They did, at least in so far as it came to bombing major civilian infrastructure as far west as Kiev.
There was also the option of simply evacuating ethnic Russians from the Donbas rather than launching an invasion into Ukraine. Cede the territory to the Ukrainian nationalists and fortify your borders without actually crossing into neighboring territory and spending the next two years in a bloody quagmire.
You always have the "Don't Do War" option. The invasion was an entirely unforced error on their part.
There was also the option of simply evacuating ethnic Russians from the Donbas rather than launching an invasion into Ukraine. Cede the territory to the Ukrainian nationalists
Do you hear yourself? That's a horrible option. "Just give the Nazis what they want."
The trolley problem, but on one side of the track are 300,000 civilians of various origins all tied to the tracks and on the other, a fascist waiting patiently by the trolley stop to receive a basket of treats.
Yes. The lives of hundreds of thousands of people are worth more than whether or not some Banderite gets to be smug on Twitter.
This isn't a question of fascist demands, its a question of preserving civilian lives.
Invading the Donbas didn't end fascism in Eastern Europe any more than invading Afghanistan ended the threat of domestic terrorism in the United States.
It literally doesn't matter how you try to justify this humanitarian atrocity. The Russian invasion only served the interests of European fascism in the long run, without doing anything to preserve the lives of the Donbas residents it was supposed to protect.
Might as well suggest we needed to bomb Auschwitz in order to kill all the German guards as bomb Ukraine to kill the fascists.
Yeah? Some anti Nazi resistance fighters asked the RAF to bomb the death camps, because anything was preferable to Auschwitz continuing to exist. There were people who wanted that.
Some anti Nazi resistance fighters asked the RAF to bomb the death camps
Well, if some random assorted collection of anonymous people said so, I guess the Allies really missed an opportunity to do an even more reprehensible attack than Tokyo or Dresden.
"In June 1944, John W. Pehle, the executive director of the War Refugee Board, appealed to the U.S. government to bomb the railways leading into Auschwitz. In July, Johan J. Smertenko, the executive vice chairman of the Emergency Committee to Save the Jewish People of Europe, sent a letter to President Roosevelt asking him to bomb the extermination camps, especially the “poison gas chambers of [the] Auschwitz and Birkenau camps.”"
https://warfarehistorynetwork.com/article/why-wasnt-auschwitz-bombed/
They can keep fomenting unrest that spills over the border while still maintaining plausible deniability, much like how they legally recognize one country two systems in regard to Taiwan while ratcheting up tension in the region with the navy.
I would agree with the statement quoted earlier if the word "actively" was replaced with "openly".
You're delusional if you think the "international community" (i.e. the West) wouldn't support Ukraine against Russia no matter what. The facts don't matter, if Russia had to respond to a literal attack they'd still be calling it an "unprovoked act of aggression" and sending Ukraine cluster bombs.
And again the proposal here, deporting ethnic Russians from their homelands in the Donbass, is just categorically bad. Plus the "international community" would condemn it as Russia "kidnapping Ukrainian citizens".
By giving into this one demand you put the fascists in the position where any further escalation is purely on them. If they stupidly took the bait in that situation the international community would be totally opposed to them, and not shipping them cluster bombs.
i.e. if they escalated against Russia and Russia responded. It's the same action from Russia, just under slightly different circumstances. The West would have treated it the exact same way.
As hawkish as the yanks are I think they're smart enough to not actively support Nazi paramilitaries doing border raids on a nuclear power. If you put Azov in the position where they're the aggressor I highly doubt they'd be getting much if any support from the west.
Azov spent 8 years being the aggressor and it didn't dampen US support of them at all.
They condemned that dumbass military adventure where a bunch of mercs drove across the border in armored trucks just to get blown up by Russian helicopters, and subsequently the media ghouls barely talked about it
You're contradicting yourself here. The US didn't condemn it they just didn't talk about it. Now the US is talking about providing Ukraine and it's far-right paramilitaries with cluster bombs. That seems like support to me, actual material support and not just cheering on a failed invasion.
That's slop for hogs, it's just there to keep the American people docile. It doesn't have any immediate effects on the American state.
Propaganda does have long-term effects on American elites, you can see the effects that its had on them over the many years. Heck, just compare HW Bush and Dubya Bush. However, this isn't the propaganda's intended purpose.
Sure but we're still in pure propaganda territory. You haven't shown that there's an actual material change in US support. You would need to show me some sort of change or reduction in actual material US support to convince me. Ukraine has attacked the Kerch Bridge and sent raids and artillery into Belgorad without the US doing more than tut-tuting. Ukraine continues to strike Donetsk City with artillery, despite Russia recognizing them as being independent at the start of the war. Russia then annexed Donetsk, making it legal Russian territory and the artillery attacks still continued. The entire spring offensive has been into Russian-annexed territory and it's had no effect on US/NATO support. The only thing that is effecting US support is depletion and self-preservation for the US. I don't know where you're getting this idea that Russia could have pulled off some kind of weird political trick to make US propaganda work against its own interests.
There was also the option of simply evacuating ethnic Russians from the Donbas rather than launching an invasion into Ukraine. Cede the territory to the Ukrainian nationalists and fortify your borders without actually crossing into neighboring territory and spending the next two years in a bloody quagmire.
In the 90s the solution would've been blue helmets and neutral zones that are controlled by international troops. Without expulsions of population.
Honestly, if you consider how NATO treated Serbia and how Russia treated Ukraine, there are far more parallels than either side would want to acknowledge.
So take the territory Ukraine has been shelling for nearly a decade and leave their supply lines and support infrastructure untouched? What’s your plan here, move the entire Russian army into the Donbas and wait to be bombed off the map?
You always have the "Don't Do War" option. The invasion was an entirely unforced error on their part.
You’re right, invading the Donbas in 2014 and starting to commit ethnic cleansing was an unforced error on Ukraine’s part. Russia meanwhile took nearly a decade to respond to the war started by its neighbor.
What’s your plan here, move the entire Russian army into the Donbas and wait to be bombed off the map?
No. Move the ethnic Russian civilians out of the Donbas and onto Russian soil, so they're out of range of Ukranian artillery.
Russia meanwhile took nearly a decade to respond
By doing the exact same unforced error at several orders of magnitude higher death toll. We went from the Ukrainians killing people by the dozen to Russians killing populations by the thousand. This did nothing to improve the situation of the civilians in the Donbas. And two years after the conflict started, we're left with hundreds of thousands dead for... what?
What has the Russian invasion actually accomplished? You can't even claim it got rid of the fascists. Azov and its ilk are as prolific as ever. The Donbas is a giant kill zone. The Russian government is less stable than its ever been. The western half of Ukraine is a giant black market for surplus arms between fascist groups. The Scandinavian states are lining up to join NATO, while the rest of Europe is gearing up for a third World War. Ethnic Russians are increasingly the subject of a global hate campaign.
What did the invasion accomplish? Show me one thing that was actually improved by this reckless and foolish decision.
Bro this ain't a small collection of villages we're talking about, the maps can distort the reality, Donbass is a massive heavily populated region, millions of people and a multitude of large cities, there's no other way to slice it, it would've been a self-inflicted ethnic cleansing lmao
And should they have done the same for Crimea? There is no escaping the confrontation, it was set the minute the fascists pulled the coup
Those were people trying to escape. If ethnic Russians wanted to leave the Donbass, they could have done so already, or at least asked for it. Forcing them to leave against their will isn't the same thing.
Turning the Russian army to the purpose of evacuating and providing relief to Donbas refugees to facilitate a smooth exit would have been an infinitely better use of Russian money and manpower than launching a suicide mission across the border.
Hundreds of thousands of lives would have been spared. The economy of border towns would have surged. Half of North Africa wouldn't be facing a famine due to destruction of arable land. Russian and Belarusian borders would have been well-fortified, rather than juggling the egos of a bunch of rebellious mercenaries. And we wouldn't be debating how many mines and cluster bombs to scatter across the Eastern European interior, to plague generations to come.
what happens to those that don't want to leave their homes
They presumably get hit by Ukrainian shells, which is a thing I assumed they would want to avoid.
Do they deserve to be cleansed by the Nazis or something?
No. But then neither does some poor dipshit in Kiev deserve to get hit by Russian artillery. Nobody deserves this shit. And cranking up the volume of artillery fired does not spare anyone. Burying more mines and dropping more cluster bombs does not spare anyone. Nothing the Russians did in the invasion spared anyone.
So basically you prefer inaction in the face of ethnic cleansing. So if Hitler hadn't invaded the Soviet Union, you think the Soviet Union should have just sat there forever never doing anything about him? Millions of lives would have been saved after all.
There's only one way to deal with Nazis, and it's not by giving them what they want.
What about in 1936 after those fascist paramilitaries were incorporated into the German army and then sent in to occupy the Rhineland? What would be your opinion in 1936 if the Rhineland had fought back instead of letting itself be occupied by Nazis? A lot of deaths could have been avoided if the Franco-Soviet treaty was enforced in 1936 or if the French and Russian backed Minsk 2 ceasefire had been enforced by the UN.
really stretching the metaphor here, but in your scenario its not just saying the rhineland should do self-defense, it's endorsing the French invading wurrtemburg & annexing the rhineland as well
The metaphor is indeed too stretched. I'll just say that I would have endorsed the French invading Nazi Germany in 1936 and indeed annexing any and all parts of it in order to bring peace to Europe. This is 1936 so I think the US was still supporting Nazi Germany at this point, if Germany had unlimited support from the US then the concept of a limited war against the Nazis would have been folly.
The Donbas is a lot more like Alsace–Lorraine (or Elsass-Lothringen) but that doesn't quite work out for historical analogies.
Nothing about this bloodbath constitutes "winning". Hundreds of thousands of people are dead. The repeated failed harvests are threatening regional famine. We're looking at economic damage well into the tens of billions, assuming the war were to end tomorrow, and trillions going into the future. Military budgets across the continent are surging, as European leadership is whipped into an anti-Russo panic.
All this so two legions of mercenaries can play artillery tag across the Donbas basin? How is that winning?
People usually die in wars, not sure what you were expecting.
NATO literally does not have the ability to sustain this war. They could get there, if they were not neoliberal hellholes, but they are. Their military industries are build around making overpriced, wildly complex equipment that is sometimes good enough to kill insurgents and not nearly good enough for symmetrical warfare. No amount of money can fix this.
Russia, while also being something of a neolib trash fire, still has enough Soviet infrastructure to produce in months what takes years in other nations, and they will eventually win the conflict. Whether that will be just the Donbass or a full annexation or somewhere in between remains to be seen.
NATO literally does not have the ability to sustain this war.
The Western MIC can keep churning out hardware forever. There is no upper limit to the number of bombs we can manufacture, just the rate.
Russia, while also being something of a neolib trash fire, still has enough Soviet infrastructure to produce in months what takes years in other nations
It doesn't matter, when one bomb can level a city block. We're approaching a point at which there simply will not be anything left worth bombing.
They did, at least in so far as it came to bombing major civilian infrastructure as far west as Kiev.
There was also the option of simply evacuating ethnic Russians from the Donbas rather than launching an invasion into Ukraine. Cede the territory to the Ukrainian nationalists and fortify your borders without actually crossing into neighboring territory and spending the next two years in a bloody quagmire.
You always have the "Don't Do War" option. The invasion was an entirely unforced error on their part.
Do you hear yourself? That's a horrible option. "Just give the Nazis what they want."
"The Russians have kidnapped x citizens from Ukraine" literally it's why Putin is wanted by the ICC lmfao
The trolley problem, but on one side of the track are 300,000 civilians of various origins all tied to the tracks and on the other, a fascist waiting patiently by the trolley stop to receive a basket of treats.
Yes. The lives of hundreds of thousands of people are worth more than whether or not some Banderite gets to be smug on Twitter.
Fascists don't stop when you give in to their demands. We learned that lesson almost 90 years ago.
This isn't a question of fascist demands, its a question of preserving civilian lives.
Invading the Donbas didn't end fascism in Eastern Europe any more than invading Afghanistan ended the threat of domestic terrorism in the United States.
It literally doesn't matter how you try to justify this humanitarian atrocity. The Russian invasion only served the interests of European fascism in the long run, without doing anything to preserve the lives of the Donbas residents it was supposed to protect.
Might as well suggest we needed to bomb Auschwitz in order to kill all the German guards as bomb Ukraine to kill the fascists.
Yeah? Some anti Nazi resistance fighters asked the RAF to bomb the death camps, because anything was preferable to Auschwitz continuing to exist. There were people who wanted that.
Well, if some random assorted collection of anonymous people said so, I guess the Allies really missed an opportunity to do an even more reprehensible attack than Tokyo or Dresden.
Heres an article with some names. 5 min research.
"In June 1944, John W. Pehle, the executive director of the War Refugee Board, appealed to the U.S. government to bomb the railways leading into Auschwitz. In July, Johan J. Smertenko, the executive vice chairman of the Emergency Committee to Save the Jewish People of Europe, sent a letter to President Roosevelt asking him to bomb the extermination camps, especially the “poison gas chambers of [the] Auschwitz and Birkenau camps.”" https://warfarehistorynetwork.com/article/why-wasnt-auschwitz-bombed/
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lmao I hope this is sarcasm.
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How do you think those Nazi paramilitaries got there?
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They can keep fomenting unrest that spills over the border while still maintaining plausible deniability, much like how they legally recognize one country two systems in regard to Taiwan while ratcheting up tension in the region with the navy.
I would agree with the statement quoted earlier if the word "actively" was replaced with "openly".
You're delusional if you think the "international community" (i.e. the West) wouldn't support Ukraine against Russia no matter what. The facts don't matter, if Russia had to respond to a literal attack they'd still be calling it an "unprovoked act of aggression" and sending Ukraine cluster bombs.
And again the proposal here, deporting ethnic Russians from their homelands in the Donbass, is just categorically bad. Plus the "international community" would condemn it as Russia "kidnapping Ukrainian citizens".
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i.e. if they escalated against Russia and Russia responded. It's the same action from Russia, just under slightly different circumstances. The West would have treated it the exact same way.
Azov spent 8 years being the aggressor and it didn't dampen US support of them at all.
You're contradicting yourself here. The US didn't condemn it they just didn't talk about it. Now the US is talking about providing Ukraine and it's far-right paramilitaries with cluster bombs. That seems like support to me, actual material support and not just cheering on a failed invasion.
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Who gives a shit about media coverage if the US continues to provide weapons to the guys who did the border raid?
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That's slop for hogs, it's just there to keep the American people docile. It doesn't have any immediate effects on the American state.
Propaganda does have long-term effects on American elites, you can see the effects that its had on them over the many years. Heck, just compare HW Bush and Dubya Bush. However, this isn't the propaganda's intended purpose.
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Sure but we're still in pure propaganda territory. You haven't shown that there's an actual material change in US support. You would need to show me some sort of change or reduction in actual material US support to convince me. Ukraine has attacked the Kerch Bridge and sent raids and artillery into Belgorad without the US doing more than tut-tuting. Ukraine continues to strike Donetsk City with artillery, despite Russia recognizing them as being independent at the start of the war. Russia then annexed Donetsk, making it legal Russian territory and the artillery attacks still continued. The entire spring offensive has been into Russian-annexed territory and it's had no effect on US/NATO support. The only thing that is effecting US support is depletion and self-preservation for the US. I don't know where you're getting this idea that Russia could have pulled off some kind of weird political trick to make US propaganda work against its own interests.
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In the 90s the solution would've been blue helmets and neutral zones that are controlled by international troops. Without expulsions of population.
Honestly, if you consider how NATO treated Serbia and how Russia treated Ukraine, there are far more parallels than either side would want to acknowledge.
So take the territory Ukraine has been shelling for nearly a decade and leave their supply lines and support infrastructure untouched? What’s your plan here, move the entire Russian army into the Donbas and wait to be bombed off the map?
You’re right, invading the Donbas in 2014 and starting to commit ethnic cleansing was an unforced error on Ukraine’s part. Russia meanwhile took nearly a decade to respond to the war started by its neighbor.
No. Move the ethnic Russian civilians out of the Donbas and onto Russian soil, so they're out of range of Ukranian artillery.
By doing the exact same unforced error at several orders of magnitude higher death toll. We went from the Ukrainians killing people by the dozen to Russians killing populations by the thousand. This did nothing to improve the situation of the civilians in the Donbas. And two years after the conflict started, we're left with hundreds of thousands dead for... what?
What has the Russian invasion actually accomplished? You can't even claim it got rid of the fascists. Azov and its ilk are as prolific as ever. The Donbas is a giant kill zone. The Russian government is less stable than its ever been. The western half of Ukraine is a giant black market for surplus arms between fascist groups. The Scandinavian states are lining up to join NATO, while the rest of Europe is gearing up for a third World War. Ethnic Russians are increasingly the subject of a global hate campaign.
What did the invasion accomplish? Show me one thing that was actually improved by this reckless and foolish decision.
"Just cooperate in Ukraine's ethnic cleansing of the Donbass."
"I have no counterargument, so I'm going to deflect by distorting something you said to make you look bad."
Bro this ain't a small collection of villages we're talking about, the maps can distort the reality, Donbass is a massive heavily populated region, millions of people and a multitude of large cities, there's no other way to slice it, it would've been a self-inflicted ethnic cleansing lmao
And should they have done the same for Crimea? There is no escaping the confrontation, it was set the minute the fascists pulled the coup
I agree with his point, but that's not going to stop me from being a snarky contrarian debatebro when I see a good opening to attack.
Telling the M.S. St. Louis to turn around and go back to Europe, because otherwise we're cooperating with the Nazis.
Those were people trying to escape. If ethnic Russians wanted to leave the Donbass, they could have done so already, or at least asked for it. Forcing them to leave against their will isn't the same thing.
Turning the Russian army to the purpose of evacuating and providing relief to Donbas refugees to facilitate a smooth exit would have been an infinitely better use of Russian money and manpower than launching a suicide mission across the border.
Hundreds of thousands of lives would have been spared. The economy of border towns would have surged. Half of North Africa wouldn't be facing a famine due to destruction of arable land. Russian and Belarusian borders would have been well-fortified, rather than juggling the egos of a bunch of rebellious mercenaries. And we wouldn't be debating how many mines and cluster bombs to scatter across the Eastern European interior, to plague generations to come.
You mean forcibly deporting. Because that's what it would be.
I mean opening the borders and building up refugee housing and civil services on the other side of the border.
Cool, and what happens to those that don't want to leave their homes, as people commonly do? Do they deserve to be cleansed by the Nazis or something?
They presumably get hit by Ukrainian shells, which is a thing I assumed they would want to avoid.
No. But then neither does some poor dipshit in Kiev deserve to get hit by Russian artillery. Nobody deserves this shit. And cranking up the volume of artillery fired does not spare anyone. Burying more mines and dropping more cluster bombs does not spare anyone. Nothing the Russians did in the invasion spared anyone.
So basically you prefer inaction in the face of ethnic cleansing. So if Hitler hadn't invaded the Soviet Union, you think the Soviet Union should have just sat there forever never doing anything about him? Millions of lives would have been saved after all.
There's only one way to deal with Nazis, and it's not by giving them what they want.
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Giving passports to the few people willing to leave their homes is barely action. And for the rest, it's inaction.
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comparing brigades strength fascist paramilitaries to nazi germany is beyond asinine
Nazi Germany started out as brigade strength fascist paramilitaries. Look up the Freikorp, the SA, and the SS.
i think most would call invading Germany in 1932 over it an overreaction
I told him that I had fought in 1936 on the northwest sector of the Madrid front in the French Battalion of the XIth International Brigade. “Oh,” he said, “you were a premature anti-Fascist.” I was taken aback by the expression. How, I wondered, could anyone be a premature anti-Fascist? Could there be anything such as a premature antidote to a poison? A premature antiseptic? A premature antitoxin? A premature anti-racist? If you were not premature, what sort of anti-Fascist were you supposed to be? A punctual anti-Fascist? A timely one?
What about in 1936 after those fascist paramilitaries were incorporated into the German army and then sent in to occupy the Rhineland? What would be your opinion in 1936 if the Rhineland had fought back instead of letting itself be occupied by Nazis? A lot of deaths could have been avoided if the Franco-Soviet treaty was enforced in 1936 or if the French and Russian backed Minsk 2 ceasefire had been enforced by the UN.
really stretching the metaphor here, but in your scenario its not just saying the rhineland should do self-defense, it's endorsing the French invading wurrtemburg & annexing the rhineland as well
The metaphor is indeed too stretched. I'll just say that I would have endorsed the French invading Nazi Germany in 1936 and indeed annexing any and all parts of it in order to bring peace to Europe. This is 1936 so I think the US was still supporting Nazi Germany at this point, if Germany had unlimited support from the US then the concept of a limited war against the Nazis would have been folly.
The Donbas is a lot more like Alsace–Lorraine (or Elsass-Lothringen) but that doesn't quite work out for historical analogies.
Evidently not, they're winning by all metrics except perhaps "not winning fast enough"
Nothing about this bloodbath constitutes "winning". Hundreds of thousands of people are dead. The repeated failed harvests are threatening regional famine. We're looking at economic damage well into the tens of billions, assuming the war were to end tomorrow, and trillions going into the future. Military budgets across the continent are surging, as European leadership is whipped into an anti-Russo panic.
All this so two legions of mercenaries can play artillery tag across the Donbas basin? How is that winning?
People usually die in wars, not sure what you were expecting.
NATO literally does not have the ability to sustain this war. They could get there, if they were not neoliberal hellholes, but they are. Their military industries are build around making overpriced, wildly complex equipment that is sometimes good enough to kill insurgents and not nearly good enough for symmetrical warfare. No amount of money can fix this.
Russia, while also being something of a neolib trash fire, still has enough Soviet infrastructure to produce in months what takes years in other nations, and they will eventually win the conflict. Whether that will be just the Donbass or a full annexation or somewhere in between remains to be seen.
The Western MIC can keep churning out hardware forever. There is no upper limit to the number of bombs we can manufacture, just the rate.
It doesn't matter, when one bomb can level a city block. We're approaching a point at which there simply will not be anything left worth bombing.