Listening to people who probably proclaim themselves "anti-imperialists" give full-throated defenses of imperialism never gets old.
>prepared to fight their proxy war to the last of them
The natural corollary to this ridiculous "fighting Russia to the last Ukrainian" argument, which you guys never seem to acknowledge, is that it already assumes that Russia will murder every last Ukrainian and take their land. That's just a given, and you then try to blame the West as though they stuck their hand into a lawnmower or something.
None of this holds up to any scrutiny, though. The whole NATO expansion narrative barely exists in Russia, they don't talk about that, they talk about standard-issue Imperialist narratives like "Ukraine doesn't exist, it's not a real country, not a real language, not a real ethnicity, Ukrainians are 'little brothers' to the superior Russian spirit, everything good in Ukraine is Russian and everything Ukrainian is bad, and we Russians must liberate them from their mental delusions of being something other than Russian and restore Russia to our natural greatness & place in the world"
Please explain why Russia has the right to dictate foreign policy postures to their independent former colonies, or disregard treaties signed with them.
I get where you’re coming from; however looking at their post history I think vatnik/tankie rather than straight troll factory or FSB.
In any case, disputin Kremlin propaganda in an otherwise well-regarded forum doesn’t feel wrong. One certainly wouldn’t bother on Twitter, for example.
Not even Fox News would stoop to this level of harebrained whataboutism.
> goat ...lovers in Afghanistan
or outright, unfettered racism
> something that they have repeatededly said they consider a casus belli
or fawning gullibility.
Ukraine isn’t a member of NATO and until 2014 was dead-set against it. Same for Finland and Sweden until 2022. Whatever happened in those years to trigger such a change in public sentiment, I wonder.
> It must be because they thought, "hey, what better than to get in a costly war", have hundreds of thousands of their own die
“Meat waves” are a decades old Soviet military doctrine that has not changed, and Putin is an ex-KGB thug. Regard for human life isn’t in that picture.
>Ukraine isn’t a member of NATO and until 2014 was dead-set against it. Same for Finland and Sweden until 2022. Whatever happened in those years to trigger such a change in public sentiment, I wonder.
The 2014 orange revolution was carried out, for starters, to put a change to that. And even when later the current leader was elected promised to normalize relationships, he was "convinced" promptly to push for the opposite direction. As for Finland and Sweden, when told to jump, they ask "how high".
Cries of "Whataboutism!" is basically "our shit doesn't stink, let's focus on the others' farts, and treat them as some unique case of foul smell producers!".
Oh I see, tens of millions of people in pluralist open democracies got a secret memo from a paternalistic deep state to change their minds. It definitely wasn’t the repeated invasions, murder, looting, sabotage, rape, kidnapping, destruction, annexation that every one of Russia’s neighbours are utterly sick of.
You’re right about one thing, though. There’s definitely a stench here.
>prepared to fight their proxy war to the last of them
The natural corollary to this ridiculous "fighting Russia to the last Ukrainian" argument, which you guys never seem to acknowledge, is that it already assumes that Russia will murder every last Ukrainian and take their land. That's just a given, and you then try to blame the West as though they stuck their hand into a lawnmower or something.
None of this holds up to any scrutiny, though. The whole NATO expansion narrative barely exists in Russia, they don't talk about that, they talk about standard-issue Imperialist narratives like "Ukraine doesn't exist, it's not a real country, not a real language, not a real ethnicity, Ukrainians are 'little brothers' to the superior Russian spirit, everything good in Ukraine is Russian and everything Ukrainian is bad, and we Russians must liberate them from their mental delusions of being something other than Russian and restore Russia to our natural greatness & place in the world"