I still don't understand how Russia (the country where I was born) would possibly want and invade Ukraine... But it did.
Conclusion: there no way to know what is inside a head of aging autocrat.
Plenty of experts have been calling it for a decade now... EU/US influence has been slowly creeping east for 30 years. Russia had no other options really - as soon as a pro-west leader was elected to Ukraine, war was inevitable.
And the same will happen in Belarus when the leadership changes there too.
You see children's playgrounds that have a big sign saying 'Proudly sponsored by the USA development fund", or "This bus route is made possible by the EU funding.".
Why would the USA be using US taxpayer money to build children's playgrounds in Azerbaijan?
It's all about a long term battle for hearts and minds... Be the 'good guys' to a 5 year old child now, and in 30 years that child is a voter and you can have influence over the whole country.
Pretty smart moves... But I can see how Russia isn't happy about it.
The whole premise “someone funded a playground in my neighbor’s backyard, I have no other options. Bomb them NOW!” is beyond ridiculous.
They could also fund our playgrounds, if it’s as effective, as you claim. In any case that would be muuuuuch cheaper than starting a war with hundreds of thousands dying, sanctions and all that.
I’m missing the explanation for how this justifies an extremely destructive invasion and war.
They do everything in their power to make you believe that is was inevitable to divert the blame.
Same with Taiwan. It is a choice for China to make - to invade or not.
But yes. US influence snuck up on Russia and tricked those countries into being scared of it. Its all so clear now...
Not to mention, it’s a large landmass that offers a huge buffer between the NATO countries and Russia.
And it’s got another 40 or 50 million people for Russia, which has a population problem.
And it’s got iron & Steel exports…
Taiwan has TSMC. And I suspect the US has a bunch of fueled up C-17’s ready to take all the important infrastructure to the US and plans in place to effectively destroy the rest at a moments notice.
Taking 40M people with the same demographic problems gives you a bigger problem - not a solution...
https://www.populationpyramid.net/russian-federation/2020/
https://www.populationpyramid.net/ukraine/2020/
In 10 years demographic in both countries will be as bad as in Japan.
For some reason people from outside of ex-USSR usually suppose there is at least something rational about this war. But USSR does not exist for 30 years and there are no massive political machine. It's just a autocracy / kleptocracy where all decisions taken by a very small groups of incompetent people whos only goal is to preserve their power.
Neither there is any real ideology in Russia. Putin is a much closer to The Dictator movie than to Stalin or Hitler. He care of his giant palaces and yachts far more than about gaining 42M extra subjects to rule. This whole war is just a presidental PR campaign 2024 gone wrong.
PS: Yeah, that's it. It's not some great powerplay to control the world. Not a war with NATO or US. Not even a war over reasources or territory. It's just aging kleptocracy that stumbled and now is killing 100,000s in pointless war.
The deal is: neither Putin nor population of Russia give a damn about this territory control. If Ukraine will free Donetsk and Luhansk tomorrow and Crimea in a year no one in Russia will care about it. Except of course people living on occupied territories, but FSB will shut them up.
On 30 September 2022 they announced annexiation of Kherson. Claimed it's will be part of Russia forever. Just a bit more than month later on 9th November 2022 it stopped being part of Russia and no one cared about it since. And too talkative members of occupation government just died under strage circumstances.
Please don’t invade any countries even if they’re smaller and inconvenient to your stories.
People need to take a much, much broader mindset. China views Taiwan as part of China, and that's that.
I personally don't, and the Taiwanese population ought to chose what they want without material interference, and 'we' should respect that by recognizing their sovereignty and statehood if that's what they want, much like at this point we ought to be recognizing Palestine as a state, if that's what they want.
Russia's invasion of Ukraine is pure classical Imperialism, Ukraine is a 'sub Russian vassal' and Russian Imperialism is part of the Russian identity - it was 'secularized' during the time of USSR, now it's just old school.
If you look at geopolitics from the 19th century it's all very clear.
That said, it is odd Apple would do this in Taiwan, and, it's a much bigger jump than people think.
This is a bold move and will reshape what Apple is, and maybe what a true international megacorp of the future looks like.
It could also make them more fragile and if they start to falter, it could really fall apart. You need a lot to work well for this to be pulled off.
* because they could (or so they thought)
* because there’s a lot of important resources in the ground
* because they want to lay down the border between NATO and Russia and preferably not at the border of Russia but on someone else’s turf