MultigrainCerealista [he/him, comrade/them]

Yes at one point Putin sought to join NATO and the idea didn’t gain traction.

I don’t understand how you feel this helps your argument.

What are you talking about? The Cuban missile crisis was resolved by the missiles being removed and the soviet military presence ended in Cuba.

You’re factually wrong when you seem to say the soviet missiles are still there. They were removed.

The US’s security interests demanded they were removed from the nearby Cuba, and US missiles that threatened the USSR were removed from Turkey.

Peace was achieved by withdrawing the military threat from each others borders.

Likewise peace in Ukraine can only be achieved if Russia doesn’t feel threatened by a NATO presence there.

It’s easy to understand.

Yes, but the point is with Cuba, missiles were removed, peace deal was reached.

Yeah so the obvious conclusion is that peace in Cuba required satisfying the US’s demand to not have a Soviet military presence there.

Likewise peace in Ukraine requires not having a NATO military presence there.

Pretending that NATO isn’t hostile to Russia is also simply disconnected from reality. You need to connect your world view to reality.

and has survived everything the US threw at it so far

The point being the US threw a lot of shit at it because of course the US wouldn’t tolerate those missiles being there, and Russia won’t tolerate NATO being in Ukraine.

If China made a defensive alliance with Mexico that included a military base in Tijuana, Mexico would suddenly be in need of some democracy and freedom.

Continuing to deny this basic reality means your position isn’t connected to reality.

Peace requires a sustainable security situation for Russia not just for Ukraine and for Russia that means no NATO since NATO is hostile to Russia. It’s clear and denying this is just putting your head in the sand.

What do you think would happen if, hypothetically speaking, a nearby state such as, let’s say, Cuba started hosting the military assets of a hostile power?

What about even a distant nation such as oh I don’t know maybe Iran or one of the koreas started making weapons the US felt threatened by?

Just thinking aloud here I don’t know.

You think democracy is a terrible idea?

DID THE SLAVES VOTE IN THOSE ELECTIONS?

If Texas today had a vote to secede then they’d have absolutely every right to secede since the current electoral laws allow for the will of the people to be expressed.

The fact you didn’t stop to think about the slaves is because you’re a fucking cracker.

It’s not well covered in English language history which basically just skips over the fact poland was a viciously fascist state in the 1930s but it does get covered by Timothy Snyder, although he has a pretty firmly anti-Russian slant through his work.

You can see a lot of the works that cover it are in Polish, Ukrainian and Russian

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

60-70 hangings a day to fight “guerrillas”, floggings and torture to control the population, the Belorussians not having access to the education system, and the use of concentration camps to hold political activists, and trade unionists. Language rights were suppressed and the local population were forcibly “Polonized” / assimilated while also being held in an oppressed state as a cheap labor force for Polish settlers who were given the land as an agricultural fiefdom no different in any sense from the lebensraum concept - especially during the Polish fascist period of the mid to late 1930s.

Today the western part of Belorussia is still less industrialized than the east and the divide clearly falls along the line of polish occupation and colonial-settlement.

Ironically it was the atrocious treatment of the Belorussian minority that Hitler pointed at when claiming the German minority in Poland needed to be “rescued” - although the German minority were actually not treated badly.

https://www.aei.org/op-eds/polands-president-says-america-and-poland-must-stop-russian-imperialism/

I can’t find the link I originally read but I found the quote here

”It is very simple,” Polish President Andrzej Duda told me last week. “Right now, Russian imperialism can be stopped cheaply, because American soldiers are not dying.” But if we don’t put a halt to Russian aggression now, “there will be a very high price to be paid.”

You’re really going to argue the polinization campaign in Belorussia and Ukraine in the 1920s and 30s was a good thing? A moral gray area?

Jesus fucking Christ.

Hopefully you’re a teenager who doesn’t know what you’re talking about because if you do then you need to eat a brick if you’re really going to take that line, and there are plenty of people alive in both belorussia and Ukraine today who would feed it to you if they heard you saying that including the Ukrainian nationalists and Nazi gangs you are here supporting.

One of the more brutal events of the 20th century that is only overlooked due to the fact that Poland soon suffered worse evils than those Poland inflicted on the Ukrainians and Belorussians at the hands of the Nazis - until the Soviets kicked the Nazis out.

Edit: actually given your world view includes supporting the campaign of Ukrainization and the violent assimilationist policies directed at the ethnic minorities in Ukraine, you have form here. It seems you’re actually very comfortable with violence being used against ethnic minorities given how you’re here supporting multiple instances of it.

But honestly, and I am truly being straight with you here, I think the more likely truth is you’re a bit of a dumbass who doesn’t know your history and you don’t actually realize what you’re supporting here but your ego won’t let you let go.

You mean the areas populated by Belorussians and Ukrainians that was conquered by Poland from Russia in the war of 1922 when Poland took advantage of the civil war to seize a big chunk of Belorussian and ukraine and taken back by Russia when the polish state collapsed following the Nazi invasion of Poland?

None of the Russian parts of the MR pact were populated by mostly polish people, with the exception of Lviv which is still part of Ukraine today.

It’s a selective reading of history to call Belorussians and Ukrainians the rightful property of Poland especially in light of the brutal Polonization campaign they suffered, being reduced to serfdom by Polish invaders.

As it happens I’d actually support restoring that part to Poland, Lviv, and also the Hungarian bit of Ukraine to Hungary since both of those ethnic minorities, along with the ethnic Greek minority, have all been suffering a lot under the rule of the Ukrainian nationalists and have also faced restrictions on their internal self determination such as language rights being suppressed or in the case of the Greek minority also religious persecution.

You mean when the USSR pushed the Nazis out of Poland and liberated Auswitch is that the event you’re talking about?

Im glad you acknowledge that Ukraine and the west does not have a moral leg to stand on but I hope you eventually take the next step and recognize that means the hundreds of thousands of dead and permanently injured Ukrainians and Russians makes this a moral travesty and a crime against humanity.

Recognizing the moral right lies with the separatists but choosing to support the use of military force against them because “fuck Russia” makes you the bad guy.

You: let’s talk about something else because I’m feeling really fucking stupid right now

I guess you’re saying you fully support Putin’s crackdown on Grozny then right?

Get your deflecting moronic ass out of here and have a think about what you are actually supporting right now and today in Ukraine.

Because you’re not supporting democracy and freedom. Not at all.

unless their right of internal self determination is compromised

Oh wait what’s that?

Lmao that’s what happened after the Ukrainian nationalists starting arming Nazi militias and banned their political parties you clown.

Banning their political parties and denying them the right to use their own language or practice their own religion or have their own political representation is called denying them their right to internal self determination.

The one where they voted to secede and the multiple elections over the past decade where they voted for political parties that were then banned by the Ukrainian government which is now also refusing to hold constitutionally mandated elections for fear of how they’d vote again.

You didn’t answer my question:

Are you of the opinion that the people in the east want to be part of Ukraine?

Why does “they voted for it repeatedly for a decade” not compute for you?

Are you of the opinion that the people in the east want to be part of Ukraine? Because they don’t, not after a decade of being brutalized by far right militias and seeing their cities shelled by the Ukrainian military and being denied the right to speak their language or practice their religion.

When you talk about “Russian backed separatists” you realize those separatists live there don’t you? You know what the word separatist means right?

Ukraine is using military force to deny them their right to self determination and the only reason you want to call the referendum illegitimate is because the people who live there chose the wrong answer.

You don’t value their views at all. They don’t matter to you. Which makes your position immoral and bloodthirsty.

“That referendum and those elections don’t count because the USA said no” truly the voice of democracy and freedom.

I guess it was Putin that forced Zelenskyy to ban the political opposition? Because the damn Putin bots kept voting wrong.

So the argument is that Ukraine never stood a chance in this war and the politicians in the west always knew this but they’ve been pushing the narrative that “Ukraine can still win” because it serves their purposes to send Ukrainians to die in the theory that this will weaken Russia.

The concept is known as a “bleeding sore”, going back to the Napoleonic wars when Britain used the same strategy in Spain against Napoleon. It doesn’t matter that Ukraine can’t win because the wests purpose is served by the conflict itself more than the resolution.

Note how the mask often slips and pro-war advocates talk about how “cost effective” this war is for the west because it’s Ukrainians dying and not Americans. The Polish President said this just yesterday. Ghoulish.

The west only drips in weapons, enough to keep Ukraine in the fight but laughably inadequate to win, or even reach the “first line” of Russian defensive works. The purpose of the west is served by keeping the conflict open because it’s Ukrainians and Russians dying.

I can give you a list of (deservedly or not) respected western geopolitical thinkers who were pointing out the only outcome of this war is a lot of dead Ukrainians going back to 2014. The western leaders knew this all along and they cynically decided to push for conflict and the abandonment of the Minsk II peace protocols because they saw an opportunity to get Russia bogged down in an Afghanistan-style strength-sapping conflict.

The shift in the narrative is that instead of simply beating their chests with slava Ukraine war chants, the absolute failure of the counteroffensive makes it obvious that Ukraine can’t win, and once that is acknowledged then it becomes morally untenable to argue Ukrainians should continue dying to try to force the culturally Russian regions to remain part of Ukraine.

The key issue for me is the right of a people to self determination.

The people who live in the eastern parts of Ukraine are overwhelming Russian speaking and identify as ethnically Russian. They voted three times in various ways for some form of preserving their cultural rights, only to have their expression of Democratic will met with violent militias, shelling, and other violence, and then finally voted once again to secede from Ukraine, largely motivated by the extreme hostility from right wing Ukrainian nationalists who were banning the use of Russian, imposing assimilationist education policies, banning political parties that represented the people there, and even banning the free exercise of religion if that religious practice looked to the Russian Orthodox Church for leadership.

The principle of the self determination of a people to choose their own government demands respect and Ukraine has no right to impose their will on a population that doesn’t want it.

You should look at what the people who actually live there, in the east not just those in Kyiv, have been saying for a decade. They don’t want to be part of Ukraine anymore and it’s because of the extreme violence Ukraine has inflicted upon them since 2014.