> That 1) is full of holes. It is 2024, only 2 years later, and Ukraine is awash with NATO gear and as mentioned the official position of the US State Department is saying they're going to be part of NATO. They were clearly on the verge of integrating with NATO if not already doing so and close to the point where Russia was out of options. If the Russian military had waited any longer there wouldn't have been anything they could do and realistically they made a massive error not invading back in 2014 when their losses would have been much smaller. To see "nowhere near joining" we can look at somewhere like Georgia. That is a country that is nowhere near joining NATO. Russia invades in 2008. They got no support and today, nearly 20 years later, they are still not part of NATO (although they are getting there). The invasion was over and done in 16 days; night and day compared to what is happening in Ukraine.
As the other poster mentioned, Ukraine and Georgia were both denied Membership Action Plans at the 2008 NATO Bucharest summit, meaning they weren't even on the first rung of the process to join NATO. In 2021 NATO made some positive noises but still refused to offer Ukraine a MAP, even though Russian troops were massing on Ukraine's border.
It also takes years to be able to join after a MAP starts, and most importantly a MAP is not a treaty with any legal power: Joining one doesn't guarantee membership and the process can be stopped at any point. So even while Russian troops were massing on Ukraine's border and threatening to invade NATO wasn't ready to formally move closer to a Ukrainian accession beyond some encouraging words. Nearly all of the military support to Ukraine came after it was invaded, not before, and it was committed because NATO quite understandably reasoned that if Russia was willing to invade Ukraine without legal justification or provocation it would not stop there, but would try to go for Moldova and other countries next, significantly changing the strategic picture of Europe for generations. Supporting Ukraine is a defensive action.
The idea that Ukraine joining NATO would've meant US 'missile banks along the Russian border' is ridiculous, given that none of the other NATO members that border or are near Russia received US missile banks. As I said, NATO was very careful to limit both the quantity and type of equipment that it would deploy in new members, restricting them to purely defensive measures such as the NATO air patrols over the Baltics.
Putin has also quite clearly stated on numerous occasions that he considers Ukraine statehood a myth and that it's really a breakaway province of Russia.[0]
Finally, even if Ukraine was about to join NATO, that gives Russia no right to invade it. I don't understand why you seem to believe that it would.
There has been order-of-magnitude 100 billion dollars worth of NATO gear provided to Ukraine with the express purpose of killing as many Russians as possible, let alone the intangible value of various forms of aid provided (things like intelligence are hard to assess). "Hehe, well we didn't file the proper paperwork" isn't exactly the sort of response that is going to get a good result.
I doubt the Russians are worried about whether the US followed its own self-imposed process of officially declaring the alliance. They're worried about the network of countries that the US is building up with the fairly plain purpose of destroying the Russian military followed by regime change. They respond to threats when they detect them, not when the US or whoever decide to officially declare that the threat is being made.
> ... 'missile banks along the Russian border' is ridiculous, given that none of the other NATO members that border or are near Russia received US missile banks.
The presence of all those members is why I think it might well happen. NATO has the real estate and doesn't seem worried about escalations. Why not? NATO seems to be pretty firm in their belief that a good offence is the best defence; I think technically we've never seen them fighting defensively? Although I maintain de-facto that what seems to be happening in Ukraine is the defence of a NATO country.
> Finally, even if Ukraine was about to join NATO, that gives Russia no right to invade it. I don't understand why you seem to believe that it would.
Can you name a war where the invader had a right to start it? This is war! The people purposefully starting wars are almost uniformly monsters clothed in human flesh. The best case is that they are monsters in an age of other monsters. If there are exceptions to that none spring to my mind.
You're mixing up cause and response, once again, and ignoring the timeline of events.
> There has been order-of-magnitude 100 billion dollars worth of NATO gear provided to Ukraine with the express purpose of killing as many Russians as possible, let alone the intangible value of various forms of aid provided (things like intelligence are hard to assess). "Hehe, well we didn't file the proper paperwork" isn't exactly the sort of response that is going to get a good result.
> I doubt the Russians are worried about whether the US followed its own self-imposed process of officially declaring the alliance. They're worried about the network of countries that the US is building up with the fairly plain purpose of destroying the Russian military followed by regime change. They respond to threats when they detect them, not when the US or whoever decide to officially declare that the threat is being made.
Many countries, just not NATO, have sent weapons and other resources to Ukraine for it to defend itself against the Russian invasion, and to deter further Russian incursions or invasions beyond Ukraine. They were not sending those quantities in advance of the war.
Had Russia not invaded Ukraine in February 2022 two things would be presently true: First, it would not have lost all that military personnel and military equipment, and, second, Ukraine would still not be in NATO. Once again, Western countries spent months trying to convince Russia not to invade, as they expected Russian forces to swiftly overwhelm Ukrainian forces and take over the country. It was only when Ukraine put up better than expected resistance and repelled the attempt to take over Kyiv that Western countries began supplying it in earnest.
> The presence of all those members is why I think it might well happen. NATO has the real estate and doesn't seem worried about escalations. Why not? NATO seems to be pretty firm in their belief that a good offence is the best defence; I think technically we've never seen them fighting defensively? Although I maintain de-facto that what seems to be happening in Ukraine is the defence of a NATO country.
Now you're just speculating. The actual history of NATO expansion, its actions, and the restrictions it has openly placed on forward deployment of forces have shown it to be very concerned about escalations and about Russia's fears.
> Can you name a war where the invader had a right to start it? This is war! The people purposefully starting wars are almost uniformly monsters clothed in human flesh. The best case is that they are monsters in an age of other monsters. If there are exceptions to that none spring to my mind.
Yes, the coalition attack on Iraq in 1991 to repel its forces from Kuwait is one example, but there are others. You should read up on jus ad bellum and how it applies.
80s? NATO expands. 90s? NATO expands. 00s? NATO Expands. 10s? NATO expands. 20s? NATO expands. Russia at peace? NATO expands. Russia at war? NATO expands. Russia tries anything, including diplomacy? NATO expands. Only the neutrality of Switzerland prevents me from drawing a line through NATO from the Russian border to Spain.
The pattern here is not "oh Ukraine wasn't going to join up until the Russians invaded". The pattern is NATO expands. The preponderance of evidence in the NATO response to the Ukraine invasion - and the flow of history - suggests that the US has its sights on integrating Ukraine into NATO and was probably in the process of it.
> Yes, the coalition attack on Iraq in 1991 to repel its forces from Kuwait is one example
The audacity. You spend a thread whinging about Russia panicking because the US is organising all of Europe against them [0], then as a counterexample you pick one of the US's invasions of the Middle East (of Iraq no less, those poor people) as your example of a justified war?
What is the criteria here? US aggression is OK? A quorum of European interests justifies any invasion? It is OK if we do it to brown Muslims but not white Christians? There is no jus ad bellum to be found in the US expeditions into the Middle East; they've been a disaster for the region and the world. And any time you end up siding with the Saudis it is bad news for any sort of principled approach.
[0] Which, I mean, fair enough what Russia is doing is awful but let's aim for some consistency here.
NATO is not a loaf of rising bread that expands on its own when left on a windowsill. My country is in NATO because I voted for successive governments that set it as their top priority, because I believed then and I believe now that tight cooperation with likeminded countries is the best way to deter another Russian invasion (we've had 40+ of them in recorded history).
And this is the universal view in Europe as of 2024. No country in Europe can afford on their own what Ukraine has been through, and this makes military alliances essential for national security. Even Sweden with its 200+ years of neutrality ditched it as soon as Russia invaded Ukraine. Ukraine is by now a cautionary tale of naive belief in diplomacy (Helsinki Accords; Budapest memorandum; etc) without a big stick to back it up.
Conspiracy theories about the US turning Europe against Russia are completely redundant. When it comes to national security, no responsible government in parts of Europe closest to Russia can afford to stay out of NATO. If you were the prime minister of Finland, why would you not do everything you could to join NATO and enter the mutual defense pact seeing how Russia behaves in Ukraine?
For a very long time, both Finland and Sweden had a deep belief that skillful diplomacy could prevent a war with Russia, but what do you do when Russia starts blasting that your country doesn't exist?
> If you were the prime minister of Finland, why would you not do everything you could to join NATO and enter the mutual defense pact seeing how Russia behaves in Ukraine?
Yes. My whole position in this thread has been that countries tend to do things for the obvious reason, I'm not sure why people keep expecting me to disagree on points like that. Everyone wants to be in NATO. Even Russia probably wants to join NATO. But that doesn't change the fact that the US was provoking Russia by signing everyone up and the US acting on that expansionist urge in Ukraine seems to be the major driver of this war.
> But that doesn't change the fact that the US was provoking Russia by signing everyone up and the US acting on that expansionist urge in Ukraine seems to be the major driver of this war.
???
But that's exactly the opposite of what happened. Ukraine and Georgia desired to join the NATO like everyone else. The US, Germany and a handful of others dashed those hopes in 2008 due to Russian pressure. This lowered the risk for Russia and they immediately invaded Georgia, and a few years later Ukraine, and expanded the invasion in 2022 after they saw the shameful retreat from Afghanistan as a further sign of US' weakness and unwillingness to support their allies.
Not American expansionist urge, but the utterly short-sighted belief in "we must not provoke Russia" is how we got here. Russians are not provoked by strength, but by weakness. Belief in enemy's weakness enables dangerous illusions like "3 days to Kyiv".
> The US, Germany and a handful of others dashed those hopes in 2008 due to Russian pressure.
That is a ruse on the part of the US and I don't know why anyone expects it to be taken seriously given what we see post 2022. NATO considers Ukraine to be part of their strategic territory. They're dumping 10s to 100s of billions of dollars into Ukraine's defence. They've claimed to have been a part of killing something like 300,000 Russian soldiers. They're explaining to anyone who'll listen that the relationship will be formalised as soon as possible. It looks like they've been working on this for years prior to the invasion in fact - unless you believe that the NATO military planners are so incompetent they didn't have contingency plans for Russia invading Ukraine. There is even the obvious pattern of behaviour on the part of the US here regarding NATO expansion.
> They're dumping 10s to 100s of billions of dollars into Ukraine's defence. They've claimed to have been a part of killing something like 300,000 Russian soldiers.
This has come only after years of war against Ukraine and refusal by Russia to take any offered exit ramp.
When Russia first invaded Ukraine in 2014, Obama refused to provide lethal aid to Ukraine. After Russia launched the full-scale invasion in 2022, the US infamously offered Zelensky a ride and not ammo. Countries like Germany were openly mocked for providing only 5000 helmets. It took approximately half a year before any considerable aid began to appear in Ukraine. They got their first American tanks (only 31 provided so far) full year and a half into the war.
NATO countries and other allies have consistently dragged their feet and done too little too late. This allowed Russia to recover from the initial shock, and their armed forces are larger than at the start of the war. This year, they are forming two new armies that are larger than the ground forces of UK, France, Spain, Germany, Netherlands, Poland, and a number of other countries COMBINED.
Instead of a conspiratorial ruse, European governments have finally recognized that Russia is a rapidly growing threat to entire Europe, and that's why they started to pour a lot of resources into Ukraine starting around fall 2023, and into rebuilding their own militaries. Russians are wiping one Ukrainian town after another from the earth with no indication of stopping anytime soon. At worst, we can expect a second front launched from Belarus against Poland and Lithuania.
> unless you believe that the NATO military planners are so incompetent they didn't have contingency plans for Russia invading Ukraine
It is very obvious that there were no serious plans for such turn of events. Many NATO countries, including mine, were caught by surprise and have had to provided military aid to Ukraine at the expense of own security from readiness stocks that cannot be replenished for many years to come, but might be needed to fulfill NATO obligations, should Russia broaden the war.
Not only were NATO countries unprepared, but several key countries didn't even believe such development could be possible at all. The chief of French military intelligence was infamously fired over inadequate assessments related to Russian invasion of Ukraine.
> The hopes of Ukraine were never dashed.
Yes they were. Even today, nobody is willing to give any firm commitments. At the last NATO summit, Biden refused to support NATO invitation for Ukraine and instead lobbied for a vague "Ukraine will become a member of NATO" statement without any specified date, to great frustration of Ukrainians.
The story you are trying to spin is the polar opposite of observable reality.
It’s a remarkably insular and US-centric view to believe that that story was the reason the United Nations Security Council voted to eject Iraq from Kuwait. It was a piece of propaganda that merely had some air play in the US and which, while it may have been convenient to the US and Kuwaiti governments for the support of the US population, was not the strategic reason for any of the nations involved.
Fortunately we have plenty of primary sources to validate this, from the minutes of UNSC minutes to statements by various heads of government at the time. All make it clear that the war was authorised because Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait was not only blatantly illegal but destructive to the international system. That story didn’t form any part their rationale.
That particular Security Council decision was entirely driven by the US though, including getting the Saudis to pay 1B USD to the ailing Soviet Union to buy their Yes vote (and by then it was already in the final stages of Perestroika).
I wonder what your justification for Saddam's invisible WMDs is. That lie was not invented by someone at the Pentagon?
Again, such an arrogant US-centric view. You do realise that other countries have agency too, right?
The idea that the US drove the Saudis to lobby the Soviets is absurd: The Saudis were independently lobbying everyone they could because all signs were that the much more powerful Iraqi military would invade them next in order to gain control of much of the world’s oil supplies. That’s why the first coalition response was to form Desert Shield to protect Saudi Arabia from an Iraqi invasion.
34 countries took part in the military operation to push Iraqi forces from Kuwait, which they had invaded without any legal justification at all. The operation was clearly and unambiguously authorised by the United Nations Security Council. It’s as clear an example of Jus ad Bellum in the modern era as you could hope for. And you still aren’t satisfied.
As for your last sentence, you’re conflating events thirty years later. It’s irrelevant to a discussion about whether the 1990 UN-authorised ejection of Iraqi forces from Kuwait was legally sound and justified.
I'm not that crazy yet, I am aware that the two Iraq wars were separately wielded by father and son.
Kind of funny that you accuse me of a US-centric view. Usually I get told I am a paid Russian troll. One last question: how long do you think the Ukraine war would last if the US decided to pull out? Other countries having agency? I'm just not seeing it. Looks like they just do what they are told from where I am sitting.
US-centric doesn’t mean that you like the US, it means you speak and act like the US is the sole or primary cause of everything that happens in the world, is the only country with grand plans, and that other countries have no agency and can merely react to it. It’s a refusal to believe that much of the time the US is reacting to plans set in motion by other countries.
Ukraine is a key example: The US (and the rest of the West) clearly didn’t want Russia to invade. They used every diplomatic means at their disposal to convince it not to. But once Russia did, and once Ukraine’s resistance was successful, they reacted by supporting it.
So, no, the idea that only the US has agency is patently absurd. Do yourself a favour and go read some autobiographies, biographies, and history books that focus on the leadership of other major powers and how they acted and thought during various crises. It’ll open your mind as to how the world actually works.
Thanks for the high brow dismissal (hey, it's better than low brow). I do quite a lot of reading; I also know that Americans like telling everyone how they are the only ones with the truth and their world view is gospel. I think you guys believe in your own version of history so deeply yourselves that not only do you never question it, you are very effective preachers.
And there, there. You are smarter than anyone foreign. You read more, your mind is more open, and you are always right.
I’ll save you from taking that attempted profiling any further: I’m not American.
I’m from a rather boring part of the world, from where it’s clear to see the meddling and machinations of all the world’s powers, big and small, if you want to pay attention to it.
Funny enough, it’s your view that promotes American exceptionalism and the idea of Americans as smarter and more knowing than anyone else. My view treats them as just another power, often as incompetent and reactive as any other.
As the other poster mentioned, Ukraine and Georgia were both denied Membership Action Plans at the 2008 NATO Bucharest summit, meaning they weren't even on the first rung of the process to join NATO. In 2021 NATO made some positive noises but still refused to offer Ukraine a MAP, even though Russian troops were massing on Ukraine's border.
It also takes years to be able to join after a MAP starts, and most importantly a MAP is not a treaty with any legal power: Joining one doesn't guarantee membership and the process can be stopped at any point. So even while Russian troops were massing on Ukraine's border and threatening to invade NATO wasn't ready to formally move closer to a Ukrainian accession beyond some encouraging words. Nearly all of the military support to Ukraine came after it was invaded, not before, and it was committed because NATO quite understandably reasoned that if Russia was willing to invade Ukraine without legal justification or provocation it would not stop there, but would try to go for Moldova and other countries next, significantly changing the strategic picture of Europe for generations. Supporting Ukraine is a defensive action.
The idea that Ukraine joining NATO would've meant US 'missile banks along the Russian border' is ridiculous, given that none of the other NATO members that border or are near Russia received US missile banks. As I said, NATO was very careful to limit both the quantity and type of equipment that it would deploy in new members, restricting them to purely defensive measures such as the NATO air patrols over the Baltics.
Putin has also quite clearly stated on numerous occasions that he considers Ukraine statehood a myth and that it's really a breakaway province of Russia.[0]
Finally, even if Ukraine was about to join NATO, that gives Russia no right to invade it. I don't understand why you seem to believe that it would.
[0]https://time.com/6150046/ukraine-statehood-russia-history-pu...