Zentetsuken wrote:If you are the type of person who can shrug off tens of thousands of deaths, rapes, murders, war crimes, razed cities and a whole population suffering because you are of a political stance that "the west is hypocritical," then there is something severely wrong with you. There are no political nuances that make this okay, or even debatable.
War crimes, rapes and murders (not counting combat deaths and genuine collateral damage) are indeed inexcusable, and city razing is similarly very hard to defend. But for the rest: roughly 5 million Nazi soldiers and between 1.5 and 3 million Nazi German civilians died in World War II, and the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed between 130,000 and 225,000 people. Are you going to claim the Allies were wrong to invade* Nazi Germany to liberate its conquered territories? The nuclear bombings are more controversial, but that just goes to show how there can be nuances even in more destructive conflicts than this.
* I mean invade in the military-technical sense. The Nazis were obviously not the legitimate owners of the territories. It must however be noted that the UK and France declared war on Nazi Germany (in response to the invasion of Poland) and not the other way around, though Germany would have attacked France even if they hadn't declared war themselves.Which is of course not to say that what Russia is doing should not be condemned. It should not be disregarded simply because the West also does vile stuff (in fact, it should be the other way around: the next time the US pulls shit like this there should be stronger objections). But simplifying conflicts to simply 'enemy bad' is dangerous and does not help to stop the conflict (which, again, requires both sides to agree to a peace treaty).
Zentetsuken wrote:Nothing NATO has done before today is on the table and no amount of shifted ideologies from events that happened 20-30 years ago matter in any way, shape or form.
There is one thing NATO has done that is very much relevant to this conflict:
Wikipedia on Ukraine-NATO Relations wrote:At the June 2021 Brussels Summit, NATO leaders reiterated the decision taken at the 2008 Bucharest Summit that Ukraine would become a member of the Alliance with the MAP as an integral part of the process and Ukraine's right to determine its future and foreign policy, of course without outside interference.[11] NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg also stressed that Russia will not be able to veto Ukraine's accession to NATO "as we will not return to the era of spheres of interest, when large countries decide what smaller ones should do."[12]
The other shady shit NATO has done in the past has no relevance to this situation, but they were absolutely playing with fire in encouraging Ukraine to join. I'm still convinced that the primary reason for the Russian invasion was to keep Ukraine out of NATO. Obviously, this was not declared as the formal reason for the invasion as that would clearly go against international law, so Putin came up with the denazification and genocide bullshit. But prior to the invasion, Russia's communication was fairly clear: Stop the process to join NATO, or Russia will take military action. NATO continued to push for Ukrainian membership despite repeated threats. The process was not stopped, and Russia took military action. NATO definitely has part of the blame for this situation.
Jalpha wrote:Russia is stronger than Ukraine.
Not counting their nuclear arsenal, which they cannot use in an offensive war, I'm actually starting to doubt this given their lack of success so far. They're bigger and they have more budget...but so far they seem very incompetent. They are losing against Ukraine (even if they end up managing some gains, it falls way short of their intended goals). How are they stronger?
