Nice cherry-picking where the maps are concerned.
First of all, Russia is the successor state of what was once called KIEVAN RUS, because that principality was centered around, you guessed it, KIEV.In the Xth century.Lots and lots and lots of ground you are not covering.
Yeah, yeah, Russia also calls itself the successor of Rome. Gauls, you better watch out.
Ukrainians and Belarussians also call Kievan Rus their ancestors.
But we're going a millenium in the past, and such national distinctions didn't exist then.
Russia has a legitimate historic claim to the territory of modern-day Ukraine, there was never a 'Ukraine' prior to the aftermath of WWI,
But by reaching this far in history, Poland, Turkey, Lithuania, and whoever you consider descendants of Cumans also have one, as these other groups in sum held it (especially the southern and the western chunks) for more time than Russia/Kievan Rus.
The important part is that the local Slavic population now is not exactly crazy about being ruled by Moscow, which at the time Kievan Rus held most of current day Ukraine was just some small town in process of becoming a city.
Russians showing up in places and claiming them because they used to be owned by Kievan Rus for some time is akin to USA declaring themselves the successors of British Empire and claiming any places that used to belong to British Empire as their rightful land. Starting with London.
and even then the Bolsheviks systematically expanded the Ukrainian SSR because they thought that there were too many rich kulaks and not nearly enough factory workers, hence the higher industrialization and Russian cultural ties and ethnically-Russian population there that wants nothing to do with the western Ukrainians, who still have this weird idea that the Stalin-era famines were supposed to target them, personally, as an ethnic group, which is not technically true, since people all over the USSR died because of moronic collectivization policies.
Crimea was actually an autonomous republic until Nikita Khruschev, an Ukrainian, decided to give it to he Ukrainian SSR as a gift.
Lets not forget that besides famines and terror there was also massive, not necessarily voluntary internal migration of people (especially the unruly about Russian governorship kind) out of Ukraine (and many other places) to Central Asia and Siberia, combined with importation of non-unruly people from Russia. The selection of both groups obviously was not chosen to be ethnically neutral to the local demographics.
Oh, it's not hard to follow at all, which makes me feel qualified to say you're full of it on this. Nowhere in the exchange did you attack the concept of providing troops in general, you only disagreed on Zachowan's particular interpretation and even now it's notable you're not ruling it out directly.
What is your malfunction?
Do you not understand what discussing a hypothetical is?
Or are you just whining at me for not sufficiently marketing for your cause while doing so (sorry, i feel no particular duty to argue for your line, ever).
Your original statement, which you helpfully provided, was that no one was talking about deploying troops.....until I quoted you and Zachowan doing exactly that in an extended dialogue.
You lied, let's be honest here.
Lets be honest here, you didn't spend 10 second thinking about this silly sub-argument about personal statements and in turn have completely beclowned yourself.
Because the original statement is conveniently marked as post number 311.
While my discussion with Zach about hypothetical military intervention begins at post 317.
Yeah, damn me and my time traveling lies.
Bingo in that you realize how schizophrenic your argument remains? In that case, thank you; it's about time you realize it makes no sense to talk about a long term NATO victory when you're claiming there will be no NATO to win said victory. It's a contradictory scenario entirely.
The fuck i did just say?
USA cannot simultanously wash its hands off the conflict and provide aid other than military intervention to Ukraine. If it does the latter, allies cannot say USA didn't give a shit about a crisis in their region, even if in the end it doesn't give Ukraine victory.
That's the secret to NATO existing even if Russia controls more parts of Ukraine.
No, you're just engaging in a pretty blatant changing of the goalposts because this has nothing to do whatsoever with what the original discussion was. If you recall, this all started because you elected to respond to a post I made in general about the United States should not doing anything at all and refrain from involvement in the FSU. You then responded to that and now we have got the point you're citing an argument I never made nor agree with even to change the fundamentals of this dialogue because you are losing in it.
No one cares. What are you going on about right now? Do you stick by your argument that United States should not doing anything at all and refrain from involvement in the FSU?
That's a long winded way of saying you're not going to look it up because to become educated on it would invalidate entirely what you are claiming. In particular, there is no "we" to be had in agreement on anything because what you are trying to manufacture an agreement on I do not agree with. Your claims show to me, and anyone who has read on the subjects of both, that you do not what you are talking about; case in point being your belief the U.S. ever cut off the aid spigot to Afghanistan.
When you actually compare Chechnya to Afghanistan with "hard data" you can find on Google in less than a minute, the idea it's some simmering hot bed of resistance comparable at all completely disappears. There's 1.3 million Chechens, and the extent of Russian subsidies is ~$780 Million USD; automatically you see that, even if we taken as factual the only thing keeping a lid on resistance is aid payments, this is completely and utterly sustainable and nowhere close to what the U.S. was doing in Afghanistan. More importantly however, when you look at military metrics you see a more stark difference; in that 2018 year you cited as a sign of continued resistance, why did you leave out citing that literally only 10 people died for the entire year? If that's a mark of insurgency for you, then your own Poland must positively be a death trap.
Russia is not USA, and as such its financial wastefulness cannot be measured by the scale of US economy. It has to be measures by the scale of Russian economy.
According to this:
With 2019 estimates factored in, the war in Afghanistan has now cost the United States $975 billion.
www.forbes.com
Late in Afghan War USA was spending about 50 billion per year on it. Which is about 0.25% of 20+ trillion USD US GDP from the same time.
Meanwhile, by the measure of Russian economy, the paltry 0.78 billion USD it spends on Chechnya constitute 0.05% of 1.65 trillion USD Russian economy.
However, wait a minute, don't celebrate yet...
As you have conveniently noticed, Afghanistan is a much larger place with many more people than Chechnya. The latter, with 1.3 million people and area of 17k sq km, is far smaller than Afghanistan's 40 million population and 652k sq km area. By factors of 30 and 38 respectively.
So long story short, USA has spent 5 times larger part of its GDP than Russia, to control a territory 38 times bigger with a population 30 times larger. Talk about sustainability... And that's without even getting how much cheaper labor is in Russia than in USA, and how much it costs to move everything to the other side of the globe.
If Afghanistan was as small as Chechnya, maintaining population proportional spending USA would be using merely 0.008% of its GDP.
First off, that there is already history there, which you seem to want to just ignore. Also, the fact that white history doesn't necessarily repeat itself, it can often rhyme - Russia has made up reason in the past for the wholesale slaughter of the people whose countries they conquer, including in Ukraine itself, so it has an established track record. Noting would stop them from doing something similar again, even if it doesn't take the form of starving landowners to death for the crime of owning land and having too much money. Russia taking over a country isn't going to be pretty no matter what happens, so keep that in mind while you draw maps to split up other people's countries to just give to Russia on a platter.