Sam Lowry said:

---

whiterock said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

[Sleepwalking To Apocalypse:

Would it kill me to be more cheerful today? Probably not, but I gotta share with you this piercing essay by an Irish journalist, Ciaran O'Regan, who is gobsmacked by the fact that we are not talking about the risks of nuclear war over the Russia-Ukraine war. I had read that Putin recently changed Russian military doctrine to allow for use of nuclear weapons in extraordinary conventional circumstances. I had not realized that Biden did the same thing two years ago. Excerpt:

Quote:

---

This nuclear posturing is very concerning to those of us who would rather not have mankind made extinct. In the final chapter of his unbelievably prescient 2018 book, Losing Military Supremacy, Andrei Martyanov argues that short of a nuclear exchange, the United States cannot defeat Russia in its immediate geographic vicinity. He also argues that the US had gotten accustomed to easily and quickly overcoming weak opposition with overwhelming technological and matriel superiority, but that we all "remain under the threat of a massive American miscalculation" as it relates to a military peer such as Russia something Martyanov saw as highly probable due to the "incompetence and delusion of the American establishment". He sees this kind of miscalculation as leading toward "uncontrolled escalation to a very dangerous nuclear threshold", to which the United States will be forced to move closer, "in an attempt to save her own dwindling reputation". Martyanov goes on to say that this might happen in the case of a "serious scale humiliation" in relation to Ukraine.
And in his recently published book, America's Final War, he comes back to the "massive American miscalculation" he had predicted six years prior:

By effectively annihilating several iterations of the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU), including the bulk of NATO's "volunteers" and Western military hardware, which for the first time faced an opponent with extremely advanced armed forces, a massive industrial economy, and a strategy which was birthed by arguably the greatest military school and thought in history, Russia's Real Revolution in Military Affairs drove a paradigm shift in warfare.
This proverbial 800-pound gorilla in the room which can no longer be ignored the West's miscalculation of Russia is one of epic proportions is driven by utterly incompetent elites, most of whom have no background in warfare, diplomacy or economics. They built the empire of lies and now they cannot do anything to stop the West's degeneration into a dystopia of whatever passes for suicidal policies. I warned of this crisis in my previous three books and now it is upon us and not going to end well for the combined West.

Martyanov goes on to suggest that Russia does not have anyone they can trust in "the West, which has become a euphemism for the United States, which has already turned European states into its lapdogs, and, possibly, into cannon fodder". This final point was echoed by Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, in his September 28, 2024, speech at the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA), when he invoked the secret plan by the US and UK from the 1940s to destroy the Soviet Union. But now, according to Lavrov, they are openly trying to inflict "strategic defeat" on Russia:
The current Anglo-Saxon strategists are not hiding their ideas. For now they do, it's true, hope to defeat Russia using the illegitimate neo-Nazi Kyiv regime, but they're already preparing Europe for it to also throw itself into this suicidal escapade.

American disregard for European interest is nothing new. "**** the EU": so said former US ambassador to the United Nations, Victoria Nuland, during a phone call that was leaked in early February 2014, in which she and US ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt, selected the new Ukrainian government, more than two weeks before the US-backed coups against president Yanukovych.
In another piece about Lavrov's UNGA speech, the Guardian writes: "Putin said that if attacked by any country supported by a nuclear-armed nation, Russia will consider that a joint attack". The piece goes on to tell us that in describing his country's new doctrine, Putin "stressed that Russia could use nuclear weapons in response to a conventional assault that posed a "critical threat to our sovereignty"." Unlike Colonel Baud above, however, the Guardian does not remind its readers that the US has changed its own nuclear doctrine nearly two and a half years ago, and did so to deter even "cyberattacks".
We are in a madhouse. An escalation toward nuclear war between the US and Russia would mean that pretty much everyone in both countries, and probably most people in the Northern hemisphere, would either be vaporised or starved to death in famine under skies blackened by particulate matter which will block out the sun for a decade. Most absurdly, this looming risk to the lives of billions of people and possibly to the existence of humanity at large if the nuclear winter is severe enough is occurring despite the fact that Ukraine has no hope of defeating Russia on the battlefield.

---

Read it all. It's important. You might get to the end and wonder: Why aren't we having these discussions in the West? Why don't we read pieces like this in our media, given the unsurpassable gravity of the issue? And then you start to understand how European powers sleepwalked into World War I, drunk on their own illusions.
Come to think of it, this story too is one of the dissolution of hierarchy and authority. Do you trust our leadership class to make the right decisions regarding that war? Do you really trust them, or do you trust them simply because the alternative is unthinkable? With me, the truth is that across a number of fronts, I trust elite leadership only because the alternative is not something I am prepared to confront. I feel like I can see more clearly than many people, but that's a matter of being a one-eyed man in a land of the blind.]

---

Martyanov's quote in bold is your sign that he's off in the weeds of Russian propaganda, with the faulty premise that victory/defeat is a battlefield question. In reality, war is a logistics problem. And that is Russia's weakness. The Russian economy cannot sustain its current war footing. Nato can.

the constant saber rattling of nuclear armageddon is just a Russian attempt to get western powers to self-deter

---

Or it's a sign that he's studied American wargames and heeded the results. And lo and behold...events on the battlefield are proving him right.

---

Not really.

Sam Lowry said:

---

whiterock said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

[Sleepwalking To Apocalypse:

Would it kill me to be more cheerful today? Probably not, but I gotta share with you this piercing essay by an Irish journalist, Ciaran O'Regan, who is gobsmacked by the fact that we are not talking about the risks of nuclear war over the Russia-Ukraine war. I had read that Putin recently changed Russian military doctrine to allow for use of nuclear weapons in extraordinary conventional circumstances. I had not realized that Biden did the same thing two years ago. Excerpt:

Quote:

---

This nuclear posturing is very concerning to those of us who would rather not have mankind made extinct. In the final chapter of his unbelievably prescient 2018 book, Losing Military Supremacy, Andrei Martyanov argues that short of a nuclear exchange, the United States cannot defeat Russia in its immediate geographic vicinity. He also argues that the US had gotten accustomed to easily and quickly overcoming weak opposition with overwhelming technological and matriel superiority, but that we all "remain under the threat of a massive American miscalculation" as it relates to a military peer such as Russia something Martyanov saw as highly probable due to the "incompetence and delusion of the American establishment". He sees this kind of miscalculation as leading toward "uncontrolled escalation to a very dangerous nuclear threshold", to which the United States will be forced to move closer, "in an attempt to save her own dwindling reputation". Martyanov goes on to say that this might happen in the case of a "serious scale humiliation" in relation to Ukraine.
And in his recently published book, America's Final War, he comes back to the "massive American miscalculation" he had predicted six years prior:

By effectively annihilating several iterations of the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU), including the bulk of NATO's "volunteers" and Western military hardware, which for the first time faced an opponent with extremely advanced armed forces, a massive industrial economy, and a strategy which was birthed by arguably the greatest military school and thought in history, Russia's Real Revolution in Military Affairs drove a paradigm shift in warfare.
This proverbial 800-pound gorilla in the room which can no longer be ignored the West's miscalculation of Russia is one of epic proportions is driven by utterly incompetent elites, most of whom have no background in warfare, diplomacy or economics. They built the empire of lies and now they cannot do anything to stop the West's degeneration into a dystopia of whatever passes for suicidal policies. I warned of this crisis in my previous three books and now it is upon us and not going to end well for the combined West.

Martyanov goes on to suggest that Russia does not have anyone they can trust in "the West, which has become a euphemism for the United States, which has already turned European states into its lapdogs, and, possibly, into cannon fodder". This final point was echoed by Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, in his September 28, 2024, speech at the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA), when he invoked the secret plan by the US and UK from the 1940s to destroy the Soviet Union. But now, according to Lavrov, they are openly trying to inflict "strategic defeat" on Russia:
The current Anglo-Saxon strategists are not hiding their ideas. For now they do, it's true, hope to defeat Russia using the illegitimate neo-Nazi Kyiv regime, but they're already preparing Europe for it to also throw itself into this suicidal escapade.

American disregard for European interest is nothing new. "**** the EU": so said former US ambassador to the United Nations, Victoria Nuland, during a phone call that was leaked in early February 2014, in which she and US ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt, selected the new Ukrainian government, more than two weeks before the US-backed coups against president Yanukovych.
In another piece about Lavrov's UNGA speech, the Guardian writes: "Putin said that if attacked by any country supported by a nuclear-armed nation, Russia will consider that a joint attack". The piece goes on to tell us that in describing his country's new doctrine, Putin "stressed that Russia could use nuclear weapons in response to a conventional assault that posed a "critical threat to our sovereignty"." Unlike Colonel Baud above, however, the Guardian does not remind its readers that the US has changed its own nuclear doctrine nearly two and a half years ago, and did so to deter even "cyberattacks".
We are in a madhouse. An escalation toward nuclear war between the US and Russia would mean that pretty much everyone in both countries, and probably most people in the Northern hemisphere, would either be vaporised or starved to death in famine under skies blackened by particulate matter which will block out the sun for a decade. Most absurdly, this looming risk to the lives of billions of people and possibly to the existence of humanity at large if the nuclear winter is severe enough is occurring despite the fact that Ukraine has no hope of defeating Russia on the battlefield.

---

Read it all. It's important. You might get to the end and wonder: Why aren't we having these discussions in the West? Why don't we read pieces like this in our media, given the unsurpassable gravity of the issue? And then you start to understand how European powers sleepwalked into World War I, drunk on their own illusions.
Come to think of it, this story too is one of the dissolution of hierarchy and authority. Do you trust our leadership class to make the right decisions regarding that war? Do you really trust them, or do you trust them simply because the alternative is unthinkable? With me, the truth is that across a number of fronts, I trust elite leadership only because the alternative is not something I am prepared to confront. I feel like I can see more clearly than many people, but that's a matter of being a one-eyed man in a land of the blind.]

---

Martyanov's quote in bold is your sign that he's off in the weeds of Russian propaganda, with the faulty premise that victory/defeat is a battlefield question. In reality, war is a logistics problem. And that is Russia's weakness. The Russian economy cannot sustain its current war footing. Nato can.

the constant saber rattling of nuclear armageddon is just a Russian attempt to get western powers to self-deter

---

Or it's a sign that he's studied American wargames and heeded the results. And lo and behold...events on the battlefield are proving him right.

---

LOL the battlefield is only material in that it is what consumes supplies of men & materiel. Victory goes to the side that falters on the supply. Ukraine will not falter as long as it has Nato support. Russia, on the other hand, cannot indefinitely continue to sacrifice 1300-1500 soldiers per day to gain a hundred yards or so of Ukrainian prairie. Probably will not be able to make it to 2026.

Make no mistake, the dribble/drabble Nato strategy for this war is predicated on exactly that calculation....to drag out the timeline and escalate so incrementally that Russia will not have justification for full mobilization before it is too late for it to matter.

18 North Korean soldiers have fled their positions in the Russian Kursk and Bryansk border regions with Ukraine.

The Russian military is now looking for them.

It’s safe to assume that they are trying to flee to the EU or Ukraine. pic.twitter.com/K64URvVHVM

— Visegrád 24 (@visegrad24) October 15, 2024

whiterock said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

whiterock said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

[Sleepwalking To Apocalypse:

Would it kill me to be more cheerful today? Probably not, but I gotta share with you this piercing essay by an Irish journalist, Ciaran O'Regan, who is gobsmacked by the fact that we are not talking about the risks of nuclear war over the Russia-Ukraine war. I had read that Putin recently changed Russian military doctrine to allow for use of nuclear weapons in extraordinary conventional circumstances. I had not realized that Biden did the same thing two years ago. Excerpt:

Quote:

---

This nuclear posturing is very concerning to those of us who would rather not have mankind made extinct. In the final chapter of his unbelievably prescient 2018 book, Losing Military Supremacy, Andrei Martyanov argues that short of a nuclear exchange, the United States cannot defeat Russia in its immediate geographic vicinity. He also argues that the US had gotten accustomed to easily and quickly overcoming weak opposition with overwhelming technological and matriel superiority, but that we all "remain under the threat of a massive American miscalculation" as it relates to a military peer such as Russia something Martyanov saw as highly probable due to the "incompetence and delusion of the American establishment". He sees this kind of miscalculation as leading toward "uncontrolled escalation to a very dangerous nuclear threshold", to which the United States will be forced to move closer, "in an attempt to save her own dwindling reputation". Martyanov goes on to say that this might happen in the case of a "serious scale humiliation" in relation to Ukraine.
And in his recently published book, America's Final War, he comes back to the "massive American miscalculation" he had predicted six years prior:

By effectively annihilating several iterations of the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU), including the bulk of NATO's "volunteers" and Western military hardware, which for the first time faced an opponent with extremely advanced armed forces, a massive industrial economy, and a strategy which was birthed by arguably the greatest military school and thought in history, Russia's Real Revolution in Military Affairs drove a paradigm shift in warfare.
This proverbial 800-pound gorilla in the room which can no longer be ignored the West's miscalculation of Russia is one of epic proportions is driven by utterly incompetent elites, most of whom have no background in warfare, diplomacy or economics. They built the empire of lies and now they cannot do anything to stop the West's degeneration into a dystopia of whatever passes for suicidal policies. I warned of this crisis in my previous three books and now it is upon us and not going to end well for the combined West.

Martyanov goes on to suggest that Russia does not have anyone they can trust in "the West, which has become a euphemism for the United States, which has already turned European states into its lapdogs, and, possibly, into cannon fodder". This final point was echoed by Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, in his September 28, 2024, speech at the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA), when he invoked the secret plan by the US and UK from the 1940s to destroy the Soviet Union. But now, according to Lavrov, they are openly trying to inflict "strategic defeat" on Russia:
The current Anglo-Saxon strategists are not hiding their ideas. For now they do, it's true, hope to defeat Russia using the illegitimate neo-Nazi Kyiv regime, but they're already preparing Europe for it to also throw itself into this suicidal escapade.

American disregard for European interest is nothing new. "**** the EU": so said former US ambassador to the United Nations, Victoria Nuland, during a phone call that was leaked in early February 2014, in which she and US ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt, selected the new Ukrainian government, more than two weeks before the US-backed coups against president Yanukovych.
In another piece about Lavrov's UNGA speech, the Guardian writes: "Putin said that if attacked by any country supported by a nuclear-armed nation, Russia will consider that a joint attack". The piece goes on to tell us that in describing his country's new doctrine, Putin "stressed that Russia could use nuclear weapons in response to a conventional assault that posed a "critical threat to our sovereignty"." Unlike Colonel Baud above, however, the Guardian does not remind its readers that the US has changed its own nuclear doctrine nearly two and a half years ago, and did so to deter even "cyberattacks".
We are in a madhouse. An escalation toward nuclear war between the US and Russia would mean that pretty much everyone in both countries, and probably most people in the Northern hemisphere, would either be vaporised or starved to death in famine under skies blackened by particulate matter which will block out the sun for a decade. Most absurdly, this looming risk to the lives of billions of people and possibly to the existence of humanity at large if the nuclear winter is severe enough is occurring despite the fact that Ukraine has no hope of defeating Russia on the battlefield.

---

Read it all. It's important. You might get to the end and wonder: Why aren't we having these discussions in the West? Why don't we read pieces like this in our media, given the unsurpassable gravity of the issue? And then you start to understand how European powers sleepwalked into World War I, drunk on their own illusions.
Come to think of it, this story too is one of the dissolution of hierarchy and authority. Do you trust our leadership class to make the right decisions regarding that war? Do you really trust them, or do you trust them simply because the alternative is unthinkable? With me, the truth is that across a number of fronts, I trust elite leadership only because the alternative is not something I am prepared to confront. I feel like I can see more clearly than many people, but that's a matter of being a one-eyed man in a land of the blind.]

---

Martyanov's quote in bold is your sign that he's off in the weeds of Russian propaganda, with the faulty premise that victory/defeat is a battlefield question. In reality, war is a logistics problem. And that is Russia's weakness. The Russian economy cannot sustain its current war footing. Nato can.

the constant saber rattling of nuclear armageddon is just a Russian attempt to get western powers to self-deter

---

Or it's a sign that he's studied American wargames and heeded the results. And lo and behold...events on the battlefield are proving him right.

---

LOL the battlefield is only material in that it is what consumes supplies of men & materiel. Victory goes to the side that falters on the supply. Ukraine will not falter as long as it has Nato support. Russia, on the other hand, cannot indefinitely continue to sacrifice 1300-1500 soldiers per day to gain a hundred yards or so of Ukrainian prairie. Probably will not be able to make it to 2026.

Make no mistake, the dribble/drabble Nato strategy for this war is predicated on exactly that calculation....to drag out the timeline and escalate so incrementally that Russia will not have justification for full mobilization before it is too late for it to matter.

---

Okay, Bakhmut Bob…it's like you're not even following current events any more, but keep on believing.

BREAKING: As Americans reel from natural disasters and record inflation, the Biden-Harris administration announces new $425 million to fund the war in Ukraine pic.twitter.com/VZUumqmKS9

— Breaking911 (@Breaking911) October 16, 2024

I sat in many of these meetings. It was glorious. pic.twitter.com/6J0UTQXvvr

— joshua steinman (🇺🇸,🇺🇸) (@JoshuaSteinman) October 17, 2024

Sam Lowry said:

---

whiterock said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

whiterock said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

[Sleepwalking To Apocalypse:

Would it kill me to be more cheerful today? Probably not, but I gotta share with you this piercing essay by an Irish journalist, Ciaran O'Regan, who is gobsmacked by the fact that we are not talking about the risks of nuclear war over the Russia-Ukraine war. I had read that Putin recently changed Russian military doctrine to allow for use of nuclear weapons in extraordinary conventional circumstances. I had not realized that Biden did the same thing two years ago. Excerpt:

Quote:

---

This nuclear posturing is very concerning to those of us who would rather not have mankind made extinct. In the final chapter of his unbelievably prescient 2018 book, Losing Military Supremacy, Andrei Martyanov argues that short of a nuclear exchange, the United States cannot defeat Russia in its immediate geographic vicinity. He also argues that the US had gotten accustomed to easily and quickly overcoming weak opposition with overwhelming technological and matriel superiority, but that we all "remain under the threat of a massive American miscalculation" as it relates to a military peer such as Russia something Martyanov saw as highly probable due to the "incompetence and delusion of the American establishment". He sees this kind of miscalculation as leading toward "uncontrolled escalation to a very dangerous nuclear threshold", to which the United States will be forced to move closer, "in an attempt to save her own dwindling reputation". Martyanov goes on to say that this might happen in the case of a "serious scale humiliation" in relation to Ukraine.
And in his recently published book, America's Final War, he comes back to the "massive American miscalculation" he had predicted six years prior:

By effectively annihilating several iterations of the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU), including the bulk of NATO's "volunteers" and Western military hardware, which for the first time faced an opponent with extremely advanced armed forces, a massive industrial economy, and a strategy which was birthed by arguably the greatest military school and thought in history, Russia's Real Revolution in Military Affairs drove a paradigm shift in warfare.
This proverbial 800-pound gorilla in the room which can no longer be ignored the West's miscalculation of Russia is one of epic proportions is driven by utterly incompetent elites, most of whom have no background in warfare, diplomacy or economics. They built the empire of lies and now they cannot do anything to stop the West's degeneration into a dystopia of whatever passes for suicidal policies. I warned of this crisis in my previous three books and now it is upon us and not going to end well for the combined West.

Martyanov goes on to suggest that Russia does not have anyone they can trust in "the West, which has become a euphemism for the United States, which has already turned European states into its lapdogs, and, possibly, into cannon fodder". This final point was echoed by Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, in his September 28, 2024, speech at the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA), when he invoked the secret plan by the US and UK from the 1940s to destroy the Soviet Union. But now, according to Lavrov, they are openly trying to inflict "strategic defeat" on Russia:
The current Anglo-Saxon strategists are not hiding their ideas. For now they do, it's true, hope to defeat Russia using the illegitimate neo-Nazi Kyiv regime, but they're already preparing Europe for it to also throw itself into this suicidal escapade.

American disregard for European interest is nothing new. "**** the EU": so said former US ambassador to the United Nations, Victoria Nuland, during a phone call that was leaked in early February 2014, in which she and US ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt, selected the new Ukrainian government, more than two weeks before the US-backed coups against president Yanukovych.
In another piece about Lavrov's UNGA speech, the Guardian writes: "Putin said that if attacked by any country supported by a nuclear-armed nation, Russia will consider that a joint attack". The piece goes on to tell us that in describing his country's new doctrine, Putin "stressed that Russia could use nuclear weapons in response to a conventional assault that posed a "critical threat to our sovereignty"." Unlike Colonel Baud above, however, the Guardian does not remind its readers that the US has changed its own nuclear doctrine nearly two and a half years ago, and did so to deter even "cyberattacks".
We are in a madhouse. An escalation toward nuclear war between the US and Russia would mean that pretty much everyone in both countries, and probably most people in the Northern hemisphere, would either be vaporised or starved to death in famine under skies blackened by particulate matter which will block out the sun for a decade. Most absurdly, this looming risk to the lives of billions of people and possibly to the existence of humanity at large if the nuclear winter is severe enough is occurring despite the fact that Ukraine has no hope of defeating Russia on the battlefield.

---

Read it all. It's important. You might get to the end and wonder: Why aren't we having these discussions in the West? Why don't we read pieces like this in our media, given the unsurpassable gravity of the issue? And then you start to understand how European powers sleepwalked into World War I, drunk on their own illusions.
Come to think of it, this story too is one of the dissolution of hierarchy and authority. Do you trust our leadership class to make the right decisions regarding that war? Do you really trust them, or do you trust them simply because the alternative is unthinkable? With me, the truth is that across a number of fronts, I trust elite leadership only because the alternative is not something I am prepared to confront. I feel like I can see more clearly than many people, but that's a matter of being a one-eyed man in a land of the blind.]

---

Martyanov's quote in bold is your sign that he's off in the weeds of Russian propaganda, with the faulty premise that victory/defeat is a battlefield question. In reality, war is a logistics problem. And that is Russia's weakness. The Russian economy cannot sustain its current war footing. Nato can.

the constant saber rattling of nuclear armageddon is just a Russian attempt to get western powers to self-deter

---

Or it's a sign that he's studied American wargames and heeded the results. And lo and behold...events on the battlefield are proving him right.

---

LOL the battlefield is only material in that it is what consumes supplies of men & materiel. Victory goes to the side that falters on the supply. Ukraine will not falter as long as it has Nato support. Russia, on the other hand, cannot indefinitely continue to sacrifice 1300-1500 soldiers per day to gain a hundred yards or so of Ukrainian prairie. Probably will not be able to make it to 2026.

Make no mistake, the dribble/drabble Nato strategy for this war is predicated on exactly that calculation....to drag out the timeline and escalate so incrementally that Russia will not have justification for full mobilization before it is too late for it to matter.

---

Okay, Bakhmut Bob…it's like you're not even following current events any more, but keep on believing.

---

Things are going so well for Russia that they are having to deploy 11,000 North Koreans to fight in Kursk. North Koreans who will mostly either get slaughtered in days if not hours, or will defect given the first opportunity.

trey3216 said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

whiterock said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

whiterock said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

[Sleepwalking To Apocalypse:

Would it kill me to be more cheerful today? Probably not, but I gotta share with you this piercing essay by an Irish journalist, Ciaran O'Regan, who is gobsmacked by the fact that we are not talking about the risks of nuclear war over the Russia-Ukraine war. I had read that Putin recently changed Russian military doctrine to allow for use of nuclear weapons in extraordinary conventional circumstances. I had not realized that Biden did the same thing two years ago. Excerpt:

Quote:

---

This nuclear posturing is very concerning to those of us who would rather not have mankind made extinct. In the final chapter of his unbelievably prescient 2018 book, Losing Military Supremacy, Andrei Martyanov argues that short of a nuclear exchange, the United States cannot defeat Russia in its immediate geographic vicinity. He also argues that the US had gotten accustomed to easily and quickly overcoming weak opposition with overwhelming technological and matriel superiority, but that we all "remain under the threat of a massive American miscalculation" as it relates to a military peer such as Russia something Martyanov saw as highly probable due to the "incompetence and delusion of the American establishment". He sees this kind of miscalculation as leading toward "uncontrolled escalation to a very dangerous nuclear threshold", to which the United States will be forced to move closer, "in an attempt to save her own dwindling reputation". Martyanov goes on to say that this might happen in the case of a "serious scale humiliation" in relation to Ukraine.
And in his recently published book, America's Final War, he comes back to the "massive American miscalculation" he had predicted six years prior:

By effectively annihilating several iterations of the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU), including the bulk of NATO's "volunteers" and Western military hardware, which for the first time faced an opponent with extremely advanced armed forces, a massive industrial economy, and a strategy which was birthed by arguably the greatest military school and thought in history, Russia's Real Revolution in Military Affairs drove a paradigm shift in warfare.
This proverbial 800-pound gorilla in the room which can no longer be ignored the West's miscalculation of Russia is one of epic proportions is driven by utterly incompetent elites, most of whom have no background in warfare, diplomacy or economics. They built the empire of lies and now they cannot do anything to stop the West's degeneration into a dystopia of whatever passes for suicidal policies. I warned of this crisis in my previous three books and now it is upon us and not going to end well for the combined West.

Martyanov goes on to suggest that Russia does not have anyone they can trust in "the West, which has become a euphemism for the United States, which has already turned European states into its lapdogs, and, possibly, into cannon fodder". This final point was echoed by Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, in his September 28, 2024, speech at the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA), when he invoked the secret plan by the US and UK from the 1940s to destroy the Soviet Union. But now, according to Lavrov, they are openly trying to inflict "strategic defeat" on Russia:
The current Anglo-Saxon strategists are not hiding their ideas. For now they do, it's true, hope to defeat Russia using the illegitimate neo-Nazi Kyiv regime, but they're already preparing Europe for it to also throw itself into this suicidal escapade.

American disregard for European interest is nothing new. "**** the EU": so said former US ambassador to the United Nations, Victoria Nuland, during a phone call that was leaked in early February 2014, in which she and US ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt, selected the new Ukrainian government, more than two weeks before the US-backed coups against president Yanukovych.
In another piece about Lavrov's UNGA speech, the Guardian writes: "Putin said that if attacked by any country supported by a nuclear-armed nation, Russia will consider that a joint attack". The piece goes on to tell us that in describing his country's new doctrine, Putin "stressed that Russia could use nuclear weapons in response to a conventional assault that posed a "critical threat to our sovereignty"." Unlike Colonel Baud above, however, the Guardian does not remind its readers that the US has changed its own nuclear doctrine nearly two and a half years ago, and did so to deter even "cyberattacks".
We are in a madhouse. An escalation toward nuclear war between the US and Russia would mean that pretty much everyone in both countries, and probably most people in the Northern hemisphere, would either be vaporised or starved to death in famine under skies blackened by particulate matter which will block out the sun for a decade. Most absurdly, this looming risk to the lives of billions of people and possibly to the existence of humanity at large if the nuclear winter is severe enough is occurring despite the fact that Ukraine has no hope of defeating Russia on the battlefield.

---

Read it all. It's important. You might get to the end and wonder: Why aren't we having these discussions in the West? Why don't we read pieces like this in our media, given the unsurpassable gravity of the issue? And then you start to understand how European powers sleepwalked into World War I, drunk on their own illusions.
Come to think of it, this story too is one of the dissolution of hierarchy and authority. Do you trust our leadership class to make the right decisions regarding that war? Do you really trust them, or do you trust them simply because the alternative is unthinkable? With me, the truth is that across a number of fronts, I trust elite leadership only because the alternative is not something I am prepared to confront. I feel like I can see more clearly than many people, but that's a matter of being a one-eyed man in a land of the blind.]

---

Martyanov's quote in bold is your sign that he's off in the weeds of Russian propaganda, with the faulty premise that victory/defeat is a battlefield question. In reality, war is a logistics problem. And that is Russia's weakness. The Russian economy cannot sustain its current war footing. Nato can.

the constant saber rattling of nuclear armageddon is just a Russian attempt to get western powers to self-deter

---

Or it's a sign that he's studied American wargames and heeded the results. And lo and behold...events on the battlefield are proving him right.

---

LOL the battlefield is only material in that it is what consumes supplies of men & materiel. Victory goes to the side that falters on the supply. Ukraine will not falter as long as it has Nato support. Russia, on the other hand, cannot indefinitely continue to sacrifice 1300-1500 soldiers per day to gain a hundred yards or so of Ukrainian prairie. Probably will not be able to make it to 2026.

Make no mistake, the dribble/drabble Nato strategy for this war is predicated on exactly that calculation....to drag out the timeline and escalate so incrementally that Russia will not have justification for full mobilization before it is too late for it to matter.

---

Okay, Bakhmut Bob…it's like you're not even following current events any more, but keep on believing.

---

Things are going so well for Russia that they are having to deploy 11,000 North Koreans to fight in Kursk. North Koreans who will mostly either get slaughtered in days if not hours, or will defect given the first opportunity.

---

LOL...yeah, I heard that one.

Redbrickbear said:

---

FLBear5630 said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

FLBear5630 said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

whiterock said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

whiterock said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

whiterock said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

whiterock said:

---

Bear8084 said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

This is exactly the point -- we're not just trying to deny Russia control of Ukraine. We are trying to control it.

NATO's defeat will be bad for the US in many ways, but at least it will dispel this miasma of lies that the West has generated around Ukraine. For that we can all be grateful.

---

---

Words, not armies, start wars.
It's always Nato's fault when Russia acts badly.
A Ukrainian defeat is bad, but Ukrainian surrender to Russia without a fight is good.
Ukraine defending itself is destabilizing; Russia invading and destroying Ukraine block by block is good.
Europe is safer when Russian armies are stationed in Lviv rather than Rostov.
Europe is safer when Russian navies are stationed in Sebastopol rather than Novorossiysk.

---

And in Whiterock's world:

NATO is in mortal jeopardy without a Ukrainian buffer zone.
Therefore NATO must eliminate the buffer zone by absorbing Ukraine.

---

Strawman all day, every day, fortified with recto-cranial inversion.

Nato is not in mortal jeopardy over Russian control of Ukraine; Nato is in greater jeopardy than it would be with an independent Ukraine. No sensible power would stand by and let that happen without a response. The response Nato has taken has been overly cautious.

Nato did not invade Ukraine to absorb it.
Nato did not invite Ukraine to join before Russia invaded.
Ukraine had not even applied for membership before Russia invaded.
Ukraine does not have the votes to join Nato.
because Ukraine does not qualify for membership in Nato = territorial disputes.

Russia knows this. All it has to do is hold on to Donbas and Ukraine cannot join Nato (unless Ukraine gives up its claims to the region).

Russian invasion of Ukraine eliminated a buffer zone which was in no danger of being eliminated from the West.

Russia caused this crisis, not Nato......

---

Ukraine was already a gun pointed at Russia. Maybe the trigger hadn't been pulled, but we'd made our intentions clear.

You're right about one thing, though. No sensible power would have stood by and let it happen.

---

If one is convinced Ukraine could never under any circumstances defeat Russia (a centerpiece of the isolationist argument against support for Ukraine),.

---

You consistently confuse foreign policy restraint with foreign policy isolationism

Getting out of NATO could be characterized as isolationist

Not funding a costly proxy war (that is not likely to win in the end) would be foreign policy restraint

---

Restraint compared to what?

Supporting proxy war to stop Russian invasion of a sovereign IS restraint..

---

If you leave out the CIA and State department launching color revolutions in Ukraine and Georgia in an attempt to pull those counties out of the orbit of Moscow

A case could also be made that Russia acted with restraint when we bombed Serbia in the 90s (for trying to defend its sovereign territory from Albanian Muslim separatists)…the last time someone attacked Serbia the powers in Moscow declared war against Austria-Hungary…Serbia being a long time ally of Russia

And they seem to have acted with restraint when we pulled Poland, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Hungary, Slovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, Croatia, Slovenia, and Czechia out of their orbit (by bringing them into NATO/EU)

Yet for some reason DC would not stop there and also wanted Ukraine, Belarus, Georgia, and Kazakhstan….Almost like they wanted to leave Moscow surrounded by non-friendly Western aligned States

---

What those Nations wanted doesn't matter, right.

---

No, of course it matters

But Poland and Ukraine for instance are NOT the same

90% of more of Poles wanted out of the Russian orbit

While in Ukraine the pro-Moscow party won the election…..before a coup in 2014 overthrew the President

Very very different situations

---

You think the "ethnic Russian's" are original to Crimea?

---

Russia has held Crimea longer than the USA has held Ohio

[Empress Catherine gave an order to invade Crimea in November 1776. Her forces quickly gained control of Perekop, at the entrance to the peninsula.]

And they took it from the Muslim tartars who made their living engaging in slave raids into Ukraine and Russia and taking Christians (including children) to sell in the Turkish slave markets of the Ottoman Empire

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crimean_Khanate

---

Most of that time was under the rule of the Ottoman Empire. I guess Turkey has a claim.

ATL Bear said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

whiterock said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

whiterock said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

whiterock said:

---

Bear8084 said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

This is exactly the point -- we're not just trying to deny Russia control of Ukraine. We are trying to control it.

NATO's defeat will be bad for the US in many ways, but at least it will dispel this miasma of lies that the West has generated around Ukraine. For that we can all be grateful.

---

---

Words, not armies, start wars.
It's always Nato's fault when Russia acts badly.
A Ukrainian defeat is bad, but Ukrainian surrender to Russia without a fight is good.
Ukraine defending itself is destabilizing; Russia invading and destroying Ukraine block by block is good.
Europe is safer when Russian armies are stationed in Lviv rather than Rostov.
Europe is safer when Russian navies are stationed in Sebastopol rather than Novorossiysk.

---

And in Whiterock's world:

NATO is in mortal jeopardy without a Ukrainian buffer zone.
Therefore NATO must eliminate the buffer zone by absorbing Ukraine.

---

Strawman all day, every day, fortified with recto-cranial inversion.

Nato is not in mortal jeopardy over Russian control of Ukraine; Nato is in greater jeopardy than it would be with an independent Ukraine. No sensible power would stand by and let that happen without a response. The response Nato has taken has been overly cautious.

Nato did not invade Ukraine to absorb it.
Nato did not invite Ukraine to join before Russia invaded.
Ukraine had not even applied for membership before Russia invaded.
Ukraine does not have the votes to join Nato.
because Ukraine does not qualify for membership in Nato = territorial disputes.

Russia knows this. All it has to do is hold on to Donbas and Ukraine cannot join Nato (unless Ukraine gives up its claims to the region).

Russian invasion of Ukraine eliminated a buffer zone which was in no danger of being eliminated from the West.

Russia caused this crisis, not Nato......

---

Ukraine was already a gun pointed at Russia. Maybe the trigger hadn't been pulled, but we'd made our intentions clear.

You're right about one thing, though. No sensible power would have stood by and let it happen.

---

If one is convinced Ukraine could never under any circumstances defeat Russia (a centerpiece of the isolationist argument against support for Ukraine), how could one simultaneously make the case that Ukraine was a "gun pointed at Russia?"

Nato refusal to promise not to admit Ukraine is not "a gun pointed at Russia." Ukraine joining the EU was not a gun pointed at Russia. Generally speaking, it's sound policy to publicly take options off the table in foreign relations. Make everyone account for every potentiality. But in this specific case, Ukraine, Russian seizure of Crimea checkmated Nato membership for Ukraine, as it was a fairly obvious case of territorial dispute ergo a bar to Ukrainian membership. Ukraine would never have had the votes to enter. Probably still doesn't. Russia knows that full well.

Notably, Russia has never promised not to "admit" Ukraine back into Russian alliance or polity, nor to respect the territorial integrity of Ukraine in any way. Quite the opposite on the latter.

No sensible power will stand by and allow its primary adversary to advance armies 500mi into the buffer zone without taking some kind of action.

---

Obviously Russia has promised to respect the territorial integrity of Ukraine. That's what the Budapest Memorandum was all about.

The answer to your question is in your last paragraph. No sensible power will stand by and allow its primary adversary (in this case the United States) to advance armies 500 miles into the buffer zone without taking some kind of action. It was the United States that was determined to undo Ukraine's policy of neutrality. We hand-picked their government officials and indoctrinated them with anti-Russian propaganda. We reserved the right to place nuclear-capable missiles there. We built and trained an army to serve our purposes there, including regime change in Russia. The push for NATO membership was certainly a sign of our intentions, but the threat was growing steadily with or without that formality.

---

How can you bring up the Budapest Memorandum and ignore everything Russia did for a decade prior to EuroMaiden? They were NEVER going to let Ukraine align West. Their invasion was the culmination of almost 30 years of trying to hold Ukraine hostage to their influence.

---

I brought up the Budapest Memorandum because Whiterock said that Russia had never promised to respect Ukraine's territory. You would have to ask him why he made such a bizarre claim. Russia promised to and did respect Ukraine's territory for over 20 years until Ukraine's government was overthrown.

Ukraine was never going to be allowed to "align" West in the way that you understand alignment. That is to say, they were never going to be allowed to join NATO or form any de facto military alliance with the West. This should come as no surprise since all parties agreed to it when Ukraine declared independence from the Soviet Union. In terms of economic alignment, Putin and Yanukovych supported Ukraine's developing ties with both Russia and the West. The EU took an either/or position and refused to negotiate any further.

Sam Lowry said:

---

ATL Bear said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

whiterock said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

whiterock said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

whiterock said:

---

Bear8084 said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

This is exactly the point -- we're not just trying to deny Russia control of Ukraine. We are trying to control it.

NATO's defeat will be bad for the US in many ways, but at least it will dispel this miasma of lies that the West has generated around Ukraine. For that we can all be grateful.

---

---

Words, not armies, start wars.
It's always Nato's fault when Russia acts badly.
A Ukrainian defeat is bad, but Ukrainian surrender to Russia without a fight is good.
Ukraine defending itself is destabilizing; Russia invading and destroying Ukraine block by block is good.
Europe is safer when Russian armies are stationed in Lviv rather than Rostov.
Europe is safer when Russian navies are stationed in Sebastopol rather than Novorossiysk.

---

And in Whiterock's world:

NATO is in mortal jeopardy without a Ukrainian buffer zone.
Therefore NATO must eliminate the buffer zone by absorbing Ukraine.

---

Strawman all day, every day, fortified with recto-cranial inversion.

Nato is not in mortal jeopardy over Russian control of Ukraine; Nato is in greater jeopardy than it would be with an independent Ukraine. No sensible power would stand by and let that happen without a response. The response Nato has taken has been overly cautious.

Nato did not invade Ukraine to absorb it.
Nato did not invite Ukraine to join before Russia invaded.
Ukraine had not even applied for membership before Russia invaded.
Ukraine does not have the votes to join Nato.
because Ukraine does not qualify for membership in Nato = territorial disputes.

Russia knows this. All it has to do is hold on to Donbas and Ukraine cannot join Nato (unless Ukraine gives up its claims to the region).

Russian invasion of Ukraine eliminated a buffer zone which was in no danger of being eliminated from the West.

Russia caused this crisis, not Nato......

---

Ukraine was already a gun pointed at Russia. Maybe the trigger hadn't been pulled, but we'd made our intentions clear.

You're right about one thing, though. No sensible power would have stood by and let it happen.

---

If one is convinced Ukraine could never under any circumstances defeat Russia (a centerpiece of the isolationist argument against support for Ukraine), how could one simultaneously make the case that Ukraine was a "gun pointed at Russia?"

Nato refusal to promise not to admit Ukraine is not "a gun pointed at Russia." Ukraine joining the EU was not a gun pointed at Russia. Generally speaking, it's sound policy to publicly take options off the table in foreign relations. Make everyone account for every potentiality. But in this specific case, Ukraine, Russian seizure of Crimea checkmated Nato membership for Ukraine, as it was a fairly obvious case of territorial dispute ergo a bar to Ukrainian membership. Ukraine would never have had the votes to enter. Probably still doesn't. Russia knows that full well.

Notably, Russia has never promised not to "admit" Ukraine back into Russian alliance or polity, nor to respect the territorial integrity of Ukraine in any way. Quite the opposite on the latter.

No sensible power will stand by and allow its primary adversary to advance armies 500mi into the buffer zone without taking some kind of action.

---

Obviously Russia has promised to respect the territorial integrity of Ukraine. That's what the Budapest Memorandum was all about.

The answer to your question is in your last paragraph. No sensible power will stand by and allow its primary adversary (in this case the United States) to advance armies 500 miles into the buffer zone without taking some kind of action. It was the United States that was determined to undo Ukraine's policy of neutrality. We hand-picked their government officials and indoctrinated them with anti-Russian propaganda. We reserved the right to place nuclear-capable missiles there. We built and trained an army to serve our purposes there, including regime change in Russia. The push for NATO membership was certainly a sign of our intentions, but the threat was growing steadily with or without that formality.

---

How can you bring up the Budapest Memorandum and ignore everything Russia did for a decade prior to EuroMaiden? They were NEVER going to let Ukraine align West. Their invasion was the culmination of almost 30 years of trying to hold Ukraine hostage to their influence.

---

I brought up the Budapest Memorandum because Whiterock said that Russia had never promised to respect Ukraine's territory. You would have to ask him why he made such a bizarre claim. Russia promised to and did respect Ukraine's territory for over 20 years until Ukraine's government was overthrown.

Ukraine was never going to be allowed to "align" West in the way that you understand alignment. That is to say, they were never going to be allowed to join NATO or form any de facto military alliance with the West. This should come as no surprise since all parties agreed to it when Ukraine declared independence from the Soviet Union. In terms of economic alignment, Putin and Yanukovych supported Ukraine's developing ties with both Russia and the West. The EU took an either/or position and refused to negotiate any further.

---

No, they weren't. They helped the Kuchma regime execute journalists digging into corruption and back room deals with Russia, thwarted EU deals using natural gas disputes including a debt trap in the middle of winter, tried to assassinate Viktor Yushenko, gave Yanukovych the goods on Yulia Tymoshenko so he could imprison his political opponent, and stole assets in Eastern Ukraine without redress. And that's not even the juiciest stuff they did to give Putin's siloviki control of industrial assets or the subversion that led to troops in Crimea, the Donbas and that war.

The hardline the EU took was on corruption because everyone knew what was going on, and is why the Russians couldn't let it go. Putin doesn't have a Billion dollar compound on the Black Sea just a couple hundred miles from Crimea because he got a raise in his government salary.

ATL Bear said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

FLBear5630 said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

FLBear5630 said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

whiterock said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

whiterock said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

whiterock said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

whiterock said:

---

Bear8084 said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

This is exactly the point -- we're not just trying to deny Russia control of Ukraine. We are trying to control it.

NATO's defeat will be bad for the US in many ways, but at least it will dispel this miasma of lies that the West has generated around Ukraine. For that we can all be grateful.

---

---

Words, not armies, start wars.
It's always Nato's fault when Russia acts badly.
A Ukrainian defeat is bad, but Ukrainian surrender to Russia without a fight is good.
Ukraine defending itself is destabilizing; Russia invading and destroying Ukraine block by block is good.
Europe is safer when Russian armies are stationed in Lviv rather than Rostov.
Europe is safer when Russian navies are stationed in Sebastopol rather than Novorossiysk.

---

And in Whiterock's world:

NATO is in mortal jeopardy without a Ukrainian buffer zone.
Therefore NATO must eliminate the buffer zone by absorbing Ukraine.

---

Strawman all day, every day, fortified with recto-cranial inversion.

Nato is not in mortal jeopardy over Russian control of Ukraine; Nato is in greater jeopardy than it would be with an independent Ukraine. No sensible power would stand by and let that happen without a response. The response Nato has taken has been overly cautious.

Nato did not invade Ukraine to absorb it.
Nato did not invite Ukraine to join before Russia invaded.
Ukraine had not even applied for membership before Russia invaded.
Ukraine does not have the votes to join Nato.
because Ukraine does not qualify for membership in Nato = territorial disputes.

Russia knows this. All it has to do is hold on to Donbas and Ukraine cannot join Nato (unless Ukraine gives up its claims to the region).

Russian invasion of Ukraine eliminated a buffer zone which was in no danger of being eliminated from the West.

Russia caused this crisis, not Nato......

---

Ukraine was already a gun pointed at Russia. Maybe the trigger hadn't been pulled, but we'd made our intentions clear.

You're right about one thing, though. No sensible power would have stood by and let it happen.

---

If one is convinced Ukraine could never under any circumstances defeat Russia (a centerpiece of the isolationist argument against support for Ukraine),.

---

You consistently confuse foreign policy restraint with foreign policy isolationism

Getting out of NATO could be characterized as isolationist

Not funding a costly proxy war (that is not likely to win in the end) would be foreign policy restraint

---

Restraint compared to what?

Supporting proxy war to stop Russian invasion of a sovereign IS restraint..

---

If you leave out the CIA and State department launching color revolutions in Ukraine and Georgia in an attempt to pull those counties out of the orbit of Moscow

A case could also be made that Russia acted with restraint when we bombed Serbia in the 90s (for trying to defend its sovereign territory from Albanian Muslim separatists)…the last time someone attacked Serbia the powers in Moscow declared war against Austria-Hungary…Serbia being a long time ally of Russia

And they seem to have acted with restraint when we pulled Poland, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Hungary, Slovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, Croatia, Slovenia, and Czechia out of their orbit (by bringing them into NATO/EU)

Yet for some reason DC would not stop there and also wanted Ukraine, Belarus, Georgia, and Kazakhstan….Almost like they wanted to leave Moscow surrounded by non-friendly Western aligned States

---

What those Nations wanted doesn't matter, right.

---

No, of course it matters

But Poland and Ukraine for instance are NOT the same

90% of more of Poles wanted out of the Russian orbit

While in Ukraine the pro-Moscow party won the election…..before a coup in 2014 overthrew the President

Very very different situations

---

You think the "ethnic Russian's" are original to Crimea?

---

Russia has held Crimea longer than the USA has held Ohio

[Empress Catherine gave an order to invade Crimea in November 1776. Her forces quickly gained control of Perekop, at the entrance to the peninsula.]

And they took it from the Muslim tartars who made their living engaging in slave raids into Ukraine and Russia and taking Christians (including children) to sell in the Turkish slave markets of the Ottoman Empire

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crimean_Khanate

---

Most of that time was under the rule of the Ottoman Empire. I guess Turkey has a claim.

---

A claim? Yes, but not a good one

Their tartar Muslim slaver vassals were not good people ….and never officially part of the Ottoman Empire

Redbrickbear said:

---

ATL Bear said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

FLBear5630 said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

FLBear5630 said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

whiterock said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

whiterock said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

whiterock said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

whiterock said:

---

Bear8084 said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

This is exactly the point -- we're not just trying to deny Russia control of Ukraine. We are trying to control it.

NATO's defeat will be bad for the US in many ways, but at least it will dispel this miasma of lies that the West has generated around Ukraine. For that we can all be grateful.

---

---

Words, not armies, start wars.
It's always Nato's fault when Russia acts badly.
A Ukrainian defeat is bad, but Ukrainian surrender to Russia without a fight is good.
Ukraine defending itself is destabilizing; Russia invading and destroying Ukraine block by block is good.
Europe is safer when Russian armies are stationed in Lviv rather than Rostov.
Europe is safer when Russian navies are stationed in Sebastopol rather than Novorossiysk.

---

And in Whiterock's world:

NATO is in mortal jeopardy without a Ukrainian buffer zone.
Therefore NATO must eliminate the buffer zone by absorbing Ukraine.

---

Strawman all day, every day, fortified with recto-cranial inversion.

Nato is not in mortal jeopardy over Russian control of Ukraine; Nato is in greater jeopardy than it would be with an independent Ukraine. No sensible power would stand by and let that happen without a response. The response Nato has taken has been overly cautious.

Nato did not invade Ukraine to absorb it.
Nato did not invite Ukraine to join before Russia invaded.
Ukraine had not even applied for membership before Russia invaded.
Ukraine does not have the votes to join Nato.
because Ukraine does not qualify for membership in Nato = territorial disputes.

Russia knows this. All it has to do is hold on to Donbas and Ukraine cannot join Nato (unless Ukraine gives up its claims to the region).

Russian invasion of Ukraine eliminated a buffer zone which was in no danger of being eliminated from the West.

Russia caused this crisis, not Nato......

---

Ukraine was already a gun pointed at Russia. Maybe the trigger hadn't been pulled, but we'd made our intentions clear.

You're right about one thing, though. No sensible power would have stood by and let it happen.

---

If one is convinced Ukraine could never under any circumstances defeat Russia (a centerpiece of the isolationist argument against support for Ukraine),.

---

You consistently confuse foreign policy restraint with foreign policy isolationism

Getting out of NATO could be characterized as isolationist

Not funding a costly proxy war (that is not likely to win in the end) would be foreign policy restraint

---

Restraint compared to what?

Supporting proxy war to stop Russian invasion of a sovereign IS restraint..

---

If you leave out the CIA and State department launching color revolutions in Ukraine and Georgia in an attempt to pull those counties out of the orbit of Moscow

A case could also be made that Russia acted with restraint when we bombed Serbia in the 90s (for trying to defend its sovereign territory from Albanian Muslim separatists)…the last time someone attacked Serbia the powers in Moscow declared war against Austria-Hungary…Serbia being a long time ally of Russia

And they seem to have acted with restraint when we pulled Poland, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Hungary, Slovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, Croatia, Slovenia, and Czechia out of their orbit (by bringing them into NATO/EU)

Yet for some reason DC would not stop there and also wanted Ukraine, Belarus, Georgia, and Kazakhstan….Almost like they wanted to leave Moscow surrounded by non-friendly Western aligned States

---

What those Nations wanted doesn't matter, right.

---

No, of course it matters

But Poland and Ukraine for instance are NOT the same

90% of more of Poles wanted out of the Russian orbit

While in Ukraine the pro-Moscow party won the election…..before a coup in 2014 overthrew the President

Very very different situations

---

You think the "ethnic Russian's" are original to Crimea?

---

Russia has held Crimea longer than the USA has held Ohio

[Empress Catherine gave an order to invade Crimea in November 1776. Her forces quickly gained control of Perekop, at the entrance to the peninsula.]

And they took it from the Muslim tartars who made their living engaging in slave raids into Ukraine and Russia and taking Christians (including children) to sell in the Turkish slave markets of the Ottoman Empire

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crimean_Khanate

---

Most of that time was under the rule of the Ottoman Empire. I guess Turkey has a claim.

---

A claim? Yes, but not a good one

Their tartar Muslim slaver vassals were not good people ….and never officially part of the Ottoman Empire

---

Or maybe it's an irrelevant consideration. Otherwise, we have a lot of Africa that doesn't "deserve" its independence.

It's pretty clear that we're not in Ukraine, but we're giving aid to preserve the post WWII order and post Soviet fall order, by opposing Russian/Sino totalitarian aggression against a free democratic people, and Russian/Sino allied totalitarian aggression against the western free world. You can rationalize, cherry pick, and trivialize all you want, but that is it in a nut shell. The choices are not unlike what the world faced in the 1930's. Isolationism doesn't work, especially in the world we live in today. NATO and our western alliances are the only things that stand a chance of holding Russian/Sino totalitarianism in check. As long as Russia and China have totalitarian regimes in place, the world will be at risk and unstable. Hopefully, we don't join them by electing a totalitarian president - it won't be the utopia many think.

Redbrickbear said:

---

ATL Bear said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

FLBear5630 said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

FLBear5630 said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

whiterock said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

whiterock said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

whiterock said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

whiterock said:

---

Bear8084 said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

This is exactly the point -- we're not just trying to deny Russia control of Ukraine. We are trying to control it.

NATO's defeat will be bad for the US in many ways, but at least it will dispel this miasma of lies that the West has generated around Ukraine. For that we can all be grateful.

---

---

Words, not armies, start wars.
It's always Nato's fault when Russia acts badly.
A Ukrainian defeat is bad, but Ukrainian surrender to Russia without a fight is good.
Ukraine defending itself is destabilizing; Russia invading and destroying Ukraine block by block is good.
Europe is safer when Russian armies are stationed in Lviv rather than Rostov.
Europe is safer when Russian navies are stationed in Sebastopol rather than Novorossiysk.

---

And in Whiterock's world:

NATO is in mortal jeopardy without a Ukrainian buffer zone.
Therefore NATO must eliminate the buffer zone by absorbing Ukraine.

---

Strawman all day, every day, fortified with recto-cranial inversion.

Nato is not in mortal jeopardy over Russian control of Ukraine; Nato is in greater jeopardy than it would be with an independent Ukraine. No sensible power would stand by and let that happen without a response. The response Nato has taken has been overly cautious.

Nato did not invade Ukraine to absorb it.
Nato did not invite Ukraine to join before Russia invaded.
Ukraine had not even applied for membership before Russia invaded.
Ukraine does not have the votes to join Nato.
because Ukraine does not qualify for membership in Nato = territorial disputes.

Russia knows this. All it has to do is hold on to Donbas and Ukraine cannot join Nato (unless Ukraine gives up its claims to the region).

Russian invasion of Ukraine eliminated a buffer zone which was in no danger of being eliminated from the West.

Russia caused this crisis, not Nato......

---

Ukraine was already a gun pointed at Russia. Maybe the trigger hadn't been pulled, but we'd made our intentions clear.

You're right about one thing, though. No sensible power would have stood by and let it happen.

---

If one is convinced Ukraine could never under any circumstances defeat Russia (a centerpiece of the isolationist argument against support for Ukraine),.

---

You consistently confuse foreign policy restraint with foreign policy isolationism

Getting out of NATO could be characterized as isolationist

Not funding a costly proxy war (that is not likely to win in the end) would be foreign policy restraint

---

Restraint compared to what?

Supporting proxy war to stop Russian invasion of a sovereign IS restraint..

---

If you leave out the CIA and State department launching color revolutions in Ukraine and Georgia in an attempt to pull those counties out of the orbit of Moscow

A case could also be made that Russia acted with restraint when we bombed Serbia in the 90s (for trying to defend its sovereign territory from Albanian Muslim separatists)…the last time someone attacked Serbia the powers in Moscow declared war against Austria-Hungary…Serbia being a long time ally of Russia

And they seem to have acted with restraint when we pulled Poland, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Hungary, Slovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, Croatia, Slovenia, and Czechia out of their orbit (by bringing them into NATO/EU)

Yet for some reason DC would not stop there and also wanted Ukraine, Belarus, Georgia, and Kazakhstan….Almost like they wanted to leave Moscow surrounded by non-friendly Western aligned States

---

What those Nations wanted doesn't matter, right.

---

No, of course it matters

But Poland and Ukraine for instance are NOT the same

90% of more of Poles wanted out of the Russian orbit

While in Ukraine the pro-Moscow party won the election…..before a coup in 2014 overthrew the President

Very very different situations

---

You think the "ethnic Russian's" are original to Crimea?

---

Russia has held Crimea longer than the USA has held Ohio

[Empress Catherine gave an order to invade Crimea in November 1776. Her forces quickly gained control of Perekop, at the entrance to the peninsula.]

And they took it from the Muslim tartars who made their living engaging in slave raids into Ukraine and Russia and taking Christians (including children) to sell in the Turkish slave markets of the Ottoman Empire

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crimean_Khanate

---

Most of that time was under the rule of the Ottoman Empire. I guess Turkey has a claim.

---

A claim? Yes, but not a good one

Their tartar Muslim slaver vassals were not good people ….and never officially part of the Ottoman Empire

---

The post Soviet collapse, and the rise of democratic/free governments in the aftermath, says they don't have a claim, and the western free world says they don't have a claim. No different than the US and the western world says Mexico has no claim to Texas (but maybe California).

ATL Bear said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

ATL Bear said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

whiterock said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

whiterock said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

whiterock said:

---

Bear8084 said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

This is exactly the point -- we're not just trying to deny Russia control of Ukraine. We are trying to control it.

NATO's defeat will be bad for the US in many ways, but at least it will dispel this miasma of lies that the West has generated around Ukraine. For that we can all be grateful.

---

---

Words, not armies, start wars.
It's always Nato's fault when Russia acts badly.
A Ukrainian defeat is bad, but Ukrainian surrender to Russia without a fight is good.
Ukraine defending itself is destabilizing; Russia invading and destroying Ukraine block by block is good.
Europe is safer when Russian armies are stationed in Lviv rather than Rostov.
Europe is safer when Russian navies are stationed in Sebastopol rather than Novorossiysk.

---

And in Whiterock's world:

NATO is in mortal jeopardy without a Ukrainian buffer zone.
Therefore NATO must eliminate the buffer zone by absorbing Ukraine.

---

Strawman all day, every day, fortified with recto-cranial inversion.

Nato is not in mortal jeopardy over Russian control of Ukraine; Nato is in greater jeopardy than it would be with an independent Ukraine. No sensible power would stand by and let that happen without a response. The response Nato has taken has been overly cautious.

Nato did not invade Ukraine to absorb it.
Nato did not invite Ukraine to join before Russia invaded.
Ukraine had not even applied for membership before Russia invaded.
Ukraine does not have the votes to join Nato.
because Ukraine does not qualify for membership in Nato = territorial disputes.

Russia knows this. All it has to do is hold on to Donbas and Ukraine cannot join Nato (unless Ukraine gives up its claims to the region).

Russian invasion of Ukraine eliminated a buffer zone which was in no danger of being eliminated from the West.

Russia caused this crisis, not Nato......

---

Ukraine was already a gun pointed at Russia. Maybe the trigger hadn't been pulled, but we'd made our intentions clear.

You're right about one thing, though. No sensible power would have stood by and let it happen.

---

If one is convinced Ukraine could never under any circumstances defeat Russia (a centerpiece of the isolationist argument against support for Ukraine), how could one simultaneously make the case that Ukraine was a "gun pointed at Russia?"

Nato refusal to promise not to admit Ukraine is not "a gun pointed at Russia." Ukraine joining the EU was not a gun pointed at Russia. Generally speaking, it's sound policy to publicly take options off the table in foreign relations. Make everyone account for every potentiality. But in this specific case, Ukraine, Russian seizure of Crimea checkmated Nato membership for Ukraine, as it was a fairly obvious case of territorial dispute ergo a bar to Ukrainian membership. Ukraine would never have had the votes to enter. Probably still doesn't. Russia knows that full well.

Notably, Russia has never promised not to "admit" Ukraine back into Russian alliance or polity, nor to respect the territorial integrity of Ukraine in any way. Quite the opposite on the latter.

No sensible power will stand by and allow its primary adversary to advance armies 500mi into the buffer zone without taking some kind of action.

---

Obviously Russia has promised to respect the territorial integrity of Ukraine. That's what the Budapest Memorandum was all about.

The answer to your question is in your last paragraph. No sensible power will stand by and allow its primary adversary (in this case the United States) to advance armies 500 miles into the buffer zone without taking some kind of action. It was the United States that was determined to undo Ukraine's policy of neutrality. We hand-picked their government officials and indoctrinated them with anti-Russian propaganda. We reserved the right to place nuclear-capable missiles there. We built and trained an army to serve our purposes there, including regime change in Russia. The push for NATO membership was certainly a sign of our intentions, but the threat was growing steadily with or without that formality.

---

How can you bring up the Budapest Memorandum and ignore everything Russia did for a decade prior to EuroMaiden? They were NEVER going to let Ukraine align West. Their invasion was the culmination of almost 30 years of trying to hold Ukraine hostage to their influence.

---

I brought up the Budapest Memorandum because Whiterock said that Russia had never promised to respect Ukraine's territory. You would have to ask him why he made such a bizarre claim. Russia promised to and did respect Ukraine's territory for over 20 years until Ukraine's government was overthrown.

Ukraine was never going to be allowed to "align" West in the way that you understand alignment. That is to say, they were never going to be allowed to join NATO or form any de facto military alliance with the West. This should come as no surprise since all parties agreed to it when Ukraine declared independence from the Soviet Union. In terms of economic alignment, Putin and Yanukovych supported Ukraine's developing ties with both Russia and the West. The EU took an either/or position and refused to negotiate any further.

---

No, they weren't. They helped the Kuchma regime execute journalists digging into corruption and back room deals with Russia, thwarted EU deals using natural gas disputes including a debt trap in the middle of winter, tried to assassinate Viktor Yushenko, gave Yanukovych the goods on Yulia Tymoshenko so he could imprison his political opponent, and stole assets in Eastern Ukraine without redress. And that's not even the juiciest stuff they did to give Putin's siloviki control of industrial assets or the subversion that led to troops in Crimea, the Donbas and that war.

The hardline the EU took was on corruption because everyone knew what was going on, and is why the Russians couldn't let it go. Putin doesn't have a Billion dollar compound on the Black Sea just a couple hundred miles from Crimea because he got a raise in his government salary.

---

Much of that information is dubious at best, but it doesn't really matter. Your claim is belied by one simple fact -- Ukraine is vastly more corrupt since it cut ties with Russia and the new, pro-Western government took control.

Yanukovych didn't delay the EU deal because Putin has a mansion on the Black Sea. He delayed it because it was a terrible deal, which not only Ukrainians but many sympathetic observers in the West found distasteful, and the EU was refusing to negotiate.

TexasScientist said:

---

It's pretty clear that we're not in Ukraine, but we're giving aid to preserve the post WWII order and post Soviet fall order, by opposing Russian/Sino totalitarian aggression against a free democratic people, and Russian/Sino allied totalitarian aggression against the western free world. You can rationalize, cherry pick, and trivialize all you want, but that is it in a nut shell. The choices are not unlike what the world faced in the 1930's. Isolationism doesn't work, especially in the world we live in today. NATO and our western alliances are the only things that stand a chance of holding Russian/Sino totalitarianism in check. As long as Russia and China have totalitarian regimes in place, the world will be at risk and unstable. Hopefully, we don't join them by electing a totalitarian president - it won't be the utopia many think.

---

Well, Russia doesn't have a totalitarian regime, so I guess that problem is solved.

Sam Lowry said:

---

ATL Bear said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

ATL Bear said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

whiterock said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

whiterock said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

whiterock said:

---

Bear8084 said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

This is exactly the point -- we're not just trying to deny Russia control of Ukraine. We are trying to control it.

NATO's defeat will be bad for the US in many ways, but at least it will dispel this miasma of lies that the West has generated around Ukraine. For that we can all be grateful.

---

---

Words, not armies, start wars.
It's always Nato's fault when Russia acts badly.
A Ukrainian defeat is bad, but Ukrainian surrender to Russia without a fight is good.
Ukraine defending itself is destabilizing; Russia invading and destroying Ukraine block by block is good.
Europe is safer when Russian armies are stationed in Lviv rather than Rostov.
Europe is safer when Russian navies are stationed in Sebastopol rather than Novorossiysk.

---

And in Whiterock's world:

NATO is in mortal jeopardy without a Ukrainian buffer zone.
Therefore NATO must eliminate the buffer zone by absorbing Ukraine.

---

Strawman all day, every day, fortified with recto-cranial inversion.

Nato is not in mortal jeopardy over Russian control of Ukraine; Nato is in greater jeopardy than it would be with an independent Ukraine. No sensible power would stand by and let that happen without a response. The response Nato has taken has been overly cautious.

Nato did not invade Ukraine to absorb it.
Nato did not invite Ukraine to join before Russia invaded.
Ukraine had not even applied for membership before Russia invaded.
Ukraine does not have the votes to join Nato.
because Ukraine does not qualify for membership in Nato = territorial disputes.

Russia knows this. All it has to do is hold on to Donbas and Ukraine cannot join Nato (unless Ukraine gives up its claims to the region).

Russian invasion of Ukraine eliminated a buffer zone which was in no danger of being eliminated from the West.

Russia caused this crisis, not Nato......

---

Ukraine was already a gun pointed at Russia. Maybe the trigger hadn't been pulled, but we'd made our intentions clear.

You're right about one thing, though. No sensible power would have stood by and let it happen.

---

If one is convinced Ukraine could never under any circumstances defeat Russia (a centerpiece of the isolationist argument against support for Ukraine), how could one simultaneously make the case that Ukraine was a "gun pointed at Russia?"

Nato refusal to promise not to admit Ukraine is not "a gun pointed at Russia." Ukraine joining the EU was not a gun pointed at Russia. Generally speaking, it's sound policy to publicly take options off the table in foreign relations. Make everyone account for every potentiality. But in this specific case, Ukraine, Russian seizure of Crimea checkmated Nato membership for Ukraine, as it was a fairly obvious case of territorial dispute ergo a bar to Ukrainian membership. Ukraine would never have had the votes to enter. Probably still doesn't. Russia knows that full well.

Notably, Russia has never promised not to "admit" Ukraine back into Russian alliance or polity, nor to respect the territorial integrity of Ukraine in any way. Quite the opposite on the latter.

No sensible power will stand by and allow its primary adversary to advance armies 500mi into the buffer zone without taking some kind of action.

---

Obviously Russia has promised to respect the territorial integrity of Ukraine. That's what the Budapest Memorandum was all about.

The answer to your question is in your last paragraph. No sensible power will stand by and allow its primary adversary (in this case the United States) to advance armies 500 miles into the buffer zone without taking some kind of action. It was the United States that was determined to undo Ukraine's policy of neutrality. We hand-picked their government officials and indoctrinated them with anti-Russian propaganda. We reserved the right to place nuclear-capable missiles there. We built and trained an army to serve our purposes there, including regime change in Russia. The push for NATO membership was certainly a sign of our intentions, but the threat was growing steadily with or without that formality.

---

How can you bring up the Budapest Memorandum and ignore everything Russia did for a decade prior to EuroMaiden? They were NEVER going to let Ukraine align West. Their invasion was the culmination of almost 30 years of trying to hold Ukraine hostage to their influence.

---

I brought up the Budapest Memorandum because Whiterock said that Russia had never promised to respect Ukraine's territory. You would have to ask him why he made such a bizarre claim. Russia promised to and did respect Ukraine's territory for over 20 years until Ukraine's government was overthrown.

Ukraine was never going to be allowed to "align" West in the way that you understand alignment. That is to say, they were never going to be allowed to join NATO or form any de facto military alliance with the West. This should come as no surprise since all parties agreed to it when Ukraine declared independence from the Soviet Union. In terms of economic alignment, Putin and Yanukovych supported Ukraine's developing ties with both Russia and the West. The EU took an either/or position and refused to negotiate any further.

---

No, they weren't. They helped the Kuchma regime execute journalists digging into corruption and back room deals with Russia, thwarted EU deals using natural gas disputes including a debt trap in the middle of winter, tried to assassinate Viktor Yushenko, gave Yanukovych the goods on Yulia Tymoshenko so he could imprison his political opponent, and stole assets in Eastern Ukraine without redress. And that's not even the juiciest stuff they did to give Putin's siloviki control of industrial assets or the subversion that led to troops in Crimea, the Donbas and that war.

The hardline the EU took was on corruption because everyone knew what was going on, and is why the Russians couldn't let it go. Putin doesn't have a Billion dollar compound on the Black Sea just a couple hundred miles from Crimea because he got a raise in his government salary.

---

Much of that information is dubious at best, but it doesn't really matter. Your claim is belied by one simple fact -- Ukraine is vastly more corrupt since it cut ties with Russia and the new, pro-Western government took control.

Yanukovych didn't delay the EU deal because Putin has a mansion on the Black Sea. He delayed it because it was a terrible deal, which not only Ukrainians but many sympathetic observers in the West found distasteful, and the EU was refusing to negotiate.

---

Putin has been scuttling the deal since Kuchma.

And you couldn't be more wrong about Ukraine's corruption. You need to check into the Yanukovych papers. I mean his former mansion is literally a museum and monument to his opulence and corruption.

ATL Bear said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

ATL Bear said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

ATL Bear said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

whiterock said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

whiterock said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

whiterock said:

---

Bear8084 said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

This is exactly the point -- we're not just trying to deny Russia control of Ukraine. We are trying to control it.

NATO's defeat will be bad for the US in many ways, but at least it will dispel this miasma of lies that the West has generated around Ukraine. For that we can all be grateful.

---

---

Words, not armies, start wars.
It's always Nato's fault when Russia acts badly.
A Ukrainian defeat is bad, but Ukrainian surrender to Russia without a fight is good.
Ukraine defending itself is destabilizing; Russia invading and destroying Ukraine block by block is good.
Europe is safer when Russian armies are stationed in Lviv rather than Rostov.
Europe is safer when Russian navies are stationed in Sebastopol rather than Novorossiysk.

---

And in Whiterock's world:

NATO is in mortal jeopardy without a Ukrainian buffer zone.
Therefore NATO must eliminate the buffer zone by absorbing Ukraine.

---

Strawman all day, every day, fortified with recto-cranial inversion.

Nato is not in mortal jeopardy over Russian control of Ukraine; Nato is in greater jeopardy than it would be with an independent Ukraine. No sensible power would stand by and let that happen without a response. The response Nato has taken has been overly cautious.

Nato did not invade Ukraine to absorb it.
Nato did not invite Ukraine to join before Russia invaded.
Ukraine had not even applied for membership before Russia invaded.
Ukraine does not have the votes to join Nato.
because Ukraine does not qualify for membership in Nato = territorial disputes.

Russia knows this. All it has to do is hold on to Donbas and Ukraine cannot join Nato (unless Ukraine gives up its claims to the region).

Russian invasion of Ukraine eliminated a buffer zone which was in no danger of being eliminated from the West.

Russia caused this crisis, not Nato......

---

Ukraine was already a gun pointed at Russia. Maybe the trigger hadn't been pulled, but we'd made our intentions clear.

You're right about one thing, though. No sensible power would have stood by and let it happen.

---

If one is convinced Ukraine could never under any circumstances defeat Russia (a centerpiece of the isolationist argument against support for Ukraine), how could one simultaneously make the case that Ukraine was a "gun pointed at Russia?"

Nato refusal to promise not to admit Ukraine is not "a gun pointed at Russia." Ukraine joining the EU was not a gun pointed at Russia. Generally speaking, it's sound policy to publicly take options off the table in foreign relations. Make everyone account for every potentiality. But in this specific case, Ukraine, Russian seizure of Crimea checkmated Nato membership for Ukraine, as it was a fairly obvious case of territorial dispute ergo a bar to Ukrainian membership. Ukraine would never have had the votes to enter. Probably still doesn't. Russia knows that full well.

Notably, Russia has never promised not to "admit" Ukraine back into Russian alliance or polity, nor to respect the territorial integrity of Ukraine in any way. Quite the opposite on the latter.

No sensible power will stand by and allow its primary adversary to advance armies 500mi into the buffer zone without taking some kind of action.

---

Obviously Russia has promised to respect the territorial integrity of Ukraine. That's what the Budapest Memorandum was all about.

The answer to your question is in your last paragraph. No sensible power will stand by and allow its primary adversary (in this case the United States) to advance armies 500 miles into the buffer zone without taking some kind of action. It was the United States that was determined to undo Ukraine's policy of neutrality. We hand-picked their government officials and indoctrinated them with anti-Russian propaganda. We reserved the right to place nuclear-capable missiles there. We built and trained an army to serve our purposes there, including regime change in Russia. The push for NATO membership was certainly a sign of our intentions, but the threat was growing steadily with or without that formality.

---

How can you bring up the Budapest Memorandum and ignore everything Russia did for a decade prior to EuroMaiden? They were NEVER going to let Ukraine align West. Their invasion was the culmination of almost 30 years of trying to hold Ukraine hostage to their influence.

---

I brought up the Budapest Memorandum because Whiterock said that Russia had never promised to respect Ukraine's territory. You would have to ask him why he made such a bizarre claim. Russia promised to and did respect Ukraine's territory for over 20 years until Ukraine's government was overthrown.

Ukraine was never going to be allowed to "align" West in the way that you understand alignment. That is to say, they were never going to be allowed to join NATO or form any de facto military alliance with the West. This should come as no surprise since all parties agreed to it when Ukraine declared independence from the Soviet Union. In terms of economic alignment, Putin and Yanukovych supported Ukraine's developing ties with both Russia and the West. The EU took an either/or position and refused to negotiate any further.

---

No, they weren't. They helped the Kuchma regime execute journalists digging into corruption and back room deals with Russia, thwarted EU deals using natural gas disputes including a debt trap in the middle of winter, tried to assassinate Viktor Yushenko, gave Yanukovych the goods on Yulia Tymoshenko so he could imprison his political opponent, and stole assets in Eastern Ukraine without redress. And that's not even the juiciest stuff they did to give Putin's siloviki control of industrial assets or the subversion that led to troops in Crimea, the Donbas and that war.

The hardline the EU took was on corruption because everyone knew what was going on, and is why the Russians couldn't let it go. Putin doesn't have a Billion dollar compound on the Black Sea just a couple hundred miles from Crimea because he got a raise in his government salary.

---

Much of that information is dubious at best, but it doesn't really matter. Your claim is belied by one simple fact -- Ukraine is vastly more corrupt since it cut ties with Russia and the new, pro-Western government took control.

Yanukovych didn't delay the EU deal because Putin has a mansion on the Black Sea. He delayed it because it was a terrible deal, which not only Ukrainians but many sympathetic observers in the West found distasteful, and the EU was refusing to negotiate.

---

Putin has been scuttling the deal since Kuchma.

And you couldn't be more wrong about Ukraine's corruption. You need to check into the Yanukovych papers. I mean his former mansion is literally a museum and monument to his opulence and corruption.

---

The most cited index, Transparency International, rates corruption on a scale of 0 to 100, with 0 being the least corrupt and 100 the most corrupt. Ukraine's all-time low score was 15 under Kuchma in 2000. It reached an all-time high of 36 last year.

If the EU took a hard line on corruption, they'd never give Ukraine the time of day.

Zelensky now threatening to seek nuclear weapons unless Ukraine joins NATO immediately. And not for the first time...he made a similar threat before the Russian invasion in 2022.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2024/10/17/zelensky-ukraine-seek-nuclear-weapons-join-nato/

ATL Bear said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

ATL Bear said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

ATL Bear said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

whiterock said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

whiterock said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

whiterock said:

---

Bear8084 said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

This is exactly the point -- we're not just trying to deny Russia control of Ukraine. We are trying to control it.

NATO's defeat will be bad for the US in many ways, but at least it will dispel this miasma of lies that the West has generated around Ukraine. For that we can all be grateful.

---

---

Words, not armies, start wars.
It's always Nato's fault when Russia acts badly.
A Ukrainian defeat is bad, but Ukrainian surrender to Russia without a fight is good.
Ukraine defending itself is destabilizing; Russia invading and destroying Ukraine block by block is good.
Europe is safer when Russian armies are stationed in Lviv rather than Rostov.
Europe is safer when Russian navies are stationed in Sebastopol rather than Novorossiysk.

---

And in Whiterock's world:

NATO is in mortal jeopardy without a Ukrainian buffer zone.
Therefore NATO must eliminate the buffer zone by absorbing Ukraine.

---

Strawman all day, every day, fortified with recto-cranial inversion.

Nato is not in mortal jeopardy over Russian control of Ukraine; Nato is in greater jeopardy than it would be with an independent Ukraine. No sensible power would stand by and let that happen without a response. The response Nato has taken has been overly cautious.

Nato did not invade Ukraine to absorb it.
Nato did not invite Ukraine to join before Russia invaded.
Ukraine had not even applied for membership before Russia invaded.
Ukraine does not have the votes to join Nato.
because Ukraine does not qualify for membership in Nato = territorial disputes.

Russia knows this. All it has to do is hold on to Donbas and Ukraine cannot join Nato (unless Ukraine gives up its claims to the region).

Russian invasion of Ukraine eliminated a buffer zone which was in no danger of being eliminated from the West.

Russia caused this crisis, not Nato......

---

Ukraine was already a gun pointed at Russia. Maybe the trigger hadn't been pulled, but we'd made our intentions clear.

You're right about one thing, though. No sensible power would have stood by and let it happen.

---

If one is convinced Ukraine could never under any circumstances defeat Russia (a centerpiece of the isolationist argument against support for Ukraine), how could one simultaneously make the case that Ukraine was a "gun pointed at Russia?"

Nato refusal to promise not to admit Ukraine is not "a gun pointed at Russia." Ukraine joining the EU was not a gun pointed at Russia. Generally speaking, it's sound policy to publicly take options off the table in foreign relations. Make everyone account for every potentiality. But in this specific case, Ukraine, Russian seizure of Crimea checkmated Nato membership for Ukraine, as it was a fairly obvious case of territorial dispute ergo a bar to Ukrainian membership. Ukraine would never have had the votes to enter. Probably still doesn't. Russia knows that full well.

Notably, Russia has never promised not to "admit" Ukraine back into Russian alliance or polity, nor to respect the territorial integrity of Ukraine in any way. Quite the opposite on the latter.

No sensible power will stand by and allow its primary adversary to advance armies 500mi into the buffer zone without taking some kind of action.

---

Obviously Russia has promised to respect the territorial integrity of Ukraine. That's what the Budapest Memorandum was all about.

The answer to your question is in your last paragraph. No sensible power will stand by and allow its primary adversary (in this case the United States) to advance armies 500 miles into the buffer zone without taking some kind of action. It was the United States that was determined to undo Ukraine's policy of neutrality. We hand-picked their government officials and indoctrinated them with anti-Russian propaganda. We reserved the right to place nuclear-capable missiles there. We built and trained an army to serve our purposes there, including regime change in Russia. The push for NATO membership was certainly a sign of our intentions, but the threat was growing steadily with or without that formality.

---

How can you bring up the Budapest Memorandum and ignore everything Russia did for a decade prior to EuroMaiden? They were NEVER going to let Ukraine align West. Their invasion was the culmination of almost 30 years of trying to hold Ukraine hostage to their influence.

---

I brought up the Budapest Memorandum because Whiterock said that Russia had never promised to respect Ukraine's territory. You would have to ask him why he made such a bizarre claim. Russia promised to and did respect Ukraine's territory for over 20 years until Ukraine's government was overthrown.

Ukraine was never going to be allowed to "align" West in the way that you understand alignment. That is to say, they were never going to be allowed to join NATO or form any de facto military alliance with the West. This should come as no surprise since all parties agreed to it when Ukraine declared independence from the Soviet Union. In terms of economic alignment, Putin and Yanukovych supported Ukraine's developing ties with both Russia and the West. The EU took an either/or position and refused to negotiate any further.

---

No, they weren't. They helped the Kuchma regime execute journalists digging into corruption and back room deals with Russia, thwarted EU deals using natural gas disputes including a debt trap in the middle of winter, tried to assassinate Viktor Yushenko, gave Yanukovych the goods on Yulia Tymoshenko so he could imprison his political opponent, and stole assets in Eastern Ukraine without redress. And that's not even the juiciest stuff they did to give Putin's siloviki control of industrial assets or the subversion that led to troops in Crimea, the Donbas and that war.

The hardline the EU took was on corruption because everyone knew what was going on, and is why the Russians couldn't let it go. Putin doesn't have a Billion dollar compound on the Black Sea just a couple hundred miles from Crimea because he got a raise in his government salary.

---

Much of that information is dubious at best, but it doesn't really matter. Your claim is belied by one simple fact -- Ukraine is vastly more corrupt since it cut ties with Russia and the new, pro-Western government took control.

Yanukovych didn't delay the EU deal because Putin has a mansion on the Black Sea. He delayed it because it was a terrible deal, which not only Ukrainians but many sympathetic observers in the West found distasteful, and the EU was refusing to negotiate.

---

You need to check into the Yanukovych papers. I mean his former mansion is literally a museum and monument to his opulence and corruption.

---

Well that is the whole point right....

Ukraine is highly corrupt place and has been so since its beginning.

Not matter if its run by Yanukovych or Zelensky

Its like Mexico....its a totally corrupt political system.

No matter if that system is pro-Brussels or pro-Moscow

so....you're saying there are a lot of corrupt nations out there. Does that mean we should never have any kind of relationship with them?

whiterock said:

---

so....you're saying there are a lot of corrupt nations out there. Does that mean we should never have any kind of relationship with them?

---

If that relationship means sending them billions in high tech weaponry and American tax payer cash....YES


"Hey lets send these super corrupt slavic knuckleheads billions in tax payer money and super dangerous weapons" -DC

Redbrickbear said:

---

whiterock said:

---

so....you're saying there are a lot of corrupt nations out there. Does that mean we should never have any kind of relationship with them?

---

If that relationship means sending them billions in high tech weaponry and American tax payer cash....YES


"Hey lets send these super corrupt slavic knuckleheads billions in tax payer money and super dangerous weapons" -DC

---

Well, for starters, we haven't sent them any "super dangerous" weapons. Actually, the opposite. Most of what we've sent them actually saved us the money we'd have otherwise spent to warehouse or destroy.

We as a nation have fortunately been very pragmatic about our alliances over the centuries. We sent an awful lot of money to corrupt (and despotic) slavic knuckleheads in WWII and it was money well spent = saved American lives on the western front. That's the way these things work. You give aid to buy loyalty to do things that need doing. We've had few allies who have been more loyal and more capable than Israel.

whiterock said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

---

whiterock said:

---

so....you're saying there are a lot of corrupt nations out there. Does that mean we should never have any kind of relationship with them?

---

If that relationship means sending them billions in high tech weaponry and American tax payer cash....YES


"Hey lets send these super corrupt slavic knuckleheads billions in tax payer money and super dangerous weapons" -DC

---

We sent an awful lot of money to corrupt (and despotic) slavic knuckleheads in WWII and it was money well spent = saved American lives on the western front.

---

Its always Hitler and WWII huh?

The ultimate trump card for why we need to spend billions on wars of choice

(even though WWII was the ultimate non-war of choice for the USA)

Sam Lowry said:

---

ATL Bear said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

ATL Bear said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

ATL Bear said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

whiterock said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

whiterock said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

whiterock said:

---

Bear8084 said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

This is exactly the point -- we're not just trying to deny Russia control of Ukraine. We are trying to control it.

NATO's defeat will be bad for the US in many ways, but at least it will dispel this miasma of lies that the West has generated around Ukraine. For that we can all be grateful.

---

---

Words, not armies, start wars.
It's always Nato's fault when Russia acts badly.
A Ukrainian defeat is bad, but Ukrainian surrender to Russia without a fight is good.
Ukraine defending itself is destabilizing; Russia invading and destroying Ukraine block by block is good.
Europe is safer when Russian armies are stationed in Lviv rather than Rostov.
Europe is safer when Russian navies are stationed in Sebastopol rather than Novorossiysk.

---

And in Whiterock's world:

NATO is in mortal jeopardy without a Ukrainian buffer zone.
Therefore NATO must eliminate the buffer zone by absorbing Ukraine.

---

Strawman all day, every day, fortified with recto-cranial inversion.

Nato is not in mortal jeopardy over Russian control of Ukraine; Nato is in greater jeopardy than it would be with an independent Ukraine. No sensible power would stand by and let that happen without a response. The response Nato has taken has been overly cautious.

Nato did not invade Ukraine to absorb it.
Nato did not invite Ukraine to join before Russia invaded.
Ukraine had not even applied for membership before Russia invaded.
Ukraine does not have the votes to join Nato.
because Ukraine does not qualify for membership in Nato = territorial disputes.

Russia knows this. All it has to do is hold on to Donbas and Ukraine cannot join Nato (unless Ukraine gives up its claims to the region).

Russian invasion of Ukraine eliminated a buffer zone which was in no danger of being eliminated from the West.

Russia caused this crisis, not Nato......

---

Ukraine was already a gun pointed at Russia. Maybe the trigger hadn't been pulled, but we'd made our intentions clear.

You're right about one thing, though. No sensible power would have stood by and let it happen.

---

If one is convinced Ukraine could never under any circumstances defeat Russia (a centerpiece of the isolationist argument against support for Ukraine), how could one simultaneously make the case that Ukraine was a "gun pointed at Russia?"

Nato refusal to promise not to admit Ukraine is not "a gun pointed at Russia." Ukraine joining the EU was not a gun pointed at Russia. Generally speaking, it's sound policy to publicly take options off the table in foreign relations. Make everyone account for every potentiality. But in this specific case, Ukraine, Russian seizure of Crimea checkmated Nato membership for Ukraine, as it was a fairly obvious case of territorial dispute ergo a bar to Ukrainian membership. Ukraine would never have had the votes to enter. Probably still doesn't. Russia knows that full well.

Notably, Russia has never promised not to "admit" Ukraine back into Russian alliance or polity, nor to respect the territorial integrity of Ukraine in any way. Quite the opposite on the latter.

No sensible power will stand by and allow its primary adversary to advance armies 500mi into the buffer zone without taking some kind of action.

---

Obviously Russia has promised to respect the territorial integrity of Ukraine. That's what the Budapest Memorandum was all about.

The answer to your question is in your last paragraph. No sensible power will stand by and allow its primary adversary (in this case the United States) to advance armies 500 miles into the buffer zone without taking some kind of action. It was the United States that was determined to undo Ukraine's policy of neutrality. We hand-picked their government officials and indoctrinated them with anti-Russian propaganda. We reserved the right to place nuclear-capable missiles there. We built and trained an army to serve our purposes there, including regime change in Russia. The push for NATO membership was certainly a sign of our intentions, but the threat was growing steadily with or without that formality.

---

How can you bring up the Budapest Memorandum and ignore everything Russia did for a decade prior to EuroMaiden? They were NEVER going to let Ukraine align West. Their invasion was the culmination of almost 30 years of trying to hold Ukraine hostage to their influence.

---

I brought up the Budapest Memorandum because Whiterock said that Russia had never promised to respect Ukraine's territory. You would have to ask him why he made such a bizarre claim. Russia promised to and did respect Ukraine's territory for over 20 years until Ukraine's government was overthrown.

Ukraine was never going to be allowed to "align" West in the way that you understand alignment. That is to say, they were never going to be allowed to join NATO or form any de facto military alliance with the West. This should come as no surprise since all parties agreed to it when Ukraine declared independence from the Soviet Union. In terms of economic alignment, Putin and Yanukovych supported Ukraine's developing ties with both Russia and the West. The EU took an either/or position and refused to negotiate any further.

---

No, they weren't. They helped the Kuchma regime execute journalists digging into corruption and back room deals with Russia, thwarted EU deals using natural gas disputes including a debt trap in the middle of winter, tried to assassinate Viktor Yushenko, gave Yanukovych the goods on Yulia Tymoshenko so he could imprison his political opponent, and stole assets in Eastern Ukraine without redress. And that's not even the juiciest stuff they did to give Putin's siloviki control of industrial assets or the subversion that led to troops in Crimea, the Donbas and that war.

The hardline the EU took was on corruption because everyone knew what was going on, and is why the Russians couldn't let it go. Putin doesn't have a Billion dollar compound on the Black Sea just a couple hundred miles from Crimea because he got a raise in his government salary.

---

Much of that information is dubious at best, but it doesn't really matter. Your claim is belied by one simple fact -- Ukraine is vastly more corrupt since it cut ties with Russia and the new, pro-Western government took control.

Yanukovych didn't delay the EU deal because Putin has a mansion on the Black Sea. He delayed it because it was a terrible deal, which not only Ukrainians but many sympathetic observers in the West found distasteful, and the EU was refusing to negotiate.

---

Putin has been scuttling the deal since Kuchma.

And you couldn't be more wrong about Ukraine's corruption. You need to check into the Yanukovych papers. I mean his former mansion is literally a museum and monument to his opulence and corruption.

---

The most cited index, Transparency International, rates corruption on a scale of 0 to 100, with 0 being the least corrupt and 100 the most corrupt. Ukraine's all-time low score was 15 under Kuchma in 2000. It reached an all-time high of 36 last year.

If the EU took a hard line on corruption, they'd never give Ukraine the time of day.

---

The CPI actually operates in the other direction. Lowest most corrupt and highest the least. I guess you answered your own question by confirming what I said.

BTW, Russia has consistently scored lower than Ukraine the past decade. They're in the 20's lately. And again lower is bad, higher is good.

ATL Bear said:

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Sam Lowry said:

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ATL Bear said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

ATL Bear said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

ATL Bear said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

whiterock said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

whiterock said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

whiterock said:

---

Bear8084 said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

This is exactly the point -- we're not just trying to deny Russia control of Ukraine. We are trying to control it.

NATO's defeat will be bad for the US in many ways, but at least it will dispel this miasma of lies that the West has generated around Ukraine. For that we can all be grateful.

---

---

Words, not armies, start wars.
It's always Nato's fault when Russia acts badly.
A Ukrainian defeat is bad, but Ukrainian surrender to Russia without a fight is good.
Ukraine defending itself is destabilizing; Russia invading and destroying Ukraine block by block is good.
Europe is safer when Russian armies are stationed in Lviv rather than Rostov.
Europe is safer when Russian navies are stationed in Sebastopol rather than Novorossiysk.

---

And in Whiterock's world:

NATO is in mortal jeopardy without a Ukrainian buffer zone.
Therefore NATO must eliminate the buffer zone by absorbing Ukraine.

---

Strawman all day, every day, fortified with recto-cranial inversion.

Nato is not in mortal jeopardy over Russian control of Ukraine; Nato is in greater jeopardy than it would be with an independent Ukraine. No sensible power would stand by and let that happen without a response. The response Nato has taken has been overly cautious.

Nato did not invade Ukraine to absorb it.
Nato did not invite Ukraine to join before Russia invaded.
Ukraine had not even applied for membership before Russia invaded.
Ukraine does not have the votes to join Nato.
because Ukraine does not qualify for membership in Nato = territorial disputes.

Russia knows this. All it has to do is hold on to Donbas and Ukraine cannot join Nato (unless Ukraine gives up its claims to the region).

Russian invasion of Ukraine eliminated a buffer zone which was in no danger of being eliminated from the West.

Russia caused this crisis, not Nato......

---

Ukraine was already a gun pointed at Russia. Maybe the trigger hadn't been pulled, but we'd made our intentions clear.

You're right about one thing, though. No sensible power would have stood by and let it happen.

---

If one is convinced Ukraine could never under any circumstances defeat Russia (a centerpiece of the isolationist argument against support for Ukraine), how could one simultaneously make the case that Ukraine was a "gun pointed at Russia?"

Nato refusal to promise not to admit Ukraine is not "a gun pointed at Russia." Ukraine joining the EU was not a gun pointed at Russia. Generally speaking, it's sound policy to publicly take options off the table in foreign relations. Make everyone account for every potentiality. But in this specific case, Ukraine, Russian seizure of Crimea checkmated Nato membership for Ukraine, as it was a fairly obvious case of territorial dispute ergo a bar to Ukrainian membership. Ukraine would never have had the votes to enter. Probably still doesn't. Russia knows that full well.

Notably, Russia has never promised not to "admit" Ukraine back into Russian alliance or polity, nor to respect the territorial integrity of Ukraine in any way. Quite the opposite on the latter.

No sensible power will stand by and allow its primary adversary to advance armies 500mi into the buffer zone without taking some kind of action.

---

Obviously Russia has promised to respect the territorial integrity of Ukraine. That's what the Budapest Memorandum was all about.

The answer to your question is in your last paragraph. No sensible power will stand by and allow its primary adversary (in this case the United States) to advance armies 500 miles into the buffer zone without taking some kind of action. It was the United States that was determined to undo Ukraine's policy of neutrality. We hand-picked their government officials and indoctrinated them with anti-Russian propaganda. We reserved the right to place nuclear-capable missiles there. We built and trained an army to serve our purposes there, including regime change in Russia. The push for NATO membership was certainly a sign of our intentions, but the threat was growing steadily with or without that formality.

---

How can you bring up the Budapest Memorandum and ignore everything Russia did for a decade prior to EuroMaiden? They were NEVER going to let Ukraine align West. Their invasion was the culmination of almost 30 years of trying to hold Ukraine hostage to their influence.

---

I brought up the Budapest Memorandum because Whiterock said that Russia had never promised to respect Ukraine's territory. You would have to ask him why he made such a bizarre claim. Russia promised to and did respect Ukraine's territory for over 20 years until Ukraine's government was overthrown.

Ukraine was never going to be allowed to "align" West in the way that you understand alignment. That is to say, they were never going to be allowed to join NATO or form any de facto military alliance with the West. This should come as no surprise since all parties agreed to it when Ukraine declared independence from the Soviet Union. In terms of economic alignment, Putin and Yanukovych supported Ukraine's developing ties with both Russia and the West. The EU took an either/or position and refused to negotiate any further.

---

No, they weren't. They helped the Kuchma regime execute journalists digging into corruption and back room deals with Russia, thwarted EU deals using natural gas disputes including a debt trap in the middle of winter, tried to assassinate Viktor Yushenko, gave Yanukovych the goods on Yulia Tymoshenko so he could imprison his political opponent, and stole assets in Eastern Ukraine without redress. And that's not even the juiciest stuff they did to give Putin's siloviki control of industrial assets or the subversion that led to troops in Crimea, the Donbas and that war.

The hardline the EU took was on corruption because everyone knew what was going on, and is why the Russians couldn't let it go. Putin doesn't have a Billion dollar compound on the Black Sea just a couple hundred miles from Crimea because he got a raise in his government salary.

---

Much of that information is dubious at best, but it doesn't really matter. Your claim is belied by one simple fact -- Ukraine is vastly more corrupt since it cut ties with Russia and the new, pro-Western government took control.

Yanukovych didn't delay the EU deal because Putin has a mansion on the Black Sea. He delayed it because it was a terrible deal, which not only Ukrainians but many sympathetic observers in the West found distasteful, and the EU was refusing to negotiate.

---

Putin has been scuttling the deal since Kuchma.

And you couldn't be more wrong about Ukraine's corruption. You need to check into the Yanukovych papers. I mean his former mansion is literally a museum and monument to his opulence and corruption.

---

The most cited index, Transparency International, rates corruption on a scale of 0 to 100, with 0 being the least corrupt and 100 the most corrupt. Ukraine's all-time low score was 15 under Kuchma in 2000. It reached an all-time high of 36 last year.

If the EU took a hard line on corruption, they'd never give Ukraine the time of day.

---

The CPI actually operates in the other direction. Lowest most corrupt and highest the least. I guess you answered your own question by confirming what I said.

BTW, Russia has consistently scored lower than Ukraine the past decade. They're in the 20's lately. And again lower is bad, higher is good.

---

Ah well, color me naive. Should have known the World Bank getting it right was too good to be true.

whiterock said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

ATL Bear said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

whiterock said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

whiterock said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

whiterock said:

---

Bear8084 said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

This is exactly the point -- we're not just trying to deny Russia control of Ukraine. We are trying to control it.

NATO's defeat will be bad for the US in many ways, but at least it will dispel this miasma of lies that the West has generated around Ukraine. For that we can all be grateful.

---

---

Words, not armies, start wars.
It's always Nato's fault when Russia acts badly.
A Ukrainian defeat is bad, but Ukrainian surrender to Russia without a fight is good.
Ukraine defending itself is destabilizing; Russia invading and destroying Ukraine block by block is good.
Europe is safer when Russian armies are stationed in Lviv rather than Rostov.
Europe is safer when Russian navies are stationed in Sebastopol rather than Novorossiysk.

---

And in Whiterock's world:

NATO is in mortal jeopardy without a Ukrainian buffer zone.
Therefore NATO must eliminate the buffer zone by absorbing Ukraine.

---

Strawman all day, every day, fortified with recto-cranial inversion.

Nato is not in mortal jeopardy over Russian control of Ukraine; Nato is in greater jeopardy than it would be with an independent Ukraine. No sensible power would stand by and let that happen without a response. The response Nato has taken has been overly cautious.

Nato did not invade Ukraine to absorb it.
Nato did not invite Ukraine to join before Russia invaded.
Ukraine had not even applied for membership before Russia invaded.
Ukraine does not have the votes to join Nato.
because Ukraine does not qualify for membership in Nato = territorial disputes.

Russia knows this. All it has to do is hold on to Donbas and Ukraine cannot join Nato (unless Ukraine gives up its claims to the region).

Russian invasion of Ukraine eliminated a buffer zone which was in no danger of being eliminated from the West.

Russia caused this crisis, not Nato......

---

Ukraine was already a gun pointed at Russia. Maybe the trigger hadn't been pulled, but we'd made our intentions clear.

You're right about one thing, though. No sensible power would have stood by and let it happen.

---

If one is convinced Ukraine could never under any circumstances defeat Russia (a centerpiece of the isolationist argument against support for Ukraine), how could one simultaneously make the case that Ukraine was a "gun pointed at Russia?"

Nato refusal to promise not to admit Ukraine is not "a gun pointed at Russia." Ukraine joining the EU was not a gun pointed at Russia. Generally speaking, it's sound policy to publicly take options off the table in foreign relations. Make everyone account for every potentiality. But in this specific case, Ukraine, Russian seizure of Crimea checkmated Nato membership for Ukraine, as it was a fairly obvious case of territorial dispute ergo a bar to Ukrainian membership. Ukraine would never have had the votes to enter. Probably still doesn't. Russia knows that full well.

Notably, Russia has never promised not to "admit" Ukraine back into Russian alliance or polity, nor to respect the territorial integrity of Ukraine in any way. Quite the opposite on the latter.

No sensible power will stand by and allow its primary adversary to advance armies 500mi into the buffer zone without taking some kind of action.

---

Obviously Russia has promised to respect the territorial integrity of Ukraine. That's what the Budapest Memorandum was all about.

The answer to your question is in your last paragraph. No sensible power will stand by and allow its primary adversary (in this case the United States) to advance armies 500 miles into the buffer zone without taking some kind of action. It was the United States that was determined to undo Ukraine's policy of neutrality. We hand-picked their government officials and indoctrinated them with anti-Russian propaganda. We reserved the right to place nuclear-capable missiles there. We built and trained an army to serve our purposes there, including regime change in Russia. The push for NATO membership was certainly a sign of our intentions, but the threat was growing steadily with or without that formality.

---

How can you bring up the Budapest Memorandum and ignore everything Russia did for a decade prior to EuroMaiden? They were NEVER going to let Ukraine align West. Their invasion was the culmination of almost 30 years of trying to hold Ukraine hostage to their influence.

---

I brought up the Budapest Memorandum because Whiterock said that Russia had never promised to respect Ukraine's territory. You would have to ask him why he made such a bizarre claim. Russia promised to and did respect Ukraine's territory for over 20 years until Ukraine's government was overthrown.

Ukraine was never going to be allowed to "align" West in the way that you understand alignment. That is to say, they were never going to be allowed to join NATO or form any de facto military alliance with the West. This should come as no surprise since all parties agreed to it when Ukraine declared independence from the Soviet Union. In terms of economic alignment, Putin and Yanukovych supported Ukraine's developing ties with both Russia and the West. The EU took an either/or position and refused to negotiate any further.

---

Still making stuff up.....

---

Oh, I know you are...you've complained bitterly about the "dribble/drabble" policy for a year and a half, and now you've decided it was the master plan all along. That's called making it up as you go.

ATL Bear said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

ATL Bear said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

ATL Bear said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

ATL Bear said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

whiterock said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

whiterock said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

whiterock said:

---

Bear8084 said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

This is exactly the point -- we're not just trying to deny Russia control of Ukraine. We are trying to control it.

NATO's defeat will be bad for the US in many ways, but at least it will dispel this miasma of lies that the West has generated around Ukraine. For that we can all be grateful.

---

---

Words, not armies, start wars.
It's always Nato's fault when Russia acts badly.
A Ukrainian defeat is bad, but Ukrainian surrender to Russia without a fight is good.
Ukraine defending itself is destabilizing; Russia invading and destroying Ukraine block by block is good.
Europe is safer when Russian armies are stationed in Lviv rather than Rostov.
Europe is safer when Russian navies are stationed in Sebastopol rather than Novorossiysk.

---

And in Whiterock's world:

NATO is in mortal jeopardy without a Ukrainian buffer zone.
Therefore NATO must eliminate the buffer zone by absorbing Ukraine.

---

Strawman all day, every day, fortified with recto-cranial inversion.

Nato is not in mortal jeopardy over Russian control of Ukraine; Nato is in greater jeopardy than it would be with an independent Ukraine. No sensible power would stand by and let that happen without a response. The response Nato has taken has been overly cautious.

Nato did not invade Ukraine to absorb it.
Nato did not invite Ukraine to join before Russia invaded.
Ukraine had not even applied for membership before Russia invaded.
Ukraine does not have the votes to join Nato.
because Ukraine does not qualify for membership in Nato = territorial disputes.

Russia knows this. All it has to do is hold on to Donbas and Ukraine cannot join Nato (unless Ukraine gives up its claims to the region).

Russian invasion of Ukraine eliminated a buffer zone which was in no danger of being eliminated from the West.

Russia caused this crisis, not Nato......

---

Ukraine was already a gun pointed at Russia. Maybe the trigger hadn't been pulled, but we'd made our intentions clear.

You're right about one thing, though. No sensible power would have stood by and let it happen.

---

If one is convinced Ukraine could never under any circumstances defeat Russia (a centerpiece of the isolationist argument against support for Ukraine), how could one simultaneously make the case that Ukraine was a "gun pointed at Russia?"

Nato refusal to promise not to admit Ukraine is not "a gun pointed at Russia." Ukraine joining the EU was not a gun pointed at Russia. Generally speaking, it's sound policy to publicly take options off the table in foreign relations. Make everyone account for every potentiality. But in this specific case, Ukraine, Russian seizure of Crimea checkmated Nato membership for Ukraine, as it was a fairly obvious case of territorial dispute ergo a bar to Ukrainian membership. Ukraine would never have had the votes to enter. Probably still doesn't. Russia knows that full well.

Notably, Russia has never promised not to "admit" Ukraine back into Russian alliance or polity, nor to respect the territorial integrity of Ukraine in any way. Quite the opposite on the latter.

No sensible power will stand by and allow its primary adversary to advance armies 500mi into the buffer zone without taking some kind of action.

---

Obviously Russia has promised to respect the territorial integrity of Ukraine. That's what the Budapest Memorandum was all about.

The answer to your question is in your last paragraph. No sensible power will stand by and allow its primary adversary (in this case the United States) to advance armies 500 miles into the buffer zone without taking some kind of action. It was the United States that was determined to undo Ukraine's policy of neutrality. We hand-picked their government officials and indoctrinated them with anti-Russian propaganda. We reserved the right to place nuclear-capable missiles there. We built and trained an army to serve our purposes there, including regime change in Russia. The push for NATO membership was certainly a sign of our intentions, but the threat was growing steadily with or without that formality.

---

How can you bring up the Budapest Memorandum and ignore everything Russia did for a decade prior to EuroMaiden? They were NEVER going to let Ukraine align West. Their invasion was the culmination of almost 30 years of trying to hold Ukraine hostage to their influence.

---

I brought up the Budapest Memorandum because Whiterock said that Russia had never promised to respect Ukraine's territory. You would have to ask him why he made such a bizarre claim. Russia promised to and did respect Ukraine's territory for over 20 years until Ukraine's government was overthrown.

Ukraine was never going to be allowed to "align" West in the way that you understand alignment. That is to say, they were never going to be allowed to join NATO or form any de facto military alliance with the West. This should come as no surprise since all parties agreed to it when Ukraine declared independence from the Soviet Union. In terms of economic alignment, Putin and Yanukovych supported Ukraine's developing ties with both Russia and the West. The EU took an either/or position and refused to negotiate any further.

---

No, they weren't. They helped the Kuchma regime execute journalists digging into corruption and back room deals with Russia, thwarted EU deals using natural gas disputes including a debt trap in the middle of winter, tried to assassinate Viktor Yushenko, gave Yanukovych the goods on Yulia Tymoshenko so he could imprison his political opponent, and stole assets in Eastern Ukraine without redress. And that's not even the juiciest stuff they did to give Putin's siloviki control of industrial assets or the subversion that led to troops in Crimea, the Donbas and that war.

The hardline the EU took was on corruption because everyone knew what was going on, and is why the Russians couldn't let it go. Putin doesn't have a Billion dollar compound on the Black Sea just a couple hundred miles from Crimea because he got a raise in his government salary.

---

Much of that information is dubious at best, but it doesn't really matter. Your claim is belied by one simple fact -- Ukraine is vastly more corrupt since it cut ties with Russia and the new, pro-Western government took control.

Yanukovych didn't delay the EU deal because Putin has a mansion on the Black Sea. He delayed it because it was a terrible deal, which not only Ukrainians but many sympathetic observers in the West found distasteful, and the EU was refusing to negotiate.

---

Putin has been scuttling the deal since Kuchma.

And you couldn't be more wrong about Ukraine's corruption. You need to check into the Yanukovych papers. I mean his former mansion is literally a museum and monument to his opulence and corruption.

---

The most cited index, Transparency International, rates corruption on a scale of 0 to 100, with 0 being the least corrupt and 100 the most corrupt. Ukraine's all-time low score was 15 under Kuchma in 2000. It reached an all-time high of 36 last year.

If the EU took a hard line on corruption, they'd never give Ukraine the time of day.

---

BTW, Russia has consistently scored lower than Ukraine the past decade. They're in the 20's lately. And again lower is bad, higher is good.

---

And no one has ever said Russia was anything more than a very corrupt country ruled by an oligarchy in Moscow (with a lost of rusting out ex-Soviet cities that make Detroit look like Miami)

Still does no good to compared Ukraine to Russia

It's like comparing one crappy corrupt African nation riddled with aids to another slightly less corrupt slightly less aids infected African nation

They all suck

ATL Bear said:

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Redbrickbear said:

---

ATL Bear said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

ATL Bear said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

ATL Bear said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

ATL Bear said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

whiterock said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

whiterock said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

whiterock said:

---

Bear8084 said:

---

Sam Lowry said:

---

This is exactly the point -- we're not just trying to deny Russia control of Ukraine. We are trying to control it.

NATO's defeat will be bad for the US in many ways, but at least it will dispel this miasma of lies that the West has generated around Ukraine. For that we can all be grateful.

---

---

Words, not armies, start wars.
It's always Nato's fault when Russia acts badly.
A Ukrainian defeat is bad, but Ukrainian surrender to Russia without a fight is good.
Ukraine defending itself is destabilizing; Russia invading and destroying Ukraine block by block is good.
Europe is safer when Russian armies are stationed in Lviv rather than Rostov.
Europe is safer when Russian navies are stationed in Sebastopol rather than Novorossiysk.

---

And in Whiterock's world:

NATO is in mortal jeopardy without a Ukrainian buffer zone.
Therefore NATO must eliminate the buffer zone by absorbing Ukraine.

---

Strawman all day, every day, fortified with recto-cranial inversion.

Nato is not in mortal jeopardy over Russian control of Ukraine; Nato is in greater jeopardy than it would be with an independent Ukraine. No sensible power would stand by and let that happen without a response. The response Nato has taken has been overly cautious.

Nato did not invade Ukraine to absorb it.
Nato did not invite Ukraine to join before Russia invaded.
Ukraine had not even applied for membership before Russia invaded.
Ukraine does not have the votes to join Nato.
because Ukraine does not qualify for membership in Nato = territorial disputes.

Russia knows this. All it has to do is hold on to Donbas and Ukraine cannot join Nato (unless Ukraine gives up its claims to the region).

Russian invasion of Ukraine eliminated a buffer zone which was in no danger of being eliminated from the West.

Russia caused this crisis, not Nato......

---

Ukraine was already a gun pointed at Russia. Maybe the trigger hadn't been pulled, but we'd made our intentions clear.

You're right about one thing, though. No sensible power would have stood by and let it happen.

---

If one is convinced Ukraine could never under any circumstances defeat Russia (a centerpiece of the isolationist argument against support for Ukraine), how could one simultaneously make the case that Ukraine was a "gun pointed at Russia?"

Nato refusal to promise not to admit Ukraine is not "a gun pointed at Russia." Ukraine joining the EU was not a gun pointed at Russia. Generally speaking, it's sound policy to publicly take options off the table in foreign relations. Make everyone account for every potentiality. But in this specific case, Ukraine, Russian seizure of Crimea checkmated Nato membership for Ukraine, as it was a fairly obvious case of territorial dispute ergo a bar to Ukrainian membership. Ukraine would never have had the votes to enter. Probably still doesn't. Russia knows that full well.

Notably, Russia has never promised not to "admit" Ukraine back into Russian alliance or polity, nor to respect the territorial integrity of Ukraine in any way. Quite the opposite on the latter.

No sensible power will stand by and allow its primary adversary to advance armies 500mi into the buffer zone without taking some kind of action.

---

Obviously Russia has promised to respect the territorial integrity of Ukraine. That's what the Budapest Memorandum was all about.

The answer to your question is in your last paragraph. No sensible power will stand by and allow its primary adversary (in this case the United States) to advance armies 500 miles into the buffer zone without taking some kind of action. It was the United States that was determined to undo Ukraine's policy of neutrality. We hand-picked their government officials and indoctrinated them with anti-Russian propaganda. We reserved the right to place nuclear-capable missiles there. We built and trained an army to serve our purposes there, including regime change in Russia. The push for NATO membership was certainly a sign of our intentions, but the threat was growing steadily with or without that formality.

---

How can you bring up the Budapest Memorandum and ignore everything Russia did for a decade prior to EuroMaiden? They were NEVER going to let Ukraine align West. Their invasion was the culmination of almost 30 years of trying to hold Ukraine hostage to their influence.

---

I brought up the Budapest Memorandum because Whiterock said that Russia had never promised to respect Ukraine's territory. You would have to ask him why he made such a bizarre claim. Russia promised to and did respect Ukraine's territory for over 20 years until Ukraine's government was overthrown.

Ukraine was never going to be allowed to "align" West in the way that you understand alignment. That is to say, they were never going to be allowed to join NATO or form any de facto military alliance with the West. This should come as no surprise since all parties agreed to it when Ukraine declared independence from the Soviet Union. In terms of economic alignment, Putin and Yanukovych supported Ukraine's developing ties with both Russia and the West. The EU took an either/or position and refused to negotiate any further.

---

No, they weren't. They helped the Kuchma regime execute journalists digging into corruption and back room deals with Russia, thwarted EU deals using natural gas disputes including a debt trap in the middle of winter, tried to assassinate Viktor Yushenko, gave Yanukovych the goods on Yulia Tymoshenko so he could imprison his political opponent, and stole assets in Eastern Ukraine without redress. And that's not even the juiciest stuff they did to give Putin's siloviki control of industrial assets or the subversion that led to troops in Crimea, the Donbas and that war.

The hardline the EU took was on corruption because everyone knew what was going on, and is why the Russians couldn't let it go. Putin doesn't have a Billion dollar compound on the Black Sea just a couple hundred miles from Crimea because he got a raise in his government salary.

---

Much of that information is dubious at best, but it doesn't really matter. Your claim is belied by one simple fact -- Ukraine is vastly more corrupt since it cut ties with Russia and the new, pro-Western government took control.

Yanukovych didn't delay the EU deal because Putin has a mansion on the Black Sea. He delayed it because it was a terrible deal, which not only Ukrainians but many sympathetic observers in the West found distasteful, and the EU was refusing to negotiate.

---

Putin has been scuttling the deal since Kuchma.

And you couldn't be more wrong about Ukraine's corruption. You need to check into the Yanukovych papers. I mean his former mansion is literally a museum and monument to his opulence and corruption.

---

The most cited index, Transparency International, rates corruption on a scale of 0 to 100, with 0 being the least corrupt and 100 the most corrupt. Ukraine's all-time low score was 15 under Kuchma in 2000. It reached an all-time high of 36 last year.

If the EU took a hard line on corruption, they'd never give Ukraine the time of day.

---

BTW, Russia has consistently scored lower than Ukraine the past decade. They're in the 20's lately. And again lower is bad, higher is good.

---

And no one has ever said Russia was anything more than a very corrupt country ruled by an oligarchy in Moscow (with a lost of rusting out ex-Soviet cities that make Detroit look like Miami)

Still does no good to compared Ukraine to Russia

It's like comparing one crappy corrupt African nation riddled with aids to another slightly less corrupt slightly less aids infected African nation

They all suck

---

What doesn't suck is the countries that successfully leave the Russian sphere of influence who improve drastically, including reducing corruption. Ukraine kept trying, but Russia kept pulling them back. They suck because of Russia's invisible hand.

---

Maybe

Romania, Bulgaria, Albania, and others still seem plenty corrupt long after leaving the Russian orbit

Either way…its not woth expensive and bloody proxy wars to try and reform poor Eastern European counties that offer little to the citizens of the United States

Redbrickbear said:

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whiterock said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

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whiterock said:

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so....you're saying there are a lot of corrupt nations out there. Does that mean we should never have any kind of relationship with them?

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If that relationship means sending them billions in high tech weaponry and American tax payer cash....YES


"Hey lets send these super corrupt slavic knuckleheads billions in tax payer money and super dangerous weapons" -DC

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We sent an awful lot of money to corrupt (and despotic) slavic knuckleheads in WWII and it was money well spent = saved American lives on the western front.

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Its always Hitler and WWII huh?
You made the comment. All I did was point out how silly it was.

The ultimate trump card for why we need to spend billions on wars of choice
Ukraine is not a war of choice for us. it was a war of choice for Russia. And once they started it, we responded logically - to counter it.

(even though WWII was the ultimate non-war of choice for the USA)
thanks for putting the exclamation point in - isolationism certainly didn't prevent it.

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Doesn't matter if your ally is a super corrupt knucklehead. Only matters if they are capable of helping you achieve your objectives. The principle of "gotta be smarter than the cow" applies - a good foreign policy is one that finds ways to put imperfect allies to good use. And giving arms/ammo to Ukraine to prevent Russia from invading to annex a quite large sovereign country adjacent to Nato's borders is, by definition, a sound way to defend against a clear threat to Nato. Even if Ukraine loses, bleeding Russia white along the way is sound policy, for a number of reasons.