Wrong. I talked to an Ukrainian just yesterday with family in Cherson. His quote: “They’ve been targeting civiliancs since day 1”
Very dirty tactics and imo terrorist behaviour
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NATO is far from just heads of state periodically convening and then making consensus decisions either.
The organisation has its own headquarters, and an internal structure comprised of a multitude of various agencies and offices that employ thousands of people (directly). In which decisions are researched, supported, drafted and influenced by and within their internal organisation. So let’s call it “some kind” of a supranational “government-like” entity, shall we?
Not disputing that at all. But whatever their policy has been, they have choice.
And the question is what they are and have been doing with it.
Should they stick to open door policy and make that decision independently of external actors (Russia) by ignoring their objections or not?
Foregone conclusion or not, I’ve quoted them verbatim on how “Ukraine will become a member” above. So they “kind of” made that decision already - or already made their intention very clear.
And the Ukraine conflict is to a large degree a result of said intention and decision. - whether you consider (Russian) external objections warranted and justified or not.
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We’ve seen the videos of individual civilians confronting Russian troops, with no shot being fired as recently as last week.
Much easier to just drop a nuclear bomb then, wiping out the city and calling it a day.
Oh I agree, it’s propaganda.
We should keep in mind that Ukraine is playing the propaganda game just as well though, with an incentive to exaggerate civilian casualties and occasional atrocities against the civilian population.
And IMO they’ve been playing the media and propaganda much better than their counterparts in the Kremlin (well, the Ukrainians do have an experienced actor as president, don’t they).
They way I see it is:
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Putin/Russia really intended to do this as a quick and “surgical” intervention against the Ukraine military. Hoping for a quick military surrender, and resignation of the president, without terrorising civilians.
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Not making the military progress they hoped for, they are now progressively “dialing up” their efforts.
It’s inevitable in war: The more frustrated aggressors become, the more cruel war gets, the more broadly targeted and ruthless their measures and operations will become, the more cruel the war and the more civilian casualties will there be.
Though such is, notably, usually and official decision made by a commander-in-chief or the highest ranks, but on a lower levels. Often it’s not a formal decision at all.
It’s rather a “natural progression” of war:
The longer a war drags on, the uglier it’s going to get.
It still shouldn’t be conflated with terrorism that plans and sets out to terrorise civilians from the get-go.
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NATO might drop a nuclear bomb too, so not a good idea.
It’s obvious to me that Putin tries to weaken Ukrainian morale with his attacks on multi family houses… I’m not sure for how long the civilians are ready to fight back facing these terrorist-like attacks 
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Could you drop that “cold observer” act already? Otherwise I will have to create a thread “[COFFEE] Is San Francisco a Russian-paid troll?”. Sure there is propaganda on both sides. Sure, there is footage of Russian troops not killing every civilian in sight. But there is also footage of residential areas in ruins. And there are already 1 million refugees in Poland (that’s not propaganda, it’s a fact). Do you think that in such a situation the elderly and the ill can be taken care of? Can you imagine the stress these people have to go through?
If Russian army is mostly going for military targets, would you feel safe to travel to Kiev or Kharkiv now? What’s the point of this argument anyway?
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It’s an escalating war. There have been and will be deplorable war crimes. From both sides. Just as I’m sure there were in Eastern Ukraine over the last few years, before the Russian invasion. I suppose the latter have been underreported in “the West”, as opposed to recent events in Ukraine. Do they justify Russia’s full-scale invasion and war we’ve seen? No way.
Come on, that’s not your way of moderating things, is it?
Do what you have to do.
Obviously I’m making a bitter joke here. I don’t speak as a mod here. I’m just saying what I feel reading your posts.
It seems like the Americans started playing some dangerous game (for Poland). Here’s a fresh post by a Polish politician, Slawomir Mentzen (machine translated). I address it especially to @Patron.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken is urging Poland to send our fighter jets over the Ukrainian skies. As he stated, the Americans are “very, very keenly watching this issue.” At the same time, part of the Polish public opinion, including the so-called serious journalists, started to wonder why NATO didn’t decide, despite Ukraine’s requests, to close the airspace over this country, and another part, such as Roman Giertych, are already directly demanding that Poland join the war. This is a total drama, which shows that our political class did not draw any conclusions from the tragedy of World War II.
One by one. What does closing the airspace over Ukraine mean? NATO planes would have to shoot at Russian planes violating this ban. Whose planes do you think they would be, and from which airports would they take off? From Polish airports. And how is making one’s territory available for an attack treated under international law? As aggression. In other words, it is a demand that Poland should attack a nuclear power like Russia. And since it is much easier to start a war than to finish it, nobody knows how the history would go on and how many years we would stay in this war.
The most important thing should be emphasized here. Between us and the wider West, there is a huge asymmetry of risk. That is why the West will urge us to take risks. If our intervention or the threat of that intervention makes Putin lose, everyone will be happy. And if Putin doesn’t get scared, bombs will fall on Polish cities, not American cities. So from their point of view, it won’t be a terrible tragedy. We’re the ones at risk here. Let’s all get this into our heads. It is Poland that will suffer the greatest losses if there is a war between Russia and NATO.
NATO will send us weapons, maybe even some soldiers, everyone will be appalled, Poland will receive as much praise as Ukraine is getting now, but it will be us who will fight, it will be our cities that will be destroyed, it will be Poles who will die. And there is no reason to get involved in this. It’s very easy to raise the stakes and scare the enemy if it’s someone else who bears all the risk. What is the chance that bombs and rockets will fall on American or British cities? Well not much, to put it mildly. And what is the chance that joining the war will make Polish cities look like Ukrainian ones do now? Very high.
[…]
Let’s be wiser for once, let’s think about our own interests. Let’s not go to war. Let us prepare for it, but let us not go to it of our own free will. Even if the whole world urges us to do so, let’s be stubborn and let them all go ahead.
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As a counter-statement, here’s a twitter thread from Garry Kasparov:
To summarize, he thinks we are already in World War III and that Putin will attack NATO states next. And that it’s not guaranteed that NATO will react, just as it is not reacting now. Even if I agree with him, I think especially Poland should buy some time and prepare better. Russia has been preparing for this war, Poland not.
The last news is that the polish will give the planes to the ukrainians, like any other weapon. The Ukrainians will fly them.
I’ve read it was already planned that Poland had to give away planes in order to get refurbished F-16. So it’s basically a win-win for some.
It looks like a proxy-war, only this time one of the part is not proxying but going directly.
@San_Francisco I haven’t read you comparing it to Syria or even Palestine yet. There are more parallels with these, what do you think?
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Yes, I guess that’s the deal. Obviously Putin does not want us to help Ukraine, he doesn’t want us to get involved at all. The question is, how will Putin keep us the least mobilized. How would he react to Poland giving Ukraine their old MIGs? I guess logic tells that he would not attack Poland, as this could be met with direct response of NATO (again, not entirely sure what would happen). But we don’t know the full picture to say with confidence that we can trust this logic.
I wonder what would the West do if a Polish city was nuked? Would they rush into war to overthrow Putin and disarm Russia, or would they plead for peace to protect their own cities and civilians? And if they attacked Russia, I suspect China would not just stand by. They would either attack Russia from the east to get a piece for themselves, or they would maybe even help Russia, not to lose an ally. Because you have to imagine, if Americans would have taken over Moscow, you could expect a repeat of what happened to Germany, Japan & South Korea post WW2. Demilitarization, democratization and westernization of the country. China would not be happy about the Western half of Russia belonging to the Western alliance. This is truly a WW3 scenario.
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Another interesting solution will be for China to implement the no-fly zone. They are not part of NATO and they can strike a deal like they did with Afghanistan. Not sure what will happen if a jet get hit. Will Russia attack China?
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China likes to have their neighbors divided. It’s like South/North Korea or Vietnam, where they were against reunification, even if the winning side was communist. I don’t see any reason why China should get involved in Ukraine. Why would they want to help Ukraine? At the same time, they are happy when Russia gets snubbed by the West. But Russia getting beaten and converted into a west ally would be devastating for China.
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The usual: Oil and Gas.
Sorry but that doesn’t make any sense to me. Disarm Russia and leave them be? I’m sure the West would push to overthrow the government, ensure freedom of media (or, if you will, allow Western propaganda) and democratic elections. I don’t know what you mean by “seize territory”. I’m not saying they would partition Russia or sth, but they would try to promote Western values and a Western-friendly government. Just look at Germany, South Korea and Japan. Post-War they’ve become big US allies. I don’t know how it exactly went down, but I suspect there was a sense of guilt and shame among the populations of these countries. Same could happen to Russia. But before that happened, Putin could have unleashed hell of Earth, and China would also act to not let that happen.
Excuse me? Aren’t you aware that China is the same kind of country as Russia? What Russia did to Ukraine, China would gladly do to Taiwan. They’re a totalitarian state, and much more powerful than Russia. I think doing business with China is very dangerous. I think we will learn it with time. China will challenge the domination of US before their population is too old and starts shrinking.
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Trying to play the devils advocate here a bit. Has anybody asked themselves what if the whole thing is staged/initiated by the Ukraine? They seemingly are rather desperate to get into NATO and/or the EU. I’ve heard from several Russian co-workers that the media in their country made it look like Ukraine started invading first. Then the “footage” of the nuclear power plant fire which looked like a regular light flare to me.
So what if Zeleski kind of asked Putin to come over to get a shortcut into NATO for his country? Would be rather twisted but not a 0% chance.
Too much misinformation/fake news for me to take a side.
I btw had a rather frightening dream recently with a nuke exploding close-by and being burnt up inside-out…
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Uh, really? While there’s a lot of unvetted stuff around, the bombing have been verified by independent media, as well as the 1.5M refugees…
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This makes zero sense. Russia has been gathering troops and supplies at the Ukrainian border for months. A claim that Ukraine either provoked or asked Russia to get invaded is so ridiculous that I don’t have the will to refute it…
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Look, 0% chance does not exist in practice. But I think there’s a much higher chance the cheese you ate yesterday has gone bad if you think this is a plausible explanation for what is happening.
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