We are 46 days into Trump ending the Ukraine war in 24 hours, and so far Trump has produced 0 concessions from Vladimir Putin.
But according to Trump, Ukraine must give up Crimea, give up NATO membership, give their minerals to the US, remove their president, and stop fighting Vladimir Putin, while he has time to build up a stronger force for attacking Ukraine.
This is not a peace deal. This is a Putin deal.
@randahl
Putin does not want all of Ukraine.
Ukraine has lost Crimea 10 years ago, Crimeans would refuse to go back to Ukraine.
The president of Ukraine is not a legitimate president (imagine if Trump were in that situation).
Why would Ukraine join NATO, an aggressive alliance that a.o. dreams to dismantle Russia?
Peace and understanding is the only winning way through.
imho
Putin is not a legitimate president. Zelensky absolutely is. And many Crimeans did flee to Ukraine when Russia conquered it. Go ask Crimean Tatars who they'd rather see in control of Crimea.
NATO doesn't want to dismantle Russia, Russia wants to dismantle NATO. NATO just doesn't want Russia to attack NATO members. Or anyone else, really. Why does Russia insist on attacking other countries all the time? Don't you have enough land already? Try using that for a change. But it's all dead poor and undeveloped because Putin would rather waste that money on stupid wars.
NATO is not a country, it's an alliance. Dismantling NATO isn't a big deal. Inside NATO itself there are voices considering putting an end to the organisation.
Dismantling a country is a completely different thing. If NATO, an agressive and powerful military alliance of many countries with a history of dismantling countries, calls and fights for dismantling Russia, one country alone, using Ukraine to do that, why would Russia not use Ukraine to stop NATO?
@randahl @DoomsdaysCW
What's the real different thing here, is the difference between NATO members wanting to leave NATO, and a nearby aggressor wanting to dismantle it because he sees his expansionist ambitions cramped by every target he sets his eyes on joining the alliance.
That's why Putin hates NATO. NATO is not aggressive, it's defensive. It defends the countries he wants to attack, and that limits his ability to act on his own aggressive goals.
That war was well underway before NATO got involved. NATO members just didn't want Serbs to genocide lots of people right on their doorstep. But NATO didn't conquer any land, like Putin is trying to do, and only after Serbian violence had been widely condemned by the entire world. It should have been a UN mission, but that didn't happen because Russia was likely to veto that.
Not the greatest showing of NATO, but hardly comparable to all of the stuff Putin does on a regular basis.
@mcv A bit sorry to have cut the discussion short, here's for your information the kind of source I myself use -- among others of course -- to shape my opinion on NATO.
Yeah, I'm not going to read all of that. Sorry. But I did briefly glance over it, and this caught my eye:
That's not how NATO works. NATO was pretty much irrelevant before Putin invaded Ukraine. And people were fine by that. There was even a moment in the late 1990s when there was talk of Russia joining NATO. There was a joint exercise. People really thought that the Cold War was over and we'd just have peace now, and everybody was happy to trade with a peaceful Russia.
Countries in eastern Europe warned against it, but western Europe didn't take them seriously.
But then Putin came to power in Russia, and while he wanted to join NATO, he didn't want to have to go through the same admission process and meet the same criteria as "countries that don't matter" (his words). And that choice of words is very telling: Putin believes that the countries in between Russia and the US don't really matter. He doesn't respect countries weaker than his. He sees them not as equals, but as countries to be controlled. And that's the wrong attitude to be in NATO. NATO is not a vehicle for control, but for mutual defense. Putin doesn't get that, because he's an imperialist.
Can you point to specific things I said that you think aren't true? Or is it just the conclusion it leads to, that you don't like?
Russia was a threat even before 2014. Putin had been meddling in Ukrainian politics and trying to prevent Ukraine from developing a closer relationship to the EU, which the people of Ukraine wanted and voted for. The invasions of Crimea and Donbass were in response to the Ukrainian people rising up against Putin's puppet government in Ukraine that rejected the will of the people and moved closer to Russia instead of the EU.
In 2008, Russia had also invaded Georgia and taken parts of their land. Russia had been holding Transnistria from Moldova too. The fears of Russia doing something similar to Estonia have always been present. Russia was absolutely a threat.
Are you saying the Donbas Ukrainians are completely unrelated to other Ukrainians? The big obvious difference is of course that they've been living under Russian occupation for over a decade now, but that doesn't mean they want to.
Or do you mean that there are Ukrainians who did, before 2014, want closer ties to Russia? That's absolutely the case, but there was also clearly a majority who didn't. Yanukovich did win an election, but it was an election where he campaigned for closer ties to the EU. So when he suddenly turned around and blocked that and went for closer ties to Russia instead, against the will of parliament even, people felt understandably betrayed.
And I don't ignore Russian speaking Ukrainians at all. They're still Ukrainian. Zelensky is a Russian-speaking Ukrainian. But the fact that they speak Russian does not mean they want to be part of Russia; to the contrary. Many Russian-speakers have learned Ukrainian over the past 10 years and are determined to raise their children in Ukrainian. Because Putin has made Russian extremely unpopular in Ukraine.
@mcv To limit myself to one one issue in the above comment: the affirmation that Ukrainians living in Donbas "have been living under Russian occupation for over a decade now" is false, blatantly false. It's so false, that it makes me wonder why you say such a thing, what is your purpose.
Could we agree on the view that they have been living under Russian occupation for the last three years, not decade? That would be somewhat less false, to me.
Russia invaded and occupied parts of the Donbas in 2014, but you're right that they massively expanded their occupation in 2022.
So some have lived under Russian occupation since 2014, a lot more have lived under Russian occupation for the last few years.
Yeah, that's a thing. Having your own opinions is one thing, but having your own facts is another. And these days everybody wants to have their own facts to justify whatever they want to believe.
So let's discuss a few basic facts: is Russia a threat to Ukraine? Is Russia also a threat to Moldova? To the Baltics? Are you familiar with Russia's long history of conquest? That it dominated and oppressed half of Europe until about 35 years ago?
Because if all of these things are true (and they are), do you really think it's surprising that Russia's neighbours want to join an alliance that can protect them against that aggression?
None of NATO's "expansion" was forced by NATO; all of it was other countries wanting to join. Poland basically blackmailed Bill Clinton into letting them in, because the US originally didn't want to let them in at all. But all those countries that were suddenly free from Moscow's yoke after decades of oppression, wanted to make sure they would stay free, and that they had allies who would protect their freedom.
Ukraine's bad luck is that they missed that boat, and that made them vulnerable to Russia's aggression.
But all the aggression in eastern Europe has always come from Russia, and not from NATO.
Randahl Fink
windy
Martijn Vos