General Politics Discussion (IX) [ARCHIVED] • Page 1154

Well, right now Russia has been issuing statements most days saying that "our security concerns are not being met in negotiations and the West's rhetoric is escalating tensions." They would lose their main justification for escalating. Plus, considering how crushing an invasion would be for the Russian economy, it is reasonable to think that Putin would be a lot less likely to do so if NATO wasn't moving it's influence to Russia's border.

As for your last question, I think Russia taking over Ukraine to prevent them from joining NATO screws them over a whole lot more than Ukraine being independent and not part of NATO/receiving less military aid. The worst case scenario is the same (Russian invasion) but it's beginning to feel like that concession is the only possible way of avoiding war

 

I absolutely get what you mean, but I think this conflict and the choice to go to war in general are way more nuanced right now than what you're describing.

For example it's great to think maybe the President is issuing a warning to people living in likely conflict areas.. but why would a President do that instead of using normal diplomatic channels to keep the Ukrainian government looped in and capable of handling their own states of emergency and evacuations?

I think, all in all, the White House is counting on Americans to share your sense of America playing the role of a moral defender. It helps distract from the many possible negative effects of the rhetoric.

 

but again like, main justifications to who exactly? which countries or powerful people/corporations out there are watching this and going "yes Russia's behavior here is justified but if the west gives in and they still invade Russia will lose my support".

what do the Ukrainian people want? Do they wanna join NATO even if it means pissing off Russia or are the west just using them as a proxy for fighting Russia?

 

Depends which Ukrainians you ask.
When they annexed Crimea in 2014, Russia tried to fashion themselves less as invading and more as supporting pro-Russia separatist rebels in the region. Those separatists certainly exist, but who's to say who speaks for a whole region or nation?

edit -- Just to make sure I'm not being misleading, public opinion in Ukraine appears to be super duper pro-Western. Why wouldn't you want to be in NATO, right? Every now and again, a President or Prime Minister will say something supportive of the idea of Ukraine (and Georgia) joining up and it never fails to agitate the Russians.

 

Wait what

 

I gotta say, if you’re ever maybe having a near nervous breakdown because you think the world is going to end, go over to r/collapse. If even those nuts are being like “this’ll be a bad war for the Ukrainian people but it’s just another small brick to toss into the slow decay of the west” you know you should calm down a bit.

 

I don’t know if I’ve ever laughed harder at the replies and conversations going on underneath the tweet

 

The moment when

 

Jean-Luc Brunel, held on suspicion of supplying girls to Epstein, found hanged | Jeffrey Epstein | The Guardian

 

Wish I would've known this sooner!

 

They really gotta stop putting these prisons right next to the rickety stool and rope stores smh

 

So do they expect women with IUD’s to get them removed…?

 

Yes of course, and also wearing a mask is an enormous infringement on individual liberty

 

BBC News - Ukraine conflict: Rebels declare general mobilisation as fighting grows
Ukraine conflict: Rebels declare general mobilisation as fighting grows

 

more FX updates

RUSSIA
The Russian government has decided that right now would be the perfect time to conduct a large-scale drill of its strategic nuclear forces. While I’m sure the timing is purely coincidental and has nothing to do with any events that may or may not be taking place in any countries bordering Russia (see below), I’m…well, I’m sorry, I lost my train of thought there. Anyway Moscow says it informed other countries of these exercises well ahead of time so there’s no need to be concerned that this is some kind of massive show of force or anything like that.

UKRAINE
Late Thursday the US State Department announced that Secretary of State Antony Blinken had accepted a Russian invitation to another meeting with Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov next week to discuss tensions over Ukraine, provided of course Russia hadn’t invaded Ukraine by then. One might have assumed that this meant the Russians would hold off on an invasion at least until that meeting took place, otherwise why extend the offer, and yet events on Friday suggested that a Russian incursion might finally, actually be forthcoming. They also hinted at a scenario that, while still an act of Russian aggression and an escalation in the extended Donbas conflict, would fall short of the total conquest of Ukraine that Western governments have been predicting/previewing for the past several weeks.

There’s a lot of noise to cut through here, some of it perhaps intentionally manufactured noise, but I’ll do the best I can. In a continuation of Thursday’s events, Friday saw multiple apparent violations of the ceasefire along the front line separating government forces and Donbas rebels in eastern Ukraine. As on Thursday, each side accused the other of being the aggressor. The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe monitoring team that’s stationed in eastern Ukraine said it recorded some 600 reports of ceasefire violations on Thursday alone, so this is unquestionably an escalation.

On Friday evening, things took a more troubling turn, as the unrecognized governments of the breakaway Donetsk and Luhansk people’s republics ordered a full evacuation of their civilian populations into Russia, citing an imminent Ukrainian invasion. No such invasion appears to be forthcoming, but the evacuation order was bolstered by an apparent car bombing near the DPR’s office building in the city of Donetsk. There were no casualties in that car bombing and crucially there’s no indication Ukrainian security forces were responsible for it, though certainly that’s the implication DPR/LPR leaders, and the Russian government, would like to convey. Now it seems that metadata taken from the videos that the DPR and LPR governments released announcing the evacuation order suggests they were filmed on Wednesday, so assuming that metadata is accurate then either the leaders of these two breakaway republics are gifted with incredible powers of foresight or they’re fabricating their claims of an imminent Ukrainian attack.

The Russian government has unsurprisingly played along with whatever it is their Donbas clients are doing, with Russia officials expressing concern about the heightened pace of shelling (Kyiv’s fault, of course) and humanitarian icon Vladimir Putin issuing urgent orders for the Russian government to take care of all the needs of the evacuating Donbas residents, all 700,000 of them if needed.

So what’s actually happening? While allowing for the possibility that everything that happened on Friday was genuine—the shelling certainly was, but I mean including the supposed car bombing and the alleged Ukrainian ground assault—we could be seeing the “false flag” operation about which Western leaders have been warning for a few weeks. The evacuation and alleged car bombing dovetail with recent Russian talk of a planned “genocide” and the recent release of a sketchy video suggesting an attempted Ukrainian attack on a chlorine storage facility in the Donbas (hinting at a kind of rudimentary chemical warfare). It’s still not entirely clear to me why the Russians would feel the need to go to these lengths to manufacture a casus belli, but it would offer one last affirmative case for war to those Russians who aren’t already on board with some sort of military intervention.

But if this really is the false flag event then it’s kind of a dud. The metadata thing in particular is real amateur hour stuff that makes these alleged evacuations basically useless for Russian propaganda purposes anywhere other than in the restricted media environment inside Russia itself. Even taken at face value it doesn’t really make the case for a full scale regime change-level Russian invasion of Ukraine. It could, however, offer a justification for a limited Russian occupation of the Donbas under the guise of a peacekeeping or even humanitarian mission. That would fall short of the “total war followed by mass executions” scenario that Western media outlets are still hyping and about which Western leaders are still warning, but as I said above it would be a clearly aggressive act.

Depending on what happens next there may be parallels here to the 2008 war in Georgia, in which Russia aided the breakaway governments in South Ossetia and Abkhazia and ultimately intervened to support them against the Georgian military. The European Union later determined that the Georgians fired the first technical shots in that war, though those shots came at the end of a cycle of provocations on both sides. If this situation plays out like 2008, and that very much remains to be seen, that war didn’t involve a column of Russian tanks rolling into Tbilisi and overthrowing the government. Georgia remains an independent state, albeit one that’s compromised in a territorial sense.

If this is how things go it remains to be seen how the US and other Western states respond. There’s been a broad if not well defined consensus in favor of large economic sanctions against Russia in the case of a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, but the appetite for those measures may not exist in the case of a more limited operation.

Then again, maybe Russia will try to roll tanks into Kyiv. Or maybe there’s still a chance to avert whatever is coming. Or maybe the outcome will be any number of other possibilities. Digesting everything that’s happened over the past couple of days I feel obliged to note to my dismay that I’ve gotten drawn into the “all or nothing” nature of The Discourse around this story, which has put the focus on the worst- and best-case scenarios while giving short shrift to all the in between possibilities. Joe Biden was openly musing about those possibilities weeks ago, though the White House hastily walked those musings back, but the point is they’ve been lingering here the whole time and I probably could have done a better job of conveying that.