All of the baltics outside of Belerus are NATO...
Russia-Ukraine War Political Discussion
- Thread starter Zachowon
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See, it can be both Soviet and Russian Federation corruption that was manipulating Ukraine before 2014.
In fact, said Russian manipulations were a large part of why their was dissatisfaction with Moscow's pre-2014 puppet, particularly when what triggered the Maidan was said puppet suddenly pulling out of a trade deal with the EU that would have undercut Russia's 'sphere of influence', along with the 2012 discovery of the Crimean and Donbass oil deposits making Ukraine an energy competitor with Europe.
So yeah, trying to say that we violated the terms, when it was both Russian and legacy Soviet issues (the issues with Chernobyl persist and will for thousands of years) that caused the Russian puppet to be ousted, is...not factual and in direct contradiction to known issues between Ukraine and Russia even after the Wall fell.
No, Russia views anything the Imperial Russia and the Soviets touched, including sovereign nations like the Baltics, Moldova, and Ukraine as 'fake nations' to be retaken. NATO exists because people didn't want to let the Soviet's roll over them, and it expanded after 91 because Russia's former victims didn't want to have that happen ever again.
All Russia has to do to not be 'penned in' is stop invading their neighbors routinely, and sovereign nations that border Russia have their own international desires as well.
Ukraine's people were tired of being a 'Russian buffer', and Russia cannot abide a petro-chem competitor between them and Europe using the old Soviet pipelines to undercut Russian sales.
All of them except Sweden are in NATO now, and most of them have been for a while.
Are you sure your not mixing up the Balkans with the Baltics?
Take a chill pill, grow some spine, learn something about geopolitics. The more people fall for "let third world shitholes invade and threaten whoever they want or they will end the world" meme the more doubts i have about the idea of universal franchise.
I dint consider Sweden Baltic
It's Scandinavia
Morphic Tide
Well-known member
The underlying point does still stand because they shouldn't have been because there should be no land border between NATO and Russia. The entire reason for NATO's existence was defense against the USSR, which had members covering all of Russia's borders. Expanding NATO proper to land borders is begging for the attack to go ahead because there ends up being no better option, expecting Russia to absolutely always look at conflict with NATO as an immediate loss when that is not the case.
Nobody in charge, at any point, seems to have spent any prior effort preparing for the case that Russia actually tries to keep itself from being bludgeoned into a rump state by "soft power" bullshit. Everyone seems to have just assumed that the status quo will continue because Russia "obviously" knows the thoroughly unofficial line in the sand and would "never" dare cross it to... Keep the primary industry floating its economy steady? Prod at its terminal demographic problems with a younger likely-to-be-assimilated population? Other matters of maintaining basic function as a state?
Citation that this extreme is official Russian policy, and more importantly that counteracting it has any need for starting the work on putting Russia in an economic straightjacket before the current government had the time to actually do anything, let alone specifically bringing back mutually assured destruction to do so? Why put our lives, on the Atlantic coast, on the line for this? Because that's what relying on NATO for it is doing.
You're essentially arguing to pile people on the freeway knowing there's "Truck of Peace enthusiasts" in the area. It sucks incredible amounts of ass for the people in that border region between power-blocks to be jerked around on various strings, but it is vastly preferable to setting things right back up for a repeat of the escalation behind World War One, now with nukes.
If you let the border be the border, instead of trying to push people with nukes in a corner, the odds of nuclear war are as close to zero as physically possible. If you push your nuclear-armed alliance to a land border with a nuclear-armed country at odds with it, you are establishing the conditions for nuclear war. Simple as that, it's an apocalyptic risk taken for the sake of "Fuck Russia", or "All Heil Status Quo", or some other profoundly absurd reason of barely-discernable and mostly theoretical benefit to the people being put at fresh risk of nuclear war.
Every country that joined NATO wanted to join. They were not forced too.
To bad for Russia they were not the nicest people as the USSR.
Poland joined the second they could
And remember, a nation has to vote internally to join NATO
..eh, ok.
With it being the only country outside NATO now, that isn't Russia, on the Baltic Sea, it fits the argument.
Think @Morphic Tide may have also confused the Balkan and the Baltic in his argument, because there are a fair number of non-NATO Balkan nations.
No, the Baltics came into NATO for protection, after having been under Russian/Soviet rule for decades, and justifiably didn't want to risk Russia getting funny ideas again.
Russian fears do not get to veto other nations domestic and international policy anymore, and that is what Russia truly cannot abide.
Also, no, I cannot give you 'official' Russian policy here, only recommend you actually pay attention the the War Room threads, and watch some of the video's of what is being said in Russia itself by the state media and even state officials.
Eastern Europe isn't going to let the Russian's dictate the politics and economies anymore, and NATO will not stop existing just because of Russian imperialist aggression.
Go tell that to the other guys, take the left's doves with you while at it.
In a normal society people should absolutely pile on the freeway knowing there's "Truck of Peace enthusiasts" in the area, and they should bring a lot of guns with them, preferably those people should be policemen or soldiers, but failing that i'll take any.
Russia has literally the biggest corner in the world. If not letting them expand from it counts as pushing it into a corner, then every country in the world has equal or greater justification to expand with no interference.
Russia should stop pushing the EU into a corner then, they need to stop for the sake of preventing nuclear war. Oh, wait, they don't think this way and openly hold people who do in great disregard.
Morphic Tide
Well-known member
Of course people are going to run under a for-sale nuclear umbrella if somebody's offering. It being left open after the reason for that deal being made died was profoundly retarded, because it invited the absolute worst-case scenario of direct borders with a nuclear-armed country with no realistic future if it doesn't take something from somebody to work with. Pretending that the Russian Federation is remotely comparable to the Soviet Union that inspired the creation of NATO is creating problems with no need to exist.
That's mostly frozen wasteland and has fuck-all way to use it without at least two middle men. By this logic, Canada should be a serious contender of some description, but it's just America's egotistical hat busy selling itself to China. Very importantly, they don't have the people to work it already. A lot of the talk of the timing I've seen is that Russia is already closing in on the last possible chance to break out of the soft power straightjacket.
Difference being that the EU has extremely plentiful trade access due to year-round ports and much less severe demographic issues because it doesn't have the double-whammy of a massive manpower crunch from WW2 depopulation combined with negligible replacement skilled labor because the education system collapsed just in time for the undersized generation to also have extremely limited ability to replace the elderly expertise.
These issues are not hard to predict. Russia's time-bomb was well set right when the USSR fell. You do not directly confront and corner the starving rabid animal, you get out a long stick to keep it away from you. But no, the Almighty Status Quo demands nobody to make use of their military spending no matter how genuine an existential threat of rotting away there is, and any hint of such is to be gone after with an incredibly long list of shady manipulations and hypocritical impoverishment.
This is not to say that Russia is in the right. This is to say that Ukraine shouldn't be a "NATO problem", because NATO was for defending against the USSR, and as has been very well demonstrated recently the Russian Federation is already a rump state in comparison. The nuclear umbrella should be reserved for essential allies, not mild Number Go Up scab worker suppliers or randos with the misfortune of bordering a kleptocracy, because any use of it is by definition an existential threat.
Russian aggression towards it's neighbors pre-dates the USSR, and trying to pretend modern Russia isn't trying to remake the USSR/Imperial Russia is ignoring what has been said on Russian state media.
The reason NATO exists did't go away when the USSR died, because the end of the USSR didn't mean the end of the threat Moscow represents to it's neighbors.
Trying to act like the end of the USSR removed the threat Russia posed/poses to it's neighbors is naive and foolish, which is why the people neighboring Russia went for all the protection they could get.
Russia's paranoia, aggression, and untrustworthiness are why so many of it's former vassals/victims have sought as much western protection as they can.
Just because a rabid dog is going to eventually die on it's own does not mean people should avoid protecting themselves from it's death throws.
King Arts
Well-known member
He was saying that we don't want them in NATO. They want to be in Nato. But Morphic does not want the Baltics in.
They should protect themselves. Why should we protect them?
Who the fuck is stopping them from making more people?
US special military operation in Canada when?
No one was stopping them from trading, they were in fact trading a lot of stuff, including fucking major military hardware like amphibious assault ships with NATO members before they were "defending themselves" in neighboring countries too much.
So did Russia before they reached out and reclaimed the title of most sanctioned country in the world from Iran and North Korea.
It's starving and rabid out of its own failures, the existence of NATO and the like being only a fair excuse for actions caused by a more obvious case of having greedy important people while seemingly easy targets for predation are just standing there.
You will see in a decade or two - the threat of rotting away was not so bad compared to the shit creek they have paddled themselves up with their remnants of hard power right now.
If Russia could refrain from doing stupid shit for another few decades there is a non-zero chance NATO would dissolve or let Russia in. But it just volunteered to stand in for the islamist's semi-failed attempt to give NATO a new purpose.
And no, alliance entanglements are nowhere near the level of existential threat an appearance of weakness is on the global arena. Nothing provokes the likes of Russia or China as much as an appearance of weakness. If Russia was genuinely afraid of NATO, it would never dare to act as ballsy as it does.
Morphic Tide
Well-known member
If they're looking for protection, they damned well better be able to pay for what they get. That's the issue I have, the massive gain of risk for fuck-all reward, for the sake of "charity" or "being the world police" or some other at-my-expense reason. Fuck them, they don't deserve our stuff on the line when Russia finally goes into the do-or-die decisions.
Said neighbors were not NATO members, had little to no carry over of trade deals with NATO members, were not demographically significant to NATO members, and in general were not NATO's problem in any measurable capacity save over-a-decade hypotheticals that NATO expansion only increased the likelihood of.
They do not have the right to drag more people into the line of fire for rabies. They do not have the right to demand those who prepared for it earlier make themselves more vulnerable to protect somebody who only had a chance to walk away "too late".
The fact they lost a frankly ludicrous amount of people in WW2 and hit economic depression right as a resulting "trough" came in meaning they didn't have enough people able and willing, to various degrees at various points, to make more people when it was actually needed. You can't stimulus your way out of losing over a quarter of your fighting-age men.
Early and end-period Soviet failures, actually. Again, WW2 demographic slump from human wave madness echoed on, and the immediate aftermath of the USSR's fall fucked their education system. They were doomed by no doing of the Russian Federation, we were guaranteed to see horrible shit from Russia in this period because the conditions of the USSR's fall locked in a do-or-die moment right about now.
Then we should have fought to the last Georgian back in 2008, or made more of an effort about Crimea in 2014, or perhaps actually given them a fucking chance in the 90s instead of rolling NATO along like the USSR was alive and well in the first place. That "appearance of weakness" is the comprehensive insistence on soft power bullshit that was invented to fight the Cold War. All manner of irritations that fall short of a traditional Casus Belli to keep up the image of being morally right instead of ever being honest about waving around the unipolar dick.
Bullshit. In fact their population went up after WW2, it's the cultural and economic effects of communism and then post-communism that led them to the demographic disaster. Still no worse than the average country in East Asia, so crimea river.
And how the hell is that supposed to help? How is creating and then getting an even greater demographic mess and a less than willing colony help? We know western jackass attempts to fix demographic issues tend to be stupid and create more problems than they solve, but come on, it's not a competition, at least not one you want to win.
Stop acting like they are vampires and NATO is made of garlic. They should have gotten the current treatment in 2008, then current war would not have happened. As long as they didn't do stupid shit NATO had absolutely no effect on them, the very fact that its presence irks them so much shows that they are thinking of doing stupid shit that NATO will get in the way of. They weren't given not enough chances, they were given too many chances - more than one that is.
Of all people the KGB colonel should be expected to know better.
And as for insistence of soft power, inb4 the usual suspects from slightly different faction start whining about Iraq, Serbia and Libya.
Well, too bad, international relations and affairs do not work like that, and the entry of the Baltics into NATO happened because the people who live around Russia know better than to leave themselves vulnerable to Russia.
Also, the Baltic's are some of the ones coming closest to actually pulling their weight in NATO, unlike the Kraut and Frogs.
They have shore lines on the Baltic Sea, which is important for sea-lane control, and connected to Poland, the country that has been thrown under the bus by the west twice in the 20th century and will never let that happen again.
I understand being upset we are at risk, because Russia is a paranoid aggressive horde of a nation and it's neighbors want our protection. However, I also came to realize that said view was really naive after what has been proven by Russia's actions, and that we have always been at risk and always will be at risk of Russia going retarded, regardless of what actions anyone else takes.
So in that regard, containing Russia and trying to gut it's ability to function internationally is the best option, till the next Russian civil war (after their defeat and removal from Ukraine) cause the Russian Federation to break up. After that, I doubt Russia will keep much territory east of the Urals when the Central Asian states decide to start carving it up with the CCP's help.
Russia literally convinced Finland, a country who has since 1945 vowed to remain neutral join fucking NATO.
NATO prides itself as being open to everyone.
If one of the happiest countries in the world is scared of Russia, then that says something
NATO prides itself as being open to everyone.
If one of the happiest countries in the world is scared of Russia, then that says something
mrttao
Well-known member
... have you ever spoken to a finn? I actually know some.
they have horrible depression due to winter being perpetual night
Kaamos, how to avoid depression when the sun doesn't rise in winter
Polar nights condemn Finland to darkness between November and January. Read here how to avoid depression and other health problems linked to this phenomenon.
www.thenomadtoday.com
And they have serious muslim rapefugee problem. As well as all the other ills of globohomo.
Yet another victim of the WEF
We have a @Tyzuris Finn here.... have you ever spoken to a finn? I actually know some.
they have horrible depression due to winter being perpetual night
Kaamos, how to avoid depression when the sun doesn't rise in winter
Polar nights condemn Finland to darkness between November and January. Read here how to avoid depression and other health problems linked to this phenomenon.
And they have serious muslim rapefugee problem. As well as all the other ills of globohomo.
Yet another victim of the WEF
Also, Finns have been reported as the happiest country in the world numerous times.
As recently as this year.
And they don't have one as bad as numerous others.
But nice try
Russian fighter jet's 'aggressive' actions cause Polish plane to lose control
Latest in a series mid-air incidents shows 'provocative' approach of Kremlin, say Ukraine allies
www.telegraph.co.uk
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