What evidence are you talking about? Where am I actually wrong? People have mostly merely dismissed me as being pro-Russia and therefore wrong. Or they seem to have just created a straw man that I support Russia invading Ukraine or some other nonsense.
Seriously, look how many times my posts are simply handwaved away by “Russia apologist, not gonna respond” rather than an actual argument. That’s not up to the level of discourse we expect on the SDMB. And it’s indeed quite similar to the way that right wingers respond to the idea of examining the motivations behind Islamic terrorism.
If by “Eastern Europe” you mean Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, eastern Germany, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, and Slovakia, this is a very ahistorical point of view. Only during the relatively brief period of the Cold War were those areas considered to be “Eastern Europe”–before then, most of them were Central Europe and most certainly had and have long had deep cultural and historical ties to the Europe of the Netherlands, Italy, and western Germany. And now that those countries have joined the European Union, they have rapidly deepening economic ties as well. Or was EU expansion also a “provocation” to Russia? (The Baltic States of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania were dominated by Russia for rather longer, but before that Lithuania spent centuries united with Poland in a Central European empire, and Estonia and Latvia were long oriented to the west, towards Sweden and the Baltic Sea. Romania and Bulgaria historically would have been in Central Europe–e.g., Transylvania–or perhaps more in “the Balkans”, but that merely puts them in the same company as Greece–NATO since 1952 and EU since 1981.)
After the fall of the Iron Curtain, these countries perfectly naturally wanted to rejoin Europe proper, and Russia has no claim whatsoever to demand that they be permanently left in some twilight zone of “Eastern Europe”, with Russia free to attack them if it ever feels like it.
I dunno, I asked you what you thought Putin should be doing in response to his current problems, and you responded with a diversion about the Cuban Missile Crisis. After I explained why that wasn’t applicable, you’ve been silent on the subject, and have complained about being dismissed instead. You still haven’t explained why the current expansion of NATO should be considered provocative. I have heard it claimed many times by folks, but none have been able to back up their reasoning when challenged, they just complain about things that happened during the cold war that they can’t tie to the current conflict except by the geography of the participants.
I’m still not saying that you’re a “Russia, right or wrong” level of supporter, but you’ve done a poor job of convincing me you aren’t.
Your claim that the United States if fighting proxy wars against Russia. What wars are these? We’ve fought four wars since the end of the Cold War: Panama, Kuwait, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Are you claiming these were proxy wars directed against Russia? How? None of these countries was a Russian ally.
Your claim that NATO is threatening Russia. It isn’t. As I’ve pointed out, nobody has attacked Russia. Nobody has claimed an inch of land belonging to Russia. Everyone has left Russia alone.
Your claim that Russia is peaceful. While nobody has attacked Russia, Russia has attacked other countries. Russia invaded Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine in 2014.
You claim that NATO is “recruiting” countries to join. Countries want to join NATO because they feel Russia might invade them like it did Georgia and Ukraine.
Russia ‘invaded’ Georgia in response to Georgian oppression of Abkhazia and Ossetia, and ‘invaded’ The Ukraine in response to Ukrainian assaults on the Donbass oblasts. In both cases, the neighboring country was using force against people who didn’t want to be part of it.
It seems to me that if the Ukraine gets to secede from Russia, then the Donbass should get to secede from the Ukraine, and same way with Abkhazia & Ossetia. (I will concede that the Georgian case for secession is stronger, since those two breakaway regions had never recognized Georgian rule, they’d been fighting since the breakup of the Soviet Union, which is not the case in Donbass).
So, you’re willing to trot all that nonsense out and not mention Chechnya at all? Why does Russia get to be the only one to hold on to territory that doesn’t want to remain part of it?
Please note that bringing up the U.S. Civil Will be roundly ridiculed. Chechnya didn’t become part of Russia peacefully, the U.S. states originally did. Also, I am not particularly in favor of an independent Chechnya, since I think fighting to get out from under a kleptocracy to establish a theocracy is a waste of lives and time. However, Russia’s position on Chechnya puts the lie to their claim of being in favor of people ruling themselves.
I strongly don’t support the Russian occupation of Chechnya, either (though I have no particular fondness for the Jihadists who will probably rule an independent Chechnya).
Ok, so why do you beleive Russia is working to end the oppression of people in Georgia and Ukraine, when they’re completely willing to oppress people in Chechnya?
ISTM that they’re willing to do anything that provides them more territory, and are willing to say just about anything to justify it.
Well, partly because they haven’t annexed Abkhazia, S. Osetia, Donetsk or Lugansk (or for that matter Transnistria).
Having said that, I don’t know what Putin’s motivations are, and I’m sure there are good and bad motivations intermixed. He isn’t my ideal Russian leader (if I lived in Russia I’d favour Zyuganov) but I appreciate that he serves as a counterweight to the West. More to the point, in the Ukraine crisis, I don’t side with ‘Russia’ so much as I side with the Donbass revolutionaries. I like what they say they want (at least, what their left wing wants, they include a variety of shades of opinion), and hope they succeed. If their revolution gets hijacked by Putin and by domestic oligarchs, though, I’m going to be extremely disappointed.
Fair enough, correction accepted. Let me rephrase: if you believe that the Ukrainian SSR had a right to choose, in 1991, whether they wanted to be an independent country, then why don’t Donetsk & Lugansk oblasts have the same right in 2014?
The fact that these secessions occurred after Russia had invaded Ukraine makes a mockery of any claim that these were legitimate secessionist movements. These are just puppet regimes set up by the Russian government.
What’s your evidence for that? The two eastern oblasts officially declared
that they were seceding after Russia ‘invaded’ Crimea, yes. (Russian troops were already in Crimea, so the ‘invasion’ was a matter of them movng outside their base). That doesn’t mean that many people in those two oblasts didn’t want to secede before then.
Donetsk and Lugansk have been alienated from Galicia and the western Ukraine since the very beginning of The Ukraine as a country. On this very board, during the Orange ‘Revolution’ ten years ago, you folks tossed around the possibility of Donetsk seceding. Please see BrainGlutton’s remark at 2:37 on 11/28, and don’t even try to deny it.
I’d say you couldn’t pick three worse examples, but I suppose you could always have picked Finland. It’s pretty hard for Russia to cry foul on Romania for participating in Barbarossa on June 22, 1941 when a year earlier it had taken Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina from Romania by force:
Oh, and harder still to complain about suffering at the hands of its western neighbors when these territories remained incorporated in the Soviet Union until its fall in 1991. Hungary didn’t enthusiastically join in Barbarossa; it didn’t declare war on the Soviet Union until June 27 in response to Soviet bombing on June 26 which may or may not have been either accidental or a German false flag operation:
Finally, as for Slovakia during WW2, there was no Slovakia. There was the Slovak Republic, which was a puppet state of Nazi Germany created from the rump remainder of Czechoslovakia after Germany finished taking over the country. The current Slovak Republic is not considered to be the legal successor state to the one in existence from 1939-45 as a German puppet state:
Abkhazia, Transnistria and South Ossetia aren’t independent in any meaningful sense of the word. Their military independence depends on Russian troops, and they depend heavily on Russian aid to even maintain their sub-Russian economies. A former president of South Ossetia expressed intent to join Russia, I suspect the reason none have been formally annexed is because they don’t offer Russia diddly in strategic advantage (unlike Crimea), and will just end up costing more than they already do.
The Donbass revolutionaries don’t really have a cohesive view, the majority just seem to want to join Russia. Since it provides easier land support to Crimea (if they continue to push along the coast), they might have a chance. Anyone in the group that didn’t want to join Russia could have accomplished their goals through the existing political system, cleaving yourself off of the parent state is the only goal that couldn’t be accomplished through it.
South Korea’s independence is (in part) secured by American troops, that doesn’t make South Korea any less than an independent country.
The Donbass revolutionaries aren’t necessarily all that ‘cohesive’, but that’s because they include a few different factions of different political stripes, united mostly by what they dislike. They include anti-modern monarchists of the Strelkov mode, people who want to establish an Eastern Orthodox religious state, they include neo-communists, and they include people who are just nostalgic for the old Soviet Union, and want something similar to (I would guess) what Belarus looks like today. It would be wrong to say that none of those groups, in and of themselves, has a coherent ideology, though. It would also be questionable to say they want to join Russia, when as of yet it seems equally likely that they want to be independent.
As for what the ideology of an independent Novorussia is going to look like, I’d say we can get some idea by looking at the constitution. Nationalizing land and factories, rewarding people according to their labour contribution, outlawing abortion, making Russian Orthodoxy the state religion, and so forth are just a few of the items that stand out.