You’re right. I don’t feel that we had legitimate grounds for invading Iraq.
I will point out that at the time, I would have said otherwise. The Bush administration claimed it had credible evidence that Iraq was actively working on WMD’s and gave this as justification for invading. That, to me and other people, gave justification to the invasion.
We subsequently found that the active WMD programs and the supposed evidence did not exist. So the war retroactively lost its justification.
I don’t want to play the semantics game. But that would be a reason for invading Ukraine not a justification.
Ukraine (and Belarus as well) belong to Lithuania, full stop. Any other notion is madness 
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Surely Mongolia will have something to say about that!
The USSR made a huge point that Ukraine was a separate nation and entitled to it’s own seat in the UN.
Here is a medieval map of Europe. See that area called Muscovy? That was Russia in 1444. Note it does not include Ukraine, that is old Lithuania.
Here is another in 1730- still Ukraine is not part of Russia.
It finally was taken by Catherine the Great around 1800.
No such promise was made to Russia. In fact later signed treaties said the opposite.
I can assure you that is definitely not the approach I take with these kinds of things. I am hardly a fan of “Western liberalism” (of the sort primarily represented by America, the UK, Germany and France).
But Russia is so very clearly the unjustified bad guy here, it is literally laughable to me that anyone would seriously suggest otherwise. Sure, Russia has reasons - but they are evil reasons. Look at the ones in the OP - “Sphere of influence” is just Lebensraum-lite. Imperialism was, is, and always will be unmitigated evil.
What if I see them as “slightly bad” and “outright evil”?
Following on from the “justifications” vs “reasons” point - one of the primary arguments put forth by Russia is that a substantial portion of the Ukrainian population are pro-Russian and consider themselves oppressed by the current Ukrainian regime.
Ukraine is clearly an extremely polarized and unstable political unit, and deeply divided along cultural/ethnic lines. What’s a little harder to nail down is just how large the pro-Russian element is, and just how real the oppression is.
In the border regions there’s obviously an overwhelmingly pro-Russian population, but in the rest of the country it seems to ‘only’ be around 30% depending on whose polls you look at. So on a purely numbers basis, you could argue that Russia would be justified in defending the breakaway provinces, but the current invasion obviously goes way beyond that.
As for the oppression argument, somewhat justified, but overblown IMO. Since the ‘Maidan Revolution’ there’s been a growing revanchism against the russophone population, and increasing polarization, but I’m not aware of any major violence outside of the border region. Back in 2014 there was some extremely unsavory “right wing” identitarian politics in the ethnic Ukrainian camp, but my impression was that it never really took hold in a big way.
I would also add that it would be a huge mistake to assume that the Russian population don’t support this invasion and/or Putin. There’s a legitimate question to be asked about ‘why now’, and ‘why an all out invasion’, but this situation has been brewing since 1990, with varying degrees of ongoing military actions since 2014, when Ukraine really started pulling away from Russia.
They don’t.
The major city of Kharkiv is almost entirely Russian-speaking and linked to Russia culturally. A quarter of the population of the city has relatives over the border in Russia. There was a fair amount of support for Yanukovych and pro-Russian parties in Kharkiv in 2014.
It was supposed to be one of the easiest areas in Ukraine for Russia to occupy.
But Kharkiv has been fighting back intensely right from the start of the invasion, and is still holding out against vicious Russian attacks, and even starting to make some advances against Russian troops.
The Mayor of Kharkiv, Ihor Terekhov, said in a video message:
The city’s attitude to Russia today is completely different to what it ever was before.
We never expected this could happen: total destruction, annihilation, genocide against the Ukrainian people – this is unforgivable.
To which we can add this report today:
A Russian general has been killed in fighting around Kharkiv, Ukrainian intelligence has claimed, which would make him the second general the Russian army has lost in Ukraine in a week.
The intelligence arm of the Ukrainian defence ministry said Maj Gen Vitaly Gerasimov, chief of staff of the 41st Army, had been killed outside the eastern Ukrainian city of Kharkiv, along with other senior officers.
The investigative journalism agency Bellingcat said it had confirmed Gerasimov’s death with a Russian source.
The first Russian general to be killed (less than a week ago), Andrei Sukhovetsky, was from the same army group outside Kharkiv. Presumably Gerasimov was his replacement.
I think that’s complicated. I live in Texas. I can see a day where 51% of the state voted to succeed, but it just doesn’t seem right that 51% of the population should put 49% of the population in a situation where they have to either substantially disrupt their life (sell real estate at a loss, move) in order to avoid losing US citizenship. I’m a citizen of the US. The 14th amendment means the Federal government is supposed to protect me against my state government taking my rights.
And what about scale? I can imagine 51% of the state wanting to leave, but I am sure 75% of my city would want to stay. Do we get to?
I feel like the threshold for dissolving a nation should be significantly higher than 50%.
Mexico isn’t an example. Cuba is a much better example. Was America justified in doing what it did to Cuba, from Bay of Pigs to threatening global war over Cuban missiles to embargoing Cuba pretty much in perpetuity? If Cuba isn’t a fair example, what about Nicaragua or Honduras or Vietnam or any other country that never did anything to the US except to align with Russia?
The US had no right to “transfer their diplomatic anger” to those countries, as you put it. And yet, it pursued ruinous policies all over the western hemisphere… economic, political, military, etc.
I think it’s erroneous to adjudicate this situation strictly as statutory/treaty legitimacy between two states, when the calculus between the US and Russia has always been about primarily about norms of security, power, and influence.
No.
So, now what?
This one thing I could actually believe. I don’t know it’s true but it could be. Russian distrust of the West is a deep cultural fact.
How it justified invading Ukraine, of course, is a real head scratcher. The Putin apologists never do explain why Russia’s alleged casus belli against NATO resulted in them invading a country not in NATO. It’s as if on the morning of September 2, 1939, the UK and France said “Invade Poland, will you, Germany? Well, that won’t do! By Christ, we’re going to war with Switzerland!”
So I guess the story becomes “America is allowed commit war crimes and violate national sovereignty with impunity because nobody’s powerful enough to push back. Meanwhile America demands that Russia adhere to the exact text of every international law, treaty, and handshake agreement, even to the point of tolerating adversarial military forces on its borders.”
He is correct. Russia is losing / did lose that cultural war. IMHO, however, any nation in which the culture is authoritarian repression deserves to end up on the wrong end of a Cultural Victory when competing against progressive democracies. The clearest example of why this should be the case is in Korea, but there are many others all over the world.
Wonderful, you’ve invented realpolitik
Still doesn’t justify Russia’s actions in Ukraine.
Who here is telling that story?
There’s no need to be condescending. I’m laying out the rationalizations without judging them. Under international law, Russia had no justification to invade. Under realpolitik they definitely did.
Americans who have used realpolitik to justify its centuries of aggression ought not object when Russia operates under those same ethics. If that doesn’t apply to you, I’m not asking you to defend it.
By the same token if we want to say America has a moral high ground because it adheres strictly to international law and treaty, we should at least acknowledge that this is a recent (and somewhat leaky) innovation.
Who in this thread has done that?
I invite both of you to re-read the first couple of sentences in the first paragraph of the OP.
