Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky has said the death of Yevgeny Prigozhin – the Russian mercenary leader whose plane crashed weeks after he led a mutiny against Moscow’s military leadership – shows what happens when people make deals with Russian leader Vladimir Putin.
As Ukraine’s counteroffensive moves into a fourth month, with only modest gains to show so far, Zelensky told CNN’s Fareed Zakaria he rejected suggestions it was time to negotiate peace with the Kremlin.
“When you want to have a compromise or a dialogue with somebody, you cannot do it with a liar,” Volodymyr Zelensky said.
The war broke out because Putin covets Ukraine and always has.
Always has? They didn’t start talking about annexation till well into the invasion. In the Minsk agreement he wanted the Donbas to remain part of Ukraine, didn’t even recognize the DPR/LPR right until the start of the invasion. Maybe, just maybe, they actually feel threatened by NATO encirclement, like they’ve been saying since basically forever, and which even prominent US politicians and foreign policy experts have been warning about. But I guess you prefer pseudo-psychological explanations to realpolitik ones. Fuck reality we got vibes!
Given this, why do you believe if the Ukrainians lay down their arms Russia wouldn’t continue doing exactly what it has been doing — trying to kill their civilian population and deport their children?
Why would they? “His army’s conduct” is about par for the course. You should read about how much civilian targets the US hit during the Iraq invasion. Of course the civilians will be a lot safer once the fighting stops. The goal of this invasion is not to kill as many civilians as possible, that would look way different. The Nazis had extermination squads trailing the front just committing one huge massacre after another. They had death camps. This is not what’s going on in Ukraine. Fighting age civilian men get imprisoned and “filtrated”, but are usually released after a while and then allowed to get Russian passports. “Harmless” old people and women and so on aren’t even filtrated. Ukrainian children are returned to their parents if/when they show up. This isn’t some extermination campaign.
In what sense does any amount of anxiety justify a war of territorial aggression and the committing of war crimes against a population and the deportation of its children?
If Russia was worried about NATO there are many better ways to handle that than creating a bunch of corpses. Or trying to take Ukraine’s territory, which again they have already demonstrated their desire for after doing it in Crimea.
I have actual sources of the war crimes they’ve committed. Where is the proof they’re not committing the well-documented war crimes against the civilian population that you assert? That it’s simply temporary?
Because it is actually an extermination campaign. Putin wants the land and he doesn’t want the people on it. His actions to this point make that quite clear.
I’m not saying they’re not committing war crimes. I’m saying the goal of the war is not extermination, since an extermination war would look very different. The war crimes are very similar to what the US did in their recent wars, like Iraq. So unless you think those were extermination campaigns, then that’s not good evidence. You’d have to compare it to e.g. the Nazi’s eastern campaign, which, again, looked very different. Where are the extermination camps? Where are the ghettos? Where are the death squads? Did the Nazis try to make every Pole get a regular German passport? The rhetoric of liberating their quasi-Russian brothers and sisters from Banderite ideology and Western vassaldom is also very different from the Nazi “Untermenschen” crap.
Whether or not “anxiety” justifies the war isn’t important. We were talking about why they invaded, and they did this in the sincere belief that this was necessary to protect against a hostile military encirclement. This is not an unreasonable belief. The US would react similarly to such an encirclement, even if the other side repeatedly insists they don’t have hostile intent. Even if there is actually no hostile intent (I doubt it), that’s still not great, since plan and intent are subject to change. Who’s going to guarantee that some future administration doesn’t want to leverage the strategic advantage gained by parking an army and/or nukes near Moscow?
So this is what’s called a provocation, and it suggests that the Russians aren’t “mad” or irrational. They’re behaving as expected by the theory of realpolitik. This would mean that this war could be deescalated by backing off and agreeing to a neutral Ukraine.
Edit: Russia invading Ukraine has therefore two main goals:
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Prevent Ukraine from becoming a NATO member. So long as Ukraine is in a war (or just a territorial dispute) with Russia, most NATO members will not want to admit Ukraine into NATO, since that could drag them into war with a nuclear power.
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Drive back the anti-Russian NATO-equipped Ukrainian army (quite a large force actually) from their core territories. This would give Russia a buffer to better absorb an attack from the territory of Ukraine (which is btw the direction both Hitler and Napoleon used to attack Russia). This also suggest that Russia is probably going to try to expand the buffer zone unless Ukraine gets demilitarized and neutralized (as in become neutral), if they can.
The goal is not to murder Ukrainians. And the primary goal is not to take territory, that just follows from the primary goal of creating a security buffer.
I actually definitely believe the US was looking to do some light ethnic cleansing in Iraq. But even so, there’s many documented instances of Russia doing it; so no need to compare them to the US. Their war aim seems to include some amount of ethnic cleansing.
Look up the articles I linked you. Children are being shipped to ghettos; adults are being moved to death camps. While not as endemic as Nazi Germany it is still clear what Russia is trying to do. That the machinery is not as advanced as the actual Holocaust doesn’t mean it isn’t a genocide.
It doesn’t matter if their belief is sincere or how real their anxiety is. There is no justification for a war of territorial aggression on territory a dictator has clearly coveted in the past and the genocide of its native population. Literally this is the same level as excusing Hitler’s aggression against Poland. It doesn’t matter how encircled a country feels; it does not justify a war of territorial aggression and the murder of the country’s native inhabitants.
If their goal is not to murder Ukrainians and take their territory, why is that exactly what they’re doing and what they’re claiming? Literally today a Russian general said Ukraine is simply the first stop to an invasion of Europe. How much more proof do you need that this has nothing to do with NATO or the west, and is only Putin’s mad ambitions for expanding the Russian empire?
