sombear said:

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Redbrickbear said:

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sombear said:

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Redbrickbear said:

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sombear said:

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Into the West/free world orbit, mostly Europe. Nothing new there.

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Nothing new in theory

Something new in practice and something that was always going to lead to a major conflict with Moscow

Ukraine is not Cuba….its of major importance to Moscow and right on their door step with millions of ethnic Russians living inside its borders

10 years of bloody conflict later and hundreds of billions spent….and yet Ukraine is still not in NATO or in the EU

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You're making artificial distinctions and justifying Russian aggression based on those distinctions. So a border country, invade. A long swim or a quick flight/submarine trip, totally fine. And what about the Soviet's supporting communists in our own country? Totally cool?

.

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Every time the Soviets sponsored communists or Marxists in our back yard we strongly opposed it…with military force or coups often times

And we had every right to do so

Moscow has no business in our sphere of influence

And they wasted money and resources trying to do foolish things like that

In fact being overextend was a contributing factor in the collapse of the USSR

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When is the last time we invaded anyone at all in our "sphere of influence?"

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You can't be this naive about our own geo-political history can you?

The US has invaded all of its neighbors--Canada, Mexico, Cuba, Haiti, and Domincan Republic. https://t.co/VzVMGse8By

— American Exception (@Aaron_Good_) December 20, 2022

The U.S. invaded Granada in 1983 and Panama in 1990 and Haiti in 1994 (3 times we have invaded Haiti)

3 years after Biden called for regime change in Moscow, and after shelling out $180+ billion on Ukraine aid, which mostly went to US contractors, the Biden admin claims it never believed Ukrainian victory was possible, and didn’t even believe retaking lost territory was possible https://t.co/sjkCb9TZia pic.twitter.com/nUEC16ZigF

— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) January 20, 2025

Politicians have no difficulty spending our money on anything.

Doc Holliday said:

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whiterock said:

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Doc Holliday said:

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whiterock said:

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Doc Holliday said:

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whiterock said:

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Doc Holliday said:

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whiterock said:

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Doc Holliday said:

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whiterock said:

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Doc Holliday said:

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whiterock said:

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bad foreign policy decisions will not solve our fiscal problems. it will make them worse.
Nothing is more expensive than getting directly involved in a hot war.

Trump Reportedly Plans To Continue Aid To Ukraine But Will Raise NATO Spending To 5% https://t.co/0XiNQMQzGg

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) December 21, 2024

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Yeah but that's not what I'm saying. Elite corporate and banking interests are running the country much like oligarchs do in the east.
The difference is, we have a system where ordinary people can organize and speak and push back against oligarchy to elect a guy like Donald Trump. (a lot of people voted for Obama for the same (mistaken) reasons.)

We're prioritizing foreign policy over domestic and have been for quite some time. We'll spend trillions on war and allow the middle class to hollow out.
Well, sorta. Foreign policy on national security is not causing that. Foreign policy on trade is.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Surely that doesn't sit right with you guys?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Choose your poison carefully.

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I keep coming back to the same conclusion. If Russia is really that much of a threat then you already have justification to engage in a direct hot/nuclear war with Russia. Forgot Ukraine vs. Russia when you already have the justification for NATO/US vs. Russia.

Why not advocate for that? It seems worse to consistently have proxy wars and spats every few decades than to just wipe them off the map. Surely you want to see the absolute destruction of Russia right? Is Russia not a big enough threat to warrant US troops on the ground?

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you do not advocate for it because you have a willing and significantly capable proxy who will do it for you. Why risk our sons & daughters when someone else is desperate to do it themselves? Let your proxies harass and degrade your opponent, so that he is tired and spent when he approaches your fresh and fully stocked armies. Use your proxies to delay, distract, and give you time to get ready for the approaching challenge. And, every once in a while, the proxy wins.

I very much want the Putin regime to collapse. It is the proper outcome given the actions he has taken. It teaches lessons Russia very much needs to learn = it is not as big a bully as it imagines itself, and Nato has quite a bit more stomach for fighting that Russia can handle.

Redbrickbear said:

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trey3216 said:

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Redbrickbear said:

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whiterock said:

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Sam Lowry said:

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whiterock said:

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Redbrickbear said:

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whiterock said:

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

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Getting our NATO allies to meet their spending commitments or raise them slightly....and building bases inside current NATO territory is not "escalation"
It most certainly is.

Its building up a strong defense in our already established sphere of influence.
Mobilizing for war has many times in history been a cause of war.

Its also amazing how your side sees that as "escalation"
Because it is. Just like NOT putting bases in former WP countries was an effort NOT to escalate tensions.

But some how sponsoring coups in Russia's back yard or funding proxy wars against them using corrupt states we never had a relationship with is not escalation.....
We did not sponsor a coup. We supported a new government that came to power by constitutional processes.
Yes, sponsoring proxy wars is an escalation. Others do it to us. We respond accordingly, to include direct strikes against proxies, to include taking them out.

I am always stunned by neo-con/neo-liberal logic
because you do not understand the subject material very well

---

At every point, you excuse Russian escalation and scream that our prudent responses are unnecessarily provocative.

another fact inconvenient to your arguments: on the day Russia invaded it, Ukraine was less tied to the West, diplomatically, economically, and militarily, than was Sweden or Finland. The Finnish border is a mortar round away from St. Petersburg. So why did Russia instead invade Ukraine? Finland was once a part of Russia, too.

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Actually that fact is highly inconvenient to your argument. The Russians have always denied that they were trying to reconstitute their old borders. They didn't invade Ukraine because it was once Russian or because it was tied to the West. They invaded it because of the specific threat that it posed.

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They didn't invade Ukraine for gaining Nato Partner status in 1994. They invaded it for moving forward with EU membership, which "neutral" Finland and Sweden already had. So why invade Ukraine and not Finland?

(answer: Nato and EU issues had nothing to do with the invasion.)

Propagandists gonna propaganda......

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Finland does not contain the Russian Black Sea Naval base (Crimea) or contain millions of ethnic Russians...nor is it a window to the Black Sea and then the Mediterranean sea

(Finland is 85% Finn, 5% Swede, and only 2% Russian)

Nor did Finland birth the civilization we know as Russia.....Kievan Russ'- Eastern Orthodoxy-Ect.

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So you admit that Russia is Ukraine rather than Ukraine is Russia???

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Settlers from Kyiv founded Moscow

Both States claim historic links to the old Kieven Russ State

The point being that it's of immense importance to Moscow….far more than Finland ever was or could be

It's their Jamestown, Plymouth Rock, Valley forge, Gettysburg all rolled into one.

Extremely important for cultural-historic reasons
(Along with economic and strategic reasons)

They were always going to fight for it.

---

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

This war is just the latest iteration of Kiev vs Novgorod. It is not in Natos's interest to let the two become one.

whiterock said:

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Redbrickbear said:

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trey3216 said:

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Redbrickbear said:

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whiterock said:

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Sam Lowry said:

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whiterock said:

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Redbrickbear said:

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whiterock said:

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

---

Getting our NATO allies to meet their spending commitments or raise them slightly....and building bases inside current NATO territory is not "escalation"
It most certainly is.

Its building up a strong defense in our already established sphere of influence.
Mobilizing for war has many times in history been a cause of war.

Its also amazing how your side sees that as "escalation"
Because it is. Just like NOT putting bases in former WP countries was an effort NOT to escalate tensions.

But some how sponsoring coups in Russia's back yard or funding proxy wars against them using corrupt states we never had a relationship with is not escalation.....
We did not sponsor a coup. We supported a new government that came to power by constitutional processes.
Yes, sponsoring proxy wars is an escalation. Others do it to us. We respond accordingly, to include direct strikes against proxies, to include taking them out.

I am always stunned by neo-con/neo-liberal logic
because you do not understand the subject material very well

---

At every point, you excuse Russian escalation and scream that our prudent responses are unnecessarily provocative.

another fact inconvenient to your arguments: on the day Russia invaded it, Ukraine was less tied to the West, diplomatically, economically, and militarily, than was Sweden or Finland. The Finnish border is a mortar round away from St. Petersburg. So why did Russia instead invade Ukraine? Finland was once a part of Russia, too.

---

Actually that fact is highly inconvenient to your argument. The Russians have always denied that they were trying to reconstitute their old borders. They didn't invade Ukraine because it was once Russian or because it was tied to the West. They invaded it because of the specific threat that it posed.

---

They didn't invade Ukraine for gaining Nato Partner status in 1994. They invaded it for moving forward with EU membership, which "neutral" Finland and Sweden already had. So why invade Ukraine and not Finland?

(answer: Nato and EU issues had nothing to do with the invasion.)

Propagandists gonna propaganda......

---

Finland does not contain the Russian Black Sea Naval base (Crimea) or contain millions of ethnic Russians...nor is it a window to the Black Sea and then the Mediterranean sea

(Finland is 85% Finn, 5% Swede, and only 2% Russian)

Nor did Finland birth the civilization we know as Russia.....Kievan Russ'- Eastern Orthodoxy-Ect.

---

So you admit that Russia is Ukraine rather than Ukraine is Russia???

---

Settlers from Kyiv founded Moscow

Both States claim historic links to the old Kieven Russ State

The point being that it's of immense importance to Moscow….far more than Finland ever was or could be

It's their Jamestown, Plymouth Rock, Valley forge, Gettysburg all rolled into one.

Extremely important for cultural-historic reasons
(Along with economic and strategic reasons)

They were always going to fight for it.

---

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

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Of course not

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

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

Redbrickbear said:

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whiterock said:

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Redbrickbear said:

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trey3216 said:

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Redbrickbear said:

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whiterock said:

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Sam Lowry said:

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whiterock said:

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Redbrickbear said:

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whiterock said:

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

---

Getting our NATO allies to meet their spending commitments or raise them slightly....and building bases inside current NATO territory is not "escalation"
It most certainly is.

Its building up a strong defense in our already established sphere of influence.
Mobilizing for war has many times in history been a cause of war.

Its also amazing how your side sees that as "escalation"
Because it is. Just like NOT putting bases in former WP countries was an effort NOT to escalate tensions.

But some how sponsoring coups in Russia's back yard or funding proxy wars against them using corrupt states we never had a relationship with is not escalation.....
We did not sponsor a coup. We supported a new government that came to power by constitutional processes.
Yes, sponsoring proxy wars is an escalation. Others do it to us. We respond accordingly, to include direct strikes against proxies, to include taking them out.

I am always stunned by neo-con/neo-liberal logic
because you do not understand the subject material very well

---

At every point, you excuse Russian escalation and scream that our prudent responses are unnecessarily provocative.

another fact inconvenient to your arguments: on the day Russia invaded it, Ukraine was less tied to the West, diplomatically, economically, and militarily, than was Sweden or Finland. The Finnish border is a mortar round away from St. Petersburg. So why did Russia instead invade Ukraine? Finland was once a part of Russia, too.

---

Actually that fact is highly inconvenient to your argument. The Russians have always denied that they were trying to reconstitute their old borders. They didn't invade Ukraine because it was once Russian or because it was tied to the West. They invaded it because of the specific threat that it posed.

---

They didn't invade Ukraine for gaining Nato Partner status in 1994. They invaded it for moving forward with EU membership, which "neutral" Finland and Sweden already had. So why invade Ukraine and not Finland?

(answer: Nato and EU issues had nothing to do with the invasion.)

Propagandists gonna propaganda......

---

Finland does not contain the Russian Black Sea Naval base (Crimea) or contain millions of ethnic Russians...nor is it a window to the Black Sea and then the Mediterranean sea

(Finland is 85% Finn, 5% Swede, and only 2% Russian)

Nor did Finland birth the civilization we know as Russia.....Kievan Russ'- Eastern Orthodoxy-Ect.

---

So you admit that Russia is Ukraine rather than Ukraine is Russia???

---

Settlers from Kyiv founded Moscow

Both States claim historic links to the old Kieven Russ State

The point being that it's of immense importance to Moscow….far more than Finland ever was or could be

It's their Jamestown, Plymouth Rock, Valley forge, Gettysburg all rolled into one.

Extremely important for cultural-historic reasons
(Along with economic and strategic reasons)

They were always going to fight for it.

---

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

---

Of course not

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

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

---

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

What would you propose to do with the Kurds, the largest ethnic group in the world to not have its own state?

whiterock said:

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Redbrickbear said:

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whiterock said:

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Redbrickbear said:

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whiterock said:

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Sam Lowry said:

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whiterock said:

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Redbrickbear said:

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whiterock said:

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Doc Holliday said:

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whiterock said:

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

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

---

Getting our NATO allies to meet their spending commitments or raise them slightly....and building bases inside current NATO territory is not "escalation"
It most certainly is.

Its building up a strong defense in our already established sphere of influence.
Mobilizing for war has many times in history been a cause of war.

Its also amazing how your side sees that as "escalation"
Because it is. Just like NOT putting bases in former WP countries was an effort NOT to escalate tensions.

But some how sponsoring coups in Russia's back yard or funding proxy wars against them using corrupt states we never had a relationship with is not escalation.....
We did not sponsor a coup. We supported a new government that came to power by constitutional processes.
Yes, sponsoring proxy wars is an escalation. Others do it to us. We respond accordingly, to include direct strikes against proxies, to include taking them out.

I am always stunned by neo-con/neo-liberal logic
because you do not understand the subject material very well

---

At every point, you excuse Russian escalation and scream that our prudent responses are unnecessarily provocative.

another fact inconvenient to your arguments: on the day Russia invaded it, Ukraine was less tied to the West, diplomatically, economically, and militarily, than was Sweden or Finland. The Finnish border is a mortar round away from St. Petersburg. So why did Russia instead invade Ukraine? Finland was once a part of Russia, too.

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Actually that fact is highly inconvenient to your argument. The Russians have always denied that they were trying to reconstitute their old borders. They didn't invade Ukraine because it was once Russian or because it was tied to the West. They invaded it because of the specific threat that it posed.

---

They didn't invade Ukraine for gaining Nato Partner status in 1994. They invaded it for moving forward with EU membership, which "neutral" Finland and Sweden already had. So why invade Ukraine and not Finland?

(answer: Nato and EU issues had nothing to do with the invasion.)

Propagandists gonna propaganda......

---

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So Russia does have, by your own analysis, ample justification for intervening in, or outright owning Finland and Ukraine. And Finland actually poses a far greater geopolitical threat to Russia than Ukraine - its border is only 90mi from St Petersburg,

---

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The existence of an independent Finland is at least a comparable threat to Russia as is Ukraine, and in some ways moreso. Finland is also smaller by orders of magnitude. So why didn't they start there?

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Then why has Moscow not invaded Finland today?

They logged no complaint when Finland entered the EU two decades ago

And they offered up no opposition when Finland just joined NATO in 2023

whiterock said:

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Redbrickbear said:

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whiterock said:

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Redbrickbear said:

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trey3216 said:

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Redbrickbear said:

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whiterock said:

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Sam Lowry said:

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whiterock said:

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Redbrickbear said:

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whiterock said:

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

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Getting our NATO allies to meet their spending commitments or raise them slightly....and building bases inside current NATO territory is not "escalation"
It most certainly is.

Its building up a strong defense in our already established sphere of influence.
Mobilizing for war has many times in history been a cause of war.

Its also amazing how your side sees that as "escalation"
Because it is. Just like NOT putting bases in former WP countries was an effort NOT to escalate tensions.

But some how sponsoring coups in Russia's back yard or funding proxy wars against them using corrupt states we never had a relationship with is not escalation.....
We did not sponsor a coup. We supported a new government that came to power by constitutional processes.
Yes, sponsoring proxy wars is an escalation. Others do it to us. We respond accordingly, to include direct strikes against proxies, to include taking them out.

I am always stunned by neo-con/neo-liberal logic
because you do not understand the subject material very well

---

At every point, you excuse Russian escalation and scream that our prudent responses are unnecessarily provocative.

another fact inconvenient to your arguments: on the day Russia invaded it, Ukraine was less tied to the West, diplomatically, economically, and militarily, than was Sweden or Finland. The Finnish border is a mortar round away from St. Petersburg. So why did Russia instead invade Ukraine? Finland was once a part of Russia, too.

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Actually that fact is highly inconvenient to your argument. The Russians have always denied that they were trying to reconstitute their old borders. They didn't invade Ukraine because it was once Russian or because it was tied to the West. They invaded it because of the specific threat that it posed.

---

They didn't invade Ukraine for gaining Nato Partner status in 1994. They invaded it for moving forward with EU membership, which "neutral" Finland and Sweden already had. So why invade Ukraine and not Finland?

(answer: Nato and EU issues had nothing to do with the invasion.)

Propagandists gonna propaganda......

---

Finland does not contain the Russian Black Sea Naval base (Crimea) or contain millions of ethnic Russians...nor is it a window to the Black Sea and then the Mediterranean sea

(Finland is 85% Finn, 5% Swede, and only 2% Russian)

Nor did Finland birth the civilization we know as Russia.....Kievan Russ'- Eastern Orthodoxy-Ect.

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So you admit that Russia is Ukraine rather than Ukraine is Russia???

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Settlers from Kyiv founded Moscow

Both States claim historic links to the old Kieven Russ State

The point being that it's of immense importance to Moscow….far more than Finland ever was or could be

It's their Jamestown, Plymouth Rock, Valley forge, Gettysburg all rolled into one.

Extremely important for cultural-historic reasons
(Along with economic and strategic reasons)

They were always going to fight for it.

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

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Of course not

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

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

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

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So borders are to be static forever?

When has that ever happened in human history? unchangeable borders

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

Kosovo, S. Sudan, East Timor, etc

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

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

whiterock said:

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Sam Lowry said:

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whiterock said:

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Doc Holliday said:

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whiterock said:

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Doc Holliday said:

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whiterock said:

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Doc Holliday said:

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whiterock said:

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Doc Holliday said:

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whiterock said:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Surely that doesn't sit right with you guys?

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

Choose your poison carefully.

---

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

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

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

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Possible....but they have so far failed to take any of the areas in Ukraine were ethnic russians are not a sizable part of the population

Most likely they can not do it militarily

And they have only stated that they want to incorporate the Russian parts of the Donbas and Crimea

Maybe that would be a good starting point for negotiations?

A recognition that the ethnic Ukrainian parts of the country do not want to be part of the Russian Federation...and a recognition that the ethnic russian parts do

Sam Lowry said:

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whiterock said:

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Sam Lowry said:

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whiterock said:

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Redbrickbear said:

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whiterock said:

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Doc Holliday said:

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whiterock said:

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

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

---

Getting our NATO allies to meet their spending commitments or raise them slightly....and building bases inside current NATO territory is not "escalation"
It most certainly is.

Its building up a strong defense in our already established sphere of influence.
Mobilizing for war has many times in history been a cause of war.

Its also amazing how your side sees that as "escalation"
Because it is. Just like NOT putting bases in former WP countries was an effort NOT to escalate tensions.

But some how sponsoring coups in Russia's back yard or funding proxy wars against them using corrupt states we never had a relationship with is not escalation.....
We did not sponsor a coup. We supported a new government that came to power by constitutional processes.
Yes, sponsoring proxy wars is an escalation. Others do it to us. We respond accordingly, to include direct strikes against proxies, to include taking them out.

I am always stunned by neo-con/neo-liberal logic
because you do not understand the subject material very well

---

At every point, you excuse Russian escalation and scream that our prudent responses are unnecessarily provocative.

another fact inconvenient to your arguments: on the day Russia invaded it, Ukraine was less tied to the West, diplomatically, economically, and militarily, than was Sweden or Finland. The Finnish border is a mortar round away from St. Petersburg. So why did Russia instead invade Ukraine? Finland was once a part of Russia, too.

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Actually that fact is highly inconvenient to your argument. The Russians have always denied that they were trying to reconstitute their old borders. They didn't invade Ukraine because it was once Russian or because it was tied to the West. They invaded it because of the specific threat that it posed.

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LOL they're not denying they want their old treaty and polity borders back. They're stating it out loud!

They didn't invade Ukraine for gaining Nato Partner status in 1994. They invaded it for moving forward with EU membership, which "neutral" Finland and Sweden already had. So why invade Ukraine and not Finland?

(answer: Nato and EU issues had nothing to do with the invasion.)

Propagandists gonna propaganda......

---

They are stating no such thing. I've asked you and others to provide these statements many times, and no one has ever been able to do so. Nor did Russia invade Ukraine for pursuing EU membership.
I am not your news service. Educate yourself.

There are plenty of reasons not to invade Finland. First among them is that the West didn't choose Finland as the main platform for its regime change ambitions in Russia.
"regime change ambitions" prior to Russian invasion of Ukraine are a figment of your imagination

We didn't overthrow Finland's legitimate government.
Neither did we overthrow Ukraine's government.

We didn't make them the second largest military power in Europe.
And would not have done so if Russia hadn't invaded them.

We didn't cause Finland to be infested with neo-Nazi militias who persecuted the Russian population (which is a tiny population in Finland anyway).
Don't you have something other than Russian propaganda to play with?

We didn't sell Finland weapons to attack its own civilians.
We didn't do that with Ukraine, either, until after Russia invaded.

Added to which Finland has wretched terrain for an invading army, a mere handful of decent roads leading into Russia, and a people that, unlike the Ukrainians, would almost universally resent and resist such a move.
The Ukrainians have proven to be no slouch, fighting Russia to a similar kind of standstill (proportionally) that the Finns did in WWII.

About the only reason Russia would invade Finland is if you were right about their imperial ambitions.

You really have demonstrated my point rather well.
No, you have demonstrated Russian propaganda rather well.

---

It's gotta be hard living in a dream world. Come back to reality.

Redbrickbear said:

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ATL Bear said:

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Redbrickbear said:

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ATL Bear said:

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Redbrickbear said:

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Interesting that Biden pardoned his entire family back to January 2014, 1 month before the CIA toppled the Ukrainian government and began money laundering... pic.twitter.com/zTCTNq6fks

— Financelot (@FinanceLancelot) January 20, 2025

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The CIA toppling Ukraine has become like the J6 was an insurrection myth. Big on feeling, small on reality. I know why Sam buys into it. Not sure why others do.

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Sure the CIA had nothing to do with the coup in Kyiv

**eye roll**

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Yes, the CIA got much more involved once Russia invaded Crimea and Eastern Ukraine.

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Don't kid yourself

They were there long before that…lol

“We overthrew the government of Ukraine in 2014.

We helped and funded a coup of $5 billion that the CIA put in through USAID.” pic.twitter.com/dRugcBzYtg

— The_Real_Fly (@The_Real_Fly) June 1, 2024

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LOL not one of RFKJR's better takes. There are rather ironclad laws about using USAID for intel activities, for obvious reasons.

Using a USAID employee in a CIA operation requires approval of C/CIA (CIA Director). I.E. doesn't happen.

whiterock said:

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Redbrickbear said:

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whiterock said:

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Redbrickbear said:

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trey3216 said:

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Redbrickbear said:

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whiterock said:

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Sam Lowry said:

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whiterock said:

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Redbrickbear said:

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whiterock said:

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

---

Getting our NATO allies to meet their spending commitments or raise them slightly....and building bases inside current NATO territory is not "escalation"
It most certainly is.

Its building up a strong defense in our already established sphere of influence.
Mobilizing for war has many times in history been a cause of war.

Its also amazing how your side sees that as "escalation"
Because it is. Just like NOT putting bases in former WP countries was an effort NOT to escalate tensions.

But some how sponsoring coups in Russia's back yard or funding proxy wars against them using corrupt states we never had a relationship with is not escalation.....
We did not sponsor a coup. We supported a new government that came to power by constitutional processes.
Yes, sponsoring proxy wars is an escalation. Others do it to us. We respond accordingly, to include direct strikes against proxies, to include taking them out.

I am always stunned by neo-con/neo-liberal logic
because you do not understand the subject material very well

---

At every point, you excuse Russian escalation and scream that our prudent responses are unnecessarily provocative.

another fact inconvenient to your arguments: on the day Russia invaded it, Ukraine was less tied to the West, diplomatically, economically, and militarily, than was Sweden or Finland. The Finnish border is a mortar round away from St. Petersburg. So why did Russia instead invade Ukraine? Finland was once a part of Russia, too.

---

Actually that fact is highly inconvenient to your argument. The Russians have always denied that they were trying to reconstitute their old borders. They didn't invade Ukraine because it was once Russian or because it was tied to the West. They invaded it because of the specific threat that it posed.

---

They didn't invade Ukraine for gaining Nato Partner status in 1994. They invaded it for moving forward with EU membership, which "neutral" Finland and Sweden already had. So why invade Ukraine and not Finland?

(answer: Nato and EU issues had nothing to do with the invasion.)

Propagandists gonna propaganda......

---

Finland does not contain the Russian Black Sea Naval base (Crimea) or contain millions of ethnic Russians...nor is it a window to the Black Sea and then the Mediterranean sea

(Finland is 85% Finn, 5% Swede, and only 2% Russian)

Nor did Finland birth the civilization we know as Russia.....Kievan Russ'- Eastern Orthodoxy-Ect.

---

So you admit that Russia is Ukraine rather than Ukraine is Russia???

---

Settlers from Kyiv founded Moscow

Both States claim historic links to the old Kieven Russ State

The point being that it's of immense importance to Moscow….far more than Finland ever was or could be

It's their Jamestown, Plymouth Rock, Valley forge, Gettysburg all rolled into one.

Extremely important for cultural-historic reasons
(Along with economic and strategic reasons)

They were always going to fight for it.

---

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

---

Of course not

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

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

---

What would you propose to do with the Kurds, the largest ethnic group in the world to not have its own state?

---

The US should actually support them (non-militarily) in peacefully pushing for a Nation-State of their own

Just like what was proposed after WWI

If the million Christian people on East Timor deserve a State (and they do)....then yes I think the 30-40 million Kurds deserve a State.

And its the Turks and Iranians opposing it right now....swell folks that they are

whiterock said:

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Redbrickbear said:

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sombear said:

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Redbrickbear said:

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sombear said:

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I thought we had moved beyond Nuland but evidently not. Serious question for you. What exactly did Nuland say that bothers you, and what about that call bothers you and/or in any way suggests a coup? Not a link. I'm truly interested in your take on this.

---

Well Nuland admitted on tape that the U.S. spent billions on influencing the politics of Ukraine in the decade leaving up to the Maidan coup/protest of dignity in 2014

That is a fact….not an opinion

In other tapes we have her (and other leaders) discussing who they should install in power in Kyiv….including the famous "f-the EU" line

This would all be strong evidence that DC was involved deeply in regime change in Ukraine long before the current war broke out.

---

It was public knowledge we gave billions to Ukraine starting when they left the Soviets. We do that with all nascent democracies. What does that have to do with a "coup" two decades later?

---

Making the argument that DC spends billions of tax payer money buying influence around the world….does not mean Ukraine was not a different kind of animal

The DC foreign policy establishment decided without consulting the American people to try and pull a major border state of Moscow into the U.S. orbit

A policy that even long term DC experts like Kissinger said would be a disaster and a major mistake.

Did CIA or State Department officials direct the coup? Or did they simply come along side and take advantage of an organic revolution?

We won't know the truth until a few decades from now when the files get declassified

But we one day will find out the truth…it always comes out

---

Except Nato has never extended to Ukraine a formal offer of membership. The votes are no there to admit them.

Ukraine did not even request membership until after it was invaded by Russia.

Geez, dude. You are literally inventing boogeymen.

---

It like you don't understand that there of course are lots of factions at play

Some (mostly in DC) that want Ukraine in NATO.....and some (mostly in Europe) that oppose Ukraine in NATO

Biden literally said Ukraine should be in NATO

[Biden assures Zelenskiy that NATO membership in Ukraine's hands, Kyiv says]
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/ukrainian-president-zelenskiy-holding-talks-with-biden-adviser-says-2021-12-09/

And Major DC think tanks and Mainstream Media entities are literally posting articles saying that Ukraine should be incorporated into NATO

https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/ukrainealert/five-reasons-why-ukraine-should-be-invited-to-join-nato/

https://carnegieendowment.org/posts/2023/07/why-nato-should-accept-ukraine?lang=en

https://www.politico.eu/article/ukraine-nato-allies-georgia-russia-donald-trump-war-british-french/

https://www.aspistrategist.org.au/forget-nato-membership-for-ukraine-instead-trade-it-for-ukrainian-sovereignty/

whiterock said:

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Redbrickbear said:

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whiterock said:

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Redbrickbear said:

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sombear said:

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Redbrickbear said:

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sombear said:

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I thought we had moved beyond Nuland but evidently not. Serious question for you. What exactly did Nuland say that bothers you, and what about that call bothers you and/or in any way suggests a coup? Not a link. I'm truly interested in your take on this.

---

Well Nuland admitted on tape that the U.S. spent billions on influencing the politics of Ukraine in the decade leaving up to the Maidan coup/protest of dignity in 2014

That is a fact….not an opinion

In other tapes we have her (and other leaders) discussing who they should install in power in Kyiv….including the famous "f-the EU" line

This would all be strong evidence that DC was involved deeply in regime change in Ukraine long before the current war broke out.

---

It was public knowledge we gave billions to Ukraine starting when they left the Soviets. We do that with all nascent democracies. What does that have to do with a "coup" two decades later?

---

Making the argument that DC spends billions of tax payer money buying influence around the world….does not mean Ukraine was not a different kind of animal

The DC foreign policy establishment decided without consulting the American people to try and pull a major border state of Moscow into the U.S. orbit

A policy that even long term DC experts like Kissinger said would be a disaster and a major mistake.

Did CIA or State Department officials direct the coup? Or did they simply come along side and take advantage of an organic revolution?

We won't know the truth until a few decades from now when the files get declassified

But we one day will find out the truth…it always comes out

---

Except Nato has never extended to Ukraine a formal offer of membership. The votes are no there to admit them.

Ukraine did not even request membership until after it was invaded by Russia.

Geez, dude. You are literally inventing boogeymen.

---

It like you don't understand that there of course are lots of factions at play

Some (mostly in DC) that want Ukraine in NATO.....and some (mostly in Europe) that oppose Ukraine in NATO

Biden literally said Ukraine should be in NATO

[Biden assures Zelenskiy that NATO membership in Ukraine's hands, Kyiv says]
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/ukrainian-president-zelenskiy-holding-talks-with-biden-adviser-says-2021-12-09/

And Major DC think tanks and Mainstream Media entities are literally posting articles saying that Ukraine should be incorporated into NATO

https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/ukrainealert/five-reasons-why-ukraine-should-be-invited-to-join-nato/

https://carnegieendowment.org/posts/2023/07/why-nato-should-accept-ukraine?lang=en

https://www.politico.eu/article/ukraine-nato-allies-georgia-russia-donald-trump-war-british-french/

https://www.aspistrategist.org.au/forget-nato-membership-for-ukraine-instead-trade-it-for-ukrainian-sovereignty/

---

LOL repeat after me:
- Nato has not offered membership to Ukraine.
- Ukraine is not eligible for Nato membership at this time.
- Ukraine does not have the votes it needs to join Nato at this time.
- Ukraine did not even request Nato membership until AFTER it was invaded in 2022.

The facts are simply not with you, friend......

---

None of these facts have I disagreed with

Now repeat after me

-Factions in the US government do want NATO membership offered to Ukraine
-Factions in DC do think Ukraine should be eligible for NATO membership
-Factions in DC are putting pressure on European allies to vote for NATO membership (including attacking leaders like Victor Orban in Hungary and Robert Fico in Slovakia who oppose it)
-Factions in DC are PUBLICLY saying that Ukraine should be brought into NATO

This has been going on since Obama....

Its nothing knew....and no secret

Within the next 45 days I expect Trump is going to impose massive economic sanctions on Russia and then invite Putin to settle the war with the premise of keeping the territory his troops currently occupy and with the promise that Ukraine will never be part of NATO.

The Rambo tear echelon types will be 'outraged' but hundreds of thousands of lives will be saved.

Redbrickbear said:

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sombear said:

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Redbrickbear said:

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sombear said:

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Redbrickbear said:

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sombear said:

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Into the West/free world orbit, mostly Europe. Nothing new there.

---

Nothing new in theory

Something new in practice and something that was always going to lead to a major conflict with Moscow

Ukraine is not Cuba….its of major importance to Moscow and right on their door step with millions of ethnic Russians living inside its borders

10 years of bloody conflict later and hundreds of billions spent….and yet Ukraine is still not in NATO or in the EU

---

You're making artificial distinctions and justifying Russian aggression based on those distinctions. So a border country, invade. A long swim or a quick flight/submarine trip, totally fine. And what about the Soviet's supporting communists in our own country? Totally cool?

.

---

Every time the Soviets sponsored communists or Marxists in our back yard we strongly opposed it…with military force or coups often times

And we had every right to do so

Moscow has no business in our sphere of influence

And they wasted money and resources trying to do foolish things like that

In fact being overextend was a contributing factor in the collapse of the USSR

---

When is the last time we invaded anyone at all in our "sphere of influence?"

---

You can't be this naive about our own geo-political history can you?

The US has invaded all of its neighbors--Canada, Mexico, Cuba, Haiti, and Domincan Republic. https://t.co/VzVMGse8By

— American Exception (@Aaron_Good_) December 20, 2022

The U.S. invaded Granada in 1983 and Panama in 1990 and Haiti in 1994 (3 times we have invaded Haiti)

---

So your answer on invade with intent to take over is none.

And what you call an "invasion" last occurred 30 - 40 years ago.

And of course, Haiti followed a military coup where our (and many other countries) goal was to restore democracy, and we never actually had to truly invade because a deal was cut.

Panama was to enforce criminal warrants against MN, and we left after democratically elected president was reinstated.

Grenada was a ****show, probably the most controversial, but basically the entire Caribbean (among others) supported it. Again, it followed a coup. We left when the duly elected pres was in office.

Redbrickbear said:

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whiterock said:

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Sam Lowry said:

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whiterock said:

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Doc Holliday said:

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whiterock said:

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Doc Holliday said:

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whiterock said:

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Doc Holliday said:

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whiterock said:

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Doc Holliday said:

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whiterock said:

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

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

Surely that doesn't sit right with you guys?

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

---

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

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

Choose your poison carefully.

---

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

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

---

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

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Possible....but they have so far failed to take any of the areas in Ukraine were ethnic russians are not a sizable part of the population

Most likely they can not do it militarily

And they have only stated that they want to incorporate the Russian parts of the Donbas and Crimea

Maybe that would be a good starting point for negotiations?

A recognition that the ethnic Ukrainian parts of the country do not want to be part of the Russian Federation...and a recognition that the ethnic russian parts do

---

Many, if not most, of the areas in Ukraine where there are significant populations of ethnic Russians are that way because Russia intentionally and deliberately planted those people there in order to stoke the fires of division and separation. It's the same thing they've done on social media.

trey3216 said:

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Redbrickbear said:

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whiterock said:

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Sam Lowry said:

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whiterock said:

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Doc Holliday said:

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whiterock said:

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Doc Holliday said:

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whiterock said:

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Doc Holliday said:

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whiterock said:

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Doc Holliday said:

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whiterock said:

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

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

Surely that doesn't sit right with you guys?

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

---

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

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Choose your poison carefully.

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

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

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

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Possible....but they have so far failed to take any of the areas in Ukraine were ethnic russians are not a sizable part of the population

Most likely they can not do it militarily

And they have only stated that they want to incorporate the Russian parts of the Donbas and Crimea

Maybe that would be a good starting point for negotiations?

A recognition that the ethnic Ukrainian parts of the country do not want to be part of the Russian Federation...and a recognition that the ethnic russian parts do

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Many, if not most, of the areas in Ukraine where there are significant populations of ethnic Russians are that way because Russia intentionally and deliberately planted those people there in order to stoke the fires of division and separation. It's the same thing they've done on social media.

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There have been Russians there since the 1700s

Though of course Crimea used to be majority Muslim Tartar (they used it as a slave base for their raids into Ukraine and Russia.

[Before the first annexation by the Russian Empire in 1783, the peninsula's population was 95 percent Crimean Tatars. Nowadays, it is 13 percent and falling. Russians form the largest ethnic group in Crimea today ]

Donbas is a little different but was always a mixed population with Russians slowly becoming a majority

[In 1880, the demographics of Donbas were largely characterized by a mixed population of Ukrainians ( "Little Russians" ) and Russians, with Russians forming a significant majority in urban areas due to the region's industrial development, while Ukrainians dominated rural areas; other notable ethnic groups included Greeks, Germans, and Jews]

sombear said:

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Redbrickbear said:

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sombear said:

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Redbrickbear said:

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sombear said:

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Redbrickbear said:

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sombear said:

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Into the West/free world orbit, mostly Europe. Nothing new there.

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Nothing new in theory

Something new in practice and something that was always going to lead to a major conflict with Moscow

Ukraine is not Cuba….its of major importance to Moscow and right on their door step with millions of ethnic Russians living inside its borders

10 years of bloody conflict later and hundreds of billions spent….and yet Ukraine is still not in NATO or in the EU

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You're making artificial distinctions and justifying Russian aggression based on those distinctions. So a border country, invade. A long swim or a quick flight/submarine trip, totally fine. And what about the Soviet's supporting communists in our own country? Totally cool?

.

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Every time the Soviets sponsored communists or Marxists in our back yard we strongly opposed it…with military force or coups often times

And we had every right to do so

Moscow has no business in our sphere of influence

And they wasted money and resources trying to do foolish things like that

In fact being overextend was a contributing factor in the collapse of the USSR

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When is the last time we invaded anyone at all in our "sphere of influence?"

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You can't be this naive about our own geo-political history can you?

The US has invaded all of its neighbors--Canada, Mexico, Cuba, Haiti, and Domincan Republic. https://t.co/VzVMGse8By

— American Exception (@Aaron_Good_) December 20, 2022

The U.S. invaded Granada in 1983 and Panama in 1990 and Haiti in 1994 (3 times we have invaded Haiti)

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So your answer on invade with intent to take over is none.

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You asked how many we invaded…i gave you those facts

DC has done it so many times in the Caribbean and Latin America it's hard to keep count

(And for the record I think most were totally justified)

Now you moved the goal post to "intent to take over"

DC goes the regime change route (like in Iraq) when it invades

Moscow was actually trying to do the same thing in Ukraine and attempted to take Kyiv with its army and install a new regime.

Now that they failed at that (another sign they are not a major threat) they have had to settle for trying to absorb ethnic Russian areas in the east (face saving measure)

But their initial attempt was to basically copy the USA in Iraq….get to the capital…topple the old regime and install a more manageable one

ATL Bear said:

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Redbrickbear said:

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Interesting that Biden pardoned his entire family back to January 2014, 1 month before the CIA toppled the Ukrainian government and began money laundering... pic.twitter.com/zTCTNq6fks

— Financelot (@FinanceLancelot) January 20, 2025

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The CIA toppling Ukraine has become like the J6 was an insurrection myth.

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What they have in common is that you're in desperate denial about both.

sombear said:

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Redbrickbear said:

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sombear said:

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I thought we had moved beyond Nuland but evidently not. Serious question for you. What exactly did Nuland say that bothers you, and what about that call bothers you and/or in any way suggests a coup? Not a link. I'm truly interested in your take on this.

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Well Nuland admitted on tape that the U.S. spent billions on influencing the politics of Ukraine in the decade leaving up to the Maidan coup/protest of dignity in 2014

That is a fact….not an opinion

In other tapes we have her (and other leaders) discussing who they should install in power in Kyiv….including the famous "f-the EU" line

This would all be strong evidence that DC was involved deeply in regime change in Ukraine long before the current war broke out.

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It was public knowledge we gave billions to Ukraine starting when they left the Soviets. We do that with all nascent democracies. What does that have to do with a "coup" two decades later?

Install? How about our thoughts on leadership instead. That, too, was public knowledge. There were rival opposition parties competing.

And as I've asked multiple times on this thread, how were we to know VY would do a 180 on core issues? And why would help broker the deal that kept him and power and "allow" the Euros to sign it?

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Well, that's not what happened. The deal didn't keep him in power because we stabbed him in the back.

whiterock said:

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Sam Lowry said:

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whiterock said:

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Sam Lowry said:

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whiterock said:

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Doc Holliday said:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Choose your poison carefully.

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No. A nuclear capable Russia 600 miles closer to NATO is what you want if you support NATO expansion. What the Russians and the Ukraine war critics have always wanted was a buffer zone.

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LOL the reflexive recto-cranial inversion.

If Russia wanted a buffer zone, it should not have invaded Ukraine, which was a lesser status than Finland and Sweden = Nato-partners who had already joined the EU (shortly after the fall of the USSR).

Why didn't Russia invade Finland or Sweden for joining the EU while being a Nato partner? If we accept your premise that Ukraine was a threat to Russia, then Finland and Sweden were even more proximate threats to Russia (closer to strategic Russian assets). Why did Russia not invade them, instead?

For that matter, Ukraine obtained its Nato-partner status in 1994. So why did it take nearly 20 years for that to become a pretext for war?

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Because Russia wasn't opposed to the EU or the Partnership for Peace. They also became NATO partners in 1994 along with those others (in fact Russia was the first to join).

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Exactly. That was the exact status when Russia invaded in 2014 and 2022. Ukraine had not even applied for Nato membership. because it was not eligible for Nato membership (due to border disputes w/Russia over Donbas/Crimea).

Russia knew all that. But invaded anyway. Because Nato membership for Ukraine had nothing to do with why they invaded......

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Russia wasn't waiting for the status to change, obviously.

whiterock said:

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Sam Lowry said:

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whiterock said:

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Doc Holliday said:

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whiterock said:

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Doc Holliday said:

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whiterock said:

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Doc Holliday said:

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whiterock said:

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Doc Holliday said:

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whiterock said:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Surely that doesn't sit right with you guys?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Choose your poison carefully.

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

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

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

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Of course you have endorsed NATO membership, just not right away. You want to build up a military, install US bases, and otherwise make them a de facto member before making them a de jure member. That's what we were doing, and it's what one would expect.

The statutory restrictions are a red herring, as I'm sure you know. We've made exceptions before (see Germany) and could do so again.

whiterock said:

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Sam Lowry said:

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whiterock said:

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Sam Lowry said:

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whiterock said:

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Redbrickbear said:

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whiterock said:

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Doc Holliday said:

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whiterock said:

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

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Getting our NATO allies to meet their spending commitments or raise them slightly....and building bases inside current NATO territory is not "escalation"
It most certainly is.

Its building up a strong defense in our already established sphere of influence.
Mobilizing for war has many times in history been a cause of war.

Its also amazing how your side sees that as "escalation"
Because it is. Just like NOT putting bases in former WP countries was an effort NOT to escalate tensions.

But some how sponsoring coups in Russia's back yard or funding proxy wars against them using corrupt states we never had a relationship with is not escalation.....
We did not sponsor a coup. We supported a new government that came to power by constitutional processes.
Yes, sponsoring proxy wars is an escalation. Others do it to us. We respond accordingly, to include direct strikes against proxies, to include taking them out.

I am always stunned by neo-con/neo-liberal logic
because you do not understand the subject material very well

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At every point, you excuse Russian escalation and scream that our prudent responses are unnecessarily provocative.

another fact inconvenient to your arguments: on the day Russia invaded it, Ukraine was less tied to the West, diplomatically, economically, and militarily, than was Sweden or Finland. The Finnish border is a mortar round away from St. Petersburg. So why did Russia instead invade Ukraine? Finland was once a part of Russia, too.

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Actually that fact is highly inconvenient to your argument. The Russians have always denied that they were trying to reconstitute their old borders. They didn't invade Ukraine because it was once Russian or because it was tied to the West. They invaded it because of the specific threat that it posed.

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LOL they're not denying they want their old treaty and polity borders back. They're stating it out loud!

They didn't invade Ukraine for gaining Nato Partner status in 1994. They invaded it for moving forward with EU membership, which "neutral" Finland and Sweden already had. So why invade Ukraine and not Finland?

(answer: Nato and EU issues had nothing to do with the invasion.)

Propagandists gonna propaganda......

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They are stating no such thing. I've asked you and others to provide these statements many times, and no one has ever been able to do so. Nor did Russia invade Ukraine for pursuing EU membership.
I am not your news service. Educate yourself.

There are plenty of reasons not to invade Finland. First among them is that the West didn't choose Finland as the main platform for its regime change ambitions in Russia.
"regime change ambitions" prior to Russian invasion of Ukraine are a figment of your imagination

We didn't overthrow Finland's legitimate government.
Neither did we overthrow Ukraine's government.

We didn't make them the second largest military power in Europe.
And would not have done so if Russia hadn't invaded them.

We didn't cause Finland to be infested with neo-Nazi militias who persecuted the Russian population (which is a tiny population in Finland anyway).
Don't you have something other than Russian propaganda to play with?

We didn't sell Finland weapons to attack its own civilians.
We didn't do that with Ukraine, either, until after Russia invaded.

Added to which Finland has wretched terrain for an invading army, a mere handful of decent roads leading into Russia, and a people that, unlike the Ukrainians, would almost universally resent and resist such a move.
The Ukrainians have proven to be no slouch, fighting Russia to a similar kind of standstill (proportionally) that the Finns did in WWII.

About the only reason Russia would invade Finland is if you were right about their imperial ambitions.

You really have demonstrated my point rather well.
No, you have demonstrated Russian propaganda rather well.

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It's gotta be hard living in a dream world. Come back to reality.

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Uniformly and consistently false, point after point. You know it's all about plausible deniability, but you lost sight of the "plausible" part a long time ago.

I'm plenty educated about what Russia said and didn't say...that's how I know you've got nothing.

Redbrickbear said:

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sombear said:

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Redbrickbear said:

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sombear said:

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Redbrickbear said:

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sombear said:

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Redbrickbear said:

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sombear said:

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Into the West/free world orbit, mostly Europe. Nothing new there.

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Nothing new in theory

Something new in practice and something that was always going to lead to a major conflict with Moscow

Ukraine is not Cuba….its of major importance to Moscow and right on their door step with millions of ethnic Russians living inside its borders

10 years of bloody conflict later and hundreds of billions spent….and yet Ukraine is still not in NATO or in the EU

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You're making artificial distinctions and justifying Russian aggression based on those distinctions. So a border country, invade. A long swim or a quick flight/submarine trip, totally fine. And what about the Soviet's supporting communists in our own country? Totally cool?

.

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Every time the Soviets sponsored communists or Marxists in our back yard we strongly opposed it…with military force or coups often times

And we had every right to do so

Moscow has no business in our sphere of influence

And they wasted money and resources trying to do foolish things like that

In fact being overextend was a contributing factor in the collapse of the USSR

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When is the last time we invaded anyone at all in our "sphere of influence?"

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You can't be this naive about our own geo-political history can you?

The US has invaded all of its neighbors--Canada, Mexico, Cuba, Haiti, and Domincan Republic. https://t.co/VzVMGse8By

— American Exception (@Aaron_Good_) December 20, 2022

The U.S. invaded Granada in 1983 and Panama in 1990 and Haiti in 1994 (3 times we have invaded Haiti)

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So your answer on invade with intent to take over is none.

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You asked how many we invaded…i gave you those facts

DC has done it so many times in the Caribbean and Latin America it's hard to keep count

(And for the record I think most were totally justified)

Now you moved the goal post to "intent to take over"

DC goes the regime change route (like in Iraq) when it invades

Moscow was actually trying to do the same thing in Ukraine and attempted to take Kyiv with its army and install a new regime.

Now that they failed at that (another sign they are not a major threat) they have had to settle for trying to absorb ethnic Russian areas in the east (face saving measure)

But their initial attempt was to basically copy the USA in Iraq….get to the capital…topple the old regime and install a more manageable one

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I didn't move the goal post. It was one of the two questions I posed to you, and I was confirming your answer.

Again, in those countries, there were democratically elected regimes in place before the military coups. We were not trying to take away anyone's sovereignty. Quite the opposite.

You comparing these to Russia invading Ukraine is laughable for multiple reasons. As I've posted many times, whether anyone agrees with the side we chose in each case, virtually all of our direct "meddling" was taking a side in a true two-sided dispute - usually against communism. Russia took its own side. There was no Ukrainian civil war or anything close to it. In fact, Ukraine was more unified than it had been since its inception.

And, again, these were 30-40 years ago in the middle of the cold war when I think you'd acknowledge both Russia and the U.S. were aggressively trying to expand their influence through basically any means necessary. Hmm, I thought one of your favorite arguments was that those days are over.

And I love your oversimplification as if all Russia wanted was a more favorable President. I mean, that's bad enough, as Zelensky was democratically elected. But Russia wanted much more than that, which Putin himself made clear - significantly reduced military and weapons with permanent Russian observers; end of Euro alliances (existing and future); implement pro-Russia education mandates; mandated energy/trade "partnership"; incorporate the East into Russia; and on and on.

sombear said:

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Redbrickbear said:

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sombear said:

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Redbrickbear said:

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sombear said:

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Redbrickbear said:

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sombear said:

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Redbrickbear said:

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sombear said:

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Into the West/free world orbit, mostly Europe. Nothing new there.

---

Nothing new in theory

Something new in practice and something that was always going to lead to a major conflict with Moscow

Ukraine is not Cuba….its of major importance to Moscow and right on their door step with millions of ethnic Russians living inside its borders

10 years of bloody conflict later and hundreds of billions spent….and yet Ukraine is still not in NATO or in the EU

---

You're making artificial distinctions and justifying Russian aggression based on those distinctions. So a border country, invade. A long swim or a quick flight/submarine trip, totally fine. And what about the Soviet's supporting communists in our own country? Totally cool?

.

---

Every time the Soviets sponsored communists or Marxists in our back yard we strongly opposed it…with military force or coups often times

And we had every right to do so

Moscow has no business in our sphere of influence

And they wasted money and resources trying to do foolish things like that

In fact being overextend was a contributing factor in the collapse of the USSR

---

When is the last time we invaded anyone at all in our "sphere of influence?"

---

You can't be this naive about our own geo-political history can you?

The US has invaded all of its neighbors--Canada, Mexico, Cuba, Haiti, and Domincan Republic. https://t.co/VzVMGse8By

— American Exception (@Aaron_Good_) December 20, 2022

The U.S. invaded Granada in 1983 and Panama in 1990 and Haiti in 1994 (3 times we have invaded Haiti)

---

So your answer on invade with intent to take over is none.

---

You asked how many we invaded…i gave you those facts

DC has done it so many times in the Caribbean and Latin America it's hard to keep count

(And for the record I think most were totally justified)

Now you moved the goal post to "intent to take over"

DC goes the regime change route (like in Iraq) when it invades

Moscow was actually trying to do the same thing in Ukraine and attempted to take Kyiv with its army and install a new regime.

Now that they failed at that (another sign they are not a major threat) they have had to settle for trying to absorb ethnic Russian areas in the east (face saving measure)

But their initial attempt was to basically copy the USA in Iraq….get to the capital…topple the old regime and install a more manageable one

---

Again, in those countries, there were democratically elected regimes in place before the military coups. We were not trying to take away anyone's sovereignty. Quite the opposite.

---

Throughout the 20th and now 21 centuries DC has removed from power regimes it did not like for ones that it did like

Iraq, Afghanistan, Panama, Haiti, the list goes on and on and on

Moscow tried the same thing in Ukraine

Sam Lowry said:

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ATL Bear said:

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Redbrickbear said:

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Interesting that Biden pardoned his entire family back to January 2014, 1 month before the CIA toppled the Ukrainian government and began money laundering... pic.twitter.com/zTCTNq6fks

— Financelot (@FinanceLancelot) January 20, 2025

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The CIA toppling Ukraine has become like the J6 was an insurrection myth.

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What they have in common is that you're in desperate denial about both.

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What they have in common is a political agenda that spun events into false narratives and propaganda that were used to exact tolls on their enemies. They also have a common danger they've exacted on the world because of that decision to use it as such.

Redbrickbear said:

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sombear said:

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Redbrickbear said:

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sombear said:

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Redbrickbear said:

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sombear said:

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Redbrickbear said:

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sombear said:

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Redbrickbear said:

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sombear said:

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Into the West/free world orbit, mostly Europe. Nothing new there.

---

Nothing new in theory

Something new in practice and something that was always going to lead to a major conflict with Moscow

Ukraine is not Cuba….its of major importance to Moscow and right on their door step with millions of ethnic Russians living inside its borders

10 years of bloody conflict later and hundreds of billions spent….and yet Ukraine is still not in NATO or in the EU

---

You're making artificial distinctions and justifying Russian aggression based on those distinctions. So a border country, invade. A long swim or a quick flight/submarine trip, totally fine. And what about the Soviet's supporting communists in our own country? Totally cool?

.

---

Every time the Soviets sponsored communists or Marxists in our back yard we strongly opposed it…with military force or coups often times

And we had every right to do so

Moscow has no business in our sphere of influence

And they wasted money and resources trying to do foolish things like that

In fact being overextend was a contributing factor in the collapse of the USSR

---

When is the last time we invaded anyone at all in our "sphere of influence?"

---

You can't be this naive about our own geo-political history can you?

The US has invaded all of its neighbors--Canada, Mexico, Cuba, Haiti, and Domincan Republic. https://t.co/VzVMGse8By

— American Exception (@Aaron_Good_) December 20, 2022

The U.S. invaded Granada in 1983 and Panama in 1990 and Haiti in 1994 (3 times we have invaded Haiti)

---

So your answer on invade with intent to take over is none.

---

You asked how many we invaded…i gave you those facts

DC has done it so many times in the Caribbean and Latin America it's hard to keep count

(And for the record I think most were totally justified)

Now you moved the goal post to "intent to take over"

DC goes the regime change route (like in Iraq) when it invades

Moscow was actually trying to do the same thing in Ukraine and attempted to take Kyiv with its army and install a new regime.

Now that they failed at that (another sign they are not a major threat) they have had to settle for trying to absorb ethnic Russian areas in the east (face saving measure)

But their initial attempt was to basically copy the USA in Iraq….get to the capital…topple the old regime and install a more manageable one

---

Again, in those countries, there were democratically elected regimes in place before the military coups. We were not trying to take away anyone's sovereignty. Quite the opposite.

---

Throughout the 20th and now 21 centuries DC has removed from power regimes it did not like for ones that it did like

Iraq, Afghanistan, Panama, Haiti, the list goes on and on and on

Moscow tried the same thing in Ukraine

---

We were discussing the localized invasions you referenced. And everything in my last post stands as to the key distinctions.

sombear said:

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Redbrickbear said:

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sombear said:

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Redbrickbear said:

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sombear said:

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Redbrickbear said:

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sombear said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

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sombear said:

---

Redbrickbear said:

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sombear said:

---

Into the West/free world orbit, mostly Europe. Nothing new there.

---

Nothing new in theory

Something new in practice and something that was always going to lead to a major conflict with Moscow

Ukraine is not Cuba….its of major importance to Moscow and right on their door step with millions of ethnic Russians living inside its borders

10 years of bloody conflict later and hundreds of billions spent….and yet Ukraine is still not in NATO or in the EU

---

You're making artificial distinctions and justifying Russian aggression based on those distinctions. So a border country, invade. A long swim or a quick flight/submarine trip, totally fine. And what about the Soviet's supporting communists in our own country? Totally cool?

.

---

Every time the Soviets sponsored communists or Marxists in our back yard we strongly opposed it…with military force or coups often times

And we had every right to do so

Moscow has no business in our sphere of influence

And they wasted money and resources trying to do foolish things like that

In fact being overextend was a contributing factor in the collapse of the USSR

---

When is the last time we invaded anyone at all in our "sphere of influence?"

---

You can't be this naive about our own geo-political history can you?

The US has invaded all of its neighbors--Canada, Mexico, Cuba, Haiti, and Domincan Republic. https://t.co/VzVMGse8By

— American Exception (@Aaron_Good_) December 20, 2022

The U.S. invaded Granada in 1983 and Panama in 1990 and Haiti in 1994 (3 times we have invaded Haiti)

---

So your answer on invade with intent to take over is none.

---

You asked how many we invaded…i gave you those facts

DC has done it so many times in the Caribbean and Latin America it's hard to keep count

(And for the record I think most were totally justified)

Now you moved the goal post to "intent to take over"

DC goes the regime change route (like in Iraq) when it invades

Moscow was actually trying to do the same thing in Ukraine and attempted to take Kyiv with its army and install a new regime.

Now that they failed at that (another sign they are not a major threat) they have had to settle for trying to absorb ethnic Russian areas in the east (face saving measure)

But their initial attempt was to basically copy the USA in Iraq….get to the capital…topple the old regime and install a more manageable one

---

Again, in those countries, there were democratically elected regimes in place before the military coups. We were not trying to take away anyone's sovereignty. Quite the opposite.

---

Throughout the 20th and now 21 centuries DC has removed from power regimes it did not like for ones that it did like

Iraq, Afghanistan, Panama, Haiti, the list goes on and on and on

Moscow tried the same thing in Ukraine

---

We were discussing the localized invasions you referenced. And everything in my last post stands as to the key distinctions.

---

Yes, a number so vast it needs its own wiki page to keep the running list (continuous interventions since the 1800s all the way to present times)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_regime_change_in_Latin_America

Be it Grenada in 1983

Or Panama in 1990

And even Haiti in 1995

All military interventions by the USA to change the regimes there