

I disagree, but regardless.

---

You think they should be in our sphere of influence?

---

Freedom and liberty will win out.

---

Like it did in Cuba, n. Korea, China, Iran, Afghanistan, etc……

---

There are always exceptions, usually due to extreme tyranny, but history is pretty clear. When people are exposed to and given the opportunity to choose freedom, they do it.

But it's actually a great point. There's a reason Russia's primary allies are bottom feeders.

sombear said:

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Redbrickbear said:

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sombear said:

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Redbrickbear said:

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sombear said:

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Redbrickbear said:

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sombear said:

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Sam Lowry said:

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whiterock said:

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Sam Lowry said:

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whiterock said:

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Sam Lowry said:

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whiterock said:

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Doc Holliday said:

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whiterock said:

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Doc Holliday said:

---

whiterock said:

---

Doc Holliday said:

---

whiterock said:

---

Doc Holliday said:

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whiterock said:

---

Your comment above reflects the faulty premise running thru the vast majority of isolationist arguments - that disengaging from world affairs will help fix our domestic problems. It's the opposite. Disengagement will make those problems worse. How many new bases do you want to build in Sweden, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria? Do you want to have to build a 600 ship navy again? Maintain a 3m soldier army again? How is letting China bully the rest of Asia going to benefit our economy? (and on and on....)

Cutting all foreign aid does not balance the budget.
Closing DOD and disbanding our military does not balance the budget.
DOING BOTH DOES NOT BALANCE OUR BUDGET.

Close down Dept of Education. States can handle the role just fine.
But if you want to make a really big impact = end the Green Energy nonsense, all $93T of it.

Repeat after me: We cannot balance our budget with a series of bad foreign policy decisions.

---

Again, that's not what I'm getting at. There's TWO wars. One domestic and one abroad.

DC is super supportive of war in Ukraine or war anywhere. They jump through the hoops for financial support, weapons etc. When it comes to putting American's first, they're silent. They don't have the same sense of urgency that they do with war. When we have major weather disasters, they'll let people die, especially if they have certain political views. They let millions of illegals in. They allow big pharma and healthcare to let us die in order for those groups to be insanely greedy.

If we keep the current status quo together for the next several decades, our country won't even be recognizable and the freedom you and I would fight for, won't even exist. That's what I'm getting at.

The people in favor of the war in Ukraine have to understand that if we don't win the war at home, then the war in Ukraine doesn't matter. I want you to be pissed off that they're enthusiastic about war in Ukraine and against American First.

---

yes, it's exactly what you are getting at. You are (along with millions of others) suggesting a cause-effect relationship - that we are not responding adequately to disasters, or canceling opposing views, or tolerating illegal immigration, or mismanaging big pharma/healthcare to facilitate policies abroad because we are obsessed with foreign affairs. That is just not so. There is nothing about fixing any of those domestic issues which would require a single change in foreign policy. In fact stopping everything we're doing abroad, closing all the bases, shutting off all the aid, bringing our entire diplomatic corps home.....would not come remotely close to balancing the budget. Those problems you cited are easily fixable with good policy, which will require negligible expense (and in many cases save us money).

If we lose the war in Ukraine (i.e. let Russia have as much of it as it wants), we will in a worse position no matter how much improvement we make on those other things.

Don't take the false dilemma. BOTH Ukraine and the border (et al...) are important. We have to win on BOTH. Failure on either one is bad, and cannot be offset by victory on the other.

There is no number of bad foreign policy decisions which will balance our budget. In fact, each bad foreign policy decision will saddle us with ever greater future costs.

---

I'm not asking to change foreign policy to benefit domestic policy. I'm not stating a cause-effect relationship.

I'm asking to treat both equally and we're not.

It pisses me off that we send hundreds of billions in aid to Ukraine and simultaneously don't give a damn about hurricane victims. $5 billion for the border is too much, but hundreds of billions to Ukraine is urgent.

Surely that doesn't sit right with you guys?

What are your red lines?
Are you ok if this war proceeds for a decade or so?
Are you ok if it costs us a few trillion?
What end goal do you have in mind?

---

Doesn't sit right with me at all, but when you pair the two things together in an argument, there is an implied "we have to stop doing X abroad so we can do Y at home." Certainly that is the construction of many who argue here and most of the arguments on the matter in the public square. Fact is, we have to do both.

The end is simple: stop Russia, up to and including causing a collapse of the current regime. We do have it in our power to do that. quite easily. Nato GDP dwarfs Russia. Zero chance Russia can last longer than Nato. Biden has simply been taking half-measures.

Why is that end so important? See sombear's comments above. Russia will always have the ability to rebuild armies and airforces, which makes them an existential threat if not robustly resisted. For centuries they have looked west and seen they need to modernize, but the corruption always wins. As a result, throughout the centuries, they have over and over and over demonstrated a lack of maturity to know their limits. Their move against Ukraine was a frickin' comedy of errors, from intelligence assessments, to operational planning, to strategic & tactical execution. But look what it's costing to stop them......

History is abundantly clear on this: Russia is a bully. If you don't knock them flat on their asses when they get out of line, they will keep coming.

---

You're correct that Biden took half-measures. We don't even have any signed military data sharing agreements with Ukraine, No geospatial data, nothing. The same clowns that prolonged war in Afghanistan/Iraq and spent damn near $8 trillion doing so are in charge of this war. That leads me to believe they want to make this a prolonged proxy war for as long as possible. After personally visiting NATO in Brussels and seeing CNN on every TV in their building...I think they're also clowns.
US and Western intel liaison with Ukraine is robust. We helped Ukraine literally rebuilt its agencies from scratch to rid them of Russian infiltration. And, of course, we trained trained trained, in classical FI/CI operations as well as paramilitary operations. Had it not been for all this "covert" investment going back to 2015-2016 timeframe, the Russian plan for a 72-hour operation to take down Ukraine would almost certainly have been successful.

I don't trust them. Our intelligence community and military leaders have largely claimed that Trump is a Russian asset as well. I don't know how you feel good about this war considering those people are in charge.
The Russian asset meme has run its course. You will hear some of the die-hards on the left still parrot it because they believe it, but it's clearly not an election winner so it will die a natural death.

This is what DC believes. This is the belief of the military industrial complex, national security, NATO and DC.

The only explanation for today’s appalling performance by @realDonaldTrump is the Russians have high value compromising intel on POTUS. Something that would have been discovered during any serviceman’s background investigation. @realDonaldTrump is unfit to command our troops.

— Major General (ret) Paul Eaton (@PaulDEaton52) July 16, 2018

Trump will deliver peace either through major aggression or pulling funds. Our leaders very clearly don't want that. How do you reconcile this?
That is pure projection by his political opponents. He and his team are making all the right statements and, as I predicted, Trump is not going to pull funds. Has very clearly signaled such to the Ukrainians.

---

Trump has, technically, already escalated - he's called for increasing NATO defense spending to 5% of GDP. The Poles have already announced they will do so. There's also strategic escalation ongoing, and you can take it to the bank Trump will continue it (i.e. he flirted with it in his admin) - putting permanent Nato military installations in former WP countries. The Romanians have already approved building a major NATO joint base (Ramstein equivalent) at an existing Romania air base = 10k troops & squadrons of aircraft. In 2027, A German brigade will be stationed in Lithuania, to guard the Suwalki Gap. Also public statements about NATO bases in Finland.

That is a fair price Russia pays for its aggression. We could always stop construction of the bases, or defer the deployment of Nato troops to the Baltics, or etc.......in exchange for Russian withdrawal from Ukraine.

The first faulty premise to sweep from analysis is that Nato actions provoked the war. Such is pure poppycock. Russian imperialism, an effort to rebuild something similar to the Ussr/Warsaw Pact footprint, is 100% the cause of the Russo-Ukraine War. Russia thought they could take Ukraine quickly and without consequence. Now, they are caught in a trap from which their current regime cannot escape. they cannot win, and they cannot withdraw. We should threaten to escalate, and then do so incrementally to ratchet up the pressure on Russia.

Opponents of policies supporting Ukraine are hopelessly out of touch with realities........

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I wish people understood what a screwed up place Ukraine has been for a long time. I've seen videos of Ukrainian soldiers committing war crimes. People say "what about Russia?". We're not funding Russia.
War crimes happen in wars. The victor gets to sort out what is/isn't a war crime.

With these huge sums of money we're giving to Ukraine, why should we tolerate their corruption and sin?
The purpose of our aid to Ukraine is not to rid it of corruption. It's to rid it of Russians. Why did we did not impose any conditions on Stalin to modernize, liberalize, economize, etc.... Because the purpose of our aid to them was to degrade the German war machine fighting on two fronts. We didn't care what Stalin believed or did to his own people, as long as he organized them to go kill Germans.
Why have we rejected an audit of aid to Ukraine? Do you deny that the west is completely without corruption here?
Wherever there is government spending, there is corruption. And you do audit and such to minimize it. What you do not do is determine that a Russian invasion of Ukraine is a threat to Nato (which it obviously is) but not respond because corruption might break out. It's like refusing to drive your car to avoid the risk of getting a flat tire.

If Ukraine is successful, I want Zelensky removed from power permanently as opposition leaders were murdered by his regime. People who opposed the war were kidnapped by militias and tortured. Its not a surprise to me that over 650K men left Ukraine when the war began.
Russian propaganda is designed to generate hyperbole like that.
Those 650k men you referred to did not leave Ukraine because of an oppressive Zelensky government. They left to avoid a repressive Russian government taking over control of Ukraine, of having to fight a hopeless battle against what at the time was seen as an unstoppable Russian Army.
Yes, Ukraine did a lot of work to root out Russian sympathizers throughout their government. They literally rebuilt their intel agencies from scratch. They had a Russian church hierarchy that was a veritable 5th column.

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The idea that Ukraine is comparable to Russia on any of those yardsticks is highly suspect. War is a messy thing. You cannot be effective without stepping on toes, nicking fingers with knives, etc.... And there are only two ways to fix that:
1) Win, so you can sort it all out when it's over.
2) Lose, so your opponent can sort it all out when it's over.

If we don't help Ukraine resist pressure from Russia, Russian will use Ukraine to ramp up pressure on Nato. So pick the problem you want to deal with - Ukrainian corruption, or having a brutal, nuclear capable Russian army with hundreds of miles of new frontage on the Polish, Slovakian, Ukrainian, and Romanian borders, +600mi closer to Nato troops. And for that price, there still will be corruption in Ukraine, given that Russia is corrupt by orders of magnitude worse than Ukraine.

In Russian doctrine, use of tactical nukes is a battlefield decision. Do really want a corrupt Russian Army Colonel with tactical nukes at his disposal to be 600mi closer to our men & women in uniform? Is that really worse than a Zelensky regime skimming a little off of the war effort?

Choose your poison carefully.

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No. A nuclear capable Russia 600 miles closer to NATO is what you want if you support NATO expansion.
I have not endorsed Nato membership for Ukraine. The list of reasons for that is not short, and includes statutory prohibitions - territorial disputes, democratic processes, etc......

What the Russians and the Ukraine war critics have always wanted was a buffer zone.
LOL you always spin Nato support for Ukraine as an effort to move Nato borders 600mi eastward, despite Ukraine's ineligibility for membership, then ignore that it is RUssia who actually went to war to move its borders 600mi westward.

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Russia doesn't want Ukraine to be a border zone. Russia wants Ukraine to be Russian.

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Of course you have endorsed NATO membership, just not right away.
Refusing to rule it out forever, wanting to watch & wait for decades, is not an endorsement of membership, Vlad, no matter how much you need it to be so. It's a very pragmatic middle-ground position to take on the matter.

You want to build up a military, install US bases, and otherwise make them a de facto member before making them a de jure member.
Nope. Not in Ukraine. I'm fine with building bases in former WP countries, though. We were wise not to do so in order to not provoke Russia. But now that Russia has returned to its old ways, we are wise to move forward with bases in Romania and Poland and Finland - prudent responses to Russian provocations. (it's Russia that broke the status quo, not the other way around).

That's what we were doing, and it's what one would expect.
Uh, no, we are not building Nato bases in Ukraine.

The statutory restrictions are a red herring, as I'm sure you know. We've made exceptions before (see Germany) and could do so again.
Sigh - false equivalence. At the time of Germany reunification, East Germany did not have Russian armies on its soil engaged in a hot war to annex German territory.

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Dude. Nato membership for Ukraine at this moment means Nato is stepping directly into a hot war.
That is just not going to happen.

You've got so many busted-up strawmen on the floor you can hardly stand.

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Not talking about reunification. I'm talking the end of WW2, which would be an analogous situation if NATO membership is part of a settlement in Ukraine. It won't be, but the fact we're talking about it demonstrates the reasons for the Russian invasion. Framing it as a 1st Amendment issue is comical.

We don't have US bases there yet. It starts with NATO troops training Ukrainian troops, integrating their forces with our forces, their arms and equipment with our arms and equipment, etc. As you say, no serious leader would stand by and wait for it to happen.

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You mean like Russia's military working with and supplying Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, and others?

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Them being in our sphere of influence is a massive provocation and totally unacceptable.

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I disagree, but regardless.

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You think they should be in our sphere of influence?

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Freedom and liberty will win out.

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Like it did in Cuba, n. Korea, China, Iran, Afghanistan, etc……

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There are always exceptions, usually due to extreme tyranny, but history is pretty clear. When people are exposed to and given the opportunity to choose freedom, they do it.

But it's actually a great point. There's a reason Russia's primary allies are bottom feeders.

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Choose being the key word

And I agree

But forced regime change or wars of "nation building" never work out well

Sam Lowry said:

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sombear said:

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Sam Lowry said:

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sombear said:

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Sam Lowry said:

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sombear said:

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Okay, for those with a purposefully very short attention span, here's the "deal" that Russia had for Ukraine before the February 24 invasion:

- Ukraine ceases to exist as a sovereign independent nation (because it's "not a real country")
- Ukraine's popularly elected leadership…

— Illia Ponomarenko 🇺🇦 (@IAPonomarenko) January 24, 2025

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This is a shockingly distorted history even by Ukrainian PR standards. Not a single one of those pre-war demands is accurate.

It is true that Zelensky was elected with a mandate to settle with the Russians, but his failure had nothing to do with Putin refusing to negotiate. It had to do with Zelensky's corrupt benefactors and the neo-Nazis who threatened to hang him from the highest tree in Kiev if he ever made a deal.

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What specifically is inaccurate?

Sure, the guy spices it up a bit, but everything in there can be found in actual proposals.

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Literally all of it. Ukraine ceasing to exist, exiling its government, replacing its president, completely dismantling its military, giving up its language and culture, breaking ties with the West, full Russian control of resources, concentration camps, mass graves, etc.

It's bizarre. Some of these things likely will happen now because of the war, but all Russia was demanding at the time was implementation of the Minsk Agreement and a pledge not to seek NATO membership.

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I guess we can quibble over characterizations, but all of these were in the actual proposals before talks broke down:

Regime change
Russia stays in the east
Major reduction in military
Major reduction in weapons
Laundry list of prohibited weapons
No western military training
"De-Nazification"
Ban "fascism"
Ban "aggressive nationalism."
Revise history taught in schools, making it more pro-Russia
Russian national language
Russia right to review/approve even non-military relationships/agreements with other countries.
Mandatory energy/mining agreements

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No, they were not. The Minsk proposals called for withdrawal of all forces from the east and limited autonomy for Donetsk and Luhansk. Only later did the demand change to independence for the two oblasts, with the presence of Russian forces to be negotiated. Never was there any talk of annexation or of regime change in Kiev.

Russian would have been an official language, not the official language. Ukraine would have ended discrimination and quotas against the Russian language in media. There were needed prohibitions on activities contrary to Ukraine's neutrality, including Western military training. There were also prohibitions on Nazi organizations and propaganda. Call it an affront to free speech, but Germany does the same thing (and their Nazi problem is nowhere near as bad as Ukraine's). Ukraine would have pledged to "refrain from using its own territory or the territories of other states to harm the sovereignty, independence, and integrity of other states," the major concern on the part of the Russians which I referred to earlier.

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Wait, you're saying regime change was never pursued? How do you explain the hit squads and attempted taking of Kyiv? I mean, were they all just going there to negotiate with Zelensky?

sombear said:

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Sam Lowry said:

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sombear said:

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Sam Lowry said:

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sombear said:

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Sam Lowry said:

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sombear said:

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Okay, for those with a purposefully very short attention span, here's the "deal" that Russia had for Ukraine before the February 24 invasion:

- Ukraine ceases to exist as a sovereign independent nation (because it's "not a real country")
- Ukraine's popularly elected leadership…

— Illia Ponomarenko 🇺🇦 (@IAPonomarenko) January 24, 2025

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This is a shockingly distorted history even by Ukrainian PR standards. Not a single one of those pre-war demands is accurate.

It is true that Zelensky was elected with a mandate to settle with the Russians, but his failure had nothing to do with Putin refusing to negotiate. It had to do with Zelensky's corrupt benefactors and the neo-Nazis who threatened to hang him from the highest tree in Kiev if he ever made a deal.

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What specifically is inaccurate?

Sure, the guy spices it up a bit, but everything in there can be found in actual proposals.

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Literally all of it. Ukraine ceasing to exist, exiling its government, replacing its president, completely dismantling its military, giving up its language and culture, breaking ties with the West, full Russian control of resources, concentration camps, mass graves, etc.

It's bizarre. Some of these things likely will happen now because of the war, but all Russia was demanding at the time was implementation of the Minsk Agreement and a pledge not to seek NATO membership.

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I guess we can quibble over characterizations, but all of these were in the actual proposals before talks broke down:

Regime change
Russia stays in the east
Major reduction in military
Major reduction in weapons
Laundry list of prohibited weapons
No western military training
"De-Nazification"
Ban "fascism"
Ban "aggressive nationalism."
Revise history taught in schools, making it more pro-Russia
Russian national language
Russia right to review/approve even non-military relationships/agreements with other countries.
Mandatory energy/mining agreements

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No, they were not. The Minsk proposals called for withdrawal of all forces from the east and limited autonomy for Donetsk and Luhansk. Only later did the demand change to independence for the two oblasts, with the presence of Russian forces to be negotiated. Never was there any talk of annexation or of regime change in Kiev.

Russian would have been an official language, not the official language. Ukraine would have ended discrimination and quotas against the Russian language in media. There were needed prohibitions on activities contrary to Ukraine's neutrality, including Western military training. There were also prohibitions on Nazi organizations and propaganda. Call it an affront to free speech, but Germany does the same thing (and their Nazi problem is nowhere near as bad as Ukraine's). Ukraine would have pledged to "refrain from using its own territory or the territories of other states to harm the sovereignty, independence, and integrity of other states," the major concern on the part of the Russians which I referred to earlier.

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Wait, you're saying regime change was never pursued? How do you explain the hit squads and attempted taking of Kyiv? I mean, were they all just going there to negotiate with Zelensky?

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Russia sent something like eight or nine battalion tactical groups to Kiev. In no way was it an attempt to take the city. The goal was to force negotiations, and it succeeded. They did in fact negotiate with the Zelensky government and came close to an agreement.