But don’t worry, the country currently committing war atrocities would never commit peacetime atrocities. Just play nice and no one gets hurt.
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What if they sell it for a profit?
https://twitter.com/Sharon_Kuruvila/status/1498810610510929934
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I don’t think I’ll have the stomach to watch the Russians starve our kyiv
A far cry from the three days everyone predicted in the beginning.
I remember some experts even predicting that of it dragged out to two weeks to take Kyiv, Putin could be in a real mess.
What happens if the US gets a few massive transport planes and starts air dropping food into Kyiv? Are the Russians going to shoot down an unarmed American plane?
I know the logistics of air dropping food to a few million people are somewhere between insane and impossible.
He could be, back home. I’m not sure who constitutes a bigger humanitarian mess after 30 days of a siege on Kyiv, the ~2.5M people in Kyiv without food and presumably power for 30 days, or the 145M people of Russia after 30 more days under these sanctions.
Yeah, probably. They’re trying to shoot down anything they don’t own.
a week? lol, RU isn’t going to go HAM for another week.
the western news sources have been very slow to wait for translated reports. and they are still working with official preinvasion assessments, because they were in fact accurate.
Just speaking to the masses as I know people will not see a connection or view the moves as similar, as Putin does. I’m sure joining a military alliance pisses him off more but he definitely sees joining the EU for example as a disaster for his Russia.
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dunno russia also has a food issue as they only brought a few lunches and no extra fuel and will need supply runners themselves, putin might not wait 30 days as well one way or another
I mean that is the basics of the surface level realism right? That if you acquiesce enough, and the ultimate goals aren’t assimilation then you can find a kind of peace. In the interview the Maiden revolution actually comes up more, and I think that’s because in his mind’s eye the Maidan revolution was really the key point for the conflagration. They threw out the guy who wanted closer ties with Putin and brought in someone who wanted closer ties to America and then their fate was sealed. There was some talk about NATO and EU membership but even if they didn’t get in, they wanted in, and anything outside of the Russian sphere was cause to start messing with them.
Yeah agree on this, Mearsheimer himself presents a black/white contrarian argument by saying its ALL NATO. Just my opinion but I think the answer lies somewhere in between for NATO pressure (Mearsheimer) vs Putin insanities (mainstream-ish viewpoint from what I see/gather) roles.
Right. He’s chastising the Ukrainian people for not being more pragmatic.
The “if rape is inevitable you might as well lie back and enjoy it” argument.
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I’m not arguing any of this because, apparently unlike most of this thread, I don’t consider myself an expert in Eastern European geopolitics. I am simply not well versed enough in the history, politics and economics of the area to make any firm judgements about whether this is the result of NATO expansionism or Russian territorial ambitions or what.
What I’m saying is that when Mearsheimer uses words like “should” and “blame”, he doesn’t mean what you mean. “Should” is an unfortunate word in English that means, interchangeably, either that a choice is prudent or that there is a moral imperative to make it. If you say to me “you should lock your door when you go out”, then I agree only if you mean “it would be prudent to lock your doors”. What you don’t mean is “locking your doors is a moral necessity and if you don’t and get robbed, it’s your fault”.
Similarly with “blame”. If I fly to Mogadishu, start walking around in the streets and get kidnapped, robbed and killed, am I to blame for that? No, would say someone using a moral framework. Yes, would say Mearsheimer, because I could rationally analyse the situation and figure out what the consequences would be, and it’s incumbent on me to accept the fact that other people have domains of control in the world and if I trespass there, I play by their rules. When Mearsheimer says “should” and “blame”, he’s always using this realist framework for what those words mean.
The reason I’m posting any of this isn’t that I agree with him - as I said, I feel I’m at the limits of my knowledge here. It’s that I think the increasingly Marvel-villain portrayal of Putin and Russia ITT is getting pretty silly. I’m sure I don’t need to go through the litany of US regional interference and bullying (endless coups in the Americas, the Cuba saga etc etc) yet the instant Russia bullies a country in its region, people ITT are straight to “ah, well clearly the Kremlin can’t honestly see NATO expansion as a threat, that’s a pretext and Putin is an insane psychopath hell-bent on drowning Europe in blood”. Like I don’t think you have to go full Mearsheimer to think this is a toddler-brained take, frankly.
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Isn’t the other glaring weakness of his argument is that he is treating Putin = Russia? Was the “East” always bound to go down the route of a thug mafia state?
The man Putin is too scared to face in a legitimate election, Alexei Navalny, is highly nationalistic but does not have this idiotic attitude towards Ukraine.
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fwiw I don‘t know a single German who „hates“ the French. Most here in Northern Germany are indifferent and the people I know closer to France actually have a very positive image of it.
I‘m sure it is more negative the other way around.
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I mean they were pretty fucked under Yeltsin but yah less nationalist. Putin is immensely powerful though.
I’m also clearly no expert in Eastern European politics. So when it comes to postulating on what’s best for the Ukrainian people, I’ll defer to their opinion over Professor Messersheimer’s.
They seem to have made their opinion abundantly clear.
See? Not a single moral argument in there.
Well I was using a pretty small sample size :o
Correction noted.
Merkel= Bill Belichick