Seriously you want troops to get into this proxy war between the US and Russia? How about WW 3 and nuclear war. This war should not have happened and could have ended quickly leaving much of the land Ukraine has loss and saving so many lives if the US and UK had not blocked peace negotiations.
Seriously you want troops to get into this proxy war between the US and Russia? How about WW 3 and nuclear war. This war should not have happened and could have ended quickly leaving much of the land Ukraine has loss and saving so many lives if the US and UK had not blocked peace negotiations.
Please stop it with the falsehoods about Russia's war with Ukraine. In Feb. of 2022 Russia invaded Ukraine - a democratic country that had formerly been one of the Soviet Republics. If you really think that Vladimir Putin will stop with Ukraine, please Google "The Sudetenland, 1938"! After Hitler invaded that small part of Czechoslovakia because he said many German speakers lived there ( sound familiar?) he told the world he would stop there.
Putin wants to recreate the old Soviet Empire. And he wants those old Soviet ports on the Baltic back. Open your atlas & take a look. That means Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia & Poland will be next.
History will not be kind to the US if we abandon Ukraine.
So many thanks for your eloquent and morally nuanced response to Nora. Apologies for missing your insights until now. Thank you for showing Nora the way.
A race of quasi criminals from the U.S. in 1991 started this.
Many were newly-minted M.B.A.s from the Ivy League. They joined with hedge funders, established banks, and the U.S. Department of State and went looking for all the former Soviet Union's nomenklatura -- to pour U.S. investment dollars into them.
So the most corrupt were able to seize all that country's most valuable assets. The new oligarch class arose. As they'd stolen all the public resources, they also defunded the once-proud health care system, and installed sycophant cronies atop all the universities. Epidemics of tuberculosis, alcoholism, and suicide among middle aged men swept the land.
It was the model of U.S. high finance chicanery that infected the new corrupt in Russia to its arrogance -- the same lickspittle allegiance to warmonger Putin as MAGA has for its Trump.
The same hate-filled nationalism tinged with idiot religious zealotry.
I think you are on-target about the pre-corporate rape of Russia. Reminds me of the questionable thinking I encountered in Iraq in setting up a government structure so culturally discordant that it was bound to fail. When other suggestions, more in line with Middle Eastern history (e.g., bringing the sixty largest tribes into a House of Lords proposed by a colleague) these highly educated dummasses laughed and said, "It's just not the way we do it." Unfortunately, the Russian culture of authoritarian belligerence dates back to three centuries of Mongol rule. That is hard to fathom and nullify.
David Halberstam recorded some of its chapters in "The Best and the Brightest."
Mark Twain got more in "Innocents Abroad."
Is it a side-show of democracy -- that we have to accept that rubes, ridge-runners, barbarians, yahoos, flim-flam artists, and fictional families Amberson, Snopes, Hubbard, Kane, Stark and more will also run with their freedom?
And it would not have happened if the US had not poked the bear along with NATO. If anyone who disagrees with BidenтАЩs foreign policy is labeled a Putin supporter what kind of democracy is that. There are many experts who agree this did not have to happen. To support diplomacy over warmongering and the military industrial complex does not make someone a Putin supporter.
Not labelling anyone but it's Putin doing the warmongering and invading a sovereign nation instead of using diplomacy.
Timothy Snyder wrote this post today about the critical situation in Ukraine and why Congress needs to send funds to their aid immediately:
"Russia is carrying out comprehensive missile and drone strikes against Ukrainian energy infrastructure. The idea is to make the entire country cease to function. Imagine what your life would be like if you local power station had just been destroyed by a ballistic missile."
Nora, How do you have diplomacy if Russia will not come to the table seriously? Who is Putin? As a former KGB and Stasi member in East Germany he played both sides against each other from what I have read about him in German. Is this someone that one can negotiate with? What treaty has he stuck to? None as far as I can see. So, how do you negotiate without getting a treaty? How are you envisioning this working?
Good point, Linda. Perhaps Nora does not know that, in her 1991 vote for independence, every oblast / province voted to exit the U.S.S.R. and that six of every seven people (at least) in Donbass wanted out of the evil empire. The open question remains Crimea in which a razor-thin majority favoured independence. That one may need to be negotiated.
Russia after the defeat of Russia. The negotiations, were they to occur, would not be designed to settle the current conflict but to avoid future ones.
There was a peace negotiation between Ukraine and Russia shortly after the war started. The US and the UK pressured Zelensky not to consider it. This is pretty well known. Look up Jeffery Sachs, Code Pink, Useful Idiots, Chris Hedges, Professor John Mearsheimer amd more. Nora is not stupid and just does not follow the PR from the Biden Administration.
I know Mearsheimer's position. He works with friends of mine. I respectfully disagree with these people. They blame NATO for this war. However, whether or not NATO provoked Putin, at this point in time what do you believe Putin would just agree to a negotiation when he has not stuck to a single agreement he has made with Ukraine in the past. By this logic you would have Ukraine be like Native Americans have been in the USA, totally absorbed through occupation and no rights to their own cultures, beyond the crumbs thrown to them. I can see why the Ukraine does not want this. All of the countries of the former Soviet Union have been psychically destroyed by Russian occupation. Ukraine has the painful history of the Holodomor. At the House of Cultures of the World in Berlin they had an exhibit of former Soviet Countries, mostly Central Asian, but Ukrainian work was in it too. It was made very clear how much one suffers when cut off from one's language, culture, identity and sense of self. So, at this point in time, how do you propose to get Putin, who has not stuck to a treaties with Ukraine to do so. https://www.robert-schuman.eu/en/european-issues/344-russia-ukraine-and-international-law
Making agreements is pointless if all it does is make a temporary cease fire and give Putin time to regroup. What do you think can be done to 1) stop Putin from making war on Ukraine (and other countries), and 2) to make a lasting end without giving up any of Ukrainian territory. From a school teacher's point of view, rewarding a bully for bullying has never led to them stopping the bullying. They only stop when the rewards are removed. That is the role sanctions are supposed to play, but Putin is cleverly finding ways around them, and as an autocrat he does not have to spend any money on his people, so he puts 40% of their economy into the war. Do you support Trump and his idea to cater to Putin, giving him what he wants and not supporting Ukraine?
Oh. And Trump would have handled it diplomatically? ANY of it? Diplomacy is not in his vocabulary. He is entirely transactional in the way you describe the corporate eliteтАЩs relationship with Russia after the wall came down. Money and power are his bottom line and if it takes being PutinтАЩs gigolo heтАЩs fine with it.
I said nothing about Trump in my opinion both choices from the duopoly are absolutely horrible. Biden is probably more of a warmonger than Trump because Trump only cares about Trump. He will swing whatever way he thinks his base wants. Biden on the other hand has been a committed warmonger for decades. Who is more dangerous is anyoneтАЩs guess. I will vote for Jill Stein and at least know I voted for a bright women with a commitment to peace and the environment. I truly understand why people donтАЩt vote with choices like this.
Yes. There is one way that maybe, possibly, one could say that the US poked the bear because Obama joined with the other members to kick Putin out of the G8 because of his annexation of Crimea.
I think not to kick out Putin would have been a show of bad faith in support of the peaceful interactions among democracies. The G-9 was an anachronism from the Partnership for Peace in the 1990s.
WRONG. N.A.T.O. did not move East. After Georgia and, especially, Chechnya in the 1990s when Russia's belligerence not changing broke the good faith efforts of the West, the newly liberated republics and former vassal states moved West.
Seriously you want troops to get into this proxy war between the US and Russia? How about WW 3 and nuclear war. This war should not have happened and could have ended quickly leaving much of the land Ukraine has loss and saving so many lives if the US and UK had not blocked peace negotiations.
Please stop it with the falsehoods about Russia's war with Ukraine. In Feb. of 2022 Russia invaded Ukraine - a democratic country that had formerly been one of the Soviet Republics. If you really think that Vladimir Putin will stop with Ukraine, please Google "The Sudetenland, 1938"! After Hitler invaded that small part of Czechoslovakia because he said many German speakers lived there ( sound familiar?) he told the world he would stop there.
Putin wants to recreate the old Soviet Empire. And he wants those old Soviet ports on the Baltic back. Open your atlas & take a look. That means Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia & Poland will be next.
History will not be kind to the US if we abandon Ukraine.
KMD,
So many thanks for your eloquent and morally nuanced response to Nora. Apologies for missing your insights until now. Thank you for showing Nora the way.
This war should not have happened because Putin should never have invaded Ukraine in the first place!
A race of quasi criminals from the U.S. in 1991 started this.
Many were newly-minted M.B.A.s from the Ivy League. They joined with hedge funders, established banks, and the U.S. Department of State and went looking for all the former Soviet Union's nomenklatura -- to pour U.S. investment dollars into them.
So the most corrupt were able to seize all that country's most valuable assets. The new oligarch class arose. As they'd stolen all the public resources, they also defunded the once-proud health care system, and installed sycophant cronies atop all the universities. Epidemics of tuberculosis, alcoholism, and suicide among middle aged men swept the land.
It was the model of U.S. high finance chicanery that infected the new corrupt in Russia to its arrogance -- the same lickspittle allegiance to warmonger Putin as MAGA has for its Trump.
The same hate-filled nationalism tinged with idiot religious zealotry.
I think you are on-target about the pre-corporate rape of Russia. Reminds me of the questionable thinking I encountered in Iraq in setting up a government structure so culturally discordant that it was bound to fail. When other suggestions, more in line with Middle Eastern history (e.g., bringing the sixty largest tribes into a House of Lords proposed by a colleague) these highly educated dummasses laughed and said, "It's just not the way we do it." Unfortunately, the Russian culture of authoritarian belligerence dates back to three centuries of Mongol rule. That is hard to fathom and nullify.
It's an old history, Ned.
David Halberstam recorded some of its chapters in "The Best and the Brightest."
Mark Twain got more in "Innocents Abroad."
Is it a side-show of democracy -- that we have to accept that rubes, ridge-runners, barbarians, yahoos, flim-flam artists, and fictional families Amberson, Snopes, Hubbard, Kane, Stark and more will also run with their freedom?
And it would not have happened if the US had not poked the bear along with NATO. If anyone who disagrees with BidenтАЩs foreign policy is labeled a Putin supporter what kind of democracy is that. There are many experts who agree this did not have to happen. To support diplomacy over warmongering and the military industrial complex does not make someone a Putin supporter.
Not labelling anyone but it's Putin doing the warmongering and invading a sovereign nation instead of using diplomacy.
Timothy Snyder wrote this post today about the critical situation in Ukraine and why Congress needs to send funds to their aid immediately:
"Russia is carrying out comprehensive missile and drone strikes against Ukrainian energy infrastructure. The idea is to make the entire country cease to function. Imagine what your life would be like if you local power station had just been destroyed by a ballistic missile."
https://snyder.substack.com/p/an-appeal-to-congress
Nora, How do you have diplomacy if Russia will not come to the table seriously? Who is Putin? As a former KGB and Stasi member in East Germany he played both sides against each other from what I have read about him in German. Is this someone that one can negotiate with? What treaty has he stuck to? None as far as I can see. So, how do you negotiate without getting a treaty? How are you envisioning this working?
Good point, Linda. Perhaps Nora does not know that, in her 1991 vote for independence, every oblast / province voted to exit the U.S.S.R. and that six of every seven people (at least) in Donbass wanted out of the evil empire. The open question remains Crimea in which a razor-thin majority favoured independence. That one may need to be negotiated.
Ned, with whom would they be negotiating?
Russia after the defeat of Russia. The negotiations, were they to occur, would not be designed to settle the current conflict but to avoid future ones.
There was a peace negotiation between Ukraine and Russia shortly after the war started. The US and the UK pressured Zelensky not to consider it. This is pretty well known. Look up Jeffery Sachs, Code Pink, Useful Idiots, Chris Hedges, Professor John Mearsheimer amd more. Nora is not stupid and just does not follow the PR from the Biden Administration.
I know Mearsheimer's position. He works with friends of mine. I respectfully disagree with these people. They blame NATO for this war. However, whether or not NATO provoked Putin, at this point in time what do you believe Putin would just agree to a negotiation when he has not stuck to a single agreement he has made with Ukraine in the past. By this logic you would have Ukraine be like Native Americans have been in the USA, totally absorbed through occupation and no rights to their own cultures, beyond the crumbs thrown to them. I can see why the Ukraine does not want this. All of the countries of the former Soviet Union have been psychically destroyed by Russian occupation. Ukraine has the painful history of the Holodomor. At the House of Cultures of the World in Berlin they had an exhibit of former Soviet Countries, mostly Central Asian, but Ukrainian work was in it too. It was made very clear how much one suffers when cut off from one's language, culture, identity and sense of self. So, at this point in time, how do you propose to get Putin, who has not stuck to a treaties with Ukraine to do so. https://www.robert-schuman.eu/en/european-issues/344-russia-ukraine-and-international-law
Making agreements is pointless if all it does is make a temporary cease fire and give Putin time to regroup. What do you think can be done to 1) stop Putin from making war on Ukraine (and other countries), and 2) to make a lasting end without giving up any of Ukrainian territory. From a school teacher's point of view, rewarding a bully for bullying has never led to them stopping the bullying. They only stop when the rewards are removed. That is the role sanctions are supposed to play, but Putin is cleverly finding ways around them, and as an autocrat he does not have to spend any money on his people, so he puts 40% of their economy into the war. Do you support Trump and his idea to cater to Putin, giving him what he wants and not supporting Ukraine?
Thank you, Nora. You and I trust the judgment of different people.
Oh. And Trump would have handled it diplomatically? ANY of it? Diplomacy is not in his vocabulary. He is entirely transactional in the way you describe the corporate eliteтАЩs relationship with Russia after the wall came down. Money and power are his bottom line and if it takes being PutinтАЩs gigolo heтАЩs fine with it.
I said nothing about Trump in my opinion both choices from the duopoly are absolutely horrible. Biden is probably more of a warmonger than Trump because Trump only cares about Trump. He will swing whatever way he thinks his base wants. Biden on the other hand has been a committed warmonger for decades. Who is more dangerous is anyoneтАЩs guess. I will vote for Jill Stein and at least know I voted for a bright women with a commitment to peace and the environment. I truly understand why people donтАЩt vote with choices like this.
Or it does.
Please say in what way the US "poked the bear."
The U.S. did not. Presidents Bush and Clinton tried to establish the partnership for peace. Russia broke the good faith.
https://www.ukrainer.net/russian-wars/ (leaves out meddling in Ukraine and Georgia)
Yes. There is one way that maybe, possibly, one could say that the US poked the bear because Obama joined with the other members to kick Putin out of the G8 because of his annexation of Crimea.
I think not to kick out Putin would have been a show of bad faith in support of the peaceful interactions among democracies. The G-9 was an anachronism from the Partnership for Peace in the 1990s.
WRONG. N.A.T.O. did not move East. After Georgia and, especially, Chechnya in the 1990s when Russia's belligerence not changing broke the good faith efforts of the West, the newly liberated republics and former vassal states moved West.
Putin speaks.
Daniel, I am assuming you are referring to someone in this thread. The pseudonym is transparently clever