Here's how Ukraine was being reported by the West before the war.
Today, increasing reports of far-right violence, ultranationalism, and erosion of basic freedoms are giving the lie to the West’s initial euphoria. There are neo-Nazi pogroms against the Roma, rampant attacks on feminists and LGBT groups, book bans, and state-sponsored glorification of Nazi collaborators.
These stories of Ukraine’s dark nationalism aren’t coming out of Moscow; they’re being filed by Western media, including US-funded Radio Free Europe (RFE); Jewish organizations such as the World Jewish Congress and the Simon Wiesenthal Center; and watchdogs like Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and Freedom House, which issued a joint report warning that Kiev is losing the monopoly on the use of force in the country as far-right gangs operate with impunity.
Five years after Maidan, the beacon of democracy is looking more like a torchlight march. A neo-Nazi battalion in the heart of Europe
If you whitewash NAZI POGROMS just because you want to beat Russia, fuck you. Siding with far-right fascists to defeat far-right fascists doesn't make you the good guy. There is no lesser of two evils here.
If you dismiss any criticism of Ukraine as Russian propaganda, you might want to ask why the rest of the world, including the West, was concerned about Nazism in the area and then suddenly changed their tune only after the war started.
We should be getting both sides into peace negotiations, not prolonging the bloodshed and providing Nazis with illegal cluster bombs
Sure. but that's a lot of dead people to defend the principle of not letting Russia get what they want. We could have said "fine, we won't expand NATO" and either Russia would have backed down or been forced to abandon that "pretense". But we didn't. We got into this dick measuring contest of "Ukraine can join if they want to 😤" and provoked a war. Which we wanted, in order to fight Russia without using American troops. But it's completely to the detriment of citizens in both Ukraine and Russia.
Russia could have stuck with the accepted modern method of Imperialism though, wherein you don't invade countries with armies but instead you use soft power and economic integration. That's what the US was trying to do even in Russia, what with how American Hollywood movies and TV shows being released there and American companies moving in there. It was supposed to change Russian public opinion and enable the subordination of Russian capital to Western capital but Putin was able to co-opt Russian capitalism so when all the Western companies like McDonald's left, there was domestic alternatives.
Problem was the west was more succesful in Ukraine and other former Soviet states, and the Russians losing at that method as Western Ukrainians looked at the EU more and more, feeling culturally closer to Poland than Russia.
We can go round and round over past decisions that are the "real" culprit for war in Ukraine but it won't stop the fighting today. Sure, Ukraine could've surrendered in the first 24 hours and saved lives, but historically speaking, occupations also result in loss of life as the people who didn't want to be part of Russia would still be Ukraine and wouldn't just accept a Moscow-aligned Kyiv government.
The fighting would also stop if Russian troops turned around and went back to Russia, but I think some people are more interested in hurting US foreign policy than they are in peace.
You are unsurprisingly distorting the past. Ukraine circa 2014 had two offers on the table for economic integration, one with the EU and one with Russia. The EU deal demanded the exclusion of Russia, the Russian deal did not demand exclusion of the EU. The sitting President chose the Russian deal, and then there was a west-backed coup that put him out of office and put in someone who would take the EU deal.
The "game" was one that Russia was not allowed to succeed at.
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There are many countries caught between two powers that manage ok (see Taiwan and South Korea as examples) -- Northern Ireland is different because it's not its own country and was brought along with the rest of the UK out of the EU with zero preparation despite one of its main trading partners being Ireland, which still is in the EU.
Russia says reactionary things about western Europe, but you are just kind of asserting that it refused to let Ukraine be involved with trade relations.
This is true, but it seems to me that the west pushed too hard on this from a strategic standpoint by refusing to let Russia join NATO back when it tried. I'm glad that they made this mistake -- it's better for multipolarity -- but for them it was surely a mistake.
China's situation can hardly be compared, or else must be compared from a much earlier state. While there are criticisms to be made of Deng's policies, he did not allow for the wholesale gutting of domestic industries the way that most of Eastern Europe did. He allowed foreign capitalists to take ownership but kept the manufacturing power where it was, allowing it to be used for development of the country rather than selling it off. It should be unsurprising that traitors like Yeltsin had no interest in preserving long-term national sovereignty in this way.
Perhaps China, too, will one day be hijacked by compradores and turned back into a backwater like the former USSR states and Yugoslavia were, but that's not how things are now.
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If you're talking about neocolonialism, neocolonialism still requires boots on the ground. Why do you think AFRICOM has military bases throughout Africa or why jihadist separatist groups like Boko Haram curiously always align with the strategic goals of the US state department? There were Danish troops rampaging around Mali before post-coup Mali told the Danes to fuck off back to Scandinavia. Just because Western troops were "invited" to those countries by neocolonial puppets doesn't mean they don't represent just another form of foreign occupation. At least when Russia invaded Ukraine, you could argue that Russia was trying to safeguard the Russian minority. Not sure what kind of excuse you could pull for French troops in "ex" French colony Niger (despite the coup, French troops are still in Niger).