The worst-case scenario is now a possible one: European troops fighting off an invasion largely alone.
It’s by no means clear the Europeans would succeed. Romanian and other European officials at the exercise in Cincu, about 260 kilometers (162 miles) north of Bucharest by road, voiced concerns about how long it would take for NATO allies to make it to the front.
French four-star General Philippe de Montenon said he’s confident Europe could prevail, even without the US on side. “The direction of history is a progressive disengagement of the United States from the European continent,” he said.
Why are you so willing to be thrown to the trenches? How is militarism a good position?
How is getting bullied without fighting back a good position?
How about engaging in deescalation by not pushing for military escalation against our neighbor? How about entering commercial relations with neighboring countries instead of antagonizing them?
Already tried that. We hoped that by buying massive amounts of Russian oil and gas they would see that peace is worth a lot more than war.
But they decided war anyways. And suddenly we had to find a replacement for all that energy.
And Russia responded to that positively. In the late 2000s and early 2010s, there were even negotiations to make Russia enter the European Union. Those hopes for Russia were shattered when Europe and the US kept interfering in its sphere of influence (Georgia, Ukraine, etc) through colour revolutions and propaganda. The culminating point where Russia saw there was no possibility was when in 2014, the democratically elected president of Ukraine Viktor Yanukovich was removed by a US-sponsored colour revolution (see Victoria Nuland’s leaked phonecalls), that’s actually what triggered the invasion of Crimea. It was Russia’s way of saying “I cannot win the soft-power competition against the US, so if my only way to maintain a sphere of influence is through military power, so be it”.
If you still don’t believe allowing for a Russian “sphere of influence” is an important geopolitical item if we want worldwide peace, imagine how USA people and their government would react to Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, Cuba, Costa Rica, Venezuela, Colombia and Peru entering a military alliance with Russia and China and started to import military material from said countries and have Chinese and/or Russian military bases. Last time something similar happened with Cuba, the world was on the brink of nuclear war.
My brother in foreign affairs, Russia has been an aggressor of Ukraine it’s whole existence.
Ukraine signed an agreement which cited that it would give up nuclear warheads for protection by the USA against Russia.
That protection never happened. Crimea was taken. Chaos ensued on the borders. Then Russia struck their fucking capital.
AND YOU WANT US TO FUCKING TRADE WITH RUSSIA, lol… Surely that will fix everything.
We trade with USA, aggressor of half of the world, and Europe itself participated in the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan and the bombing of Libya and Yugoslavia. Currently, the EU stance is to support the genocidal apartheid regime of Netanyahu. Why is Russian aggression worse and should be punished more than any other aggression?
The fact that I think Russia should be put in its place doesn’t mean I don’t despise that devil called Netanyahu and his zionists, Trump, and everyone else orchestrating violence for profit. I hate all of them, and I don’t want my country being buddy-buddy with any of them.
Yeah, how about no escalation? No hybrid war tactics? No drones in foreign airspace? No threats to neighbouring countries?
Cool, I agree that all of those things should stop. How about we engage in actual negotiations with Russia instead of grinding down Ukrainian young men in trenches as a form of diplomacy?
Because appeaemt doesn’t work?
They’re not willing to engage in good faith. If they were they never would have started the “special operations” in the first place. Nor would they be asking to keep all of their gains in the war.
They were more than willing to engage in good faith from late 1990s to early 2010s, it’s the constant western meddling in Georgia, Ukraine, Moldova and other Russian sphere of influence countries, coupled with the expansion of NATO, that pushed Russia to isolation. Russia doesn’t have the economic or soft power to fight the US+EU in that field, so either US+EU accept Russia peacefully having its own sphere of influence, or Russia will naturally attempt to do so militarily.
The USA doesn’t need to militarily engage in Mexico because it already belongs to its sphere of influence, in Venezuela they don’t enjoy that so the natural response is to threaten with military invasion (as it’s doing now). It’s basic geopolitics.
What about the stolen ukrainian children, was that a de-escalation tactic as well? Face it, theses russians are some of the worst neighbors europe could have, and I’m not even gonna mention the cyber warfare, the arsons, the shooting down of civilian airplanes, that journalist body returned with her fucking eyes scooped out.
It’s mostly magnified out of reality. The source for the vast majority of “stolen Ukrainian children” numbers (supposedly hovering around the tens of thousands according to western media) is a Ukrainian ministry. You don’t believe Ukraine has any reasons to exaggerate the numbers in atrocities for international image purposes? When the numbers are roughly confirmed by independent journalistic work, I’ll take the claims as they are, but until then I’ll be cautious and not take Ukrainian government propaganda at face value, the same way that I don’t take Russian government propaganda at face value when they talk of genocide of ethnic Russians in Eastern Ukraine pre-2022.
Russians could say the same about Europe contributing to genocide in Palestine, to the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan and the bombing of Libya and Yugoslavia. Or those don’t count somehow? Do you really think Europe has any moral high ground to stand on seeing its current support to the Netanyahu genocidal regime?
Cyber warfare is universal, and CIA actually dominates simply by the fact that most social media are owned by US companies. If you don’t think Twitter being owned by Elon Musk counts as western Cyberwarfare you’re plainly wrong. Chinese cyberwarfare through TikTok arguably is the biggest contributor to awareness of the Palestinian genocide in the west. As for the rest of comments, they’re isolated minor incidents during wartime, I could be talking shit about Poland keeping a Spanish journalist prisoner for years without evidence because he has Russian ancestors, but I don’t bring these things up because all states do dirty shit.
Aww poor Russia, they were just trying to “peacefully have its own sphere of influence”.
Give me a fucking break.
And what the US is doing in Venezuela is not a “natural response” to anything, and to try to point to it as a justification for Russia’s actions is actually insane.