You know that how?
Your TL is way off BTW. The Uyghur repressions started ~2014 and the US conquered Afghanistan in 2002. So plenty of time to fund resistance activities out of Afghanistan.
Which part, the mass rapes? Chinese leaked documents, interviews, etc. The other things? Well, China clearly isn't destabilizing at all from the crackdown nor would anyone think it would; and the Uyghur population is from Wikipedia.
You're the person making a crazy claim here, which not even the Chinese claimed at the time. You need evidence here. Along explanations for all the other problems I pointed out.
Again you're missing the entire point, the US did exactly the same thing with Iraq and normalized this behavior. The Russians have done nothing that the US hasn't done first in the 21st century. The Iraq invasion was against the UN resolutions. How is what Putin is doing any different?
The difference is that he's getting backlash, that's the difference. The US didn't have real international backlash, Russia did. The difference between the two is that the US has a lot of banked goodwill, economic power, military might and other levers. Russia doesn't. So Russia literally can't afford to do this: they don't have the money.
What copium are you huffing?
Copium? It's called realpolitik: you're the one whining "It's not fair that Russia can't get away with same stuff the US does", I'm the one pointing out that geopolitics isn't fair and never will be, so stop trying to win points by saying "but they got away with it".
It started out defensive in nature, but then we stayed for two decades and sent our people over there to die for absolutely no reason.
Oh, definitely, after Osama (at the longest), there was no reason to be there. I'm just saying that the initial invasion was fine.
He only absorbed Crimea; and the fact that he didn't also absorb the Donbass region is why I think it's possible he might go the route of creating a puppet state in Ukraine.
My guess is that he goes a combo: extend Donbass so that it stretches to Crimea giving him a land bridge to it. Then either absorb it or make them acknowledge it's independant, and hopefully get a puppet too.
The United States military couldn't conquer a ham sandwich at this point, even if you gave them a millennia to do it; we may have the equipment and the training, but our leadership is complete garbage, as the Afghanistan withdrawal clearly illustrated. Also the sanctions don't seem to be hurting Russia nearly as much as people are insisting they are; their recent move to demand payment in Rubles for their natural gas has apparently undone much of the damage.
BWAHAHAHA, no. The US could conquer any non-nuclear country we wanted (and if nukes disappeared tomorrow, any country, with us taking some losses from China, but we'd still win). We absolutely could, it'd be a matter months, with maybe a month for the invasion itself. Seriously, the big problem is just moving the troops to occupy the bombed out husks after we wreck everything.
The whole problem in Afghanistan and Iraq wasn't the invasion: it was holding it. That is beyond us or anyone else, 100%. But an invasion? Shit, we can invade anywhere we want, with a fairly simple strategy: 1) cruise missile/bomb their SAM and air capabilities, and also their ships. Any of our carrier groups can do this to nearly any country, maybe some will require 2-3. All that's left afterwards is their mobile SAM. I'm certain we have stuff that targets that (Russia does too, just not enough). Then with air superiority, any big group of troops is just a target. The rest falls from there.
America is stupid powerful militarily (like the second most, the problem is just the political leadership. The military warned Biden to prep for evacuation, he didn't.
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