"The 1980's are calling to ask for their foreign policy back."

That's part of the reason. The other part is that Donald Trump only did in the open what previous presidents tend to do behind closed doors. If they do get him, it would be for being a fucking idiot and doing it in plain view, otherwise likely not because then they'd open themselves up to litigation and prosecution. It's not a conspiracy to see millionaires banding together to protect their self-interest. That's why we're in this mess in the first place. They just like to attach names like "freedom" and all that bullshit, which none of them believe, but it gets people cheering for the team. I mean, yeah, the US fucks over millions of lives every day, especially right here in the country itself, but who doesn't love a good old fashioned war to clean out the pipes every so often?

You might have to click around to find the video, but a Ukrainian woman met Russian soldiers and basically told them to make themselves useful by becoming fertilizer. That's fucking hardcore.

Someone needs to verify this.


If true he would be the first Ace in… how many years? First Gulf War?

Fuck man, what a tiny speck in the ocean.

Tucker Carlson, too.

I don't know why it being translated makes it so much better.

Pretty sure those are neo Nazis are militias...and who doesn't have neo Nazi militias? I would imagine there might be a few around your neck of the woods.

If only @Paladin had got his wish of a second Trump term.

I have no idea if this is tongue in cheek (sorry, text is hard sometimes). That said, they've become an arm of the Ukrainian national guard. It would be like if the Proud Boys were granted recognized status with our own national guard:

Sources:
https://www.haaretz.com/world-news/...group-that-dreams-of-ruling-ukraine-1.6936835
https://www.vice.com/en/article/3ab7dw/azov-battalion-ukraine-far-right
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2...litia-takes-law-into-own-hands-neo-nazi-links
https://multipolarista.com/2022/02/23/nato-atlantic-council-ukraine-nazi-azov/
https://military-history.fandom.com/wiki/Azov_Battalion

Y'know, I totally get that Putin's big thing here is maintaining some kind of buffer zone between NATO and Russia. It's not necessarily fair to his neighbors that Russia wants to dictate who they can and can't ally themselves with, but I also understand that Russian paranoia isn't exactly unfounded. I get that.

But Ukraine wasn't scheduled to join NATO today or tomorrow or this week, and now Russian troops are killing Ukrainians. That's absolutely 100% indefensible. Putin's a fucking monster and an enemy of humanity, and every single asshole that defends him or attempts to minimize his actions or shift blame is supporting the side that's against humanity.

Putin is indeed monstrous for many reasons. He joins the ranks of most imperialist leaders, including ours. Both the US/NATO and Russia need to back the fuck off and leave Ukraine alone, because only their people suffer from this imperial dick waving contest.

Ok, but what should we be doing now when Russia isn't backing the fuck off?

Is this what the people propping up Biden are going with: that Putin only had to invade Ukraine because his "puppet" was no longer in the White House? The same puppet who had blocked NS2? The same one building up U.S. oil and gas production? The same one driving oil to $50/bbl? The same one trying to get NATO to spend more money on their own defense? Laughable.

No amount of spinning is going to change the fact that Putin acted when Biden was in office, because Putin has made the strategic calculation--the same one everyone else is making--that Biden is a weak, doddering fool, and whose administration is utterly, unredeemably incompetent.

The fallout from this is still to come: China will make a move on Taiwan and we will be forced into either humiliating acquiescence or a real shooting war.

Okay, but do you honestly buy that Zelensky, who is jewish and had 3 uncles killed in the holocaust, is the leader of a Nazi regime?

Well, now's kinda too late, isn't it? We could've had four more years of Russia not invading its neighbors, but noooooo...

The United States shouldn't be doing anything. This situation has become the way it is because of the United States and its incessant need to mold nation-states toward its economic interest, and that includes the Ukraine. We meddled in 2014. We meddled last week by sending them $500 million in "lethal aid." We literally sent half a billion dollars in weapons, of which a number of those were put into the hands of neo-Nazi groups, the same ones bombing the Donbas region for years.

We don't give a fuck if the Ukrainian people live or die, this is political, and it's about gaining an economic foothold in resources. For once, the United States should back the ever loving fuck off and leave other countries alone. It has done more than enough damage already. We should have never meddled, but now that we have, we need to back off and convince Russia to back off, and not by sanctions. We've been sanctioning them for years and it only hurts the poor people of Russia, not those with money and power. We encouraged Ukraine to join NATO as a buffer against Russia, even though we have no business doing that. Ukraine was under the impression the US/NATO would protect them, but now Biden's saying no soldiers in Ukraine. Will that hold true? Probably not. The US has never met a war it didn't profit from in some way, and I suspect that will happen here when Nord Stream 2 is shut down, and the US gets what it wants: energy rights to a significant swathe of Europe.

While it goes beyond him, Hunter Biden wasn't on the executive board of Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company, for nothing.

Zelensky? No. He's a puppet, and a generally ineffective leader who believed that the US actually gave a damn about him and his people. He has served his purpose, and what happens to him now won't matter.

I never defended him, I'm largely a pacifist but my personal values are of little import.

Every military aggressor in history has been choosing to end thousands of innocent lives, that goes without saying. It's always a monstrous decision to make.

I've simply tried to be objective about the sequence of events that got us here and wars don't happen in a vacuum. There is a clear role played by the West and I'm interested in what could have been done differently precisely because I wish we could have avoided all that death and suffering.

Or because he was now ready and NATO have put their intentions towards Ukraine in black and white.

Trump is currently praising Putin publicly, how much of an obvious sycophant need he be before we can agree he's a danger, if not outright traitor?

Nope.

Not everything is about US domestic politics.

Putin wanted his buffer zone and he wanted a former USSR territory. Denying it was not only a motivator but also an excuse.

Prior to that he could have argued the case over Donbas, but now the entire country has become game.

This is crucial to the whole puzzle. NATO made it clear they were going to continue encroaching upon Putin. I mean NATO's entire purpose was as a bulwark against the USSR, which no longer exists. Yet NATO continued to push after the fall of the USSR, and kept pushing despite the USSR being a memory rather than a living country. The animal NATO is up against now is not that former Soviet state, so why does it still exist except to create new problems where old ones were laid to rest?

A modern Russia, in the halls of its government, aims to be like its former imperial majesty, with Putin like the Tsars of old, having absolute authority over his people, beloved by them whether they like it or not, and all that entails. Narcissists like Trump are drawn to that kind of ambition, they seek it for themselves. That said, Trump is merely a symptom of something much deeper in the soul of the US, something that continues to rot from the root upward. The US is indwelt with its own narcissism, and cannot abide a strong player on the field who does not concede to its imperial authority. In essence, we get mad if you invade someone we believe is our property, and the US considers all of the world its property. The entirety of the globe is the US' "backyard." I say this as people who will never have to face the consequences of war talk about how we need to take action. We're on a war footing now, with the blue version of "you're either with us or against us." It is easy to get the people's minds off of their own poverty if they can be safely ensconced observers to the spectacle of war on foreign shores.

All of this as it is, in dealing with Russia, the US and NATO have royally fucked things up in the past for their own goals, and when it came time to prevent further entanglement in places where they didn't belong, they fucked up again. Instead of looking to de-escalate, they gave Ukraine false hope, that it would have allies backing it should Russia come prowling. Well guess what? Just like the US has done to middle eastern nations for generations, we were allies right up until we weren't, and at the end of the day, the only people who will suffer the most will be the people of Ukraine, whose leadership fell for the oldest trick in the book when it comes to imperialist powers: always sacrifice your pawns first.

People are asking "what should the US do?" and the answer is that the US shouldn't have done anything in the first place. There is no unmaking what has been made, no reversing what has been put in motion. We now have to deal with what has been done. If we were smart, we'd step back and de-escalate, but we're not as smart as we are ambitious, there's too much to gain from staying involved, from keeping the heat up as high as it will go, so that even in the midst of a pandemic, even amidst the precipitously boiling climate, against a tired and weary populace at home just trying to survive, we cannot let the riches of another nation go unclaimed and ungathered.

Again, the people of Ukraine will suffer the most. The higher ups at the State department who once sat on the boards of Lockheed-Martin and Raytheon will do quite well for themselves and their shareholders. The US will not learn its lesson until something terrible happens here, and then the cycle will start over again as it once more forgets what it did to get us to that point.

Another point that springs to mind is about Putin himself.

His entire political career has been predicated on succeeding where his Soviet predecessors failed.

Losing the USSR was central to that failure and his power base has its foundations in the belief he can rebuild and directly challenge Western dominance.

Whilst Ukraine was ambiguous, a contested territory he could avoid conflict by having it as a long term goal, but once it is publicly allied with the West and NATO in particular he can't be seen to fail.

"Disputed" is tolerable from his POV, "lost" to the enemy is disproportionately important because it is a symbolic defeat.

It's his "build the wall " but unlike Trump he has the power, willpower and competence to see it through regardless of the cost to human life.

This becomes the defining point of his presidency because this is where he is tested by a major foreign power rather than internal dissent. He can't afford weakness now and thus will be unlikely to step back from the brink.

Doing so would break the spell and break him.

Which is another reason why Ukraine should have been left well alone. We (collectively, the world) have nominated it the arena for testing powers against each other.

To win the moral victory? Is that what you want? Cool. You win. Congrats. Let it be written, let it be done. Electronically signed this day 25 February, 2022. Hon. E. Blues

But, "coulda, shoulda, woulda" ended the moment the first Russian missile was launched.

If you think Trump’s attempts to destabilize NATO, constant fucking with and scapegoating Ukraine and inability to keep his hands off Putin’s nut-sack is all just a coincidence, then I have a bridge to sell you.