At present the only person who can stop the fighting is Putin, who is doubling down once again. Blame him.
Right, nobody should expect the the small countries of eastern europe to absorb 10s of thousands of Russian refugees. The US can, and should. We (our government, anyway) had a hand in creating this situation.
Except that is exactly what has happened and is expected of those nations.
As noted, millions went to Poland just by itself.
And how, exactly, do you conclude that? (I’m presuming you’re American - correct me if I’m wrong)
I was not clear, I apologize. I was referring to the smaller countries of eastern europe. Poland is one of the larger countries in eastern europe and can do more with regard to refugees. With regard to your second quote, I am not a Putin apologist, or a Russian nationalist, or anything related. The US has been backing Ukraine in this conflict from day one. It has been a display of US power, by our government that started before the first shots were fired. So that is what I meant by the US having a hand in the situation.
Putin and his enablers are responsible for invading Ukraine, not the US. The US is far from perfect, but this conflict was entirely a war of choice, and a choice that Putin made.
This is true.
This is not.
Putin massed troops and equipment near the Ukraine border. U.S. intelligence knew what Putin was up to (not that it was difficult to guess at that point), and so yes, the U.S. did say that Putin was going to invade before it happened. The U.S. made some empty threats about retaliation, but backed down fairly quickly and made it clear that the U.S. was not willing to go to WWIII over the invasion of the Ukraine.
Putin invaded. The U.S. pretty much immediately began sending weapons and whatever it could to the Ukraine. This was (1) not a display of power and (2) not before the first shots were fired.
Does the U.S. have a hand in the Ukraine? Yes, absolutely. The U.S. is providing weapons, intelligence, and other support. But the U.S. is stopping well short of actually getting involved, and the U.S. is not displaying power. We are not giving our best weapons to the Ukrainians. The fact that our weapons are incredibly effective in the Ukraine says more about the ineffectiveness of the Russian military and the effectiveness and motivation of the Ukrainian military than it does about our technical superiority.
China was not engaging in a display of power when it gave weapons and training to the North Vietnamese in the Vietnam War. The U.S. was not engaging in a display of power when it gave weapons and training to Afghan rebels when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. You can call the Ukraine a bit of a proxy war if you want, but calling it a display of U.S. power is silly.
You are accusing the U.S. of blame, as if the U.S. acted proactively in this engagement. This is false. The U.S. acted reactively, not proactively. Putin alone is to blame for the conflict. The U.S. reacted to Putin’s aggression, which shouldn’t be a surprise since Putin attempted to take over a country that directly borders NATO.
This was a power move, but not by the U.S. It was a power move by Putin, in an attempt to grab a bunch of land just as he did when he annexed the Crimean Peninsula in 2014. Calling it a power move by the U.S. is a bit silly. That’s like saying the U.S. made a power move against Japan in WW2 when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. The U.S. is defending the Ukraine because it’s in the best interest of the U.S. and NATO to do so. But one thing is very clear. Putin started this mess.
Russia has been fairly consistent in saying that they attacked in order to kill Nazis. You will need to make an argument that the US is to blame for creating white nationalists in Ukraine. You could point out Henry Ford and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. But, likewise, I could point out Nicholas II and how he funded propaganda against Jews in Ukraine and condoned Pogroms in those districts because he feared that the Jewish denizens had gone over to Lenin. But, realistically, there are racist nationalist groups in every nation and none of those have any strong connection to the people of 80 years ago. You would also need to explain how the US is to blame for Russia choosing a war of conquest to fight the Nazis rather than doing something like Operation Wrath of God, and sending out targeted hunters to deal with them. I don’t think anyone would have given a damn if he’d done so.
Russia has also blamed NATO encroachment. Some people buy into this argument on the belief that NATO is an anti-Russia organization. However, Russia was a part of NATO from 1994 until 2014, when they were kicked out for attacking Ukraine. You can read about Putin and Bush, at the Bucharest Summit, working together to bring more countries into NATO. So far as I can tell, the 2014 attack was over Ukraine joining a trade agreement with the EU. Neither the US nor NATO were involved.
The US seems to have been aware since 2021 that Russia was going to attack. Being aware of something doesn’t mean being to blame for it.
Firstly, besides sending an army to the border of Ukraine in late 2021, Russia also started sending demands letters to Ukraine and the US. If someone sends you a letter like, “Kick my ex-wife out of her self-defense class and promise to never admit her, again.” One might reasonably get a spidey-sense that something is up.
From that point, we either need to ask which is more likely:
- Spies and leaks, that allowed the US to track Russian intentions. Or…
- We mind controlled Putin into attacking and, since he isn’t consistent in wearing a tin foil hat, we were easily able to take control of him. This leading us to have to spend billions to fight off the Russian attack on Ukraine, against ourselves.
I vote for #1.
Claims I’ve heard on some national right-wing U.S. talk shows:
- There was evidence that the U.S. was operating biolabs in Ukraine
- Biden’s poor handling of the Afganistan withdrawal encouraged Putin to attack
- Biden’s slow response in arming Ukraine resulted in thousands of Ukrainian deaths
So, overall these shows have been painting Biden in a far more negative light than Putin.
As far as Russian refugees I’d want some serious background checks if I were a European country, but otherwise yes they and the US should take as many as they can comfortably support until the conflict is over.
There is no way that Russia was part of NATO, and I can’t find any cite that says it was. Do you mean that it was kicked out of the G20 or something?
By that standard, dozens of Dopers had a hand in conspiring to start this conflict, as the existence of this thread below – started in April 2021! – proves…
The only way the US had a hand in creating this solution was in the support they gave to prevent Ukraine from being overrun, and destroyed.
To make yet another analogy:
A dude gets out of the bar, and challenges someone to a fight in a parking lot. He has a gun, two knives, brass knuckles, pepper spray and a taser. He’s screaming that the guy disrespected him and he’s going to kill him and take his truck and children.
You think “this is not right”. And give the victim a two by four and a piece of board to use as a shield. He proceeds to fight back against the irrational crazed bully. And seems to be doing pretty good in the fight. You pass him some gravel to throw at the bully, because you perceive that if the bully wins, he’s going to come after other people next. One after the other.
Question: Did you “Have a hand in creating this situation?”
You are correct, however starting in 1994, Russia joined the Partnership for Peace program. Many former Soviet countries had joined that program, which fostered cooperation between NATO countries and other European countries. Specifically, they are part of the Collective Security Treaty Organization. They are still members of that group, despite their aggression against Ukraine.
They joined the Partnership for Peace in 1994.
Now, usually, to join NATO you have to go through a complicated process where you submit an application, get put into line, ignored for a couple of decades, given an “improvement plan”, and eventually approved.
Putin didn’t want to wait in line:
And NATO decided to grant Putin what he wanted and created a whole glue-on organization, just for Russia:
In their quasi-member position, they were able to directly lobby NATO and, effectively, veto the admission of Ukraine, Georgia, etc.
The US funds research around the planet. That includes Ukraine, but also China, Madagascar, and Peru.
https://pe.usembassy.gov/naval-medical-research-detachment/
And note that I didn’t know until right this moment that we did research in Madagascar and Peru, I just picked two random countries that I thought would be surprising, googled, and they both had something. That is to say, the scientist community of the world is effectively border-free and the American scientists are usually funded by the US government. North Korea might be the only place on the planet that isn’t part of the US biological research conspiracy. (By conspiracy I mean an organized, nefarious agenda for killing diseases.)
But realistically, if we were developing biological weapons, we would do it in a cave in Utah or on an island near Guam or something.
I should amend this to say that Putin was there to veto discussions between NATO and Ukraine/Georgia. He seems to have been ambivalent about countries like Albania joining, though, and didn’t mention them.
No, the US is not to blame. Only Russia is to blame for Russia invading Ukraine. Putin is a rotten, evil asshole.