Think it would’ve been the fault of Nazis that brutally murdered unions, communists (as we seen in Odessa) and other political opponents to turn Ukraine into a Nazi rump-state.
If Putin hadn’t invaded Ukraine, NATO would be laughing off Trump’s demand to increase military spending just like they did the first time. Hell, considering how much more power Trump is weilding this time around, that could have directly lead to the US leaving NATO as he has often threatened to do.
However, Putin’s invasion completely reinvigorated the desire of other countries to be in NATO, turning the demand to increase spending from a silly political whim to a credible ultimatum. No, it isn’t solely Putin’s fault, but the SMO played directly into the American empire’s hands.
If Putin hadn’t invaded Ukraine, it would’ve been a launching ground for an invasion into Russia or forced submission. Trump isn’t wielding any more power than Biden who also demanded increased military spending.
NATO was always an imperialist organization made up of colonizer states eager to form a bloc against the spread of “gommunist USSR” which no longer exists. So now it is an entity that functions to serve the imperialists of the western hegemony. This was shown when Ukraine was couped by far-right nationalists with assistance from western intelligence to make a entity right on the edge of Russia’s border when it began distancing itself from the West. I’d argue Ukraine becoming a Nazi state was more of the fault here than anything Putin ever did.
Which, weirdly, Ukraine had a lot of support from nato states before in their little nazi adventure?? I wonder what that means.
Check the copypasta. Yes, very much so. With explicit U.S support all the way back to the 60s leading up to the violation of the minsk accords and fascist takeover. Classic imperialism.
Okay yeah I can see why you sent the text dump, you were trying to specify that the Americans were planning on pushing some colour revolution bullshit within the region which is what incentivised Putin to take action. Honestly? I did not know about that, which is a bit embarrassing but that does explain it. I do wonder why putin didnt just say america was planning on doing a colour revolution and we need to get involved to stop the inequality. NVm typing it out loud explains why lmfao. Fuck america, but I do believe an unfortunate consequence of this was that NATO got further investment from the fascist vassal states in europe, perhaps this was a gambit dont by the states?
It was indeed and I respect you deeply for recognizing it. This other guy is trying to argue it was a “fringe paramilitary” lmfao. Yeah, the guys who couped Assad were just “fringe paramilitaries”.
The thing is, America is getting cold-feet with Asia becoming more and more of a threat to them. This is why we’ve seen the actions they take now.
If Putin hadn’t invaded Ukraine, it would’ve been a launching ground for an invasion into Russia or forced submission.
With what army? Nobody wanted fund their militaries prior to the SMO, the SMO is what created what is currently the largest threat to Russia’s security.
NATO began military exercises in Ukraine at the end of 2013. In the years leading up to the SMO, NATO flew B-52 nuclear bombers up to border of Russian airspace, they ran a simulated invasion of Kaliningrad with a full force, and Putin explicitly stated that the reason the SMO launched was because there was NATO activity on the border that was indistinguishable from preparations of nuclear capabilities.
Since the SMO, none of these things have been possible. This is the reason for the SMO. It was not mindless adventurism. It was calculated and reluctant.
With…what army? The very same fascist paramilitaries that killed the trade unionists in Odessa? Or are we continously ignoring that part? Or the banderites? Azov being an example of both? Also, they had received explicit intelligence support from the U.S…
Like are we for real right now? The largest threat to Russia’s security is the West, NATO and the imperialists that reside within them.
ALL OF THOSE THINGS THAT YOU LISTED ARE A BIGGER PROBLEM NOW THAN THEY WERE BEFORE THE SMO AND NOT ONLY THAT BUT THE CONVENTIONAL WESTERN MILITARIES ARRAYED AGAINST RUSSIA HAVE GROWN IN SIZE IN DIRECT RESPONSE TO THE PERCEIVED THREAT OF RUSSIAN AGGRESSION.
Do you think that the American invasion of Afghanistan reduced the number of anti-American paramilitaries in the world? Because the exact same thing happened here - a big invasion to stamp out a small threat only managed to galvanize resistance against the big invader. Who would have guessed given how many times this exact scenario has played out in history.
They were already an issue to Russia’s sovereignty before as I said and then backed up in the copypasta I literally just posted that you apparently “read”. Of course the issue would be larger in proxy military confrontation. Doesn’t change the fact that it’s not Putin’s fault for launching the SMO when it was gearing up to threaten the country on orders of imperialists. Caps-lock doesn’t change that either.
American invasion of Aghanistan was imperialist. Russian invasion of Ukraine was not. There is no comparison there. This wasn’t a “Small threat” because you keep seemingly ignoring CIA and western-intelligence sponsored paramilitaries and political organizations that reorganized the country in a violent overthrow and murdered leftists and trade-unionists as we seen in Odessa. That is not a “small threat” that is a direct threat to the sovereignty of Russia.
Could those CIA and western-intelligence sponsored paramilitaries and political organizations have ever inflicted as much damage to Russia as this war has? Don’t get me wrong - intervening to stop the persecution of ethnic Russians in Ukraine by organized neonazis is good and I do think that they had legitimate security concerns about Ukraine basically being turned into a hotbed for fascists, terrorism, and organized crime. I realize I’m not privy to all the information they have access to, but I just don’t see the strategic advantage this war has for Russia.
Small threat is relative here. If you think that a fringe paramilitary is a threat on par with multiple countries’ conventional militaries, then you are a moron.
я не из калининграда@lemmy.ml (not a native english speaker, I believe)
i do not support the current administrations internal actions, as capitalism has brought nothing but injustice, suffering, poverty, crime and corruption. but i absolutely do support its foreign policy, especially regarding the ukrainian question. the putin government has evolved to become one of the most effective anti-imperialist forces on the planet and even if you ignore the terrible nature of the terrorist zelensky-regime one has to be grateful to our military for fighting the biggest enemy of mankind, america.
so lets detail the happenings that led to the current situation:
(it may be important to note that the current russian administration pushes a slightly different narrative due to sadly being a right wing state)
banderite collaborators parading in front of nazi officers
the banderites (see picture), members of the fascist “organization of ukrainian nationalists” led by stepan andreyevich bandera were a gang of rapists and murderers who collaborated with the invading german hordes and assisted them by conducting acts of terror against civilians. It is important to note that popular support for them was close to zero.
after the victory of the heroic red army, the majority of those parasites fled to the west, predominantly to canada. they received funding from american and british intelligence agencies, which were more than happy to welcome “former” nazis into their own anti-communist ranks.
another subset of the banderites remained in the ukrainian ssr and conducted a campaign of terror and sabotage against the civilian population. their bloody deeds were supported by the cia and its european puppet agencies through the so called “operation aerodynamic”.
spoiler banderites
referendum on the preservation of the ussr. its results were ignored by the anti-communists
After the illegal and undemocratic dissolution of the ussr, the leaders of those fascist gangs were glorified by the ukrainian far-right, with support from the cia. efforts to further their “rehabilitation” were primarily directed by nazi expatriates in canada. outlets such as voice of america portrayed them as “heroes”. (aerodynamic, some of these were manufactured in the U.S under Operation Mockingbird like a lot of U.S state dept. bullshit)
results of the 2004 presidential election before cia intervention. this division between neonazi northwest and pro-russian southeast is visible to this day
in 2004, the west sabotaged the ukrainian presidential elections and installed their puppet, viktor andreyevich yushchenko, through a color revolution. he was a terrible leader, not only dismantling the remaining aspects of the ukrainian economy and managing to make life even more miserable than it already was, but also granting “hero of ukraine” status to banderite leaders and holocaust perpetrators stepan bandera and roman iosifovich shukhevich.
(not adding picture of 2014 ukrainian nazis since you have already said you believe in that)
in 2014, america and the west orchestrated another coup, this time not even bothering to hide the involvement of neo-nazis. the new regime perpetrated unspeakable atrocities against the russian population, whom it consideres “subhuman,” as well as against ukrainian anti-fascists. in odessa alone, 39 people were burned alive in the local trade union building.
those developments led to the revolution in the predominantly russian populated donbass-area and the creation off the donetsk and lugansk peoples republics, as well as the referendum in crimea that led to the peninsula finally rejoining russia. from 2014 till 2022 the majority of humanitarian aid to the donbass republics came from the cprf.
the reason for the smo is the ukrainian western-aligned nazi regime violating the minsk accords by refusing to demilitarize, trying to join the fascist nato-block and murdering russian civilians for years on end. the russian government showed itself extremely lenient, to lenient even, as any sensible politician would have staged a military intervention much earlier. if you need further proof for the tyrannical nature of the kievan regime just look at the fact that zelenskiy has banned all opposition parties in his country, refuses to hold elections and effectively rules as a military dictator. furthermore he has outlawed the russian language, made any negotiation with the russian state illegal and is currently selling whatever is left of his country to the highest bidder.
combine all this with the fact that the west and its puppets need to always be opposed due to them being a cancer of humanity and you’ll get a pretty good picture of why to support the russian military.
In a word, no. In a few more words, support for Russia (not Putin, as historical materialists don’t subscribe to great man theory) is only a partial, temporary, tactical one, in the context of imperialist liberation. Russia is still a capitalist state, though, so it’s a two stage strategy: first liberate colonized bourgeois states from colonizer states, and second revolution within those liberated bourgeois states.
Russia is an interesting case: it has already liberated itself from the post-Soviet “shock therapy” neocolonizers. This occurred during Putin’s administration, which is why he is especially hated by the US. So now the support for Russia is in the context of keeping the colonizers from recolonizing it, and supporting Russia to the extent that it helps other states liberate themselves. But Russia isn’t trying to “liberate” Ukraine, at least not all of Ukraine. It’s trying to resolve the genocidal attacks on the people of the Donbas, and it’s trying to resolve the imperialist military expansion at its border.
Nothing in this copypasta addresses my arguments, which are: a) the military forces at the command of NATO have massively increased as a direct result of the SMO and b) the amount of Nazis in Ukraine’s military and government have also massively increased as a direct result of the SMO. Regardless of whether or not the invasion could be justified, it has been a failure in all respects save for territorial acquisition.
The fact that you would even post this completely irrelevant copypasta that doesn’t address what I’m saying indicates that you’re not actually interested in arguing about this, you’re debating a liberal strawman that only exists in your head and not the communist right in front of you.
a) They were planning this in the first place, with them wanting a justification for increase. SMO was a response to that. I already addressed this.
Think it would’ve been the fault of Nazis that brutally murdered unions, communists (as we seen in Odessa) and other political opponents to turn Ukraine into a Nazi rump-state.
b.) It literally has not. They were already primed, in governance and acting out political violence. Literally before the Ukrainian conflict they were used as forces against insurgents in a genocide of Eastern Ukraine. This was pointed out in the copypasta I sent.
the reason for the smo is the ukrainian western-aligned nazi regime violating the minsk accords by refusing to demilitarize, trying to join the fascist nato-block and murdering russian civilians for years on end. the russian government showed itself extremely lenient, to lenient even, as any sensible politician would have staged a military intervention much earlier. if you need further proof for the tyrannical nature of the kievan regime just look at the fact that zelenskiy has banned all opposition parties in his country, refuses to hold elections and effectively rules as a military dictator. furthermore he has outlawed the russian language, made any negotiation with the russian state illegal and is currently selling whatever is left of his country to the highest bidder. combine all this with the fact that the west and its puppets need to always be opposed due to them being a cancer of humanity and you’ll get a pretty good picture of why to support the russian military.
They were planning this in the first place, with them wanting a justification for increase. SMO was a response to that. I already addressed this.
Planning does not equal doing. Trump’s notion of increased spending among NATO members was literally laughed at when he suggested it in his first term. The SMO changed the equation for Europe and made them willing to do it when they previously weren’t.
It literally has not. They were already primed, in governance and acting out political violence. Literally before the Ukrainian conflict they were used as forces against insurgents in a genocide of Eastern Ukraine. This was pointed out in the copypasta I sent.
While Ukraine did have those tendencies prior to the SMO, remember that Zelensky was initially elected on a platform of ending the Ukranian Civil War and making Azob stand down. While he had failed to do this, it nevertheless showed that the Ukranian people did not broadly have the thirst for violence that the far-right Azov battalion had - but the SMO changed this equation too, linking far right nationalism and fascism with self defense in the minds of the Ukrainians. Instead of being de-nazified, the SMO accelerated Ukraine’s fascist shift, turning it from a nation with a radical foreign-backed far right fringe to a nation with a radical foreign-backed far right majority.
“Planning does not equal doing. Trump’s notion of increased spending among NATO members was literally laughed at when he suggested it in his first term. The SMO changed the equation for Europe and made them willing to do it when they previously weren’t.”
Except countries were already beginning to act on it in forms of austerity and assigning funding to rearmament and militarization, which Ukraine already violated an accord to prevent that after they had been couped by fascist paramilitaries that had an intelligence support/presence and aid since the 60s as documented literally by the fucking C.I.A itself. Waiting for someone to pull the trigger while they have a gun on you is some pure lib-shit idealism. Of course they’re going to SMO to protect their nation. Are you insane? I literally don’t understand the core argument here where yes Putin is at fault for literally invading a nation that had a coup from an imperialist hegemony that had literally been planning and arming for an invasion supported by the leader of said hegemony’s intelligence agency? Like the fuck?
You’re also literally fucking wrong when you look at an actual chart of military spending. Shit goes all the way back to 2017-2018, lmfao. WAY before Ukraine was invaded and…after the coup LMAO.
“remember that Zelensky was initially elected on a platform of ending the Ukranian Civil War and making Azob stand down” platform does not mean a single fucking thing with imperialist intelligence agency pulling your strings. Now he’s waging an existential war to the last man and woman for the sake of NATO and will where America has already begun to lose faith after securing nearly half of their resources.
Also why the fuck are we downplaying the amount of Nazis in their military and government? What is this shit? They literally were waging a civil war and literal genocide against Russian-speakers in Eastern Ukraine and murdering trade unionists and communists WITH SUPPORT OF THE WESTERN INTELLIGENCE AGENCIES FROM THE 60S BACK. That’s fringe to you? That’s a fringe-minority? What the fuck are you literally talking about?
You keep repeating things that I’m not contesting, as though you think that they run counter to my argument. Putting US support for far right extremists in caps lock doesn’t change the fact that Russia’s Special Military Operation also massively empowered those extremists and reinvigorated NATO as a global military alliance.
Oh and Russia’s moves in Ukraine started with the takeover of Crimea. That military move can be rationally defended as the counterreaction to it from the west was relatively small (the area on the graph you helpfully circled), but the full-scale invasion cannot be defended on the same grounds because it sparked a much larger response (the area to the right of what you circled).
Thats certaintly a good point, I do agree this conflict ending the way it has had a consequence of reinteresting the fascists in europe with NATO and their local military industries.
If you go to page 5 it certainly paints that picture, I was initially going to argue that because of trump pushing for the usa to exit nato around his capaign season, they began funding their local military industries more, but they have been putting more money into NATO percentage wise since 2021, at an exponential rate. Perhaps the consern for the USA voting in trump forced the western world to fearfully put more money in to NATO, as an effort to persuade trump that it is worth the usa’s interest to remain in the organisation, but i am not sure, what do you think?
Yes, dastardly Putin didn’t allowed the western imperialists to loot and balkanize Russia, oh no, now the imperialists will just simply have to spend more on guns!
Yeah man the fringe officer of a dysfunctional intelligence apparatus largely degenerated like the rest of the worker’s state destroyed and looted the Soviet Union. Wasn’t the West, wasn’t American finance capital, wasn’t any of that. T’was Putin. Evil genius.
I said “one of”. If you can’t recognize the reality that the Soviet Union was looted by the people who currently form Russia’s oligarchy then we can’t have a conversation because you are completely in another reality.
Putin’s fault for not allowing a Nazi regime on Russia’s borders which would have been built up military for several more years then used to attack Russia after getting it into NATO and used as a potential springboard for an under 5 minutes nuclear decapitating strike on Moscow or something else equally deranged?
Putin was between a rock and a hard place, the objectively correct thing would have been to invade and subdue Ukraine in 2014 after the coup, to roll in and murder all the Nazis and dismantle their military but Russia foolishly got played into diplomacy stalling. Besides that objectively if Russia had done that in that year the sanctions against Russia at that time would have done far more damage, possibly would have destroyed Russia because at that time they hadn’t had years of time to take steps to prepare and insulate themselves from the shock and pain.
It’s NATO’s fault. It’s the Euro loser vassals’ fault, it is the fault of the US. Russia really didn’t have any good moves to make and every year it waited meant more Russians who would die in the fight against an increasingly more well armed and more well trained by the month military.
Unfortunately i think this is true. As much as we all like to say that Russia should have gone all the way in 2014 i think the material basis just wasn’t there yet. Russia has come a very long way since 2014, economically but also militarily, and this should be acknowledged. Arguably they were not even fully ready in 2022, but they literally could not wait any longer, even a few more weeks might have been too late and the Donbass could have been overrun by Nazis and there would have been large scale massacres and an exodus of millions of civilians fleeing to Russia. Russia waited until the very last possible moment. They had to sort out their military issues on the fly, and it’s actually quite impressive what they managed to achieve while fighting all of NATO in a proxy war.
I really don’t think that the potential massacre tipped the scales here. Realpolitik requires that you let people die if the consequences of intervening threaten national security.
From what I read, Russian intelligence could no longer assure that the activities of NATO were not preparations of nuclear kill chain capabilities. This, I believe, is far more likely to be the cause of the SMO launching when it did and the genocide of ethnic Russians was the legal and moral pretext that aligned with Russia’s national security profile.
Different people can have different reasons for doing things, and often there is not a single reason. For some in the Russian government what you say was probably the main reason, for others it may have only been one of multiple reasons. Either way, that is the most important reason for me to support this operation. And it is the reason which in my opinion best explains the timing. If it was only about NATO activities then the timing doesn’t necessarily make sense. Why not earlier or later?
It’s also not just a matter of not letting people die, it’s about the severe political consequences of doing so and the impact that such a massive political and refugee crisis would have on Russia and Russian society. Something like that has the potential to topple a government and bring real hardliners to power instead.
As i said, this is just my opinion. I don’t think we can know for sure until someone deep inside the Russian government writes their memoirs and tells us.
I agree with your main points. I just don’t think saving lives at the expense of national security makes sense. I think national security was the main driver and saving lives was part of the process and part of the calculations.
As for the timing, I think the timing was very interesting from an intelligence perspective. The US was warning about an imminent attack and Ukraine was saying there was no intelligence to support it and then Russia invaded the next day. To me, that says the Russians were testing the West’s intelligence capabilities and launched when they thought they had the element of surprise. I think they were correct and the ensuing first day of battle gave the Russians good intelligence on what was and wasn’t known by the West. It is very useful to know what your opponents know (and what they don’t know), so I think timing was partially urgency and partially opportunity.
Exactly. Russia had only bad choices. They tried to navigate them as best they could. With the benefit of hindsight it’s easy to see that the west was playing them all along with the Minsk agreements and such but even if they’d had known that making the move was incredibly dangerous and the more time spent preparing the better.
Russia’s hand was quite literally forced. Either stand up now at the last moment or be trod on for the next decade or more. Either way NATO would have won and that’s what people saying Putin made this worse don’t understand: the chessboard was already fixed. What Russia has pulled off instead we must be aware of is nothing short of a humiliation of NATO and the west so dire that they’ve nearly escalated to all out war against Russia and only Russian nukes prevent that. They have without intending to given hope to the global south, to anti-imperialist forces, to everyone who resists US/EU/NATO hegemony and that is worth more than a few more racist, reactionary Euro-nazi-lover nations officially joining NATO instead of maintaining a tactical neutrality.
Russia pushed back the Azov battalion, but now every other NATO military is increasing spending and multiple other countries’ militaries have joined it. You have to be huffing serious amounts of copium to think that the SMO has been an overall benefit to Russia or the people in Donbas or anyone except the military contractors on both sides of the conflict.
Oh yeah and the Azov Battalion is now the Azov Regiment and Ukraine’s military and politics are more Nazi than they’ve ever been. Territorial gains aside the SMO must be evaluated as a failure according to its stated goals of denazifying Ukraine and improving Russia’s security.
Putin’s invasion has reinvigorated NATO to a degree not seen since the Cold War ended. Ten years ago Germany’s military was an international joke - they were putting broomsticks on their tanks to simulate having machine guns because the political will to actually fund it just wasn’t there, but now they’ve massively increased spending and they’re not the only one. While Ukraine’s military capacity has been taken down as the SMO was intended to do, the total military strength arrayed against Russia has only increased thanks to multiple new countries joining NATO and the much-more-credible demand from the US that the previous membership increase spending.
Back before the war started, the consensus on the left was “he won’t do it because it’s obviously a terrible idea”. We were wrong about the first part, but history has vindicated the second.
The “consensus on the [western] left” was the way it was because the western left (myself included) was largely ignorant of the real conditions on the ground in Ukraine and the Donbass. We were wrong because we didn’t understand the situation, especially if we didn’t follow Russian language media (even there it was downplayed, for political reasons) and relied on what was available in the Western information sphere which completely either misrepresented or blacked out any real information about the region. The reality is that Ukraine prior to the SMO had already amassed the largest army in Europe after Russia, and was preparing to launch an all out assault on the Donbass republics.
If they had managed to gain a foothold in the urban areas, which is a very realistic possibility given the blitzkrieg tactics that NATO trained them in, it would have been a catastrophe. What we have seen so far in the SMO has vindicated Russia’s decision to launch it when it did ten times over. If the Nazis had been allowed to entrench themselves in the cities of Donetsk and Lugansk Russia would have had to level them entirely to dislodge the Ukrainian forces. Tens of thousands of civilians branded “terrorists” or “collaborators” by the Kiev regime’s Nazi thugs would have been tortured and murdered. Millions would have fled, the remainder would have been used as human shields. Thanks to the SMO today Donetsk and Lugansk do not look like Bakhmut, they are not depopulated ruins, they are thriving cities.
You speak of all of the consequences of the SMO on western policy as if that was not always the plan, as if this conflict was not engineered and provoked by them precisely because they wanted to have this pretext. They left Russia no other choice and they knew it. They put Russia in a Zugzwang where they were forced to make a choice and neither choice was good. This is what nobody who says the SMO was a mistake has ever been able to answer: what choice did Russia have? What were they supposed to do instead?
They literally tried every other avenue, not just since 2014 but since NATO expansion started, they tried explaining their concerns to the West about NATO expansion time and time again, they repeatedly warned, they tried negotiating - doesn’t work when the other side doesn’t negotiate in good faith and only sees agreements as a ruse to buy time to rearm (as has been admitted by multiple European leaders), when the other side doesn’t abide by the agreements - they even tried putting an entire draft treaty proposal in front of the Americans to avoid having to launch the SMO. Nothing worked, Ukraine was getting more and more Nazified, more and more militarized, pumped more and more full of weapons by the West. All this before the SMO, mind you.
It would have been a massive mistake not to launch the SMO. If the Donbass had been overrun and fallen to the Nazis the Russian government would have had a political crisis on their hands that might have brought down the entire government. Leaving the Ukraine situation to fester was creating an existential security risk for Russia that would have destroyed the Russian state. Instead now Russia is in a better economic and military position than it has been since 1991. NATO is panicking and increasing their budgets because they have been humiliated in the Ukraine proxy war. They really believed they could engineer a regime change or even collapse of the Russian state using this conflict, and instead it is NATO that is now close to collapse.
NATO may have (formally) expanded but in material terms it is weaker than ever, its stocks of weaponry and ammunition so depleted it will take a decade or more to refill them. If that’s even possible given how this conflict has exposed the systemic inability of the privatized for-profit arms industry to keep up with the demands of a real peer conflict. And it is by no means as united as it pretends to be, we constantly see signs of their dysfunction and inability to agree on any substantive action. Throwing more money down the bottomless pit of the private MIC won’t change this. It will only further destabilize the social and economic conditions here in Europe as our social safety nets get gutted, taxes increase, inflation continues to rise. Sooner or later this will cause massive political crises in Europe.
Meanwhile Russia’s military industry is reinvigorated, their army expanded, reformed and massively more experienced. Their economy is thriving not despite but largely because of the sanctions and how it has forced the Russian state and economy to adjust, reorient, re-industrialize, and to clamp down on much of the neoliberal rot left over from the 90s. And diplomatically they are more popular across the global south than they have been since the days of the Soviet Union.
Was everything done perfectly? No of course not, far from it. I even think that much of this was not foreseen or planned by the Russian government, they very much were forced to improvise on the fly. Being consummate liberals, they were surprised at how hostile and how hellbent on Russia’s destruction the West turned out to be (despite the fact that many in Russia, especially the communists, were trying to warn the government about this). They were very naive up to and even some time into the SMO. And even they did not expect their economy to hold up as well as it did.
It reminds me of how liberals talk about about successful revolutions in general. “They just should’ve done something else.” And that something else is never elaborated. The conversation is then supposed to move on as if that was a scientific law or something.
No but seriously, this question needs to be asked. What should Russia have done instead? Typically you get one of three possible answers from the anti-SMO liberal-left:
No answer at all. Simply dodging the question and pretending it wasn’t asked, or just flippantly saying “just don’t invade”…ok, but what then? You’re just saying what they shouldn’t do, but what should they do? Should they do nothing? Have you given a single thought to what the consequences of that would be? Of course not, “just don’t invade”.
Suggest that Russia should do the very things it had already tried and was already doing for years if not decades; protest, negotiate, offer concessions, try to deter aggression by posturing, etc. This just shows that they have not been paying any attention whatsoever prior to 2022, instead acting as if history started in 2022, like Zionists with Oct 7.
Completely unrealistic and naive non-proposals like “wait for the UN/international community to condemn Ukraine’s aggression if it attacks the Donbass”. It goes without saying that this is laughable and infantile. Ukraine was already attacking the Donbass and we all saw how these international institutions ignored it or even gave them cover.
The only conclusions you can draw from this are either a) they have a very shallow understanding and very superficial knowledge about the conflict and its history, or b) that they are just trying to find ways to say “Russia should just roll over and surrender”, which is what they are saying when they suggest Russia should have let Ukraine make the first move (and overrun the Donbass) “so that the Russians are not seen as the aggressor”…
Except that they know perfectly well, even if they won’t admit it, that Russia would have been cast as the aggressor by the Western media regardless even if they let Ukraine make the first move, even if they reacted purely defensively and restricted their operations to the DPR and LPR. The West was already saying that Russia was in Ukraine even before 2022, they were already claiming that the Donbass militias were “Russians in disguise”. We weren’t born yesterday, we’ve been reading this shit since 2014.
The idea that Russia would be treated fairly if they “played by the rules” is ridiculous, and the West’s moral condemnations are worthless anyway, they are literally supporting a genocide. They would condemn Russia for defending itself no matter what, just like they condemn anyone resisting Western imperialist aggression, occupation and genocide. There is only one thing that can satisfy the West and get its media to not cast you as the villain and that is total and complete capitulation.
Someone who wants badly enough to engineer a war will always find a way to get one, no matter how much restraint the other side tries to exercise. And no matter how much ground you give and how defensively you act, those who control the narrative via the media will always be able to spin it to make you look like the aggressor. At some point the only possible response is to establish undeniable facts on the ground, which sooner or later will have to be acknowledged. This is what Russia is doing. It’s as simple as that. (Geo-)Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.
Thank you. Occasionally i try to put in some real effort, not just rely on copypasta because i think it’s important to take some time to take a step back and re-asses every now and then, to organize our thoughts about a certain subject as our views evolve, and writing out a comment like this really helps with that.
sThe countries who joined were to do so anyway should anything happen.
Sweden was always a de facto NATO country, during the cold war the US air force assets in germany should relocate to sweden in case of nuclear exchange and continue fighting from there. Not exactly something a neutral country would agree with, which Sweden pretended to be at that time.
And Finland moved towards NATO after the end of the USSR, the socdems there paved the way and the right wingers afterwards nailed it in, not remotely unexpected.
Likewise switzerland throwing out its neutrality, they were US lapdogs for a while already. With US state visits to switzerland getting away with outright disrespecting the local government. Once a country sinks that deep, it will come when its master calls.
Any other NATO expansion? Nah.
How great NATO is doing is obvious by not one, but two batshit increases of defense spending, first 2% and now 5%! While all NATOcountries have decrepid infrastructure, underfunded education and recessive economies.
If it ends up sticking it’s pretty much 100% Putin’s fault.
Think it would’ve been the fault of Nazis that brutally murdered unions, communists (as we seen in Odessa) and other political opponents to turn Ukraine into a Nazi rump-state.
If Putin hadn’t invaded Ukraine, NATO would be laughing off Trump’s demand to increase military spending just like they did the first time. Hell, considering how much more power Trump is weilding this time around, that could have directly lead to the US leaving NATO as he has often threatened to do.
However, Putin’s invasion completely reinvigorated the desire of other countries to be in NATO, turning the demand to increase spending from a silly political whim to a credible ultimatum. No, it isn’t solely Putin’s fault, but the SMO played directly into the American empire’s hands.
“If Hamas hadn’t attacked Israel on Oct. 7, the genocide could have been avoided. However, Israel was reinvigorated by the attack.”
“If Kim Il-sung hadn’t attacked the South in June of 1950, the Korean War could have been avoided. However, the US was reinvigorated by the invasion.”
Some conflicts are already baked in. Submitting to your oppressor isn’t the answer.
If Putin hadn’t invaded Ukraine, it would’ve been a launching ground for an invasion into Russia or forced submission. Trump isn’t wielding any more power than Biden who also demanded increased military spending.
NATO was always an imperialist organization made up of colonizer states eager to form a bloc against the spread of “gommunist USSR” which no longer exists. So now it is an entity that functions to serve the imperialists of the western hegemony. This was shown when Ukraine was couped by far-right nationalists with assistance from western intelligence to make a entity right on the edge of Russia’s border when it began distancing itself from the West. I’d argue Ukraine becoming a Nazi state was more of the fault here than anything Putin ever did.
Which, weirdly, Ukraine had a lot of support from nato states before in their little nazi adventure?? I wonder what that means.
Was Ukraine really exploring this at the time?
Check the copypasta. Yes, very much so. With explicit U.S support all the way back to the 60s leading up to the violation of the minsk accords and fascist takeover. Classic imperialism.
Okay yeah I can see why you sent the text dump, you were trying to specify that the Americans were planning on pushing some colour revolution bullshit within the region which is what incentivised Putin to take action. Honestly? I did not know about that, which is a bit embarrassing but that does explain it. I do wonder why putin didnt just say america was planning on doing a colour revolution and we need to get involved to stop the inequality. NVm typing it out loud explains why lmfao. Fuck america, but I do believe an unfortunate consequence of this was that NATO got further investment from the fascist vassal states in europe, perhaps this was a gambit dont by the states?
It was indeed and I respect you deeply for recognizing it. This other guy is trying to argue it was a “fringe paramilitary” lmfao. Yeah, the guys who couped Assad were just “fringe paramilitaries”.
The thing is, America is getting cold-feet with Asia becoming more and more of a threat to them. This is why we’ve seen the actions they take now.
Ill give it a read one sec
With what army? Nobody wanted fund their militaries prior to the SMO, the SMO is what created what is currently the largest threat to Russia’s security.
NATO began military exercises in Ukraine at the end of 2013. In the years leading up to the SMO, NATO flew B-52 nuclear bombers up to border of Russian airspace, they ran a simulated invasion of Kaliningrad with a full force, and Putin explicitly stated that the reason the SMO launched was because there was NATO activity on the border that was indistinguishable from preparations of nuclear capabilities.
Since the SMO, none of these things have been possible. This is the reason for the SMO. It was not mindless adventurism. It was calculated and reluctant.
With…what army? The very same fascist paramilitaries that killed the trade unionists in Odessa? Or are we continously ignoring that part? Or the banderites? Azov being an example of both? Also, they had received explicit intelligence support from the U.S…
Like are we for real right now? The largest threat to Russia’s security is the West, NATO and the imperialists that reside within them.
ALL OF THOSE THINGS THAT YOU LISTED ARE A BIGGER PROBLEM NOW THAN THEY WERE BEFORE THE SMO AND NOT ONLY THAT BUT THE CONVENTIONAL WESTERN MILITARIES ARRAYED AGAINST RUSSIA HAVE GROWN IN SIZE IN DIRECT RESPONSE TO THE PERCEIVED THREAT OF RUSSIAN AGGRESSION.
Do you think that the American invasion of Afghanistan reduced the number of anti-American paramilitaries in the world? Because the exact same thing happened here - a big invasion to stamp out a small threat only managed to galvanize resistance against the big invader. Who would have guessed given how many times this exact scenario has played out in history.
They were already an issue to Russia’s sovereignty before as I said and then backed up in the copypasta I literally just posted that you apparently “read”. Of course the issue would be larger in proxy military confrontation. Doesn’t change the fact that it’s not Putin’s fault for launching the SMO when it was gearing up to threaten the country on orders of imperialists. Caps-lock doesn’t change that either.
American invasion of Aghanistan was imperialist. Russian invasion of Ukraine was not. There is no comparison there. This wasn’t a “Small threat” because you keep seemingly ignoring CIA and western-intelligence sponsored paramilitaries and political organizations that reorganized the country in a violent overthrow and murdered leftists and trade-unionists as we seen in Odessa. That is not a “small threat” that is a direct threat to the sovereignty of Russia.
Could those CIA and western-intelligence sponsored paramilitaries and political organizations have ever inflicted as much damage to Russia as this war has? Don’t get me wrong - intervening to stop the persecution of ethnic Russians in Ukraine by organized neonazis is good and I do think that they had legitimate security concerns about Ukraine basically being turned into a hotbed for fascists, terrorism, and organized crime. I realize I’m not privy to all the information they have access to, but I just don’t see the strategic advantage this war has for Russia.
Small threat is relative here. If you think that a fringe paramilitary is a threat on par with multiple countries’ conventional militaries, then you are a moron.
Also, Time for the copypasta!
я не из калининграда@lemmy.ml (not a native english speaker, I believe)
i do not support the current administrations internal actions, as capitalism has brought nothing but injustice, suffering, poverty, crime and corruption. but i absolutely do support its foreign policy, especially regarding the ukrainian question. the putin government has evolved to become one of the most effective anti-imperialist forces on the planet and even if you ignore the terrible nature of the terrorist zelensky-regime one has to be grateful to our military for fighting the biggest enemy of mankind, america.
so lets detail the happenings that led to the current situation:
(it may be important to note that the current russian administration pushes a slightly different narrative due to sadly being a right wing state)
banderite collaborators parading in front of nazi officers the banderites (see picture), members of the fascist “organization of ukrainian nationalists” led by stepan andreyevich bandera were a gang of rapists and murderers who collaborated with the invading german hordes and assisted them by conducting acts of terror against civilians. It is important to note that popular support for them was close to zero. after the victory of the heroic red army, the majority of those parasites fled to the west, predominantly to canada. they received funding from american and british intelligence agencies, which were more than happy to welcome “former” nazis into their own anti-communist ranks. another subset of the banderites remained in the ukrainian ssr and conducted a campaign of terror and sabotage against the civilian population. their bloody deeds were supported by the cia and its european puppet agencies through the so called “operation aerodynamic”.
spoiler banderites
referendum on the preservation of the ussr. its results were ignored by the anti-communists
After the illegal and undemocratic dissolution of the ussr, the leaders of those fascist gangs were glorified by the ukrainian far-right, with support from the cia. efforts to further their “rehabilitation” were primarily directed by nazi expatriates in canada. outlets such as voice of america portrayed them as “heroes”. (aerodynamic, some of these were manufactured in the U.S under Operation Mockingbird like a lot of U.S state dept. bullshit)
in 2004, the west sabotaged the ukrainian presidential elections and installed their puppet, viktor andreyevich yushchenko, through a color revolution. he was a terrible leader, not only dismantling the remaining aspects of the ukrainian economy and managing to make life even more miserable than it already was, but also granting “hero of ukraine” status to banderite leaders and holocaust perpetrators stepan bandera and roman iosifovich shukhevich.
(not adding picture of 2014 ukrainian nazis since you have already said you believe in that)
in 2014, america and the west orchestrated another coup, this time not even bothering to hide the involvement of neo-nazis. the new regime perpetrated unspeakable atrocities against the russian population, whom it consideres “subhuman,” as well as against ukrainian anti-fascists. in odessa alone, 39 people were burned alive in the local trade union building.
those developments led to the revolution in the predominantly russian populated donbass-area and the creation off the donetsk and lugansk peoples republics, as well as the referendum in crimea that led to the peninsula finally rejoining russia. from 2014 till 2022 the majority of humanitarian aid to the donbass republics came from the cprf.
the reason for the smo is the ukrainian western-aligned nazi regime violating the minsk accords by refusing to demilitarize, trying to join the fascist nato-block and murdering russian civilians for years on end. the russian government showed itself extremely lenient, to lenient even, as any sensible politician would have staged a military intervention much earlier. if you need further proof for the tyrannical nature of the kievan regime just look at the fact that zelenskiy has banned all opposition parties in his country, refuses to hold elections and effectively rules as a military dictator. furthermore he has outlawed the russian language, made any negotiation with the russian state illegal and is currently selling whatever is left of his country to the highest bidder. combine all this with the fact that the west and its puppets need to always be opposed due to them being a cancer of humanity and you’ll get a pretty good picture of why to support the russian military.
[Query: Do communists have to support Russia?]
@davel@lemmygrad.ml
Also, Ukraine really does have a fascism problem and has for a long time, and the coup government has materially supported it.
Nothing in this copypasta addresses my arguments, which are: a) the military forces at the command of NATO have massively increased as a direct result of the SMO and b) the amount of Nazis in Ukraine’s military and government have also massively increased as a direct result of the SMO. Regardless of whether or not the invasion could be justified, it has been a failure in all respects save for territorial acquisition.
The fact that you would even post this completely irrelevant copypasta that doesn’t address what I’m saying indicates that you’re not actually interested in arguing about this, you’re debating a liberal strawman that only exists in your head and not the communist right in front of you.
a) They were planning this in the first place, with them wanting a justification for increase. SMO was a response to that. I already addressed this.
b.) It literally has not. They were already primed, in governance and acting out political violence. Literally before the Ukrainian conflict they were used as forces against insurgents in a genocide of Eastern Ukraine. This was pointed out in the copypasta I sent.
Do we need pictures next?
Planning does not equal doing. Trump’s notion of increased spending among NATO members was literally laughed at when he suggested it in his first term. The SMO changed the equation for Europe and made them willing to do it when they previously weren’t.
While Ukraine did have those tendencies prior to the SMO, remember that Zelensky was initially elected on a platform of ending the Ukranian Civil War and making Azob stand down. While he had failed to do this, it nevertheless showed that the Ukranian people did not broadly have the thirst for violence that the far-right Azov battalion had - but the SMO changed this equation too, linking far right nationalism and fascism with self defense in the minds of the Ukrainians. Instead of being de-nazified, the SMO accelerated Ukraine’s fascist shift, turning it from a nation with a radical foreign-backed far right fringe to a nation with a radical foreign-backed far right majority.
“Planning does not equal doing. Trump’s notion of increased spending among NATO members was literally laughed at when he suggested it in his first term. The SMO changed the equation for Europe and made them willing to do it when they previously weren’t.”
Except countries were already beginning to act on it in forms of austerity and assigning funding to rearmament and militarization, which Ukraine already violated an accord to prevent that after they had been couped by fascist paramilitaries that had an intelligence support/presence and aid since the 60s as documented literally by the fucking C.I.A itself. Waiting for someone to pull the trigger while they have a gun on you is some pure lib-shit idealism. Of course they’re going to SMO to protect their nation. Are you insane? I literally don’t understand the core argument here where yes Putin is at fault for literally invading a nation that had a coup from an imperialist hegemony that had literally been planning and arming for an invasion supported by the leader of said hegemony’s intelligence agency? Like the fuck?
You’re also literally fucking wrong when you look at an actual chart of military spending. Shit goes all the way back to 2017-2018, lmfao. WAY before Ukraine was invaded and…after the coup LMAO.
“remember that Zelensky was initially elected on a platform of ending the Ukranian Civil War and making Azob stand down” platform does not mean a single fucking thing with imperialist intelligence agency pulling your strings. Now he’s waging an existential war to the last man and woman for the sake of NATO and will where America has already begun to lose faith after securing nearly half of their resources.
Also why the fuck are we downplaying the amount of Nazis in their military and government? What is this shit? They literally were waging a civil war and literal genocide against Russian-speakers in Eastern Ukraine and murdering trade unionists and communists WITH SUPPORT OF THE WESTERN INTELLIGENCE AGENCIES FROM THE 60S BACK. That’s fringe to you? That’s a fringe-minority? What the fuck are you literally talking about?
You keep repeating things that I’m not contesting, as though you think that they run counter to my argument. Putting US support for far right extremists in caps lock doesn’t change the fact that Russia’s Special Military Operation also massively empowered those extremists and reinvigorated NATO as a global military alliance.
Oh and Russia’s moves in Ukraine started with the takeover of Crimea. That military move can be rationally defended as the counterreaction to it from the west was relatively small (the area on the graph you helpfully circled), but the full-scale invasion cannot be defended on the same grounds because it sparked a much larger response (the area to the right of what you circled).
Thats certaintly a good point, I do agree this conflict ending the way it has had a consequence of reinteresting the fascists in europe with NATO and their local military industries.
If you go to page 5 it certainly paints that picture, I was initially going to argue that because of trump pushing for the usa to exit nato around his capaign season, they began funding their local military industries more, but they have been putting more money into NATO percentage wise since 2021, at an exponential rate. Perhaps the consern for the USA voting in trump forced the western world to fearfully put more money in to NATO, as an effort to persuade trump that it is worth the usa’s interest to remain in the organisation, but i am not sure, what do you think?
Yes, dastardly Putin didn’t allowed the western imperialists to loot and balkanize Russia, oh no, now the imperialists will just simply have to spend more on guns!
Only because Putin is one of the people who looted the Soviet Union himself.
Yeah man the fringe officer of a dysfunctional intelligence apparatus largely degenerated like the rest of the worker’s state destroyed and looted the Soviet Union. Wasn’t the West, wasn’t American finance capital, wasn’t any of that. T’was Putin. Evil genius.
Fucks sake man.
I said “one of”. If you can’t recognize the reality that the Soviet Union was looted by the people who currently form Russia’s oligarchy then we can’t have a conversation because you are completely in another reality.
We can’t have a conversation because you ignore imperialism.
/s?
Putin’s fault for not allowing a Nazi regime on Russia’s borders which would have been built up military for several more years then used to attack Russia after getting it into NATO and used as a potential springboard for an under 5 minutes nuclear decapitating strike on Moscow or something else equally deranged?
Putin was between a rock and a hard place, the objectively correct thing would have been to invade and subdue Ukraine in 2014 after the coup, to roll in and murder all the Nazis and dismantle their military but Russia foolishly got played into diplomacy stalling. Besides that objectively if Russia had done that in that year the sanctions against Russia at that time would have done far more damage, possibly would have destroyed Russia because at that time they hadn’t had years of time to take steps to prepare and insulate themselves from the shock and pain.
It’s NATO’s fault. It’s the Euro loser vassals’ fault, it is the fault of the US. Russia really didn’t have any good moves to make and every year it waited meant more Russians who would die in the fight against an increasingly more well armed and more well trained by the month military.
Tbf the russian army was not ready for such a thing in 2014. Likewise the russian economy was not resilient against sanctions by then.
Unfortunately i think this is true. As much as we all like to say that Russia should have gone all the way in 2014 i think the material basis just wasn’t there yet. Russia has come a very long way since 2014, economically but also militarily, and this should be acknowledged. Arguably they were not even fully ready in 2022, but they literally could not wait any longer, even a few more weeks might have been too late and the Donbass could have been overrun by Nazis and there would have been large scale massacres and an exodus of millions of civilians fleeing to Russia. Russia waited until the very last possible moment. They had to sort out their military issues on the fly, and it’s actually quite impressive what they managed to achieve while fighting all of NATO in a proxy war.
I really don’t think that the potential massacre tipped the scales here. Realpolitik requires that you let people die if the consequences of intervening threaten national security.
From what I read, Russian intelligence could no longer assure that the activities of NATO were not preparations of nuclear kill chain capabilities. This, I believe, is far more likely to be the cause of the SMO launching when it did and the genocide of ethnic Russians was the legal and moral pretext that aligned with Russia’s national security profile.
Different people can have different reasons for doing things, and often there is not a single reason. For some in the Russian government what you say was probably the main reason, for others it may have only been one of multiple reasons. Either way, that is the most important reason for me to support this operation. And it is the reason which in my opinion best explains the timing. If it was only about NATO activities then the timing doesn’t necessarily make sense. Why not earlier or later?
It’s also not just a matter of not letting people die, it’s about the severe political consequences of doing so and the impact that such a massive political and refugee crisis would have on Russia and Russian society. Something like that has the potential to topple a government and bring real hardliners to power instead.
As i said, this is just my opinion. I don’t think we can know for sure until someone deep inside the Russian government writes their memoirs and tells us.
I agree with your main points. I just don’t think saving lives at the expense of national security makes sense. I think national security was the main driver and saving lives was part of the process and part of the calculations.
As for the timing, I think the timing was very interesting from an intelligence perspective. The US was warning about an imminent attack and Ukraine was saying there was no intelligence to support it and then Russia invaded the next day. To me, that says the Russians were testing the West’s intelligence capabilities and launched when they thought they had the element of surprise. I think they were correct and the ensuing first day of battle gave the Russians good intelligence on what was and wasn’t known by the West. It is very useful to know what your opponents know (and what they don’t know), so I think timing was partially urgency and partially opportunity.
Exactly. Russia had only bad choices. They tried to navigate them as best they could. With the benefit of hindsight it’s easy to see that the west was playing them all along with the Minsk agreements and such but even if they’d had known that making the move was incredibly dangerous and the more time spent preparing the better.
Russia’s hand was quite literally forced. Either stand up now at the last moment or be trod on for the next decade or more. Either way NATO would have won and that’s what people saying Putin made this worse don’t understand: the chessboard was already fixed. What Russia has pulled off instead we must be aware of is nothing short of a humiliation of NATO and the west so dire that they’ve nearly escalated to all out war against Russia and only Russian nukes prevent that. They have without intending to given hope to the global south, to anti-imperialist forces, to everyone who resists US/EU/NATO hegemony and that is worth more than a few more racist, reactionary Euro-nazi-lover nations officially joining NATO instead of maintaining a tactical neutrality.
💯
Russia pushed back the Azov battalion, but now every other NATO military is increasing spending and multiple other countries’ militaries have joined it. You have to be huffing serious amounts of copium to think that the SMO has been an overall benefit to Russia or the people in Donbas or anyone except the military contractors on both sides of the conflict.
Oh yeah and the Azov Battalion is now the Azov Regiment and Ukraine’s military and politics are more Nazi than they’ve ever been. Territorial gains aside the SMO must be evaluated as a failure according to its stated goals of denazifying Ukraine and improving Russia’s security.
The people in donbass have not been ethnically cleansed, that is a big benefit.
deleted by creator
I don’t mean this in a confrontational way at all and I’m no putin stan, but in what way do you mean?
Putin’s invasion has reinvigorated NATO to a degree not seen since the Cold War ended. Ten years ago Germany’s military was an international joke - they were putting broomsticks on their tanks to simulate having machine guns because the political will to actually fund it just wasn’t there, but now they’ve massively increased spending and they’re not the only one. While Ukraine’s military capacity has been taken down as the SMO was intended to do, the total military strength arrayed against Russia has only increased thanks to multiple new countries joining NATO and the much-more-credible demand from the US that the previous membership increase spending.
Back before the war started, the consensus on the left was “he won’t do it because it’s obviously a terrible idea”. We were wrong about the first part, but history has vindicated the second.
The “consensus on the [western] left” was the way it was because the western left (myself included) was largely ignorant of the real conditions on the ground in Ukraine and the Donbass. We were wrong because we didn’t understand the situation, especially if we didn’t follow Russian language media (even there it was downplayed, for political reasons) and relied on what was available in the Western information sphere which completely either misrepresented or blacked out any real information about the region. The reality is that Ukraine prior to the SMO had already amassed the largest army in Europe after Russia, and was preparing to launch an all out assault on the Donbass republics.
If they had managed to gain a foothold in the urban areas, which is a very realistic possibility given the blitzkrieg tactics that NATO trained them in, it would have been a catastrophe. What we have seen so far in the SMO has vindicated Russia’s decision to launch it when it did ten times over. If the Nazis had been allowed to entrench themselves in the cities of Donetsk and Lugansk Russia would have had to level them entirely to dislodge the Ukrainian forces. Tens of thousands of civilians branded “terrorists” or “collaborators” by the Kiev regime’s Nazi thugs would have been tortured and murdered. Millions would have fled, the remainder would have been used as human shields. Thanks to the SMO today Donetsk and Lugansk do not look like Bakhmut, they are not depopulated ruins, they are thriving cities.
You speak of all of the consequences of the SMO on western policy as if that was not always the plan, as if this conflict was not engineered and provoked by them precisely because they wanted to have this pretext. They left Russia no other choice and they knew it. They put Russia in a Zugzwang where they were forced to make a choice and neither choice was good. This is what nobody who says the SMO was a mistake has ever been able to answer: what choice did Russia have? What were they supposed to do instead?
They literally tried every other avenue, not just since 2014 but since NATO expansion started, they tried explaining their concerns to the West about NATO expansion time and time again, they repeatedly warned, they tried negotiating - doesn’t work when the other side doesn’t negotiate in good faith and only sees agreements as a ruse to buy time to rearm (as has been admitted by multiple European leaders), when the other side doesn’t abide by the agreements - they even tried putting an entire draft treaty proposal in front of the Americans to avoid having to launch the SMO. Nothing worked, Ukraine was getting more and more Nazified, more and more militarized, pumped more and more full of weapons by the West. All this before the SMO, mind you.
It would have been a massive mistake not to launch the SMO. If the Donbass had been overrun and fallen to the Nazis the Russian government would have had a political crisis on their hands that might have brought down the entire government. Leaving the Ukraine situation to fester was creating an existential security risk for Russia that would have destroyed the Russian state. Instead now Russia is in a better economic and military position than it has been since 1991. NATO is panicking and increasing their budgets because they have been humiliated in the Ukraine proxy war. They really believed they could engineer a regime change or even collapse of the Russian state using this conflict, and instead it is NATO that is now close to collapse.
NATO may have (formally) expanded but in material terms it is weaker than ever, its stocks of weaponry and ammunition so depleted it will take a decade or more to refill them. If that’s even possible given how this conflict has exposed the systemic inability of the privatized for-profit arms industry to keep up with the demands of a real peer conflict. And it is by no means as united as it pretends to be, we constantly see signs of their dysfunction and inability to agree on any substantive action. Throwing more money down the bottomless pit of the private MIC won’t change this. It will only further destabilize the social and economic conditions here in Europe as our social safety nets get gutted, taxes increase, inflation continues to rise. Sooner or later this will cause massive political crises in Europe.
Meanwhile Russia’s military industry is reinvigorated, their army expanded, reformed and massively more experienced. Their economy is thriving not despite but largely because of the sanctions and how it has forced the Russian state and economy to adjust, reorient, re-industrialize, and to clamp down on much of the neoliberal rot left over from the 90s. And diplomatically they are more popular across the global south than they have been since the days of the Soviet Union.
Was everything done perfectly? No of course not, far from it. I even think that much of this was not foreseen or planned by the Russian government, they very much were forced to improvise on the fly. Being consummate liberals, they were surprised at how hostile and how hellbent on Russia’s destruction the West turned out to be (despite the fact that many in Russia, especially the communists, were trying to warn the government about this). They were very naive up to and even some time into the SMO. And even they did not expect their economy to hold up as well as it did.
According to the liberal with Marx’s face, the Kremlin should have done some secret third thing.
It reminds me of how liberals talk about about successful revolutions in general. “They just should’ve done something else.” And that something else is never elaborated. The conversation is then supposed to move on as if that was a scientific law or something.
No but seriously, this question needs to be asked. What should Russia have done instead? Typically you get one of three possible answers from the anti-SMO liberal-left:
No answer at all. Simply dodging the question and pretending it wasn’t asked, or just flippantly saying “just don’t invade”…ok, but what then? You’re just saying what they shouldn’t do, but what should they do? Should they do nothing? Have you given a single thought to what the consequences of that would be? Of course not, “just don’t invade”.
Suggest that Russia should do the very things it had already tried and was already doing for years if not decades; protest, negotiate, offer concessions, try to deter aggression by posturing, etc. This just shows that they have not been paying any attention whatsoever prior to 2022, instead acting as if history started in 2022, like Zionists with Oct 7.
Completely unrealistic and naive non-proposals like “wait for the UN/international community to condemn Ukraine’s aggression if it attacks the Donbass”. It goes without saying that this is laughable and infantile. Ukraine was already attacking the Donbass and we all saw how these international institutions ignored it or even gave them cover.
The only conclusions you can draw from this are either a) they have a very shallow understanding and very superficial knowledge about the conflict and its history, or b) that they are just trying to find ways to say “Russia should just roll over and surrender”, which is what they are saying when they suggest Russia should have let Ukraine make the first move (and overrun the Donbass) “so that the Russians are not seen as the aggressor”…
Except that they know perfectly well, even if they won’t admit it, that Russia would have been cast as the aggressor by the Western media regardless even if they let Ukraine make the first move, even if they reacted purely defensively and restricted their operations to the DPR and LPR. The West was already saying that Russia was in Ukraine even before 2022, they were already claiming that the Donbass militias were “Russians in disguise”. We weren’t born yesterday, we’ve been reading this shit since 2014.
The idea that Russia would be treated fairly if they “played by the rules” is ridiculous, and the West’s moral condemnations are worthless anyway, they are literally supporting a genocide. They would condemn Russia for defending itself no matter what, just like they condemn anyone resisting Western imperialist aggression, occupation and genocide. There is only one thing that can satisfy the West and get its media to not cast you as the villain and that is total and complete capitulation.
Someone who wants badly enough to engineer a war will always find a way to get one, no matter how much restraint the other side tries to exercise. And no matter how much ground you give and how defensively you act, those who control the narrative via the media will always be able to spin it to make you look like the aggressor. At some point the only possible response is to establish undeniable facts on the ground, which sooner or later will have to be acknowledged. This is what Russia is doing. It’s as simple as that. (Geo-)Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.
I hope that person reads your comment because it truly is one of the most thorough comment regarding the SMO.
Thank you for taking the time to write this! It is very helpful for people that are following up this discussion.
Thank you. Occasionally i try to put in some real effort, not just rely on copypasta because i think it’s important to take some time to take a step back and re-asses every now and then, to organize our thoughts about a certain subject as our views evolve, and writing out a comment like this really helps with that.
sThe countries who joined were to do so anyway should anything happen.
Sweden was always a de facto NATO country, during the cold war the US air force assets in germany should relocate to sweden in case of nuclear exchange and continue fighting from there. Not exactly something a neutral country would agree with, which Sweden pretended to be at that time.
And Finland moved towards NATO after the end of the USSR, the socdems there paved the way and the right wingers afterwards nailed it in, not remotely unexpected.
Likewise switzerland throwing out its neutrality, they were US lapdogs for a while already. With US state visits to switzerland getting away with outright disrespecting the local government. Once a country sinks that deep, it will come when its master calls.
Any other NATO expansion? Nah.
How great NATO is doing is obvious by not one, but two batshit increases of defense spending, first 2% and now 5%! While all NATOcountries have decrepid infrastructure, underfunded education and recessive economies.