Every war has horrible tragedies and innocent lives lost or harmed, but to suggest invading a stable democracy to annex it is even remotely the same as supporting a locally led uprising against a murderous dictator like in Syria is absurd and offensive.
To be clear, I don’t agree we shouldn’t sanction Russia. EU should remove its dependence on Russia since Putin doesn’t seem to be going any where and if he does, we don’t know what that means
But our politicians are fucking up that too... just look at the german fight against nuclear power, while being happy to buy coal-generated power from poland.
We have a nuclear powerplant in slovenia, and we're talking about expanding it for literally 30 years now, and all the arguments against it are "this will take 10years, that is too long, we need power now". ...well, and austrians protesting against it.
From the very beginning the "locally led uprising" was 50% Islamists.
And by the way, Turkey is essentially annexing Syria right now. Unlike Ukrainians, the Syrians can't meaningfully fight back because Turkey is in NATO, so their forces have absolute safe harbor.
Beyond this, there is no reasonable moral argument that an annexation is any worse than installing a puppet dictator.
NATO won't protect Turkey if they are the aggressors. NATO is a defensive alliance.
NATO means that Turkey doesn't have to worry about any retaliation from Syria's allies. That is to say, impunity. On the other hand if Israel invaded Syria and IRGC troops fired a missile onto a base in Israeli territory, the US wouldn't invade Iran, but they would if it was into Turkey. That's a significant chilling effect.
Preventing allies from retaliating
We are much closer to this.
Also guess who might have joined Russia after Ukraine? You don't think having Russia suddenly as your neighbor doesn't matter?
So they wouldn’t have had Russia as neighbor, but a Russia-friendly country, just like they did for most of the rather brief time Ukraine existed as an independent country. Or another Belarus, which Poland at least is already neighboring.
I get why these countries are nervous but Ukraine’s very very different from Romania or Poland or any other EU country.
The Serbs are still stirring things up in Bosnia. Stop now and embrace Tito's genius.
You learn something new every day...
Did the US want to annex that country into the US? And convert its citizens into obedient Americans? And murder everyone who resisted?
The benefit the US gets from protecting Poland is that in doing so it helps keep Russia boxed in, it keeps great influence over the EU (Poland is a pivot of US influence on the EU), thereby greatly helping curtail 2 out of 3 threats to the US's position as the most powerful country on Earth. It's not done out of benevolence but it's quite great for Polish people.
That's, by the way, a result of a 12 year period, compared to the list you gave that's over 80 years.
Those aren't great lives by any means, but avoiding Iran-Iraq V2, or Turkish invasion of most of Syria, a complete Azerbaijani victory, or complete subservience to China, is genuinely a positive. On the greater balance, simply existing as a counterbalance to the US is something that's useful for most of the world, which explains indifférence over Ukraine.
So no, it’s not the same at all as NATO intervening in an actual ethnic cleansing campaign.
Somehow we treat those wars and those agressors differently.
We really don't. There's been much acknowledgement that the Iraq war was a mistake and wasn't justified, since no weapons of mass destruction were found.
I think it would have been great for countries to sanction the US over it, but at the time, part of Europe also thought that if Iraq had nuclear weapons they'd be a threat to them. But Russia should have sanctioned US and Europe, they should have cut their supply of oil for example. I'd have been for it.
Just as the US should have been sanctioned then, and the war in Iraq should have not happened or been prevented, so is the war in Ukraine.
Normally we should learn from past mistakes, Iraq was a mistake, the world should have acted different back then and didn't. Now Ukraine is a chance to do better and act as we should have in Iraq.
Note: The other distinction is that Iraq was a clear and obvious dictatorship, so there was hope that it could improve the lives of the people of Iraq and lift them into more individual rights and prosperity.
Ukraine is not as clear, in appearance it seems they are on a good path to have more individual rights and prosperity, and it looks like Russia's trying to stop them from doing so. Is that completely accurate, hard to say, but probability wise it is a possibility.
So from the angle of picking a side as well, it's easier to side with Ukraine, which appear to support individual rights and democracy, and against Russia, which appears to oppose individual freedoms and seems to be moving towards full on dictatorship.
But we didn't sanction them. We're still friends with them. We even helped them.
> but at the time, part of Europe also thought that if Iraq had nuclear weapons they'd be a threat to them.
I'm pretty sure 'we' (our leaders, who sent our armies there) knew that iraq had no such weapons... Tony Blair even half admited it.
> Normally we should learn from past mistakes, Iraq was a mistake, the world should have acted different back then and didn't. Now Ukraine is a chance to do better and act as we should have in Iraq.
So, we knew iraq was a mistake, and we stopped? After the first time? Or after the second time? What about syria? Libya? What about somalia? Didn't biden just send more troops there? I won't even mention afghanistan... US basically armed the terrorists for the next few decades with their pull-out.
> Ukraine is not as clear, in appearance it seems they are on a good path to have more individual rights and prosperity, and it looks like Russia's trying to stop them from doing so. Is that completely accurate, hard to say, but probability wise it is a possibility.
Let's be fair... ukraine has areas where a lot of russians live, and they weren't very nice to those russians (and i mean "nice" in the same way as israelis are not "nice" to palestinians...). Somehow many people have forgot about those things (ukraine) or don't care about the others (isreal).
Yes, we didn't sanction them, and you seem to argue we should have, and I agree. That's why I think with Ukraine this time we're doing the right thing, same thing we should have done with Iraq. Do you disagree?
And before you say “Ukraine”, consider that Ukraine and Russia have a common history going back hundreds of years and together with Russia were part of the USSR. The attack on Ukraine is illegitimate, but at least it makes some logical sense.
Russia going after Romania or Poland which are part of EU and NATO and were never part of the USSR, but instead individual countries in the Warsaw Pact makes no sense at all.
The Baltics are more complicated, but once again - NATO and EU.
Also, who gives a f*ck what Putin says?!?