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Randarkman posted:You probably aren't to find a school history course anywhere in the world that goes into any meaningful detail on Ukraine or even mentions the place more than once or twice, outside of Ukraine and probably some of its neighbors.
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# ? Jan 17, 2022 15:35 |
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# ? May 27, 2024 02:18 |
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GABA ghoul posted:If the gas pipelines through Ukraine get shut down or even damaged it's going to be insane on the spot market. Some countries get the majority of their gas supply from there and don't have a lot of long term, price stable contracts. Nord stream 2 might actually go online.
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# ? Jan 17, 2022 15:35 |
To be clear, I just meant paying a bit more attention to the thread. Both Grouchio and Gigolo are long term regulars in my eyes, so I was surprised to see a relatively “out there” read on the symbolism of Poroshenko’s arrival. On the other hand, he’s obviously an oligarch first and foremost, and one with non-zero commercial interests towards Russia. While you could speculate that he’s just a faithful nationalist returning home in the darkest days of the nation, a conspiracy theory I couldn’t personally discard outright would be that the has calculated imminent fall of Zelenskiy’s administration, and is looking to capitalise on that. The background context here is that he’s facing treason charges for allegedly entering an illegal coal sale deal in Donbas, during his presidency, where at least part of proceeds went towards financing the separatists.
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# ? Jan 17, 2022 15:38 |
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cinci zoo sniper posted:To be clear, I just meant paying a bit more attention to the thread. Both Grouchio and Gigolo are long term regulars in my eyes, so I was surprised to see a relatively “out there” read on the symbolism of Poroshenko’s arrival. I misread Poroshenko as Yanukovych. Probably shouldn't post 35 mins after popping a melatonin
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# ? Jan 17, 2022 16:14 |
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Randarkman posted:You probably aren't to find a school history course anywhere in the world that goes into any meaningful detail on Ukraine or even mentions the place more than once or twice, outside of Ukraine and probably some of its neighbors. I was going to say the first place American children would have heard the name is from Yakko's World, but, on rewatching, it appears all the Soviet republics are just put as "Russia" despite the song coming out a couple years post independence
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# ? Jan 17, 2022 17:25 |
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https://twitter.com/kofmanmichael/status/1483100755099856896
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# ? Jan 17, 2022 17:35 |
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Nenonen posted:This constant moving troops to and from the border makes me think Russians are doing the classic caracole maneuver against Ukraine, except they're not firing their shots. Russia only actually has 10 tanks now, they keep sending the same train loaded with them in a circle to deceive CIA observers.
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# ? Jan 17, 2022 17:38 |
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It's a military exercise. Again. It is known that it's for a military exercise, as it was officially announced today. For all Lukashenko's faults he would never allow to launch an offensive on Ukraine from Belarusian soil, and it's insane that people still react to obvious trolling by Russia like that.
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# ? Jan 17, 2022 17:53 |
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Paladinus posted:It's a military exercise. Again. It is known that it's for a military exercise, as it was officially announced today. For all Lukashenko's faults he would never allow to launch an offensive on Ukraine from Belarusian soil, and it's insane that people still react to obvious trolling by Russia like that. Are you aware of how closely war game exercises and actual invasions look? Because it's pretty much identical with the only difference being the actual invasion. "Just military exercises" as a jumping off point to war is such a well known trope that its even satirized in the Civilization games ffs. Look up Able Archer 83 if you want an idea of how sufficiently realistic wargames look to a country that isn't participating in them
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# ? Jan 17, 2022 18:05 |
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Paladinus posted:It's a military exercise. Again. It is known that it's for a military exercise, as it was officially announced today. For all Lukashenko's faults he would never allow to launch an offensive on Ukraine from Belarusian soil, and it's insane that people still react to obvious trolling by Russia like that. I'm gonna go out on a limb an assume you don't live in Ukraine. At best, it's a feint. A feint within a feint, if you think Russia isn't being serious. And Belarus joining in with the invasion is not something Ukrainian military planners can discount out of hand as easily as you. Even if you're right, and Lukashenko won't go that far, it'll still tie up troops in the North when the Russians invade from other directions.
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# ? Jan 17, 2022 18:15 |
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Russia could be feinting troop buildup to cause Ukraine to mount a defense of Kiev instead of defending the minsk protocol buffer line. Achieving operational victory by sending Ukraine back to the dniper.
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# ? Jan 17, 2022 18:22 |
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Or it could be yet another pointless military exercise, one of many that happens every year in Belarus. Hard to say.
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# ? Jan 17, 2022 18:27 |
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Cugel the Clever posted:Yeah... no offense to Ukraine, but there's zero context in which it might come up in a primary or secondary curriculum outside of Eastern Europe. Excepting in a "memorize all the countries in the world" week in geography class. It comes up when discussing the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, and the whole thing about Ukraine being the bread basket of Europe, but that's about it.
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# ? Jan 17, 2022 18:47 |
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Sinteres posted:It comes up when discussing the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, and the whole thing about Ukraine being the bread basket of Europe, but that's about it. I don't really see the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk getting mentioned at all in primary and secondary education outside of Eastern Europe. e: In Norway, WW1 is basically rushed through in the high school history curriculum and for a while it was considered to be dropped all together, and to only exist as a backdrop for summarizing the Russian revolution and Nazi Germany being angry about something. Randarkman fucked around with this message at 18:54 on Jan 17, 2022 |
# ? Jan 17, 2022 18:52 |
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Randarkman posted:I don't really see the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk getting mentioned at all in primary and secondary education outside of Eastern Europe. It came up in my classes. Not by name necessarily, but Russia dropping out of the war and Germany picking up territory like Ukraine.
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# ? Jan 17, 2022 19:03 |
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EU signing off on it https://tass.com/world/1389297 The United States and the European Union are not considering an option of disconnecting Russia from SWIFT and are discussing target economic sanctions against the largest Russian banks instead, Handelsblatt newspaper reported on Monday, citing sources in the German government.
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# ? Jan 17, 2022 19:44 |
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Randarkman posted:You probably aren't to find a school history course anywhere in the world that goes into any meaningful detail on Ukraine or even mentions the place more than once or twice, outside of Ukraine and probably some of its neighbors. Hell, my undergraduate Soviet history course barely went into anything Ukraine-specific. IIRC there was discussion of the "Dizzy with success" article, but really only in the context of collectivization in general, not really with regard to outcomes in any specific SSR. That was about it. Didn't take the earlier history course, but it looks like that was 1500s onward, so probably not much on Ukraine either. The Russian department's cultural courses didn't go into much more than a cursory overview of ethnic diversity in the empire and USSR, but not really to the extent of detailing the different Slavic cultures (as an aside we did get assigned this very readable survey of Siberian cultures, which I'd recommend). That level of detail is probably gonna be graduate-level only outside maybe a few very large departments (searching around semi-randomly, Harvard at least has undergrad Ukrainian language and culture courses).
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# ? Jan 17, 2022 20:47 |
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Bunch of people thirsty for war itt imo (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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# ? Jan 17, 2022 20:50 |
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The only mentions of Ukraine in my US public schooling were related to Chernobyl, and even then it was more or less related as a Russian event. I’m an outlier as a history enthusiast who read a lot of books, and pretty much everything I know of Ukrainian history now is from spending time in Odessa and Kiyv with a bunch of friends who wanted to share stories with me. I don’t think many in the US would give a gently caress at all if Hunter Biden hadn’t gone there in the middle of a bugnuts news cycle.
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# ? Jan 17, 2022 21:03 |
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Preoptopus posted:Bunch of people thirsty for war itt imo Why, is Putin here?
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# ? Jan 17, 2022 21:04 |
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FishBulbia posted:EU signing off on it Disconnecting SWIFT would be satisfying from a ‘haha, gently caress you’ perspective, but what they say in the article is correct - it would also hurt western markets and would accelerate Russia building an alternative system with other asian countries. Instead it gives insight into Russian financial operations and allows for a more targeted approach - only thing is it hasn’t really been used properly yet, the sanctions system is lackluster at best.
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# ? Jan 17, 2022 21:13 |
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Preoptopus posted:Bunch of people thirsty for war itt imo You are right, everybody is pleased as peach over the possibility of a war starting next door to where they live.
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# ? Jan 17, 2022 21:15 |
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When you think about it, maybe the real aggression is the anxiety over Russia's overt threats we expressed along the way.
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# ? Jan 17, 2022 21:15 |
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From liveuamap: White House National Security Council spokesperson says "no option is off the table" - in response to Handelsblatt report that Western countries are considering scaling back Russia sanctions package by stripping out a cut off from Swift
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# ? Jan 17, 2022 21:23 |
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Just listened to a podcast self-described as a European left-wing take on European politics that doesn't deserve to get name dropped. Apparently, in this context, "left-wing" means ludicrous apologism for Putin's right-wing imperialism and just straight up brain worms. In brain worms land, the West is the impetus behind the crisis and Russia's done literally nothing at all but for defensively stationing troops on its borders to deter Western aggression like missile bases in Poland. Anti-Russian sentiment in the Baltics is proof positive that they're 100% nationalist neo-Nazis and, by the way, Crimeans are ethnically Russian and just invited Russia to reclaim the territory, which is cool and good. It's all just a toxic concoction of falsehoods, non sequiturs, and outright hypocrisy that comes from being steeped in a bubble of pro-Putin memes for years on end. If Russia does end up attacking again and seizing territory, it'll be interesting to see what justifications they come up with to support it after repeating ad nauseam that this is just NATO saber rattling. Though, honestly, it would probably just be obvious bullshit like "it was a preventative strike to stop Nazi aggression and, hey, remember the invasion of Iraq? loving USA imperialist pig dogs"
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# ? Jan 18, 2022 02:38 |
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It'll be a mix of some specific 'provocation' triggering a push to assert control in the face of the vague 'deteriorating security situation' that prompted the troop mobilizations in the first place, and also providing water to Crimea. And you know? It's all true! Because Crimea needs better access to utilities before next summer, and it did seem like the Ukrainian military (with Western backing) was planning a move on Donbas last year that only preemptive reinforcing of the frontier put a stop to. Of course, in the first place those are only concerns for Russia because of what they did in 2014
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# ? Jan 18, 2022 02:48 |
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Cugel the Clever posted:In brain worms land, the West is the impetus behind the crisis and Russia's done literally nothing at all but for defensively stationing troops on its borders to deter Western aggression like missile bases in Poland. Anti-Russian sentiment in the Baltics is proof positive that they're 100% nationalist neo-Nazis and, by the way, Crimeans are ethnically Russian and just invited Russia to reclaim the territory, which is cool and good. I think it's rational for Russia's former satellites to seek the protection of an outside alliance like NATO, but I also think Russia's rational to view the US admitting all of those states who clearly bring more liabilities than assets to the table as being motivated by continuing anti-Russian animus and a desire to contain/rollback Russian power and influence to the greatest extent possible. Is that actually why the US does it? I think it's at least part of the calculation, where the US does often have high-minded reasons for doing things...that just happen to coincide with utterly cynical foreign policy objectives, as when we engaged in humanitarian interventions in locations that just happened to be friendly to Russia rather than to the West, while overlooking the crimes of regimes we support, or even of other NATO allies like Turkey. If Russia does think the US is pursuing a maximalist rollback strategy against it, it then makes sense for Russia to push back to the greatest extent that it can without provoking an even bigger disaster, since calmly watching while it happened just invited more of the same. Does that mean it's right for Russia to invade Ukraine? Not if you're most Ukrainians, obviously, but I do think Ukraine and the West are being unreasonable by not being willing to offer any kind of security guarantees about future alliance membership. I get why the West is resisting, because Russia will presumably shift to 'okay, now that we've established that you won't invite Ukraine, here are other states we won't allow to join,' but if Ukraine actually does get invaded, I think the Ukrainian leadership's unwillingness to be pragmatic will look like a pretty big blunder. As the thread I posted before discussed, NATO membership for Ukraine isn't realistic in the first place, and Crimea is probably going to be Russian for the rest of our lives, so while I don't think they should give those chips away for nothing, I do think accepting those realities in return for some kind of security guarantee makes a lot of sense, and that the West should probably remove some of the sanctions for that invasion in return for reduced tensions and ideally a return of the Russian-occupied portions of eastern Ukraine (obviously not including Crimea). Of course there's a chance Russia comes back demanding more later, but them's the breaks, sucks to have a more powerful neighbor while being sufficiently removed from the Western core that they can't/won't provide reliable guarantees on your behalf I guess. Finland found a way to placate the Soviet Union during the Cold War, and I think a rational Ukrainian leadership could do the same now. Dr Kool-AIDS fucked around with this message at 03:13 on Jan 18, 2022 |
# ? Jan 18, 2022 03:09 |
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Does NATO really want Ukraine to join? Like ever? I feel like they don't. I'm not sure why, maybe it's because there would be little to gain and potentially a lot to lose if Ukraine was ever invaded. If NATO doesn't really want Ukraine to join (but they can't openly admit that) and Russia obviously doesn't want Ukraine to join doesn't that sort of put NATO and Russia on the same page? And couldn't that potentially be a way to de-escalate the situation? Of course it would have to be done with neither side losing face.
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# ? Jan 18, 2022 03:46 |
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Probably some NATO members do want Ukraine to join, and more would if circumstances allowed, which is part of why it's hard to disavow the idea entirely. Like if you're in Lithuania or even Poland you probably want things to keep moving in the direction of pushing back Russian influence so you're not on the front line, even if you're already a full member of the alliance, at least if that can be done peacefully, while some of the older members who already feel that the alliance brought in buffer states probably feel like they're safe enough as it is and don't want to risk economic relationships over it. The US obviously tends toward the maximalist approach as much by default as anything imo, and has disproportionate influence in the alliance for obvious reasons, which is why I'd ideally like to see Ukraine blink, because I think some Americans would rather see Russia invade Ukraine and give NATO a continuing purpose in standing firm against future Russian aggression while trying to cripple Russia economically than concede that NATO has any reason to limit its expansion anywhere.
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# ? Jan 18, 2022 04:00 |
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Ukraine falling or rumping absolutely doubles the resolve of NATO. And as such will probably be allowed to happen to continue US European influence.
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# ? Jan 18, 2022 04:41 |
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Russia began emptying out its embassy in Kyiv, Ukraine. On Jan. 5, 18 people—mostly the children and wives of Russian diplomats—boarded buses and embarked on a 15-hour drive home to Moscow. About 30 more followed in the next few days, from Kyiv and Lviv Edit sorry for double post
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# ? Jan 18, 2022 05:09 |
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MyMomSaysImKeen posted:I'm a Russian citizen on vacation in Ukraine and I genuinely had no idea this was occurring. it's actually common to wake up with a T-72 and no idea how it got there
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# ? Jan 18, 2022 05:11 |
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Sinteres posted:
Where else could Russia even demand aren't allowed allowed to join NATO if Ukraine is disregarded? Turkey and the Baltic states have already been lost to NATO from their POV, which is a major strategic handicap to Russia and probably their next biggest issue after Ukraine when we are talking about their Western foreign policy, and I doubt they would ask for something as nuts as expelling currently existing members. Finland seems like the only realistic candidate next but if that's the case then the Russians are playing a dangerous game since its typically been best for everybody to just let Finland perform its tightrope balancing act like its done since the 1940s, acting aggressively towards the countries that border Russia only makes NATO seem much more useful to said countries, and I can't imagine that Finns are terrifically fond of what they are seeing in Ukraine. After that its ridiculous Clancy level stuff of NATO trying to make inroads in the Caucasus or Central Asia but if recent history has indicated anything to me its that America and its satellites really do not consider these places worth the hassle of antagonizing Russia as the Georgians and Armenians found out the hard way.
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# ? Jan 18, 2022 05:43 |
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Is there really any evidence - at this point - that Russian is going to invade then occupy Ukraine? If anything, it seems to me that they're planning some version of '97 Desert Fox. Destroy the Countries military, infrastructure, etc. then simply leave.
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# ? Jan 18, 2022 06:14 |
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Charliegrs posted:Does NATO really want Ukraine to join? Like ever? I feel like they don't. I'm not sure why, maybe it's because there would be little to gain and potentially a lot to lose if Ukraine was ever invaded. No. They dont. This is why neo-realists have been saying the US needs to be explicit about Ukraine not being an ally. Only issue is Putin cleary knows that Ukraine is not actually going to become a NATO member, yet it doesn't change his behavior or rhetoric.
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# ? Jan 18, 2022 06:25 |
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Crosby B. Alfred posted:Is there really any evidence - at this point - that Russian is going to invade then occupy Ukraine? If anything, it seems to me that they're planning some version of '97 Desert Fox. Destroy the Countries military, infrastructure, etc. then simply leave. Or make Ukraine accept the full version of the peace deal it was offered the first time it was defeated, which would assure a perpetual yanukovich like leader.
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# ? Jan 18, 2022 06:26 |
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FishBulbia posted:No. They dont. This is why neo-realists I've never heard of "neo-realists" before. I'm curious what differentiates them from just regular old realists?
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# ? Jan 18, 2022 06:43 |
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Cugel the Clever posted:Just listened to a podcast self-described as a European left-wing take on European politics that doesn't deserve to get name dropped. Apparently, in this context, "left-wing" means ludicrous apologism for Putin's right-wing imperialism and just straight up brain worms. I wonder what would happen if somebody said that Morales deserved to be overthrown because Bolivia challenged the Monroe doctrine, and thus brought too much stress to US security.
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# ? Jan 18, 2022 07:21 |
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Crosby B. Alfred posted:Is there really any evidence - at this point - that Russian is going to invade then occupy Ukraine? If anything, it seems to me that they're planning some version of '97 Desert Fox. Destroy the Countries military, infrastructure, etc. then simply leave. This wouldn't achieve any strategic objectives that Russia has for Ukraine - Would confirm Russia as the psychotic bad guy that attacks its neighbors with whatever consequences - Further resolve to join NATO and EU for Ukrainians - Installed Yanukovich figure overthrown in two days - Crimean water access not secured - Russian speakers not saved, Czar looks weak, no bump in polls Etc The only outcome I see is an occupation, massive repressions and flooding Europe with refugees as punishment which is again, nuts to think about but not zero chance of happening It's truly bizarre poo poo and I hope we get media analysis books written about the world class political PR that Russia does. It really boggles the mind how the people posting all day about satan united states invading Iraq or Saudi Arabia invading Yemen turn around and post apology for Russia invading its neighbours because hurr durr it has internal logic and reasons to do vile poo poo The crux is still how for some reason Russia's actions are only seen from "realist"/realpolitik perspective while everyone else has to be very palatable symbolically and does not deserve their actions being seen from a realpolitik perspective (e.g. trying to join a military alliance that will protect them from the chimp with a nuclear grenade). Still need to wrap my head around that one
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# ? Jan 18, 2022 08:13 |
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# ? May 27, 2024 02:18 |
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Somaen posted:The crux is still how for some reason Russia's actions are only seen from "realist"/realpolitik perspective while everyone else has to be very palatable symbolically and does not deserve their actions being seen from a realpolitik perspective (e.g. trying to join a military alliance that will protect them from the chimp with a nuclear grenade). Still need to wrap my head around that one From a realist perspective, Ukraine is also rationally motivated. The issue is its goals are insignificant compared to powers which can delete life on earth in under an hour. Neorealists mostly claim that the US has surrendered its interests in exchange for vague notions of principals, and is therefore harming its geopolitical goals by being lost in rhetoric.
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# ? Jan 18, 2022 08:21 |